← 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 2
02:11:06
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Tom Bilyeu
Welcome back to Impact Theory. In the first part of our chat
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with Donald Hoffman, we explored how our perceptions might just be a tiny slice
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of reality and questioned the very foundation of space time. Now let's jump back in and explore the implications of what lies beyond this potentially simulated reality.
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Do we recognize the truth of reality?
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Donald Hoffman
Well, our best science tells us that space time is not fundamental. This is the conclusion of both physics and evolution by natural selection. So the physicists tell us that spacetime is doomed, it's not fundamental. And they're finding new structures beyond spacetime like the amplitude Hedron, that actually make the math easier in space time for the things they need to do. And then evolution by natural selection also agrees with the physicists that spacetime is not fundamental.
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Tom Bilyeu
And let's explain that. So when you say that space time isn't fundamental, what do we mean exactly in like the simplest or we'll get into the geeky, like deep stuff in a second. But for the audience that hasn't heard you talk before.
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Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
What does that mean?
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Donald Hoffman
Well, we tend to think of space and time as the basic level of reality. Everything that could possibly be is inside space and has some some time. The big bang was the start of it all. And who knows what the end will be? Maybe a big crunch or just petering out in low entropy and low temperature. We don't know yet. But that we think or we thought is the basis of all reality. So space and time are the basic stage on which all of reality plays out.
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Tom Bilyeu
And how can most not be, though?
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Donald Hoffman
That's the weird thing. Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Does that mean that whatever is real and we should probably give people your headset metaverse explanation which speaks dear to my heart. But before we do that, does that mean that whatever is real is non physical.
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Donald Hoffman
Well, so the word real is a little slippery. So in some sense my headache is real. Right, because it's a real experience, but it real in the sense that the physicists are talking about it. When they thought that space and time were fundamental, they were thinking that this was the fundamental ground of all possible realities, like in a Newtonian universe. And even in Einstein point of view, Einstein thought that space and time was the grounding reality for everything. And now we realize that the four dimensions of space time, or even ten dimensions of string theory or something like
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Annik Harrison
that is not going deep enough.
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Donald Hoffman
There are structures entirely beyond space time and entirely beyond quantum theory. So these new structures are not like little structures sitting inside at the small scale.
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Tom Bilyeu
I don't think we can get the structures yet. People are going to be super lost. So the idea of the headset I think is a really core concept. So somebody asked you once in the future we're going to start using different metaphors. What metaphors do you think we're going to use? And you said the metaverse. As somebody trying to contribute to the metaverse, my ears perked up on that one. Why will that become such a useful metaphor for this moment and how we perceive things?
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Donald Hoffman
Right, because the way that evolution speaks on this is it says that our perceptions of objects in space and time is really just like a virtual reality headset. It's there to help you play the game of life without knowing what's on the other side of the headset. What's on the other side? What's the hardware and software that's running the game. You don't have to know that to play the game. And in fact, if you were trying to play a game of like Grand Theft Auto and virtual reality, and you know, you had to toggle millions of voltages per second to drive your car, you would lose when you were, you know, competing with someone who could just turn a nice little simple steering wheel and press on a artificial gas pedal. So evolution gave us senses that allow us to survive by hiding the truth and just telling us how to act. So as the evolutionary theorists would say, our senses guide adaptive behavior.
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Tom Bilyeu
Why does natural selection as a theory predict that? Because I understand the theory, I guess, well enough at a high level, but I never would have guessed that it actually says that it makes a prediction anyway that you, whatever is real. The only thing I can tell you that evolution is selected for is not that. So where, like would. Is this something that Darwin himself saw in his theory, or would he be Surprised.
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Donald Hoffman
I think Darwin would be surprised. And in fact, many evolutionary theorists today are surprised.
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Tom Bilyeu
And, and so how do we know
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this isn't just a kooky interpretation of natural selection by Donald Hoffman?
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Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
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Annik Harrison
So the,
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Donald Hoffman
the way we pursue this is it turns out that Darwin's theory has been turned into a mathematically precise theory. It's called evolutionary game theory. So John Maynard Smith started that in, in the 1970s. And so we now have, instead of, you know, Darwin's theory, which is, you know, it's imprecise in the sense that it's not a mathematical model. Evolutionary game theory, evolutionary graph theory, are mathematically precise. So we can now prove theorems and we can ask technical questions. So what is the probability that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal any true structures of objective reality? That's a clean, technical question. And it turns out that evolutionary game theory is precise enough to address that question.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so I know I've gotten hung up on that a lot, and I think for people of my cognitive ability, we will have to accept that as the miracle of this conversation. Otherwise we'll derail on that because I don't understand how his theory can be turned into a math equation. And I worry that for you to explain it to me would take an entire semester and cause me to tear my hair out. But, so if we can accept, unless you're thinking, it looks like you may
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Donald Hoffman
have a way to give you a hint. I can give a little hint. It's when we say evolutionary game theory, it really think about game theory. How do you play Monopoly and win? How do you play various games? So it turns out you can look at different strategies that someone might have. You know, I'm going to go for Park Place, I'm going to go for Boardwalk. I'm going to try to. There's all different strategies. And you can then write down mathematically, okay, if you take this strategy, what is the probability that you will do well against someone who's taking this other strategy?
