← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
5 Breakthrough Discoveries That Prove Reality Is A Lie! (Discover the Truth) | Donald Hoffman PT 1
02:04:01
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- [00:00]
Donald Hoffman
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- [00:17]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [00:30]
Donald Hoffman
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- [00:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Everything you think you know about the world around you, the people you interact with, even the very fabric of space and time itself, it's all a facade. What if our perception of reality is merely a survival tool, a trick played by evolution? You and I might be living in a simulation, and your senses are nothing more than a virtual reality headset carefully tuned by evolution to maximize your survival, but not to reveal the truth. Today's episode is going to challenge everything you thought you know about the nature of existence and consciousness. Today, we're diving deep into the nature of reality and consciousness themselves, challenging the very fabric of what we perceive as real. Our guest today is a cognitive scientist whose groundbreaking theories propose that what we see is just a user interface and not indicative of the underlying truth. He believes believes that space, time, local realism, and even our physical bodies are just a virtual layer on top of a much deeper story. From evolutionary game theory to quantum physics and beyond, this conversation will rewire your brain and transform your understanding of your life and the universe. Let's get into it. Would you stay inside the headset if you. If you could you. There were two paths before you. Path number one is you completely exit the headset and inside the the game world, the simulation, you. Your avatar falls over and basically appears dead. But you are now like out chilling with the consciousness or you return to the consciousness as maybe you become aware of your oneness with the consciousness. That feels like the right way to sum up the way you see it. Yes.
- [02:49]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, I think that that idea can't be dismissed out of hand. I Think it's a very interesting idea and I don't have a better one right now. So. Yes, it feels to me like I'm not my body. My body is just an avatar. If you're in virtual reality, you do feel that? No, I would. Well, I think that I'll say that I'm very much attached to my body and if something hurt my body, I would, I would be panicked and so forth. So, so I, I don't feel like I'm not my body. Absolutely. But, but when I'm, you know, thinking intellectually and coolly about things, if something actually happens to me, if I'm in a car wreck, it's a different story. But, but just thinking intellectually about it and maybe if I meditated more I would actually feel that way. But, but I don't. But just intellectually it seems, I don't know, I'll just leave it at that.
- [03:49]
Tom Bilyeu
So I asked that part of it because what I'm really trying to get to is if you could return to oneness with consciousness or stay in the Matrix but be like Neo, where now you know how to bend it to your will.
- [04:02]
Donald Hoffman
Would I.
- [04:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Which would you prefer?
- [04:06]
Donald Hoffman
Well, my, my guess is at death we take off the headset and maybe we lose a lot of stuff that was in the headset, but we don't. But we're still aware, but we're, we're just not tacked into the headset anymore. That's my, my best guess. And so there I am completely open to being wrong. Deeply wrong. But you know, there are near death experiences that, that may or may not point to that kind of thing that people have. I'm going to be doing, being part of a, I'm part of a film where they discuss near death experiences. And so I talk about that possibility in the film from, from this point of view. And so, so if I were a physicalist, it's real clear there. You know, if the brain is somehow creating consciousness, then when the brain is dead, there's no consciousness. This other view that says consciousness creates space, time and brains as just headsets has open to it that my consciousness, where I put my in quotes, the consciousness that's looking through this avatar does not perish when the avatar perishes. That's certainly open to this point of view. That's not what motivated the point of view, but it certainly is open to it. So intellectually I'm open to that point of view. Emotionally I fear death. So even though intellectually it seems quite reasonable, I have the Darwinian fear of death that's wired into me and that's part of the game.
- [05:50]
Tom Bilyeu
So there's two buttons before you. One, rejoin consciousness. And let's say for now that really is what happens. So you would maintain a sense of awareness, but all of your sense of self is gone forever. Or you stay in the Matrix knowing that it's fake, knowing that you're in the headset, but you have special powers. Which button do you press?
- [06:13]
Donald Hoffman
I, I would probably go for the new stuff. I would probably. Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time feels quite confining to me. I feel like we got a cheap headset and then this is a fairly cheap simulation that we're in. And I would love to see what else is on offer. For example, when I'm trying to solve these some mathematical problems, I can imagine a three dimensional shape, but I can't imagine a four dimensional shape. And we had to do some of the problems we're solving. We have to look at the geometries of things in six or nine or more dimensions. And we can't just sort of imagine it and figure out what's going on. We have to crawl our way up to the geometry by theorem proof. Theorem proof. We actually have to prove our way. So we're like blind men filling the elephant with theorems and proofs to understand the geometry. I would love to have a headset where I could just see in a glance everything about nine dimensional space. And you can't do that with our current headset. And why stop at 9 dimensions? Why not be able to just see in 30 or a thousand or a billion dimensions?
- [07:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you though think that inherent in the way that you think about that, it still requires you to be you? Because I'll think about this a lot. If you've ever seen the movie Freaky Friday, I think about this a lot with my wife. I really, really want to change bodies with her for 24 hours so that she can see what it's like to be me and I can see what it's like to be her. I think I'd be a much better husband if I really understood.
- [07:42]
Donald Hoffman
Probably so, yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
But the reality is the second you change bodies would be her, right? And she would be me. There wouldn't be her as me, me as her.
- [07:51]
Donald Hoffman
Right?
- [07:52]
Tom Bilyeu
And so I, my, even if you're right, here's what I think would happen if you, when you take off the headset, the headset is everything you think of as you and that even if you're right, that you can meditate your way to moments like that where you're just pure awareness. One, if you're right, all that the consciousness lives to do is cycle through other qualia. So you would either be reincarnated, meaning that you would just pop back up in a new headset, because that's what the consciousness is meant to do, is cycle through all this qualia. And so you would refragment yourself, back off, you would pop up, you'd be reincarnated, you'd live life again, or you would return to the Borg, the beehive, the ant colony, however you want to think about it, you would be reinstantiated as just pure awareness. And all of that loving and clinging and hating and attachment and precious moments and distance and all that poof, gone. And I find that when people explore these ideas from a religious perspective, they are forgetting that they're mired in the gruesome reality of the human experience. And that to transcend that and be in heaven, for instance, and never experience pain again or whatever, you would be so different. You wouldn't recognize or relate to anybody in the same way. And so I have yet to hear any theory whatsoever other than regrowing your biological organs, where you actually end up cheating death. Everything else is you die, all of the things you love, poof, go away. Maybe you're exchanging them for something better, but make no mistake, everything goes away.
- [09:50]
Donald Hoffman
Well, these are deep waters again, but here's another take on it, and that is that if you and I are just the One looking at itself through avatars, the One is learning whatever it needs to learn through these avatars. And that's not lost on the One. It is now part of the One that's in some sense eternal. And so the reason I would, given the choice that you're asking me to make here, my own predilection would be to say, let's go for something entirely different now, because in some sense that partly because I'm inquisitive and I would like to. What is it like to live in a five dimensional world? What is it like to have 20 dimensions of color and a thousand dimensions of emotion instead of just a few that we have? What is it like? My feeling is that we have the training wheel set version right now of this stuff, really, really small. And so my guess is. One possibility is that, look, you and I really are this infinite intelligence, this infinite consciousness. That's what we really are. We're peering through, in this case, very, very simple avatars with very, very simple interfaces. And maybe it's the one saying, this is fun. But when I answer your question this way, maybe it's the one saying, yeah, this is great and it's fun, but there's so much more to explore in different dimensions. I haven't lost whatever I learned in this little interface. And I'm happy for the relationships and the friends and all the things I learned about war and hate and, and religion and all that other stuff, you know, all the things that go on here. But that's only a mere, in some sense trivial projection of this entire Cantor's hierarchy of infinities, of potential. This is trivial and the potential is mind bogglingly infinite. And so my attitude, let's get on with it. Nothing is lost by moving on and everything is to be gained. You can see. But again, these are very, very deep waters. I'm not talking theorem and proof here. I'm now speaking very intuitively based on the science as it is in the very initial steps. I should be very, very clear. I mean, all of science has been about the spacetime interface until the last 20 years or so. We're taking our very, very first baby steps outside of space time. And so almost surely all of the ideas that we're having are going to look very naive, you know, a century or two from now. They'll look back and go, yeah, great generation. They were the generation that stepped outside of the space time interface. Hats off to them, but boy, were their ideas so parochial. They were shedding the interface, but boy, they didn't really understand what they were really doing. That's my guess. All right.
- [13:10]
Tom Bilyeu
I actually want to spend more time in the intuitive, but is there anything from the paper, any sort of grounded mathematics that you think will ground people in your theory more in a way that will keep the intuitive exploration from just spinning off into la la land?
- [13:30]
Donald Hoffman
Well, yeah, so I'll just say in the paper I gave you and it'll come out on June 24, it's going to be made and I'll, I'll tweet it when it comes.
- [13:37]
Tom Bilyeu
If you made it this far in the interview, read the paper.
- [13:41]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, so It'll be available June 24th and I'll tweet it when it comes out. It might be a couple days before that. I would say that one, one of the interesting things we're doing in that paper is we're showing how specific properties of the markoving dynamics of conscious agents map to specific properties of particles like mass, spin, momentum and energy. And so I'm not saying we're right but we now have mathematically precise proposals. So I mean, for example, these are words that won't make sense, but mass is the entropy rate of recurrent communicating classes of conscious agents.
- [14:16]
Tom Bilyeu
And just to be clear, what you're saying you can predict now is particle scattering.
- [14:20]
Donald Hoffman
This is going to be for particle scattering. And by the way, the reason I'm going after particle scattering is not because I have some fetish for high energy physics or something like that. That's the simplest place that we can make our first connections with the interface. Particles are the most elementary things that our interface has. That's why I'm going there. They're the simplest thing. I'm not going for brains first because those are countless quadrillions, trillions, whatever of particles. And so that's not the place to start. Let's see if we can get the mathematics and the experimental data for individual particles. So our paper is proposing, and maybe just so the people can show that we're wrong, we'll see. But we have, you know, we say that mass is so called entropy rate of the recurrent communicating classes. And that has, that then tells us what are massless particles and what are massive particles. And, and, and so we're, we're getting very specific predictions that we're going to be making about momentum and spin and, and energy and, and mass. So, so that's why, so this is where rubber hits the road, right? I'm talking all this high fluent stuff about consciousness leading to the interface. Well, the right questions are, so what is the, what is the mass of an electron? What part of your conscious agent dynamics is going to map into what we call mass? What is the spin? Why is there a hyperfine structure in the energy levels of the orbitals of electrons and so forth? We're getting hints at answers to those kinds of questions about like the hyperfine structure. So it's, it's really quite interesting. So, so again, I would be stunned if we're right, but at least we're precise so that we can now begin the, the whole process of, of saying, okay, at least these hypothesis hypotheses are precise. So now we can try to show their limits, try to prove where they reach their limits and then move on, or to show that, you know, this is just fundamentally nothing worthwhile. Maybe our definition of mass is just plain wrong. We'll see. But it's intriguing enough that I have a particle physicist who put his name on the paper with us. Doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't mean that he's convinced that we're right. But we have a real particle physicist who thinks that if it's wrong, it's not obviously wrong and it's worth pushing on right now.
- [16:49]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [17:26]
Donald Hoffman
I just booked my VRBO because there was a sweet wine fridge.