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Tom Bilyeu
That's all about most offspring.
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Donald Hoffman
And so the strategies are ways to survive long enough to reproduce. And so you can look at different strategies for playing the game of life. So, for example, some organisms will have millions or thousands of offspring, but they don't care about the offspring. Most of them will die. But if 1% of them make it, you're good. Humans tend to have just a couple, a handful of offspring, and we put a lot of effort into them. So those are different strategies. And so as you look. So some strategies for Example in perception. Humans really have focused in our evolution on vision and hearing and less on smell and taste and so forth. Other organisms focus on things that we don't even have, like echolocation and bats. So different organisms will take different strategies. The game of life is how do I live long enough to reproduce and how do I raise my offspring to maturity? Do I just make lots of them and let them fend for themselves and most of them die but a fraction will make it? Or do I make just a few of them and really help them for 20 or 30 years until they can go on their own?
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Tom Bilyeu
Or more of these days.
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Donald Hoffman
Or more those days.
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Tom Bilyeu
So by, from evolutionary game theory's perspective, what is the most successful creature on planet Earth?
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Donald Hoffman
Well, probably bacteria. Interesting, right?
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
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Donald Hoffman
There's a lot more bacteria than there are.
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Tom Bilyeu
Good answer.
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Donald Hoffman
Than us and maybe viruses if they're more. So from that point of view. Right. The winner is the one who survives long enough to reproduce and reproduces for a long period of time. And cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years. So, you know, they're, they're certainly candidates. I'm not saying that they're the final answer, but that kind of thing would be humans are, you know, relative newcomers.
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Tom Bilyeu
And I actually really like the theory that humans are bacteria's way of moving around, which is pretty interesting. When you think that we're outnumbered by the bacteria in our guts, on our skin and all of that stuff, it's pretty interesting. I should have guessed that answer, but I didn't. But that makes a lot of sense.
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Donald Hoffman
Right? Right. So. So this gives you the idea, when you're playing a game, there's lots of strategies. Especially in a complicated game, there's lots of strategies. And it's not that there's going to be one best strategy. It's rather that if Tom is using this strategy, what strategy should I use to counter Tom's strategy and so forth? Same thing in business, right? It depends on who your competition is, what strategies you're going to take, and what is the governing system and so forth, like the laws and so forth, that will all determine your strategy. So you can use game theory and turn it into a tool for studying evolution as a game where your bacteria are trying to play the game of life one way, humans are playing the game of life another way. Every different organism, every different plant is playing the game of life with a different kind of strategy.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's really interesting. It's funny, this is the third time I've interviewed you and I'VE never pushed on this because there was something about. I couldn't wrap my brain around it. So I'm glad you took the time. What's fascinating to me is every species has its own umvelt.
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Donald Hoffman
Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
Which is a really fascinating concept. So I looked this up once, and every time I say this stat, I think I must be wrong because it just seems way too far off. But humans are able to perceive 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. And I was like, how is that possible? That's so like every. Everything that we see and think of as the. The known world is 0.0 35%. That is like vanishingly small.
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Donald Hoffman
Exactly right. So our, our window on the, on the world is trivial compared to what could in principle be available. And so the, the question that you can then ask in a technical fashion is what is the probability that a strategy of seeing truth, true structures about objective reality, would that strategy help you to survive long enough to raise kids? And so we can ask that as a technical question. Evolution has the tools to do that. And the key concept is something called a fitness payoff. So fitness payoff is like if you're playing a game, there's a certain way that you get points in the game. If you're playing a video game, right, you have to shoot things down or avoid getting hit and to get points. And if you get enough points, you get to the next level of the game. Well, fitness payoffs. If you get enough fitness payoffs, what that corresponds to is you're surviving long enough to reproduce and you don't go to the next level of the game, but your offspring and your DNA in your offspring go to the next level of the game. So here's the big idea. We can ask these fitness payoff functions that govern our evolution, they do depend on whatever the world is and the world structure. So they do depend on the world. They depend on the organism. You know, what's fit for me is not fit for a benthic fish. Being 5,000 meters under the water would kill me. It's just what the benthic fish wants. So the fitness payoffs depend on the true structure of the world, depends on the organism. You know, Hoffman versus a fish and the action, feeding, fighting, fleeing and mating and so forth. And you can then ask, what is the probability? Now this is the key technical question. What is the probability that a randomly chosen fitness payoff function that's governing my evolution has information about the true structure of the world?
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Annik Harrison
Right?
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Donald Hoffman
Because it's that fitness evolution tells us those Fitness payoffs are what determine how your senses are going to evolve. They're going.
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Tom Bilyeu
So what's the base assumption there that reality is so complex? In fact, I want to press, I want to take a second to really elucidate the example you gave about grand theft, which I think is so brilliant. What's actually happening in Grand Theft Auto is electrical currents are toggling on and off gates on the computer and that somehow makes things happen on your screen that you can interact with and score points and all that.
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Right.
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But at like, if you look at a chip, it is so complicated that trying to like zap electrodes in the right order. Literally impossible.
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Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
And so everything that we, we as the average non computer programmer think of as a computer is really just the gui, it's the interface. And so you're there at a really abs really abstracted level. It is so abstract is to be nonsensical compared to what's actually happening at the electrical communication level with the machinery itself sending signals to your tv.
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Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
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Tom Bilyeu
And if real life has that same level of complexity, then I get why it would need to be so abstracted that as to be just nonsensical compared to what reality really is. Something I think breaks in people's intuition. It certainly breaks in my intuition when I think though, that there has to be some sort of mapping. So the example that you've said many times, which I think is really on point, is if people are going to make fun of you, what they will say is, oh, you don't think any of this is real? Go ahead and step in front of that train and see if it kills you. And of course it's going to. So the representation of the train is pointing at something that will change your state from alive to dead. That's right. Now, whether all of that is so again, abstracted from what's actually happening at a electrical level, I don't even know what to liken it to. But nonetheless, stepping in front of a train will flip you from alive to dead, whatever that means in the underlying reality. So do you think at all about, like, do you care what it's mapping to or are you just like, it doesn't matter.
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It's too complicated.
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We're not there yet.
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Donald Hoffman
Well, I do care, and that's why I'm interested in this particular theorem, right? Because my interest is I'm seeing a world of space and time and objects with colors and shapes and motions. How is. Is that the true world? Is that the, the true structure of objective reality or Is this as divorced from reality? Is what we're seeing as divorced from the fundamental reality as my Grand Theft Auto VR headset is from the voltages inside the supercomputer that's running it? That's the, that's the simple question, right? So when I talk about things outside of space time, it's just like, suppose someone had played Grand Theft Auto since they were one day old and their parents had left them in a headset their whole life. And when they're 25, the parents say, guess what? You've been in the headset your whole life. And that person probably can't even. What could possibly be outside of my headset? I've lived my whole life inside this headset. And you pull it off and you realize, oh, wow, there's a whole world that's entirely outside of what you're in. That's the question we're asking. Has evolution shaped us with just a little headset? A VR headset that guides adaptive behavior but shows us none of objective reality? That's the technical question, and the answer is very, very clear. The probability is one that we don't see the truth at all.
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Tom Bilyeu
Meaning 100%.
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Donald Hoffman
100%.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so if the probability is 100% that you are seeing a very false version, right. The, the thing that that seems to predict to me is that the underlying reality is so complicated that at least in this form. I don't know how else to refer to that. In this form, it would. With our umwelt, our ability to process data, whatever, it would not make sense to try to, to deal with the reality that it's far more efficient to create an abstraction layer. But if underlying reality is dead simple, that doesn't seem like it would hold true. So do we just presume that there is extreme complexity?
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Donald Hoffman
Well, it turns out that the extreme complexity isn't necessary for this theorem to be true. Interesting.
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Tom Bilyeu
Why would you need such an elaborate abstraction if it isn't complicated?
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Donald Hoffman
Well, so it turns out when you actually just look at the math. So suppose the world has some number of states, a billion states or 100 states, whatever it might. So there's some number of states in the world and you have some number of states of perception. I can see green, red. There's lots of things I can see. When you just do a simple count. Look at all the possible functions from the states of the world to the states of my perception. Just count them. So the world doesn't have to be complicated. It could have just 100 points or a thousand points. When you count all the functions that are the fitness functions and ask how many of those functions actually contain information about the structures in the world, it turns out that very quickly the proportion goes to zero. So even if the structure isn't that complicated, maybe there's only one structure in the world. That's all it has like a total order, something, you know, one is less than two is less than three. What is the probability that that total order. So the world could be very simple. It only has one simple structure, total order. And the world only has, you know, maybe a million states. So it's not a very complicated world, a million states. What is the probability that the fitness payoff functions that govern my, my evolution would preserve the total order? Information would actually be able to tell me about the total order. And the math is quite simple and the answer is zero.
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Tom Bilyeu
But that has to predict something like.
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So when, when I make the base assumption that it's, it's because it is too complex. So to give people, I want to start putting definitions to some of these words. So when you say state, let's say lights on, lights off. So we all live where earth has two states. The sun is up, the sun is down. That's one temperature. Would be another state. Could be hot, could be cold. Barometric pressure, could be high, could be low, could be wet, could be dry. Like we can just. So there's a lot of different things. And so to your point about the fish, they're dealing with massive pressures. If they were to come up where there's no pressure, they would disintegrate or not be able to move or whatever. Just like we crush down to the, you know, like a tiny can.