- [17:29]
Tom Bilyeu
We all have our reasons. If you know you VRBO terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details. Yeah, I mean, I hope anybody listening to this understands how the scientific method works. I am constantly trying to tell my team, hey, you need to be fearless in the predictions that you make, because you shouldn't hold yourself accountable to always being right. You should hold yourself accountable to always learning and getting a little bit better. So the fact that you're willing to make a precise prediction, your paper is full of mathematics and it's there for anybody to check, so people will be able to help you find the edges. Which is something I've heard you talk about and I really respect about you, is that one, you obviously approach everything with humility. But two, you, you actively want people to find the edges of your hypothesis, your theory, so that you know where it's wrong, so that you can adjust and get more right. Which is far more interesting, especially if you sincerely want to understand what's outside of that headset. It's like, well, I would rather realize I'm wrong, find out how to get right so that I can actually begin to explore that possibility. Space versus think I'm right, but really I'm wrong and nobody ever helps me come to understand why. I really, I really like that. And I hope everybody listening takes that on in their own life. I think that that's really important. Okay. So I wanted to make sure that you had a second to lay out the grounding there, that this is something that you're seeing in particle physics, that there really is a there there to pursue. Because the intuitive space for somebody like me who's not a Mathematician who while I use the scientific method in business, I definitely do not consider myself a scientist. But pursuing the intuitive things, pursuing the thought experiments feels true to Einstein's encouragement to all of us lay people to focus more on imagination than knowledge.
- [19:25]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
To really understand how to begin to think through these things. So one of his famous thought experiments was that in a falling elevator you would feel like you were weightless. And that ends up being. It took him years, but he ends up finally putting that together with some other ideas that he had intuited, including if you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn on the flashlight, what happens? And in that spirit, you said something as you were describing the consciousness and you as an instantiation of that, only to go back to the One. And you said well, the One is still learning what it needs to learn. And I am like a dog with a bone with that idea. What do you mean? Needs to learn what? Like when I think about a human.
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Donald Hoffman
Right, right.
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Tom Bilyeu
It needs to learn things to stay alive because it's been given these drives by evolution. But what has set up the. The. The consciousness that isn't physical.
- [20:28]
Donald Hoffman
Right, right.
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Tom Bilyeu
To need anything.
- [20:32]
Donald Hoffman
My guess again we're way in over my head. But here we are. Might as well take you the joy of exploration.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's just pre programmed how it is.
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Donald Hoffman
It's just yeah that the One is the only thing that there is. But it's infinitely changing infinitely is self exploration. It's really infinite self exploration and looking and enjoying and ever expanding its understanding of itself. That would be my.
- [21:15]
Tom Bilyeu
So you conceptualize it as still moving towards pleasure.
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Donald Hoffman
Well that that pleasure is just in some sense. It's different than an evolutionary thing. So an evolution and I should say also concretely wise different. This dynamics of conscious agents does not need to have an arrow of time. So there's. That's really interesting.
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Tom Bilyeu
Why? Because that doesn't seem true. Okay.
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Donald Hoffman
The entropy. One can write down a Markovian dynamics in which the entropy does not grow. Straightforward. But it's a theorem three line proof, trivial proof that any projection of that Markovian dynamics that has no arrow of time, any projection of it that loses information, say by conditional probability, it will give you new dynamics. It'll be a projected dynamics of the original dynamics. And that new dynamics will have an arrow of time because of the loss of information. So the arrow of time. So here's my view. Our experience right now of an arrow of time and of the universe with a big bang and then maybe a big crunch or whatever or entropy Death at the end. That whole arrow of time is not an insight at all into what lies beyond spacetime. It's an artifact of the projection. And from an evolutionary point of view, time is the fundamental limited resource, right? If I run out of time before I get to my next meal, if it takes so much time to get my next meal, it's over. If it takes too much time to get my next drink of water, it's over. For me, time is my most fundamental limited resource. So that limited resource of time is not an insight into reality. That's an artifact of projection from a timeless conscious agent dynamics. And that also suggests all the other limited resources, that's all artifacts. So evolution with natural selection is a beautiful theory, but it's the theory of all the artifacts that you see when you do a projection from a realm in which there are no limited resources, there is no competition. But what looks like evolution by natural selection, in this projection, it looks like there's an arrow of time. So all of our intuitions right now about learning new stuff, it's going to be very hard for us because our intuitions are deeply shaped right now by our interface where there's an entropy arrow. And in this realm beyond there is need not be an entropy arrow. And so wrapping our heads around what it's like to have the notion of exploration where there's no entropy arrow. Now, I'm not saying I wrap my head around it, but I do know that the mathematics is there, that the Markoving dynamics does not have to have an arrow of time in the sense of an arrow of increasing entropy. And that's again one of the points of doing science with precise mathematics. I get emails quite often from people that I think are very, very bright and have really good ideas and they don't know how to take them and make them precise. And as a result, you can never surprise yourself, you can never like Einstein, when he had his idea about you mentioned the falling elevator and so forth. And so he had that in 1907 or something like that, 1906. And he worked for years to take that idea and make it mathematically precise. 1915, and he learned tons and tons of what at the time was state of the art, fairly new math. It was hard for him, sleepless nights, pulling his hair out, really working hard to take his good intuition and turn. So he finally wrote down in mathematics in 1915, and a year later a guy named Schwarzschild wrote back to Einstein and said, here's a solution to your equations and they predict what we now call black holes. Now, Einstein didn't foresee that. He didn't like it. He didn't believe it. He disbelieved in black holes. He wanted to get rid of them. So Einstein's theory came back and surprised him. And that's why it's so important for us to do science, because what we do is we take our best ideas that we have right now and then we make them mathematically precise. And then the mathematics comes back and it slaps us in the face and says, here are the implications of the ideas that you started with, implications that you simply couldn't think deeply enough about on your own. But the mathematics can take you where your own. You know, just consciousness wouldn't necessarily go. And so here's one of those directions with this notion of conscious agents, the dynamics need not have increasing entropy. And so our whole intuition about an arrow of time need not hold in this realm. So when we talk about the notion of explore consciousness, exploring for the joy of it, we're going to have to rejig how we think about the notion of. For us, exploration is something that happens in an arrow of time. What does it mean for us? Can we wrap our heads around the notion of exploration where we let go of an increasing entropy kind of thing? I don't know if we can. Maybe you just have to let go of this headset altogether to really get that. But is it possible, while we're under the limits of this headset, to wrap our minds around it, we can at least get pointers to that idea. Our mathematics led to this pointer, and I would never even gone there unless the mathematics took me there. So I would say that it's just like the amateur astronomer with a pair of binoculars could be brighter than the guy with the James Webb Space Telescope, but he's never going to beat the guy with the James Webb Space Telescope because the guy's got better tools. And that's what science does for you. You may be smarter than Einstein, but if you don't actually put yourself using the tools of mathematics and so forth, that genius will never actually flower in the sense of reaching all the potential implications of what it means. And so that's why we do science the way we do it, with mathematical precision. Because for two reasons, if our ideas are good, we probably don't understand all their implications. And so the math will come back and it'll be our teacher. And second, certainly our ideas have their limits, and it's hard for us to understand what the limits are. And in good cases, the math will come back and tell us what those limits are. So, for example, Einstein's theory of gravity, together with quantum field theory tell us 10 to the -33 centimeters and space time is over. It has no operational meaning. Who could have guessed? Could you have guessed? Could Einstein have guessed? Oh, yeah, I have the idea about space time, but at 10 to the minus 33 cm is going to fall apart. Not even an Einstein could guess that. That would only come through taking your ideas, making them, doing the travail. I mean, Einstein really, it was a birthing process. It was very, apparently very, very hard to give birth to general relativity. And many mathematicians working in physics and so forth say the same thing. You're working in the dark, it's hard, you're struggling, and then all of a sudden, if you're lucky, you get that breakthrough and you see things. But then it comes back and you learn the limits of the basic concepts that you started with, and then you reboot from a new set of assumptions.
- [29:13]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting that you say about the set of assumptions. So as we explore this topic, I realize that I think we still have. We each have slightly different assumptions, though I think that we're talking well about the topic. But take the arrow of time, for instance. So the thing that I find fascinating about the hypothesis that you put forward is, for me, anyway, I don't have the math to back it up. It's definitely land of intuition. But what I find fascinating is if you're correct and it's just consciousness is the singular thing, it is, for whatever reason, joy, need to pursue, desire to learn, whatever it's running through all of these qualia, and that the tool it uses to do so is this headset. There's an infinite array of headsets, but the one we're in has learned that there's only certain qualia that can be achieved when there is an arrow of time. And that's why I was saying, when you first said that, I was like, I don't know that that's true meaning inside the headset for at least certain types of qualia. It is clear, in fact, the only thing we know is that the qualia that we have access to requires the arrow of time. We presume that there are infinite headsets that provide just unimaginable, unknown types of qualia, but the type that we have directly experienced all require the arrow of time.
- [30:48]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. And we've been shaped basically by our headset to think that way. And if I ask you to imagine a new Color that you've never seen before? You can't do it. I mean, again, it's not because there aren't, I mean, pigeons have four color receptors, presumably. Pigeons are experiencing colors that no human could even imagine. And maybe the mantis shrimp is seeing stuff that the pigeon can't, you know, and, and then the birds that see polarization of light, I mean, they're seeing something that I, I, what is it like to see polarization of light? I, I don't know. It, it, what is it like to have infrared vision like certain pit vipers? What is it like to actually experience an electric field? To sense some electric field for some fish or creatures in underwater? I mean, I have no. What is it like to be a bat doing echolocation? I don't know. I literally have no idea. So these are pointers to me that in the headset we get all these hints of realms of qualia utterly outside anything that I can concretely imagine.
- [31:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So talk to me about near death experiences and then I want to get into psychedelics and whether they are simply another form of qualia of what it's like to be a human who's having that experience, or whether that's actually melting the human away and revealing something closer to being the one again. But what can we learn from near death experiences? Do you think it's a, like a sort of half return to the one, or is it just. Well, that's what happens in the headset to the brain when you deprive it of oxygen?
- [32:33]
Donald Hoffman
Well, from a physicalist framework, clearly the latter is the case. Right? So from a physicalist framework, spacetime is fundamental and consciousness is a product of the brain. And so any experiences of transcendence, of things going beyond the headset, have to be just the brain malfunctioning in its final throes of death, Something like that. But if space time is doomed, as the physicists tell us, and it's not fundamental, then that leaves open the possibility, it doesn't dictate that near death experiences are genuine insights into some conscious experiences that transcends our spacetime interface, but it certainly is, is compatible with that point of view. And so I think it's worth on, on that framework to explore the possibility that there are some insights. And I would take any of those reports like we take any kind of eyewitness testimony, right, with a grain of salt and you try to get corroboration and, and discount it. But on the other hand, you don't want to just ignore the data either, right? So there's the fine line to be open to get the insights, but not to jump on anything just because it sort of fits your preconceived conceptions. Most of our preconceived conceptions are deeply wrong. We thought the Earth was flat. We thought the Earth was the center of the universe. We thought space and time were fundamental wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So we're batting poorly. So anything that even if we think that consciousness will survive death, what we think about that, the way we think about it is probably wrong. And so what we have to do is again, be. So that's why when I say we're in deep waters here and I'm being very, very careful, it's. These are things that my theory, our theory suggests. But, but I don't want to be at all doctrinaire. I think what I should do is make bold proposals. But they're just proposals and the goal is to be precise so we can figure out where the proposals are wrong. So, so yeah, so in that spirit, yeah, the near death experiences may have some good data about transitions out of this interface in that, in that spirit.
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Tom Bilyeu
And there's probably of what people bring back.