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Donald Hoffman
So they would explode and we would crush. Right, exactly right, right.
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Tom Bilyeu
So, okay, that when you say states, that's one example. Exactly right. I don't understand how if everything were static, it were one state, that we would need an abstraction layer to navigate it more effectively than somebody that sees objective reality. So now I'm going to use an example to further illustrate what I mean. I'm Going to use an example you gave me the first time. You cannot imagine how many times I've quoted you on this.
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Donald Hoffman
Okay.
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Tom Bilyeu
You said, tom, you have to understand that objective reality isn't like, oh, here's a table, and it's got this nice swirly grain pattern. It's the number of photons reflecting off of that desk and the. The amount of reflectivity and all that. Now, irony of ironies, as I have started working in the metaverse, you realize how complicated the visual world is. The. The.0035% of the visual spectrum that we actually see is. Is insanely complicated to replicate. Right, Right, Donald. Right, right. It's the hardest thing I've done in my life. It's crazy. And I don't even have to fully understand it. I just have to guide the team that understands it. Anyway, when you said that, I was like, whoa, what reality is, is very different than how I experience it. So cool.
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Complex, right?
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So now I get why the math works out.
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Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
But if it isn't complex, so you don't seem to be struggling with this, what is it that you understand that I don't? Or what is your base assumption that's different than mine that makes it make sense to you that to achieve maximum fitness payoff, you would 100% not retain elements of reality?
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Annik Harrison
Right.
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Donald Hoffman
So. So first, I don't deny that I suspect that reality is very complicated. So. So my point isn't necessary. Necessary for this. That's right. It's just simply accounting things. So if you. If you look at all the functions from. To another set like, so I have functions. Say I have numbers 1 through 10, and that's my base set. And I'm going to map them into numbers 1 through 10. So I can map 1 to 3 and 2 to 5 and so forth. So now if you just do. Okay, if you think about that problem, I could probably figure out, okay, how many different functions are there? Right. So you can write down all. Now you can say, okay, how many of those functions have the property that, you know, they preserve, that 1 is less than 2 is less than 3 and less than 4? How many of them scramble that order? How many preserve that order? How many scramble. How many contain information about the 1, less than 2, less than 3, less than 4? So this is called combinatorics. It's a branch of mathematics.
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Tom Bilyeu
Oh, I'm unfortunately all too aware of it because of NFTs.
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Donald Hoffman
Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
Which require you to understand this, because you're making. You have to.
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Donald Hoffman
Your point.
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Tom Bilyeu
And maybe this is what you're saying. And so maybe I actually, now I'm understanding it. Let me walk you through what we had to discover in NFTs.
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Okay?
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So you create all these traits, all these categories, I should say, and then within each category, you have maybe 10 possible eyebrows that it could be eyeball types, hairstyles, facial hair, so on and so forth, that outputs, let's say, 2 billion potential permutations.
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Donald Hoffman
Exactly right.
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Tom Bilyeu
But you want to maintain a distribution in the 10,000 that you're actually going to show. So we were all trying to do the math and we're working it out, and I'm like, there's no way it's as simple. There's some problem. And then we showed it to physicists and they fell out laughing and they're like, yeah, it's not that simple. And so they're like, for you to maintain the, the percentage likelihood to get gold eyes, let's say, out of your 2 billion combinations, they're like, you have to force it down into this thing which they called combinatorial or whatever. And so I was like, okay.
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Donald Hoffman
And so that really is the point here, that even though I agree with you that the universe is probably the real universe, whatever it is, is very complicated, I believe that combinatorics blow up so quickly.
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Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
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Donald Hoffman
By the time you just get to a few hundred elements, you know that as you found the thing, the explosion of possibilities is so great that when you ask how many of those possible fitness functions would actually be so special that they contain information about the structure of where they came from out of all of the possible fitness functions, that
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Tom Bilyeu
it's not an overly complicated world. It's just the number of potential mapping points and combinations.
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Donald Hoffman
Exactly right.
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Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting.
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Donald Hoffman
Because evolutionary theory puts no restriction on the fitness payoff functions.
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Tom Bilyeu
Any possibility there could be as many as you can imagine.
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Donald Hoffman
And there's no restrictions. There's no restrictions. They have to show you the truth. That's not part of the theory.
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Tom Bilyeu
Right.
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Donald Hoffman
So until. So, and by the way, no one knows how to put that into the theory. Right. So I mean, to say that it requires that only the fitness functions that preserve the truth would be a major revision to evolutionary theory. It would be unrecognizable. So when you look then and say, okay, every fitness payoff function is equal likely as any other fitness payoff function, they're all on equal footing. And then you count the ones that actually have information about the truth, they go to zero probability in fast order. Now, there is one I should bring out. There's a group at Yale that has recently published a paper that's trying to push back on this. And what they say is if you have say, a bunch of like thousands of fitness payoff functions, they're all radically different, then they say that you'll be forced to go to the truth. And the argument that they make is that if our high level cognitions, our beliefs, our goals and so forth are not going to interfere with our perceptions, they claim that then our perceptions have to have a single mapping from the state of the world into the state of our senses. It has to be a single mapping you can't have. Because one thing I could do with a lot of fitness functions is say, well, this fitness function is different from that one. So I will do this kind of mapping from the world into my senses with this fitness page payoff function. Then I'll do another mapping with this fitness payoff function. And they say, no, if you're going to have what we call cognitive impenetrability, so what you believe cognitively cannot affect what you see. Okay, that's the argument. Then you must have only one mapping. Well, so that's their assumption.
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Tom Bilyeu
So hold on, let me make sure I understand that. So they're saying that basically, so that your delusions don't create the exterior world, or at least your perception of it, you have to have this mapping so that you're actually detecting and seeing what is real.
- [27:59]
Donald Hoffman
They're saying that if what you believe doesn't affect your senses in a fundamental way, then they claim that that entails that you can only have one mapping from the world. The fitness, the, the mapping of your senses from the, whatever the world is into what, what you're seeing, the colors and the shapes and so forth, there can only be one map that, that holds regardless of what the fitness payoff functions. That was their claim. So, and, and the only reason I bring this up is because this is a recently published paper. The claim is false. It's, it's trivial to show counterexamples. Their fundamental claim is false.
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Tom Bilyeu
Please do as a way just to make sure that I actually understand what they're saying, because this sounds like what they're trying to protect against is hallucinations basically becoming subjectively real.
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Donald Hoffman
Right. So, so I actually think that it's true probably to a large extent that what we believe does not really affect fundamentally what we see. So technical term we use, the geek term is cognitive impenetrability of perception. That's what the philosophers of science will talk about. And cognitive scient that Are, and you can think about, scientists might like this because they'll say, look, we want to use our senses in our experiments. I want you, my theory makes a prediction, I have to go look and see if the prediction is true. Well, if my theory that I'm holding would change what I see, then science isn't going to really be objective, right? I mean if I believe this theory and it changes how I see the data, then I might just see the data that confirms the theory and I can't escape. So that's why there's philosophy of science has been very interested in this question. Are our high level theoretical beliefs and just our beliefs as everyday people do, they get in there and somehow fundamentally affect how we see the world. And there is a sort of a way, you could say the way I believe things does change my world, but they don't change like the color I see or the three dimensional structure of the cube here that I'm seeing. I mean they might change it in some way, but not fundamentally like that. So that's the question. And so it's trivial. So when the group at Yale makes this point that if you have lots of different fitness payoff functions and you don't have your high level beliefs interfering with the process of perception, then you can only have one map from the world into your senses. And of course they don't prove that, they just state it without proof. And so it's trivially false. We have made counterexamples. It's very, very easy to make counter examples. I can design a system in which I have say two fitness payoff functions and I use one fitness payoff function to make one map from the world into my perceptions, use the other fitness function to make another map. And if I have a system that has no high level beliefs, then the high level beliefs aren't interfering with it. There's a counterexample right there. No cognitive penetration of perception, multiple maps. But then I can add beliefs and say I know I can have beliefs there as long as they don't interfere with this mapping here. I could have two maps, why not? So the guys, the group at Yale, they're brilliant experimentalists and one of them is a really good friend of one of my collaborators. I mean they were postdocs at MIT together and so forth. So they're brilliant experimentalists, but the fundamental assumption that they're making is just trivially false. And so then how do we see this in our perceptions? The way we see it in our perceptions is we have probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of fitness payoff functions that are governing our behavior. So what do we do with all that complexity? What we do is we group the fitness payoff functions into groups that are similar, and we make simple little data structures out of them. And those data structures are what we call objects. So this object is good for drinking.
- [31:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you. What. What is a data structure when you say that it's an object, meaning my mind groups it so that I can differentiate the cup from the coaster from the desk.
- [32:11]
Donald Hoffman
What I'm saying is we're making all this stuff up as a simple way to represent the fitness payoffs and how to get them. So, for example, when you're playing Grand Theft Auto, you're playing a game. If you looked inside the supercomputer, there is no red Porsche. There is no steering wheel, there is no gas pedal. In some sense, those are what I call simple data structures. They're coding for the gas pedal and pushing on the gas pedal is coding for, who knows, countless millions of voltage changes happening in exactly the right sequence. In the computer, I have this trivial data structure gas pedal push on it. That triggers this whole other thing that I don't want to know about. It's really too complicated. So that's what I mean by these simplifying data structures. My steering wheel is this simple data structure that I can use to interact with who knows how many billions or trillions of voltages and make them do exactly the right sequence in the right order.