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Donald Hoffman
Yeah, there are, there are some commonalities. There's a lot of reports of, you know, going through a tunnel, a light tunnel. Some of like a review. I think Ray Moody or something like that is famous for categorizing a lot of the similarities in near death experiences. A life review. And then of course the reports we have were people who came back. So then they, they came back and so forth. So, so there are, there are, but, but there are also some that report, you know, horrific. You know, it's just not all, not, not all reports are, are great. So someone that, that we know personally had a near the death experience and was very, very pleasurable and came back and has no fear of, she claims to have no fear of death now. So I don't know. So, yeah, I'll be part of the film that's exploring these near death experiences there. It's put out the, I think it's the Langone Medical center in New York. There are some cardiologists who are, you know, they, they work with patients who die, but with, with new cardiology techniques they can keep the heart and the body in from deteriorating for quite a long time now. You know, an hour or something or maybe longer. And then they can bring these people back. And so this film is partly directed by a cardiologist or who, who was seeing so many of these experiences that, that he Wanted to document what he's seeing in. In the er, you know, and. And again, you know, I'm not going to be doctrinaire about it, but I think it's data that shouldn't be ignored and how we should interpret it, we should be very careful.
- [36:51]
Tom Bilyeu
So if that stuff is real, the prediction that that seems to make is that not only is there a sense of consciousness that remains, but that there is sensory perception that holds out for quite a while, because at least from the things I've heard, people come back with a sense of either it's peaceful or whatever, but that means that they were able to experience that and retain it.
- [37:15]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. That's right.
- [37:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [37:17]
Donald Hoffman
This is quite fascinating. Yeah. That again, this is exactly the right scientific way to think about it. This is data. Maybe if it is data, what does it entail about letting go of the headset and what kind of experience we might have afterwards? And is that just a transition thing or is it more permanent and so forth?
- [37:38]
Tom Bilyeu
If you have what I call the only belief that matters, that you can, if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you actually will get better.
- [37:45]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [37:46]
Tom Bilyeu
If you believe that, then you'll pursue improvement. If you don't believe that, then you won't, because it wouldn't make any sense.
- [37:51]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [37:51]
Tom Bilyeu
So you miss out on fitness payoffs based on your cognitive assessment of how the world works.
- [37:58]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [37:59]
Tom Bilyeu
So all of that's fascinating.
- [38:00]
Donald Hoffman
Okay, Absolutely.
- [38:02]
Tom Bilyeu
And important to understand. Where my brain breaks with your thesis is how different what you perceive is and what the world is like. And I know, and this is where it gets hard because I think you would say we don't know what's under space time.
- [38:20]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [38:21]
Tom Bilyeu
But what's your best guess like as we strip away this layer? And this might be the time to talk about consciousness. But I don't want to lead the witness if it isn't space time. Stab in the dark for me. What the hell is it?
- [38:38]
Donald Hoffman
Well, I'll tell you what the physicists are doing on this, because the physicists are the ones who are saying space time is not fundamental.
- [38:45]
Tom Bilyeu
So it's there. It's a pointer, it's a representation. It's a data structure.
- [38:49]
Donald Hoffman
It's a data structure to something deeper. That's right.
- [38:51]
Tom Bilyeu
But it happens to be the human brain, which is already a data structure. You're already making that up.
- [38:57]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right.
- [38:58]
Tom Bilyeu
But that data structure represents things through space time.
- [39:03]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right. That's our headset. Space time is just our headset.
- [39:07]
Tom Bilyeu
And it only goes down to the. Is that the Planck length? I always hear you quote size.
- [39:13]
Donald Hoffman
Plank length is 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.
- [39:15]
Tom Bilyeu
So that is what you're quoting, right?
- [39:16]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
- [39:16]
Tom Bilyeu
That's the smallest thing that we can measure.
- [39:20]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. That's the smallest thing. That's the smallest scale at which space time has any operational meaning. If you try to go smaller, space time ceases to make any operational sense
- [39:31]
Tom Bilyeu
at all because gravity insists that below that things have condensed to too fine of a point. It becomes a black hole.
- [39:38]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right. You create a black hole. Okay, so, so and if you think
- [39:43]
Tom Bilyeu
about it, and we know that isn't true, like why can't that just be true? Smaller than that is a black hole. Yay.
- [39:49]
Donald Hoffman
Well, we know it's, we know that at the Planck scale, you, space time stops and you get, you, you get black holes.
- [39:57]
Tom Bilyeu
So what's the problem?
- [39:58]
Donald Hoffman
Well, black holes are. Singularity means we don't know what's happening. So you get infinities popping up.
- [40:05]
Tom Bilyeu
But black holes are real, right? They're, they're real as a data structure.
- [40:10]
Donald Hoffman
They're, they're, they're real stopping points in our understanding.
- [40:13]
Tom Bilyeu
But they're in the universe.
- [40:15]
Donald Hoffman
Well, they're.
- [40:18]
Tom Bilyeu
I know, this gets complicated. Universe is a representation.
- [40:21]
Donald Hoffman
Oh yeah. So, and so that's why I want to start hitting Penrose and others have been study the properties of black holes. Right. Penrose won the Nobel Prize very recently for his, his wonderful work on black holes. And so there's a lot of work that's being done to understand the properties of black holes. For example, the amount of information you can store in a black hole doesn't depend on its volume, only the surface area.
- [40:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I don't understand that.
- [40:45]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, right, right. This is, it's very, very strange. But that turns out to be true. In everyday space. The amount of information that you can store in this volume here is not dependent on the volume. It depends on the surface, the surface area. That's the universe we live on. So that's led people to this holographic kind of idea.
- [41:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh. Every word out of your mouth. I'm like, we actually are in a simulation. We haven't even talked about the non local things are not locally real. We'll get to that.
- [41:14]
Donald Hoffman
Because that's the new Nobel Prize this year.
- [41:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Which is insane. And literally just says you're in a simulation. And it's the same as rendering. And when you look at something, it renders. When you look away, it, it doesn't. And we can prove it mathematically.
- [41:26]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, that's right.
- [41:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Way too fascinating. We'll get to that. But first I want to understand like black holes. The word real gets very slippery in this conversation, right? But black holes are observable.
- [41:38]
Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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Donald Hoffman
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Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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- [42:39]
Donald Hoffman
So, so the idea is that the notion of space time at like instead of 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, say 10 to the minus 40 centimeters. What would that mean? It does. It has no meaning. There's nothing you can do with it. So black holes are fine. They're objects there that are at the end point of what spacetime can do. But if we say but I thought spacetime was fundamental, that means I should be able to talk about what's happening at 10 to the minus 50 centimeters. And you just cannot. There's no operational meaning. And in that sense.
- [43:08]
Tom Bilyeu
So you're saying whatever is fundamental will be able to tell you exactly what's happening inside of a black hole.
- [43:14]
Donald Hoffman
Well, or it will tell you that this whole framework in which black holes appear is the wrong framework.
- [43:19]
Tom Bilyeu
And thusly black holes are just a data structure for something else that is describable once you get outside, once you
- [43:25]
Donald Hoffman
get out of space time. And, and you know, it's hard for us to think outside of space time. Like, yeah, can we, can we beat
- [43:32]
Tom Bilyeu
this point to death for a second? Because this one was a, a breakthrough for me when I realized I always thought of the Planck plunck length as like so infinitesimally small that like we should all be in awe. And you're like, like that space time breaks down that early is just ridiculous. And I was like, okay, that's a different frame of reference.
- [43:52]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, it's, it's It's a very shallow data structure. If it was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters that it broke down, I'd be. I'd be impressed. 10 to the minus 33. We got cheated. This is a really shallow data structure. It's only four dimensions. I can't even imagine something in five dimensions. I can't even imagine a new color that I've never seen before. So we've been given this really. We think that we're. In many cases, we think we're the epitome of intelligence and the smartest thing in the universe. My feeling is we've been shortchanged. Really shallow data structure, only three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. We got a cheap headset.
- [44:29]
Tom Bilyeu
And so when. That's a fun way to say it when data breaks down like that, right? What? So I always forget the guy's name, so I wrote it down, but. Nima Arcani. Hamed.
- [44:41]
Donald Hoffman
Right, right.
- [44:42]
Tom Bilyeu
So I've heard you talk about him a lot. So I started doing some research on him. And if I'm understanding what he's saying correctly, is basically when you have a data structure that falls apart that early. Right. Which was again, a total reframe for me because I thought of that as like, oh my God. But apparently when you understand this better, you realize that's a pretty early tap out. So when a data structure falls apart that early, that tells you that it's proximal, which I'm interpreting as it's the finger pointing at the moon. It is not the moon itself. Exactly. And so now you know, you're looking at a pointer. And so that seems to be the thing that his whole case rests on for space time being doomed. That if your data structure falls apart that early, you know, there's no way this is the fundamental thing.
- [45:32]
Donald Hoffman
That's one of the big pointers, the other big pointer, a couple other big pointers he gives is that when you let go of space time and you start computing particle interactions, like two gluons hit each other and four gluons go spraying out the kind of thing that happens at the Large Hadron Collider all the time if you compute it inside of spacetime. That one I mentioned, two gluons in, four gluons out, hundreds of pages of algebra for one interaction. Why is it so complicated? Because it's the wrong data structure. It's an ugly, nasty data structure.
- [46:03]
Tom Bilyeu
And the thing that you're doing the algebra on is in what way they
- [46:06]
Donald Hoffman
scatter inside space time. You have to do to make all the math work out. You have to have these Feynman diagrams with virtual particles.
- [46:13]
Tom Bilyeu
People are trying to. They're trying to say, okay, a theory of everything, which you are saying does not exist and will never exist. We'll get to that later. So if there were a theory of everything, though, we should be able to know everything so finely that I can tell you. Oh, if they collide at this energy with this directionality, it will scatter exactly like this.
- [46:34]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. With these probabilities. You have probabilities of their. Of their scattering.
- [46:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. And so they're just like, oh, my God. It's a dizzying amount of math.
- [46:41]
Donald Hoffman
That's right.
- [46:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Until.
- [46:43]
Donald Hoffman
Until you let go of space time. And then that one that I mentioned, two gluons in, four gluons out. It's one term. You can compute it by hand.
- [46:51]
Tom Bilyeu
It's like when they hit, there'll be a diamond. Yeah, well, because you need to start talking in shapes, right?
- [46:57]
Donald Hoffman
Well, yeah, so. So it's a shape beyond space time. Whose volumes. So, yeah, it's a shape outside of spacetime, outside of our headset. And the volumes of this shape actually tell you the probabilities of the various kinds of particle interactions.
- [47:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. So.
- [47:13]
Donald Hoffman
And so it turns billions of terms into. Into a handful of terms, and it shows you new symmetries. That's what the physicists really love is simpler math, which is great. And then all of a sudden, you see new symmetries that you can't see in space time.
- [47:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, I'm going to try to draw an analogy which is already going to break things, but let me see how close I get. You're in Grand Theft Auto, right? You step on the gas and you go forward, and we're just like, oh, my God, the math. To predict in what way the car is going to move when you step on the gas pedal is ridiculous. But if we were to be actually looking at the electrical pattern that's stepping on the gas, which would be pressing buttons on your controller. In a certain context, if we understood that there's a pattern outside of the headset. So in the. The PlayStation or the Xbox, there's an electrical pattern inside of that that looks. So if you know chess, and I don't, but I'm familiar with the. The idea of chunking. So apparently what chess masters do is they're not looking at the individual pieces on the board. They just know the patterns. So they're like, oh, that image of where the pieces are in this order, that's this setup. So they've Chunked the whole board into like, oh, I know where we're at in the game, and I know what the right next move is. So basically what you're saying is you step on the gas and it gives you an image of a shape of electrical patterns outside of the headset. If that's what you're saying, I at least understand. I don't. I could not give you the math or any of that, but I get like, this representation, this data structure which you think of as being real. Stepping on the gas and the red Porsche goes is actually this chunk of electrical impulses. If we think of it as a shape or a pattern or a rhythm or however we're going to think of it. Is that what we're saying?