- [33:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Could I say representation instead of data structure?
- [33:16]
Donald Hoffman
Sure, absolutely. Data structure is a computer science term, so computer scientists would be very happy with that. But representation is perfectly good. And so the idea then is what evolution has done from an evolutionary point of view is it takes all these fitness payoff functions that govern us, that govern our survival, and that we need to respect in order to play the game of life. And we organize them. So an apple is an object. It's a representation of a bunch of fitness payoffs. For example, the apple. If I'm interested in mating, apple's no good. If I'm interested in eating, great. If I'm interested in a weapon, so. So, I mean, I could throw it to someone's head, but it's not going to do much damage. If I'm, you know, so there's if. But if I have a sword, a sword, well, for mating, no good. For eating, not really. I mean, I could use it to cut a coconut in half, but I can't eat the sword. For fighting, great, but not if you're fighting against A gun and things like that. So every object and we can recognize, I would say on the order of 30 or 40,000 different objects, basic kinds of objects. So what that indicates is that evolution has taken all these hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of fitness payoff functions. And it's not making one map from the world into our senses, it's making a bunch of different maps. And those different maps are what we call objects and our high level cognition. All it does is, I'm hungry, okay? I won't be looking for tables, I won't be looking for the moon, I'll be looking for apples and bananas and things like that. Those data structures, those representations that have high fitness payoffs for the action of eating. And so visual attention, paying attention to different objects is our way of switching from this representation of fitness payoffs to this representation of fitness payoffs, as I need to be able to do, to survive long enough to reproduce. And so that's so this sort of technical, but it's the reason I bring it out is because this is brand new. It's gotten a lot of attention from Yale. And so it's an important thing from the scientific side to really lay to rest that there's not one mapping that's required from the world into our senses by evolution. Even if we assume that our beliefs don't interfere with our cognition, our cognitions don't interfere with our perceptions, that doesn't entail that we have to have one mapping. It's just a false assumption. Once you let go of that false assumption, then you are opened up to realize that objects, every object, is just a data structure coding for a whole group of fitness payoffs. And that's how evolution deals with it.
- [36:05]
Tom Bilyeu
The hypothesis that I have that, okay, maybe this really is all a simulation, because as we go to build the next simulation, it actually tells us more. It gives me a better way to understand what's already happening. Now, again, I'm a layperson, so I may be way out of my own depth here, but I think people will be able to follow the internal logic. So this is what I was stating earlier about AI. So the way that AI works is there is an infinite possibility space in noise. So you can just think of it as a screen. And that screen can have think of every conceivable pixel that's there. And depending on what color you make any one of those pixels, if you have like a grand enough resolution, meaning enough pixels in a finite space, that you can recreate any image that's ever been seen or created or Even just what's possible. So if anybody's seen what they call an AI hallucination, where the AI will just continually like, push into itself, and every time it pushes in and a pattern begins to emerge, it then crystallizes that pattern and basically says the most likely shape to emerge out of this would be a staircase. But as you push in, the most likely shape to emerge out of that would be a cathedral.
- [37:18]
And.
- [37:18]
And it just keeps going and going and going and going, and it never runs out of sort of most likely things emerge out of this pattern is because it's looked at all of these things, and so it will create things that it's seen before. So the Mona Lisa would be one representation that is very predictable, especially given how many times the Mona Lisa has been replicated. So one of the things in the possibility space is the Mona Lisa is a Rembrandt. Is David, is you looking at your wife this morning? Is one of the possibilities, spaces that it could eventually draw out of this thing.
- [37:50]
So, so it's.
- [37:51]
It's constantly searching for what is the next potential pattern. Now, my whole thing is what really starts to make this interesting. And the reason that I think that the simulation isn't something to be brushed aside as being trivial, but is critically important.
- [38:10]
If you're right, that what the.
- [38:14]
What consciousness is doing is it has some motivation for some reason that neither of us know why, but that it is cycling through all of its permutations, if that's what's really happening, then to do that you need a set of rules. And so what I realize is I'm building the. Going back to the Grand Theft Auto, so we're building a simulated world. And I realize as we build it, all I'm doing is making the most detailed if this, then that statements. And so I'm trying to create these algorithms that then not trick you, but they give you a set of rules by which you now must adhere. But by doing that, by actually limiting the possibility space, I can make a game that's quote unquote fun. So it is in the limitation, it's in the setting of rules that this becomes a useful space. So what I want to know is you. You talk a lot about, like, hey, we want to get out of the headset. Do you really. Do you want to get out of the headset or do you want to manipulate the headset?
- [39:25]
Annik Harrison
Well, when I say we want to
- [39:27]
Donald Hoffman
get out of the headset, that's as
- [39:28]
Annik Harrison
a scientist trying to look for a deeper theory. So as a scientist, I mean We've sciences.
- [39:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Let me ask you.
- [39:34]
So the reason that Einstein his breakthroughs were so useful is within the headset they let us do something. Are you trying to do something in the headset or. So if you understand how the headset works, you can either manipulate the like Einstein, bend space time. Right. You can create gps, which if you didn't understand relativity, you would not be able to do. And that made the atom bomb possible and made nuclear energy possible, made GPS possible. His breakthroughs. Are you trying to do a breakthrough that has headset implications or are you searching a breakthrough that has get out of the headset implications?
- [40:12]
Annik Harrison
Both. So what I want to do is get. Get a theory of what's beyond. At least a baby step beyond the headset. Presumably, as I mentioned, there's a Cantor's hierarchy of infinity, so we have infinite job security going beyond the headset. That is literally an unending job. But to take a step entirely outside of the headset, then as you point out as a scientist, I need to make predictions back in the headset because that's the only place we can do
- [40:38]
Tom Bilyeu
experiments to prove that your.
- [40:40]
Annik Harrison
To get right. Well, to, to. I don't. You can never prove that you're right. But, but to, to sort of what we say scientists would say to, to get confirmation of your theories, which is not proof.
- [40:52]
Donald Hoffman
But to, to say
- [40:55]
Annik Harrison
you're not stupid, you seem to be on the things
- [40:59]
Tom Bilyeu
that we already understand.
- [41:01]
Donald Hoffman
That's right.
- [41:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Hopefully makes novel predictions about things that we don't currently understand.
- [41:06]
Annik Harrison
That's right. We should be able to get quantum field theory back as a special case. We get Einstein's theory of general relativity as a special case. Evolution by natural selection as a special case or generalizations of these theories within spacetime. So yes, we're going for the first baby step outside of spacetime in terms of a scientific theory. But of course we have to project it back into space time where we can do experiments and a better look like evolution by natural selection and quantum field theory or understandable generalizations of those theories. Or we're wrong. Right?
- [41:40]
Donald Hoffman
So, so the.
- [41:41]
Annik Harrison
You might say, well yeah, if you go outside of space time, you can do anything. You have all the fun you want. You can do anything you want to. No, you can't. You can. You need to tie it back to what we can perceive inside our headset
- [41:53]
Donald Hoffman
so that that's where we're headed.
- [41:55]
Annik Harrison
But as I said, there's infinite job security. And, and so I view myself as, as just looking for a first baby step outside of the headset. Science for centuries has only studied our headset because spacetime is our headset. But in the last 10 years, physics has gone beyond. We've talked before about the amplitude and decorated permutations and other structures that physicists are finding.
- [42:18]
Donald Hoffman
These are not the final word.
- [42:19]
Annik Harrison
Again, these are the first baby steps
- [42:21]
Donald Hoffman
outside of our headset.
- [42:22]
Annik Harrison
And they will be, of course, refined and eventually superseded.
- [42:27]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so there's one of these things that I think I've got grasped enough that I can present it to people as one of the first baby steps. So in physics, one of the things they're constantly doing is smashing particles together to try to see what happens when those particles collide in the hopes that it will reveal smaller and smaller elements of the building blocks of the universe, which will then help us understand what the sort of fundamental makeup of space time is. And as they look at this data, what they found is that there are patterns in that data that replicate endlessly. And you smash these together and the collisions, there's so much data at first, it seems impossible, just so much data to wade through. We'll never understand anything. And then all of a sudden, you realize, wait, there's only so many patterns. Once you take those, like, once you group those shatters. Like, if you think of it this way, if every time you broke a mirror, it broke into the same pattern, you'd be like, wait a second. And am I understanding it correctly that that's what happens when you collide particles statistically?
- [43:40]
Donald Hoffman
Yes.
- [43:40]
Annik Harrison
Right. So it's not exactly. But, but, but you. You can use statistics to show that there are these statistical commonalities to the interactions. Absolutely.
- [43:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, walk us through that. And why does that matter?
- [43:51]
Annik Harrison
Well, for physicists, of course, this is some of their most fundamental data. So they're. What are particles. Particles Eugene Vigner taught us, are what he called, you know, irreducible representations, unitary representations of the group of symmetries of space time that what they call the Poincare group is essentially, particles are like the. The simplest things allowed by the symmetries of space time. The simplest entities allowed. And so in some sense, by studying these particles, we're really studying the nature of space time itself and the structure of space time. And so when they, for example, in the Large Hadron Collider, they will smash protons together, or they will. They'll also sometimes have an electron and smash it into a proton at high energies. And when you do that, at high enough energies, you destroy the proton, it actually falls apart. And you see all these Particles scattering up things like quarks and gluons and mesons and so forth. And so you can look at the angles that these particles are spraying out at. And look at, for example, do they have, you know, a spin, a magnetic charge? What's their, do they have a mass? So you can sort of, you can look at all the, and then when, when you start looking at all the data, you begin to see patterns in the data. And, and so we see, you know, for example, it was a big surprise to physicists that inside the proton there were these things that they now call quarks. But the quarks, in some sense, at least at the energies that, that are available to us, can't be on their own. You can't have like quarks flying out on their own. There's something called quark confinement. And that was a big, big discovery. So quarks, like in, in a proton, there are three quarks, two up and one down. A neutron has two down and one up. And. But if, if you, if the quark escapes, if it's trying to get away, the force of attraction between two quarks grows with the distance and the energy. Well, the force doesn't grow the energy. So the force doesn't. Normally we think of the force, the force.