- [49:18]
Donald Hoffman
That could be a helpful metaphor. And I've got another metaphor that may also try to help people on the. Because that's an important point that you're raising. So suppose. Here's another way to think about this. Suppose that I'm looking at a video and I'm seeing all these pixels, and the pixels are moving in really complicated ways. You know, there's red pixels and green pixels and light pixels and dark. And I'm just. And I know that there's something interesting going on. And so I write down all these equations for the motions of these pixels. But someone says, you know what? There is just this. I've got this little Rubik's Cube, and all I'm doing is rotating a Rubik's Cube. And. But. But you're only seeing the pixel projection of. If you just could see this 3D object, you would realize how simple it is. But when you only see the pixels and see all the. Then it's. Oh, man, I gotta. I've got to model all the pixels moving on my screen. How do I do that? Well, if you can just let go of the screen behind it, there's this unified geometric object, the Rubik's Cube. And if you just see. Oh, it just rotates rigidly. That's. And that rigid rotation is the only motion I need. It's a rotation. Here I have to look at all the pixels.
- [50:28]
Tom Bilyeu
This pixel, I'm paying attention to the dots rather than the shape.
- [50:32]
Donald Hoffman
Space time is paying attention to the dots. So in space time, we're stuck on the video screen and we're trying to model all the pixels moving around the video screen. And what the physicists have said, if you let go of the video screen, take it off, you see that these geometric objects like that Rubik's Cube, are Outside of it. And their structure is much simpler. I'm not saying simple, but much, much simpler. But when it projects into this, really. See, you lost information in the projection, Right. That's why you have all these little pixels. You have a 3D object here, a two dimensional screen. So now it looks really complicated.
- [51:10]
Tom Bilyeu
But what's happening then? When these things collide, they're making a
- [51:15]
Donald Hoffman
new Rubik's Cube, so.
- [51:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Or they're just rotating a shape that's already there. This is where I have no way to anchor myself.
- [51:23]
Donald Hoffman
Well, so particles are things inside spacetime, right? Yes, so. So when we look at particle interactions at the Large Hadron Collider, we're looking at the pixels. Yeah, Motions of the pixels inside space time, the amplituhedron and other structures that they're finding.
- [51:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. Amplitude is something you say. So fat. I've heard you say this a gazillion times, but I had to look it up.
- [51:47]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [51:48]
Tom Bilyeu
So an amplitude Hedron, is a shape. Yes, geometric shape.
- [51:54]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [51:55]
Tom Bilyeu
In how many dimensions?
- [51:58]
Donald Hoffman
They can be in small numbers dimensions, but they can go to infinity. So there's lovely, there's different kinds of amp, different size of amplituhedra depending on how many particles you want to interact.
- [52:07]
Tom Bilyeu
And that's our Rubik's Cube.
- [52:09]
Donald Hoffman
That would be the Rubik's Cube beyond the headset.
- [52:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [52:12]
Donald Hoffman
And by the way, this is brand new. This was published in 2013. This is not even 10 years old. So this is, this is all new stuff, this amplitude. So it's no surprise that people haven't heard of it and, and many physicists haven't heard of it. It's truly, truly remarkable. Quantum theorists, in fact.
- [52:30]
Tom Bilyeu
And so how, what makes people think the amplitude Hedron is actually real, that we have detected the shape outside of the headset?
- [52:38]
Donald Hoffman
Well, I think that the really brilliant physicists would not say, we're done. They would say we've taken a first step outside of the headset of space time. And one of the first structures we found is the amplitude Hedron. That doesn't mean it's going to be the final answer. They're looking at other structures, something called the cosmological polytope and surface hydra and so forth.
- [53:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Cosmological polytrope.
- [53:05]
Donald Hoffman
Polytope.
- [53:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Polytope. Polytope. What is that? Is it another geometric shape?
- [53:10]
Donald Hoffman
It's another geometric shape that Nima Arkani Hamed, Juan Maldacena and others. A lot of the work has been done at the Institute for Advanced Study and collaborators with the people there and this is trying. See, the amplitude Hedron, is primarily for flat space time. My understanding. So without gravity, but when you deal with gravity and Einstein told us that sort of curves space time, then things get a little more complicated. And in that case, I think they're looking at the cosmological polytope for more like cosmological kinds of predictions. So the amplitude, and I'm sure that they're saying that they're not saying the cosmological polytope is the final word. What's really interesting is they've already taken a step beyond the amplitude Hedron. So there's something called meaning even that
- [53:59]
Tom Bilyeu
they don't think is fundamental or just that it's part of the fundamental.
- [54:04]
Donald Hoffman
They think it's an important step outside of space time. But what surprises the physicists is that the heart of the amplitude is something called a permutation, a kind of permutation called a decorated permutation. It's like shuffling cards, you're permuting cards. So it's a surprise that, that if you let go of space time, things become simple, you get this amplitude, the math becomes simple. And then when you look at the amplitude about its essential character, you find out that behind the amplitude is just permutations, decorated permutations, shuffling cards kind of thing. And so we're at this position. So this is only, you know, in the last couple decades, right, that this has happened. The amplitude Hedron is 2013, so it's only nine years old. So here we're at this really interesting position in science, in physics. I like to think of it like the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. Remember the scene? It was a great movie. Yeah. And there's a scene where there's the monolith. It's just sitting there, pregnant with meaning. And the apes are looking at it. They're afraid of it, they're beating on it. They don't know what to do with it. You get the sense that they know it's important, but they haven't a clue what it's pointing to. That's where we are. The amplituhedron and the decorated permutations are these monoliths outside of spacetime, there's no dynamics. Who ordered this monolith? The amplitude Hedron, just sitting outside of spacetime, it captures all these amplitudes, all the particle amplitudes. It captures the structure of spacetime, Einstein's special relativity, quantum theory and a so called unitarity of quantum theory. So this is deeper, this thing is deeper than spacetime. It's Deeper than quantum theory. Quantum theory itself is not deep enough. This structure, the amplitude Hedron. This monolith is beyond quantum theory, but it codes for quantum theory as projection in space time. So who ordered this? Like just in 2001, A Space Odyssey, the apes. You can imagine. What is this? Where did it come from? Why? What's it going on?
- [56:15]
Tom Bilyeu
I can imagine me asking that.
- [56:16]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, well, everybody's asking it right now. It's just a static structure. Physicists like dynamics. We want to have equations of motion. We don't have that. We just have. Here's the geometry and here's behind it. This permutation. They're just sitting there. Who ordered that and why? So that's where so. But the attitude is not one of despair. This is really for the young geniuses who are doing this stuff. This is like fabulous, right? We're the first generation that. Not me, but the young physicists, the first generation that really gets to step outside of the headset of space time. They've already found these monoliths, the amplitude decorated permutations.
- [57:01]
Tom Bilyeu
And just to really make that simplistic Shapes, shapes. And then the shuffling of the shapes.
- [57:08]
Donald Hoffman
That's right, some shuffling that codes for the shapes. There's a shuffling that.
- [57:13]
Tom Bilyeu
When you say codes for the shapes,
- [57:15]
Donald Hoffman
what does that mean? It captures their essential structure. In some sense. Even the geometry, the volumes and so forth are redundant. There's this even simpler, more compressed description right now the decorated permutation is the most compressed description that doesn't have any extra bells and whistles. The amplitude Hedron in some sense, the positive grassmanian that they used to build it and so forth. They have extra bells and whistles. In some sense the amplitude boils it down to its essence. So it's shuffles, permutations. And the big question is why this? In the beginning, God said. Why would God say that? What is that? Let there be shapes. Let there be the amplitude Hedon. Let there be shuffles. That doesn't seem quite deep enough. Right. It seems like there's got to be something beyond that, something dynamical. And there's no clue right now in the physics about a dynamical thing behind the decorated permutations or the amplitude Hedron.
- [58:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, we just lost me. So I'm guessing that we lost a lot of people. So this is outside of the headset. So we're beginning to get to what we think may be these foundational pillars. But it's so early that nobody really knows what these are yet. Let's go back to the quantum realm for a second. So this is one of my pet peeves that people in the mindset space tend towards magical thinking. And there's something about quantum entanglement, the quantum tubules in the brain, or whatever it is that they think about collapsing and all that one. Is there anything even inside the headset? Is there anything to be learned from the quantum realm? Does the quantum realm point to anything outside of the headset? And where are we? Like, how. How do people not drift into meaninglessness as they begin to pursue this? Because it. I. Because I'm so focused on usefulness, right. I get very agitated, might be the right word when people are like, oh, we're quantum entangled, and that's what the soul is. And I want to tear my hair up, right?
- [59:46]
Donald Hoffman
So it's one thing just to say those words. It's another thing to have a mathematical model and a mathematical model that actually predicts precise outcomes of precise experiments. And so that's the difference. When physicists talk about quantum entanglement, they're talking serious math and then serious experiments that. Just a week ago, the Nobel Prize was awarded to three of the pioneers in testing one of the key predictions of entanglement, which is that the real world isn't real. See, it's called local realism, the belief that we tend to have of local realism. So objects like an electron has a property like its position or its spin, whether or not you observe it has got a value of that because it's real.
- [60:40]
Tom Bilyeu
And we assume.
- [60:41]
Donald Hoffman
We've assumed that, right? That's the reality.
- [60:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Whether you see it or not, it is spinning up or spinning down, right?
- [60:46]
Donald Hoffman
It's like saying the train is there and it's going to hit you. Even if you don't see it, you close your eyes, it's not going to stop the train from hitting you. So the electron really has its position and really has a spin when it's not observed. And the other assumption is locality. It's Einstein's assumption that nothing, no effects, travel faster than the speed of light through space, through space time. And so that the two together are called local realism. So it's possible that when we say local realism is false, that it's either the realism that's wrong or the locality. So it could be, you could say, okay, local realism is false because there really are properties that exist, but they travel, their influences go faster than the speed of light. Or you can say nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but. So the realism is false. I believe Einstein, but the realism is false. My attitude is both are false. Local and realism are both false. And that comes out of just the idea that space time itself is not fundamental. Right?
- [61:48]
Tom Bilyeu
And so let me say it real simply for people like me, things only exist when you look at them, right?
- [61:57]
Donald Hoffman
You create them when you see them. Like in Grand Theft Auto, I have a VR headset on. I look over there and I see a red Camaro. Is there a red Camaro in the supercomputer? No.
- [62:07]
Tom Bilyeu
The average person is going to reject this out of hand. So one, we're going to have to walk through the Nobel Prize. So thankfully you had linked to an article. So I read about it. It melted my brain about an hour before you and I sat down together, and I was just like, how the hell is this real or true? I guess because it's not real. And then. So we'll. We'll walk through that. But to give people the analogy to anchor them, I think you and I disagree about this. And I've always told people, largely because I don't want to argue about it, and I don't really know that I don't think we live in a simulation. The more times I interview you, the more I'm like, maybe we do. Or maybe the way our fitness payoffs get mapped, it is so effectively like a simulation, as you might as well think of it as living in a simulation. So I've written this story with my team. I don't want to overly take credit, but we've created this thing called Project Kaizen. And in Project Kaizen, they're in this thing that we call the Array. The Array is basically quantum foam. And the idea is that it's information theory, so that you information can travel faster than the speed of light. And that ultimately the thing that drives people mad in our world is to ask the question, where is the Array? Because they're thinking of it as like a quantum supercomputer or something. But in the lore where we play with that question, I don't want to give away what we think is the right answer, but we play with that question a lot. And so one of the characters in the story is literally driving himself mad by asking the question, where is the array? I know if I can generate enough energy, I can rip this veil and I can see through beyond the headset into like, is this sitting on a desk somewhere? And like, can we actually discover where that is? And okay, so working with that idea, at first I thought, nah, I mean, this is all just a story. But the more that I look at this in. In this is in real life. Put that in air quotes. In real life, you only render things when the player is looking at it. It's the only way to not melt the computer. So as they move their character's eyes around, they see different parts of the world. It literally comes into existence. It gets rendered when they look at it, and it ceases to be rendered when they look away. So they feel like they're in the seamless 3D environment, but in reality, it's a trick, and so it's only rendering right up to the edge of your field of view, and then outside of that, it's gone.
- [64:41]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly, yeah.
- [64:42]
Tom Bilyeu
As you describe the math, that is what's really happening, Right. That, I mean, it's kind of fun and cool and interesting.
- [64:52]
Donald Hoffman
Right?
- [64:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so with that analogy, people understand that one I agree at. If you try to replicate. So going back to what I was saying about if I try to replicate this table, make it look photorealistic, it is unbelievably difficult. And there are so many elements of, like, reflectivity and depth, of how far the light penetrates and.
- [65:10]
Donald Hoffman
Absolutely.
- [65:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, my God.
- [65:11]
Donald Hoffman
And it on and on and on. Right, Absolutely.
- [65:14]
Tom Bilyeu
So we know that there are all these things that you can do to recreate reality. One of the things as you build reality in a virtual environment is you have to deal with rendering only that which you're pointed at, what you measure.
- [65:27]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly. Right.
- [65:28]
Tom Bilyeu
As we look at the quantum world, that holds true in a way that is so weird. I don't know whether to laugh or be creeped out or whatever, but it's utterly fascinating. Okay, so now to the Nobel Prize. So we know that that's how you would have to do it if you want to recreate reality. And the Nobel Prize was won for
- [65:47]
Donald Hoffman
showing that the idea of local realism, that things exist and have definite values of their properties and with influences that go no faster than the speed of light, that's false. That assumption of local realism is false. And there are even really interesting quantum setups where you can prove that when I make this particular set of measurements, I know with probability one what I will get. Like, on my eighth measurement, I know with probability one what the value will be.
- [66:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Again, probability one means 100%.
- [66:20]
Donald Hoffman
100%. That's right. 100% what I'm going to measure. And yet I also can prove that that value, say, of the position or the spin, cannot possibly exist until the moment I make the measurement.
- [66:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so let's walk people through that. So Einstein and two other people basically said, huh? The Math predicts that what you just said is true, that I can have two. We end up calling them quantumly entangled particles. But I have two particles. I forget which type of racing away from each other, right to the opposite ends of the solar system. Very, very, very far apart. And one of them, we know they have to have opposite spin. So one of them is going to be spinning up, one of them is going to be spinning down.
- [67:12]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [67:12]
Tom Bilyeu
And they said they're like socks. So one of them could be the right sock and one of them is the left sock. So once you measure that, oh, this is the right one, then you know automatically that the other person has the left one.
- [67:26]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [67:26]
Tom Bilyeu
And the Nobel Prize was won for proving that you don't. They're not like socks.
- [67:33]
Donald Hoffman
Right? Right.
- [67:34]
Tom Bilyeu
It's not you. It's not even that you don't know which is which. It's that whichever one you look at first, if that spins up, then, you know, instantaneously, the other one is spinning down, but causally, because this one is spinning up, that one must be spinning down.
- [67:49]
Donald Hoffman
Right? Right. Okay.
- [67:50]
Tom Bilyeu
So now the part I don't understand, which, by the way, means that these things will react effectively to each other because you measured it instantaneously across the entire solar system in this example, which is way faster than light, my question is, when you measure it, if it wasn't already spinning up or down, what makes it spin up or down? Is it just probability?
- [68:16]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. That's all the physics can tell us right now are the probabilities for this. So. And probability is where explanation stops. Right. When you put a probability measure in your theory, you're saying, my understanding stops right here. So I need a probability measure. Because if I could tell you how it worked, then I would tell you how it worked right. Now I can just say, here's the probabilities. And so that's what we get in quantum theory is. And so that's why Einstein said, I don't. God doesn't play dice. He didn't like the idea that God didn't know all the way down what was going on, that there would be these random probabilities. But. But, yeah, when you do the experiments, it turns out entanglement is real. And that then leads to the conclusion, ultimately, that local realism is false. And it's truly stunning. But if you think about it in terms of a headset, as you said, I render, like in the virtual reality Grand Theft Auto, I render the Camaro when I look, and I garbage collect it when I look away. I Just delete it. I render particles, I render spacetime itself. Spacetime itself doesn't exist except as a data structure that we use. And so it's now in terms of a simulation. I should make a distinction between what we're saying here and a different kind of notion of simulation that Nick Bostrom has. So there's a simulation theory of Nick Bostrom and others where they, you know, say, look, this isn't real. It could be just some computer geek that did a program, and we're just creatures in the simulated world in this program. And it turns out that that computer Greek herself is just a program from someone else at a lower level. And there's this whole hierarchy all the way down until you get to some base programmer. But they assume that the base level is a space time world, so they're still stuck on the headset. That kind of simulation theory isn't thinking big enough. You have to let the. And they're also assuming that that programs can create consciousness, which is another story. No one's been able to show how, how that's even possible. So they're just not thinking big enough. You've got to let go of space time at the base of the entire hierarchy of simulations to really get where the physicists have gotten. Space time itself is merely a headset. So, so the standard simulation theory isn't thinking big enough. It's still stuck in the headset.
- [70:37]
Tom Bilyeu
As we strip away the headset, is local realism going to remain false? Or will there be something, a better way to ask it? When we strip away the headset, is God still playing dice?
- [70:50]
Donald Hoffman
I'll put it this way. As scientists making theories, we will always come up short. We will always have a place where we say in our theory, this is where our knowledge stops. And what, that's what we call the assumptions of our theory. So every scientific theory says, if you grant me these assumptions, I'll explain all this wonderful stuff. But you have to grant me those assumptions. And I can't explain those assumptions. Like even Einstein, he said, let me, grant me that the speed of light is constant for all observers. And grant me that the laws of physics are the same for all, all people moving in uniform motion. If you grant me those two things, then I can do all this wonderful stuff. And that's the way all scientific theories work. Grant me this assumption, these miracles, because
- [71:40]
Tom Bilyeu
we don't yet understand these things well.
- [71:43]
Donald Hoffman
And, and it's also, I think, intrinsic to what it means to be a scientific theory. So there's no escaping this. A scientific Theory. There is no theory of everything. That's a flat out statement. There can never be a scientific theory
- [71:58]
Tom Bilyeu
of everything because of Godel's incompleteness.
- [72:00]
Donald Hoffman
Incompleteness theorem. But. But even just before Godel's incompleteness theorem, every theory says, grant me these assumptions, please. You have to make certain assumptions to even to boot up.
- [72:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Isn't that just our ignorance?
- [72:13]
Donald Hoffman
Probably so. But our ignorance is unlimited.
- [72:16]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. So I heard you and Yosha Bach.
- [72:20]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [72:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Discussing. And he said something that rings intuitively true to me, which is that we always want to say, oh, we'll never understand that.
- [72:29]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [72:30]
Tom Bilyeu
But we just don't understand it right now. And just like Newton and his whole thing at the end of his life where he was like, the right way to think of me is as a child on the shore playing with the seashell in front of the entire vast sea of undiscovered truth.
- [72:44]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [72:45]
Tom Bilyeu
And his students, though, didn't believe that. Now, maybe out of arrogance, maybe they just sat so icky with them to think that they were so ignorant to so many things, but also to be generous to them, maybe because they believed on a long enough timeline we really would figure things out. Or even if you'll grant me my miracle of. As we begin to merge with machines, will we be able to process data in such a more vast way that we're able to see what is true? All of the mismapping of the. Or all of the combinatorial combinations become manageable just because we can crunch so much data. And so. Oh, you might as well look at what is exactly real, do you? Does that? So with that setup, I finally just went and looked up Godel's incompleteness theorem. Because I've tried to hang with you every episode around this, and looking at it, it's basically that there are. And this will be the world's most simplistic interpretation, but there are. You can create an equation that you know to be true, but you can't prove it.
- [74:08]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [74:09]
Tom Bilyeu
And it's beyond me to be able to explain how that's true, but when you read about it, it's like, whoa, okay. So you can really create. It's kind of like the mathematical version of a linguistic trap where it's like the statement on this side of the card or the statement on the other side of the card is false. You turn it over and it says what? The statement on the other side of the card is true. And so now you're trapped because they can't both be right or wrong.
- [74:35]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [74:36]
Tom Bilyeu
So it. I Can't explain it better than that. But like, without that, if there isn't things that are. If he's right, and there are things that are true but that cannot be proven, I get why you say that we'll never have a theory of everything, but if we just don't understand enough yet, then it feels like we will eventually.
- [74:58]
Donald Hoffman
No, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is definitive. It says that no matter how complicated your mathematical or scientific theory is, you can always produce a new statement that's true and is not provable within the theory that you've got. So it means it escaped your current theory. Your theory was not a theory of everything because it wasn't a theory of this. It didn't capture this truth. So you didn't have a theory of everything. So you say, okay, well, I'll just put it in my theory. So now I've got. Then Girdle says, well, sorry, now with your new augmented system, here's this new. I'll use it to show you there's this new thing that's true but can't be proven. So you don't have a theory of everything. And you add that. And, and what that means is that there is this unlimited realm of truth that's forever beyond our notion of proof of scientific theory. It's unlimited. So there's this. I think of it as like unlimited intelligence. And that is out there. And our scientific theories will, will get huge and far more interesting and far more complex and cover lots and lots. They, they'll cover, will be blown away. We'll make lots and lots of progress. And. But Godel's Incompleteness Theorem says, but you will have not even begun to scratch the surface of the unlimited intelligence that's out there. So I'm not. By the way, some people say, well, Hoffman, you're, you're, you're. You've walked away from modernism and the desire for logic and truth and rationality. You've gone into postmodernism. And, and you know, and my attitude is, no, no, no, Reason is telling us its limits. Reason is saying that logic itself cannot get to all truths. So I'm paying due respect to reason because reason itself is saying its own limits. And in fact, that gives me even more respect for reason because reason is smart enough to tell us where it gets off. So it's not abandoning reason. It's not going into, you know, some postmodernism kind of thing where anything goes. No, not anything goes. Reason is saying, yeah, use your logical systems, but your logical systems must of course, be internally consistent. So Godel's theorem is not Godel's inconsistency theorem. It's Godel's incompleteness theorem. Our logic can be consistent. If it is consistent, then it's necessarily incomplete. If it were inconsistent, then it's mostly useless. Right, It'd be mostly useless. So is Godel's. So what Godel really showed is our, our theories are either inconsistent or incomplete. But we call it Godel's Incompleteness theorem because that's. We don't think about inconsistency. It's really the incompleteness. And so it's truly respecting reason to recognize that reason itself says where it gets off. And it points to, as Newton pointed to, this unbounded intelligence that reason can always happily explore fully knowing. It will always be a trivial foray into the unknown. A trivial foray into the unknown. And yet somehow it's important for us to do that foray. So as a scientist, this is not just abstract stuff for me. I take reason very seriously. It says I have limits and there are unbounded truths beyond reason. So I take time to just sit in complete silence and let go of reason and see what happens. Maybe I can touch that unlimited intelligence. Maybe I am that unlimited intelligence under a headset. That's an interesting possibility, which many spiritual traditions have pointed to, that we are that unlimited intelligence. So that we then have this interesting back and forth between rigorous logic. Not anything goes rigorous logic on the one hand, and then complete letting go of all concepts, going into complete silence where there's this incredible intelligence that's literally infinitely greater than our scientific intelligence and having them go back and forth. I think the best science in the future will be from those who can do that. Be absolutely hard nosed in your math and your experiments. Absolutely hard nosed. It's not everything goes. It's rigor and then go into complete interior silence to get the true tap into this unlimited wisdom, unlimited intelligence, and go back and forth. Somehow my feeling is that's what all this is pointing to, that. That we should have our feet in both realms. And for some reason, having feet in both realms is really what we're up to, what this is all about.
- [80:16]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you think about the AI scientists that signed the paper saying that we need to slow AI down because. And I had one of them on the show because it passed a Turing test faster than they thought. It's just moving faster than they expected and they're very worried. Do you think that AI will ever become conscious?
- [80:34]
Donald Hoffman
I'm actually not too worried about AI right now myself. So I'm not one of the alarmists that says we need to stop and worry about it. The thing that would alarm me more would be if there were some kind of law that criminalized most people from doing it and let a few people do it, a few companies do it. That alarms me. So if there's going to be any kind of laws, they should be universal and no one should be excluded. Is that.
- [80:59]
Tom Bilyeu
But why aren't you worried about AI?
- [81:01]
Donald Hoffman
It's pretty easy even with ChatGPT, to give it questions it can't answer right now. It's basically a good statistical analyzer. It's not deeply intelligent, it will find things that humans won't find in medical searches and so forth, but that's because it just can handle more data and do more statistical analysis than we can. But it's not deeply intelligent. And the founders would tell you that it's fairly straightforward kinds of algorithms. And in terms of consciousness, there is no theory right now of any kind that can start with physical systems like circuits, software, and explain even one specific conscious experience, how it arises. So I'll be very, very clear. There's no theory on the planet today that can start with an artificial intelligence and a description of some kind of circuit or some kind of software pattern of activity and can give you a specific conscious experience like the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic, where you would say this pattern of activity must be identical, must be the taste of chocolate. It could not be the smell of, of a rose. There's nothing on the table and there's nothing even close. So if AIs can be conscious, there are no theories right now at all that could explain how that could possibly be and nothing that makes it even plausible. So, so I'm not too, too worried about AI's being conscious. I think that they will eventually outperform humans in, in, in most everyday activities, but, but simply because they'll have more compute power and can search more deeply than we can will.
- [82:45]
Tom Bilyeu
So for people that don't know you, I'm going to give a super brief synopsis and by all means put in where I go awry here, but you believe that this is all a simulation. We are living in a simulation. None of this is real. Space time itself is not real. We are effectively living inside of what you call the headset that everything you've ever known or ever experienced is all effectively an illusion. It is a computer video game by way of analogy, right? Given that, and audience listening at home, you will Notice he did not say no. So, and this is something I have forever just dismissed out of hand that we're living in a simulation. And I say dismissed out of hand because I don't have any evidence to back it up. And I've heard all the arguments from a mathematical perspective that if you believe that humans are capable of creating photorealistic simulations and you give any rate of progress whatsoever, we will eventually create a simulation. We certainly with AI and how rapidly it's been advancing, I think people now really have a sense of, whoa, we really are going to be able to do this. Apple Vision Pro certainly gives an indication like you will really be able to create some very compelling, very realistic things inside of a visor. So I think people more now more than ever, could see how we could get into a simulation, a simulated world. That's convincing. I'll leave it at that. And if that's true, then why would we, then once we create that simulation, not create another simulation? And I will just tell you as somebody, the T shirt that I'm wearing is literally about this. We're building a. A game that we hope over time will be a truly simulated world that people will go in. They will have an identity inside that game. Okay, so if we know that loop exists, then once the game inside the game gets powerful enough, it will do another simulation. Once the game inside that game, inside that game gets powerful enough, it will do a simulation. And so you end up in this point where just mathematically, it would make more sense to believe that you're in one of those conceivably infinite recursive loops of a simulation than that you're in base reality. But it just always seemed weird to me to say, no, no, we're in one of the simulations. But the more I research you, the more I'm like, maybe we really are in a simulation. And to that point, you talk about consciousness as being fundamental. And so I'll need you to explain that for people that. That will be so jarring, it will take them a while to really grok that. But that consciousness is fundamental. So couldn't AI ever become a window into what you call a conscious agent in the same way that a human child is or a dog is or whatever?
- [85:38]
Donald Hoffman
That I think is possible. Absolutely.
- [85:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So if you don't mind, walk people through how it could be possible, that physicality, everything they see, touch, taste, the loves that they have, all of that is a simulation. And not fundamental meaning it. It arises out of something else. But consciousness is the fundamental.
- [85:57]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [85:58]
Tom Bilyeu
The foundation.
- [85:59]
Donald Hoffman
Well, There are two arguments for the idea that what we see is not an objective reality that exists independent of us and is there prior to when we look at it. So in physics, the Nobel Prize last December was given to three physicists for the experimental testing of a clean prediction of quantum theory that something called local realism is false. Local realism is the claim that physical objects like electrons have definite. So realism is the claim that electron has a definite value of position, momentum and spin when it's not observed. And locality is the claim that those properties have influences that propagate through space time no faster than the speed of light. And the conjunction of those two claims. The properties exist even when they're not perceived, even when they're not measured, and they have influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light. That's local realism. And local realism is false. How did they prove it? So that's why you get a Nobel Prize. So John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger and Allen aspect. Over decades, there's a string of experiments that were tighter and tighter. Each experiment closed loopholes in the previous ones. So the experiments have to deal with. They're complicated experiments. I mean, Zeilinger was actually using photons from outer space to get entangled particles that they could use, that you could, couldn't argue that they were somehow, you know, being connected or correlated some in some deep way. But basically, the experiments are set up to show that properties like position or momentum or spin, typically they like to use spin in principle, could not have definite values until you actually measured them. So one way that they do this mathematically are there these bell inequalities. And so if the statistics of the correlations between the particle spins, you have two different particles that you're measuring, the spin axis, for example. And if they had definite values even when you weren't observing, you'd have certain pattern of correlation. And if quantum mechanics is right and those values don't exist until you measure them, then you have a different pattern of correlation. And so that's what they, they do. They have to look at a bunch of different measurements, look at the correlations, and the correlations come out to be what's what quantum theory predicts and not what our classical intuitions would tell us. And so the. This was done by Clauser decades ago, but it's so counterintuitive that people were going, okay, well, there must be a loophole here. So then they closed a series of loopholes and finally they started getting photons from, like, distant galaxies where the photons couldn't possibly have certain within space time causal connections and close that loophole. And so that's one direction. So physicists tell us that local realism, at least for microscopic subatomic particles, recently they've gotten up to groups of 700 atoms, I believe. So they're showing that these effects, these superposition effects of quantum theory are not just at the very, very small end of things. So local realism is false. Now, one can still try to say, well, but that's for really tiny things. But at the macroscopic level, maybe, look, local realism is true and that leads to a problem because there's no principal distinction in quantum theory between the microscopic and the Mac. You can't say it 10 to the minus, you know, 20 centimeters, that's, you know, that's, that's the limit. There's no boundary between micro and macro. And this is a well known open problem. So that's one direction. I'll just go with that. Now the other direction of argument is from evolution by natural selection, where you can ask a technical question. Evolution shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior. So that means to keep you alive along long enough to reproduce, right? So you have vision and touch and hearing and smell, and they've been shaped so that you're able to get the food you need, mate and stay alive at least long enough to reproduce and pass your genes on to the next generation. That's the standard story of evolution. Many theorists also think that evolution shapes our sensory systems to tell us truths about objective reality. Like when I see an apple, that's because there really is an apple and the red color and the shape really exist even when they're not perceived. And so notice that's a step beyond just saying that our senses evolved to guide adaptive behavior. They want to say more than that. They want to say that if you guide adaptive behavior, you're going to see the truth. So I decided with my colleagues Chetan Prakash and Manish Singh and Robert Prentner and others, my graduate students Justin Mark and Brian Marion, to test this Evolution is a mathematically precise theory. We have evolutionary game theory. So there's a technical question. What is the probability that evolution but natural selection would shape any sensory system to see truths about objective reality, the structure of objective reality. And it's straightforward to prove what we do is we look at various kinds of so called fitness payoff functions, maybe payoff functions that are, that are. And we can ask, do these payoff functions preserve certain kinds of structures in the world, like orders, a total order or a partial order or a metric or a topology or a measurable structure. So we can say we don't know what objective reality is. But suppose it had this structure. What is the probability that fitness payoffs which govern our evolution would actually have information about that structure in the world so that we could actually be evolved to have some insight into that structure of objective reality? And in case after case, the answer is probability is 0. There are payoff functions that would preserve the structure, but those payoff Functions have probability 0 in the set of all payoff functions. So that means if you're a betting man, you would bet long odds against it. So it doesn't mean that it can't happen, it's just that the probability is zero. And so I take this as a convergence between two of our big theories in science, evolution by natural selection and quantum theory, quantum field theory. Both are telling us that local realism is false. And so I think a good metaphor then is, as you were saying, like a user interface or a video game where you render on the fly what you need. So I'm looking at you, I'm rendering a TOM face and I look away and I'm not rendering it. Someone else might be looking at you and they're rendering their tom face, but their tom face is not the same as mine. It's going to be at a different angle and so forth. So we render on the fly. And that's what physics is telling us basically, that local realism is false. We render on the fly.
- [93:36]
Tom Bilyeu
And so the where you're taking that from is the quantum uncertainty principle. Basically everything has a probability of being in a given state. And the reason that it's just a big question mark is because nothing's looking at it. So it does not need to render that. It doesn't need to decide the system which is the simulation which people think of as space time. But they're almost certainly. I've interviewed you so many times and I know how hard it is to escape this matrix, but they're thinking of things within space time being real. But once you start looking at space time as purely a simulation, and that the then rendering only happens when you look at something. So that to me makes a hypothesis that I think your data backs up, which if that were really the case, then I understand why big things would adhere to what seem like a different set of rules, where things are static and small things would not. Because you're far less likely to observe a first order consequence of something microscopic. You may be observing a second or third order consequence, which raises questions for me that I'm sure we will get to at some point, but just to close the loop on that. So first order consequence, I can look up and see the moon. I see planets, I see stars. And so for that to be persistent, which is going to be a big thing in, in our discussion today, this is like the prime thing I want to talk to you about is persistence and what that means. But big things will need to be persistent, and therefore there has to be. There is a constant collapsing of its probabilities because there are so many things that require. Even if it's just its effects on gravity, there's so many things, quote, unquote, witnessing that or measuring that. So I get why those would be stable. But then things where they're so small that there's very little that hinges on that, that would need to be directly rendered. That would need to. Because you can get away with sort of the probabilistic rendering of the big things and their influence by these smaller things. But you don't need a direct representation of the spin, for instance, of a particle that all things that will quote, unquote, measure it, don't see, don't interact with or whatever, because nobody's effectively looking at it. It does not need to be rendered.
- [95:47]
Donald Hoffman
Right? So a good.
- [95:49]
Tom Bilyeu
So that'll feel right. Just to.
- [95:51]
Donald Hoffman
No, that's a great question. And, and so, great question.
- [95:54]
Tom Bilyeu
I was not asking a question. I was stating a hypothesis about crazy or.
- [95:58]
Donald Hoffman
No, I think it's.
- [95:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Does that make sense at the macro to the micro level?
- [96:01]
Donald Hoffman
Well, it, it, it does. But I think a good analogy here that might help clarify the. The issue is, is so in, say, Grand Theft Auto, right? I look over, I'm playing with somebody who's, you know, in Canada and somebody else is in Europe and someone else is in China. We're all playing a remote version of it in virtual reality. And I look over and I see a red Porsche to my right. And so I say, is there a red Porsche? Am I right? And the guy in China says, oh, yeah, I see a red Porsche. And the guy in Canada agrees, and the guy in Europe agrees as well. So, of course, each of them is rendering their own red Porsche. So there is some reality that's coordinating all of these perceptions, right? So the guy in Canada didn't see a red Porsche until he looked. But when he looked, there was this whole world of circuits and software that you don't see. There's some supercomputer that's coordinating the whole thing. How's it coordinating in that particular metaphor? Right. There's a supercomputer that's taking the inputs from your headset. What direction are you looking with your headset? Maybe you've got a bodysuit, so it's looking at your arm movements and so forth, and it's feeding all that into a supercomputer where it's got a model of the game. And in that model there's some red Porsche model. Of course, there's no red portion in the computer and it knows then how to coordinate and send the photons to your headset in Canada and my headset and Irvine and someone else's headset in, in China. So that we have this notion of a persistent reality of a Porsche, even though it individually, for each one of us, local realism is false. The Porsche doesn't even exist until I render it. And there's no red Porsche inside the supercomputer. So that's sort of the idea is that space time is just a headset and there's behind space time, there's going to be an incredibly complicated realm to explore. That's least as complicated as more complicated as like the supercomputer is to my little headset. Headset is sophisticated, it's beautiful technology, but the supercomputer is really, really powerful thing. And the same thing will be true of space time. It's just our headset. But if we look beyond that headset, we're going to be finding a realm that's far more complicated. So in some sense, science up till now has only studied our headset. We've studied inside space and time. We're taking our first baby steps to start to explore. We've cut our teeth in science on studying our headset. We learn the tools in the last three or four hundred years about experiments and clean mathematical theories and the loop between experiments and theories. But we thought we were studying objective reality, we were studying our headset. But now we have the tools to actually take a first step beyond space time and start to find structures beyond space time and their projection back into spacetime. And so from that point of view, our view that objects in space time, we've taken that to be the fundamental reality, will look sort of parochial. Hopefully in just a few decades, I think the next generation, where many people will have spent a lot of time in virtual reality, my generation didn't spend a lot of time in virtual reality. So this is hard concept. But if you've spent.
- [99:14]
Tom Bilyeu
I've heard you say that before, I don't think that's going to get people where you Think it's going to get them?
- [99:19]
Donald Hoffman
Maybe not.
- [99:19]
Tom Bilyeu
But in this episode, I want to try to explain why I think that and get your take. So here's what I think we need to do first, and then we'll go even deeper. There's two things we need to do in the near term. One, I think we. We need to. In. In our previous interviews, we spent a lot of time dealing with the headset. So for anybody that's sort of confused on that idea of you're living in a simulation, everything that you know and love and touch and have ever experienced, it is all a simulation. You have never existed outside of the headset. So if right there your brain breaks, go watch the other episodes. We spend a tremendous amount of time building that up. But for now, what I want to do is say, okay, I'm going to assume that you get it, that your whole life is basically Grand Theft Auto, okay? And people understand it. You've been in there playing the game, and they understand the difference between playing the game and the computer rules and things that give birth to that game. And so that's. That's the difference. What I want to do now is map that one layer back. So I want to take that idea of your life is Grand Theft Auto, but there's this thing called space time that's outside of it and gets what you're actually saying, which is that same relationship, but moved back one very profound level. Because what it does is it inverts everything. And what it says is that the universe. The universe, space, time is an emergent phenomenon from consciousness. That consciousness is in this. To use that analogy, just to map it back, that consciousness is the quote unquote computer and rules of the system. And then the simulation is what we all think of as real life, okay? So that's where we're mapping. So one does. Does that track for you, that we can move that analogy sort of. One rung deeper is probably the word you'd be most comfortable with.
- [101:19]
Donald Hoffman
Right? So absolutely. A model in which we take consciousness as fundamental and we have a mathematical model of consciousness, and we then try to show how spacetime gets rendered from that.
- [101:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, perfect. So now in this interview, instead of making our references to Grand Theft Auto, unless we need to, for whatever. For an anchor point. Point. I want to talk about space time.
- [101:37]
Donald Hoffman
Okay?
- [101:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Like a simulation, Okay. I want to talk about space time like it is Grand Theft Auto. Because researching you this time, I. I want to sit with it for a while before I start saying I'm 100% behind it. And I mentioned one of our previous interviews that I do revert to the mean after I spend time with you, but each time you're. You're shifting me farther where my mean is sort of closer to you. This time, at least in the research, I had a real sense of. He's right. I don't know about the consciousness is the only part that we may disagree, but that you really gave me an internally consistent set of logic points for why space time is the simulation. And when I grant you a few base assumptions that we'll go through, my own worldview makes more sense.
- [102:26]
Donald Hoffman
Okay.
- [102:27]
Tom Bilyeu
And so I realized for the first time, again, fully acknowledging that I may revert to the mean once I've interviewed three or four other people on totally different topics. And this is sort of cleared my system. But right now, as we do this, I really felt like you improved what I consider a prediction engine. I think of the human mind as a prediction engine. And the closer you get to baseline truth, the more you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors. What I'm watching happening with AI, which is why I wanted to start there, I can't make sense. I don't. When I think about a hallucinating AI, I'm like, I don't understand. When I think about AI pulling patterns out of noise, I don't understand. When persistence is difficult for AI, I don't understand. And then I research you, and click, click, click. Those pieces fall into place when I assume that it's all already a simulation and that AI is simply revealing to me how the simulation works. And so. But the fact that we disagree or maybe we don't, I think AI will be windows into consciousness. I think AI is leveraging your own theories to create AI Right now, as we're talking about it, I think I'm a layperson. Everybody needs to take this with a huge grain of salt. Trust me, I am well aware of my limitations. But I think right now that what we're witnessing with things like stable diffusion, where AI is creating an image out of the infinite possibilities that exist within this, the. The possibility space of noise. Okay? For people that don't understand how stable diffusion works, that's how it works, is it dips into the noise to find a pattern and then solidifies that pattern to reveal, is this what you wanted? And what I'm saying is, when I research you, I realize, oh, my God. That's precisely what your theory predicts in the idea of Godel's Incompleteness theorem, which I have struggled with so Hard in the previous interviews. I feel bad for everybody that has to watch me go through that. But the more I feel like I can grasp why you keep coming back to it and why this sort of infinite possibility space is so important to understand. When I watch AI pull a static image out of infinite possibility, I'm like, oh my God, that's exactly what you've been trying to describe. Okay, put a pin in that. Because what I want to talk about now is consciousness as fundamental. Because this is the part, if people are really paying attention, this is the part that will change your worldview. To get into the space time as a construct, as a simulation, you first have to understand that you think that's born of the. As born of consciousness itself. And I. Please, dear audience, stick with this because this point is going to be very important as we piece together the predictions that your own model is going to make. But they have to understand this first. So how is it possible that consciousness, the thing that I think everybody intuits, comes from stacking neurons, neurons, neurons, neurons, neurons. And you pass through a cricket, an ant, a mouse, a cat, a dog, a dolphin, a gorilla and humans, it just feels like, oh, just stack more neurons. And then you're ultimately going to get these more sophisticated neurons which give you a more sophisticated consciousness. That seems so self evident. And you're, to me, but you're saying,
- [105:55]
Donald Hoffman
nope, no, and, and by the way, I'll just, on the pin, I'll just mention that I agree with you that AIs could actually give us a window into consciousness, but they won't create consciousness. That was all I was saying.
- [106:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. I think we disagree about that.
- [106:11]
Donald Hoffman
Okay, so we can go more thoughtful
- [106:13]
Tom Bilyeu
and so much farther ahead when we get there, I will lay out my ignorant perspective.
- [106:18]
Donald Hoffman
So on consciousness being fundamental
- [106:26]
Tom Bilyeu
meaning, that's all there is.
- [106:28]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. So the idea would be, and this is by the way, in some sense, not new. Leibniz in his monadology had the same idea.
- [106:38]
Tom Bilyeu
I really appreciate that you assume I know what that means, and from context I can tease it out. But can you tell us what that means?
- [106:45]
Donald Hoffman
Oh, so Leibniz was this genius contemporary of Newton, sort of an antagonistic. They both invented calculus roughly the same time. There was a question about who was first and so forth, and they were sort of at each other, but they were contemporaries. But Leibniz had this idea that consciousness couldn't emerge from physical systems. He has a famous argument of the mill where he in one paragraph basically dismisses the idea that objects inside Space and time, like neurons, for example, could create consciousness. For him, it was so obvious that he spent a paragraph on it and moved on. And then he's got a book called the Monadology where he was proposing essentially that consciousness, perceiving entities are the fundamental reality and that they were interacting.
- [107:39]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, if I break down the words mono, dology,
- [107:44]
Donald Hoffman
monad, so M O N A D is a technical term for him, it was a new term for him. Monadology is then the book's name, monadology. And it was basically, it was a dynamics, it was a strange dynamics we called a pre. Established harmony where God, so he had, he brought God in on, on his thing, I believe, to, to sort of coordinate all the, the perceptions of these.
- [108:10]
Tom Bilyeu
So meaning God was the first mover. The fundamental.
- [108:13]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, the fundamental.
- [108:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Right, okay, but he saw it as a creator touching things with like a divine spark of consciousness.
- [108:23]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, but his ontology was that, that the fundamental reality beyond space time was these monads, these perceiving entities basically. And, but, but God I think was that the, was the deepest reality for, for Leibniz there, I'm less secure the monologue. I'm not sure exactly what his thoughts were on God, but I believe that's what he said. So I just brought that up just to say that we're not the first to have this kind of idea. Centuries ago, Leibniz with his Monadology had an idea that perceiving entities, experiencing entities, could be more fundamental than the physical space, time, world.
- [109:02]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, you talk about conscious agents. Do you mean exactly that same thing?
- [109:07]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. So conscious agents are a mathematically precise statement of what we mean by consciousness. Right. So as a scientist, it's not enough for me just to say, okay, there's consciousness beyond space time and it's fundamental. I have to write down a mathematical description of what I mean by that. So what aspect of consciousness do I take to be fundamental? And what's the mathematical description? So if you think about it, when you think about consciousness, there's of course experiences, there's learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, maybe free will. There's lots of things, the notion of a self, all these things that you might think a theory of consciousness needs to, to. To incorporate.
- [109:53]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm so sorry, and I should have done this before. And that apology goes to the audience. If you're new to Donald, it's probably worth just a quick sentence about what consciousness is.
- [110:03]
Donald Hoffman
Oh, well, so I would say consciousness is the ability to have experiences like the taste of chocolate, a Headache, emotions.
- [110:16]
Tom Bilyeu
So this thing feels like something.
- [110:18]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. The way a lot of philosophers will talk about it is to have conscious experience. There's something it's like to be a conscious entity. There's something it's like to have a headache. There's something it's like to have your, you know, to, to have a nice cup of coffee or something like that.
- [110:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, and so let's call that qualia again, me stealing directly from you. Right, but just so we have words, because qualia is going to become very important as we get into your paper and all of that. Okay, so back to conscious agents.
- [110:47]
Donald Hoffman
So what we decided to do was we don't want to throw the kitchen sink in our mathematical definition. So we took what we felt was the bare minimum starting point. There are experiences like the taste of chocolate, smell of garlic, and so forth. And those experiences affect the probabilities of other experiences occurring. So there are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences. That's it. So we're not bringing in the notion of a self learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, none of that. What we're saying is, yeah, all that stuff is important, but we have to prove how it arises from just experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences. So that's. As a scientist, you try. It's what we call Occam's Razor. You want to have the minimum number of assumptions at the start of your theory. Every theory has assumptions. There are the miracles of the theory. We want as few miracles as possible. Right. So our only miracles are, well, that's a big miracle. There are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences. And we formalize that. The experiences, we just write down what's called probability spaces. If you want, we can talk about probability spaces. And the relationships among experiences are what we call Markovian kernels. And we get what's called Markov chain. So very simple dynamics.
- [112:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So we'll explain what Markovian dynamics are in a second. Now that I finally have at least a tiny bit of a grasp. I don't know how important it is that people understand that.
- [112:21]
Donald Hoffman
Sure.
- [112:22]
Tom Bilyeu
But I do want to know how important is it that one bit of qualia impacts other qualia? Like, does that relationship play heavily into the idea of consciousness as a fundamental agent?
- [112:38]
Donald Hoffman
Yes. We stipulate that as a fundamental property that experiences aren't in a vacuum. Experiences probabilistically lead to other experiences.
- [112:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. It's very interesting that you said not in a vacuum, because that my whole thesis is that the construct of space time, the simulation. Let's Just be very clear. The simulation that. Is this real world. Sorry, that's a terrible use of word real. The simulation that everybody lives in and experiences is required. This is, this is my pitch. The simulation is a required constraint in order to give context that something can be like anything but that. For consciousness to explore the possibility space of qualia, you have to have a rule set. And the rule set that we're all in, which may be one of a gazillion headsets, but the rule set that we're all in creates the possibility for the subset of qualia that we as human beings or lizards or whatever experience. But without that rule set, that is Space time, we would not have enough limitations to give us the context in order to feel a certain way.
- [114:02]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So that a lizard presumably sees things very, very differently than I do. Pigeons have four color receptors. We only have three.
- [114:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Pigeons have four.
- [114:15]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, that's right. So they see more color than we do.
- [114:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Birds and bullshit. I feel cheated now. I knew. 15% of women do. I did not know pigeons.
- [114:24]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. The mantis shrimp has more than 10 photoreceptors. Yes, that's right. Different kinds of. Or pigments that are used for the photoreception process. So. So we may be cheated in many, many ways, that's for sure. So, yeah. And we don't, for example, perceive polarization of light. And birds and baby bees do as they can perceive the polarization of light. We can't directly experience electric fields. And there are animals in the water that can do that. So some that see infrared, some that see ultraviolet that we can't. So, so we're, we have a very, very small window and, and other animals are not restricted to the windows in which we. We see. So I like your idea that there, there's an infinite space of conscious experiences to explore. And when we look at different animals, we're seeing different explorations with different headsets and, and different, as you say, different constraints. And it's, it's, in some sense, consciousness exploring all of its possibilities, all the possible ways that to explore. So in some sense we're here for the ride and we should enjoy the ride. We're exploring. We thought this was the final reality. No, this is just one of countless possible headsets. Just one of countless. And we'll enjoy this ride. And then consciousness will. Then it's looking through other headsets. So I like your idea that it's, you know, there's some kind of consistency, some kind of coherence but it's a subset of the experiences. There's an infinite number of experiences to explore. So this ride never ends.
- [116:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so when I think about consciousness as fundamental, I cannot help but imagine a blob that then takes shape in the form of a human or a lizard or an avocado, whatever. Help me understand what. Do you have an image in your head of what the, what consciousness is? Is it just completely non physical?
- [116:35]
Donald Hoffman
Well, maybe the closest I can get that would be the way that would communicate to people would be if you go into an entirely quiet room, shut off all the lights, close your eyes and get very, very still and don't think.
- [116:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Good luck.
- [116:52]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. Usually letting go of thought is not easy, but if you can go for a few seconds or a minute with absolutely no thought and now you're just aware, you realize, yeah, I can be aware without being aware of anything in particular. I am fundamentally awareness. And into that awareness right now are coming a cup, a microphone, a table. I can close my eyes and those are gone from awareness. So somehow there is this field of awareness that is in some sense deeply and fundamentally who you really are.
- [117:37]
Tom Bilyeu
That so that it seems like your theory would say that's false.
- [117:42]
Donald Hoffman
Well, it's going to say that the. So the reason why I talk about this awareness is that when we talk about all these specific conscious experiences, we have to write down something that's called a probability space first. We're required mathematically to do that. So we write down a probability space in which.
- [118:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Probability of qualia.
- [118:02]
Donald Hoffman
That's right, probability of qualia. So you have to write down the space of all the potential qualia that this particular conscious agent could experience. So here is this space and there's the mathematical structure. It's just sitting there prior to any particular experience happening. It's just sitting there. And it took me a few years to ask myself the question, what is that space? I had to write it down. I couldn't do the math. I couldn't write down my Markovian dynamics until I wrote down the probability spaces. But as a, you know, the way we do it is we just of course have to write that down. So you don't even think about, you write down the probability space and you go on to the fun stuff. You write down now the dynamics and so forth. But a few years later I came back and go, well, wait a minute, I went too quickly on this first part. I had to write down a probability space. What does that mean? Because this is a space prior to any specific conscious Experiences happening. And so the best I can say right now is that perhaps is the mathematical counterpart to what I was just describing, which is the awareness that you can experience prior to having any particular specific conscious experience arise in that awareness. So that's why I talk about it in that way.
- [119:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Can I just restate that to make sure that I understand and linger on it for a second for the audience? So you're using words that I know you know are dangerous, that Annika Harris has warned you about letting people carry the sense of self into all this because you said you are the awareness. But really consciousness is the awareness that animates me in some way or it needs my constraints in order for it to experience the qualia, I think that's the right way to think about it. And so in those moments where either through meditation, I get to true, where I am simply aware of the qualia of being aware, but when it's not aware of anything in particular. So I'm not aware that my foot hurts. I'm not aware that my stomach is churning on food. I'm not aware of something I need to do later in that day. I am just the potential to point that awareness at something is the thing that I'm sitting in that that's who we really are. So that feels right. But I know it's re trapping me in my sense of self, that I am a real thing. Your whole thing clicks into place for me when I realize that according to your theory, and this makes a lot of things make sense in my own life, I am simply one instantiation that creates a set of what I call biological limitations that then once I have those constraints now the fundamental element of consciousness can begin to explore its qualia. The, the different things that, like, oh, in this human form, I can experience these things with all the context that this person has. He responds to this thing in this way.
- [121:19]
Donald Hoffman
Right, Agreed.
- [121:21]
Tom Bilyeu
There are some deep complexities with that, but we'll push those off for later. Okay, so if that's where we're at, my fundamental question is why does consciousness, why is it compelled to explore these qualia states?
- [121:37]
Donald Hoffman
That's the $64,000 question. So I don't know. But of course, that's the very natural question to ask. And I agree with what you just said. Said. I mean, I don't want to reify the self. What we are are avatars of the one effectively. And the one consciousness is the one awareness is exploring all of its possibilities through different avatars. Why there I, you know, I think there may be some deep mathematical reasons. So it may be that, I mean there's, there are theorems to the effect that no system can completely know itself. It's impossible. So because, for example, if I have a computer and I want the computer to explore itself, how is it going to know itself? Well, it's going to have to build a model of itself and write down what. Well, in the very process of building a model of itself and writing into its memory things about itself, it's becoming more complicated, it's changing itself. So now to really understand itself, it's going to have to now describe what it just did. And now to. So you get this infinite loop. And so there are problems with self understanding. It's not possible, in many cases provably not possible to have a complete understanding of yourself. You get into this infinite loop of now I have to get more complicated to understand myself after I just understood myself. Right. And so that's one direction of this. Another direction is there's a whole hierarchy of infinities. So the integers like so 1, 2, 3, up to infinity, that's an infinite number of integers. We call that accountable infinity or aleph 0, the Hebrew letter aleph and 0, just meaning the smallest infinity. But there are other infinities. So the next, if you take the set of all subsets of integers, so like 1, 2 and 1, 5 and 2, 3, 4, look at all the possible subsets of integers and ask how many subsets are there? How many subsets of integers can you come up with? It turns out that of course there's an infinite number of these subsets because
- [123:54]
Tom Bilyeu
every number is divisible by an infinite number of.
- [123:57]
Donald Hoffman
No, we're just grouping them together. So I'm saying think about the group one and two. So that's a group. Now one and five.
- [124:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it. So we can group an infinite number an infinite number of times.
- [124:07]
Donald Hoffman
So those are called the. All the different possible subsets of the integers.
- [124:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
- [124:11]
Donald Hoffman
And there's of course an infinite number of them because one is a group, two is a group, three. So we already know there's an infinite number. But there's more than that. How much more? It turns out it's a bigger infinity. So the. It's a bigger infinity, it's a, it's a bigger.
- [124:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Say what?
- [124:24]
Donald Hoffman
That. Well, that's what mathematicians said when Cantor, the mathematician who first came up with this when he first proved this feels
- [124:32]
Tom Bilyeu
a bit like my speaker goes to 11. Why not just take, make 10 louder?
- [124:37]
Donald Hoffman
But this one goes, this one goes. It's actually a different size of infinity.
- [124:42]
Tom Bilyeu
And so I literally can't wrap my head around that.
- [124:44]
Donald Hoffman
There is something called Cantor's diagonal argument. So there's a simple diagonal argument where you can actually show on paper, pen and paper that it's impossible to capture all the power set, this bigger infinity with the smaller infinity. So he gives what's called Cantor's diagonal. So if people want to check me on this, you just look up Cantor and Cantor's diagonal argument for a proof that there are these bigger infinities and you can actually, I think most people can actually follow the proof. I mean, it's mind bending, but you can follow it well. There's not just one bigger infinity, that's Aleph one is the bigger infinity. Now take the power set. So by the way, taking the set of all subsets is called taking the power set. So the power set is all the possible subsets. So Now I've got Aleph1, which is the bigger infinity, which is all the power sets of Aleph zero. But now I can take all the power set, the power set of Aleph 1 that gives me Aleph 2. Take the power set again at Aleph 3, Aleph 4, and this goes forever. So infinity is not one thing. There's an infinite unending hierarchy of ever larger infinities. So we have to my view, take this into account in our theory of consciousness that all of these different infinities are valid directions for projection of this one deeper consciousness. And so we're going to. So the answer to your question may again be because Cantor's hierarchy never ends, this exploration never ends. The exploration of the possibilities of consciousness of qualia is in principle never ending.
- [126:31]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, that's a wrap for the first half of our mind bending conversation with Donald Hoffman. But now stay tuned for part two where we're going to dive into even deeper into these brain melting concepts. Thanks for listening to impact theory and I'll see you in part two.
- [126:45]
Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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Donald Hoffman
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Tom Bilyeu
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