- [46:15]
Donald Hoffman
So the force doesn't grow.
- [46:16]
Annik Harrison
The force remains constant. And so the energy, the potential energy keeps growing and growing as you move these particles apart. And so at some point they snap and you, you create all that energy goes and creates a new quark, say so. So then they pair off. So it's very, very strange, this quark confinement thing. So one reason we do experiments is because, I mean, who ordered that? We, we wouldn't have, like guessed, you know, quart confinement. And so, but we, we found quart confinement and is still being studied. I mean, trying to understand that there's a theory that if we get really, really high energies, they won't be confined, but those are energies that we currently are nowhere near. And we have no analytic proof right now of quart confinement for what are called non abelian gauge theories. So one of the big open questions in physics is to actually prove this analytically. So they have lattice gauge models of this that show it, and, and they have other cases where the experiments and the theory convince them it's the truth. But we don't actually have the final analytic proof of this in what's called non abelian gauge theories. So that's still an interesting open question, but that's why physicists are doing this, these particles are really probing in some sense the fundamental nature of space time itself. And so they look at, at patterns, they look at the cross sections for interactions. So this was for example, way back in the early studying of the atom. So there was a plum pudding model of the atom, right? So there was electrons were these negative point particles inside a positive field. And then this one experimenter started shooting particles at, at atoms. And the plum model would say that most of these particles would just go, go straight through. And most of them did, but every
- [48:27]
Donald Hoffman
once in a while one would bounce
- [48:28]
Annik Harrison
back a very, very small percentage of the time. And so that, that gave them the idea, okay, there are point like particles, we would now call them protons and neutrons. These particles that were hitting, but they were a very, very small space within the atom. So the atom was mostly empty space. The electrons were way far away, so to speak, from the much smaller protons and neutrons. And so, but then we look inside the protons and we find that the proton itself and the neutrons are composed of even smaller particles, quarks and gluons
- [49:03]
Donald Hoffman
and, and so forth.
- [49:04]
Annik Harrison
And who knows, even the quarks and gluons might be composed of smaller particles. But we don't have the resolution in
- [49:12]
Donald Hoffman
our colliders right now to test that.
- [49:14]
Annik Harrison
We can only go to thousandth or ten thousandth the diameter of a proton, I think. And at that resolution, the quarks and gluons still look like point like particles.
- [49:25]
Tom Bilyeu
It doesn't seem self evident to me that just because again, I'm granting you the conceit that consciousness is the fundamental thing, but it does not seem self evident to me that even if consciousness is the fundamental thing that gives rise to this constricting rule set as I describe it, that we call space time, that you couldn't have a theory of everything regarding spacetime. Why do you think we have failed to get a theory of everything in spacetime? In spacetime, knowing that it's the simulation. But going back to Grand Theft Auto feels like even if I just said, oh, all I can tell you is cause and effect, that when this pixel goes here, it has this effect. And so now I can play everything's forwards or backwards. And you could in Grand Theft Auto it has a set of rules and it adheres to those rules, period, Plain and simple. And so even though it is the, the it is the headset, a computer program, assuming that a simulation acts like a computer program, space time, in this case, it adheres to rules. And so when you get a Quote, unquote bug. It is what the program is programmed to do. You just didn't intend to program it that way.
- [50:41]
Annik Harrison
Well, in that framework, yes, I agree with you that I think we could get a complete theory of space time. Not a complete theory of everything, but a complete theory of space time. So the theory of everything for me would be, you know, space time is a trivial aspect of everything.
- [50:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [50:56]
Annik Harrison
So, but, but absolutely, I think we can get a complete theory of space time and we'll see its limits. It, it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. So we'll, we'll see that, we'll understand that.
- [51:09]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [51:10]
Annik Harrison
So it's, it's quite, quite possible. I would say though, and I like your idea about the, the program and
- [51:16]
Donald Hoffman
the rules and setting up a framework
- [51:18]
Annik Harrison
in which you can explore experiences. I'll throw in a little wrinkle. You're writing computer programs. And so Alan Turing, you know, is sort of one of the fathers of modern computer science. And, and Turing machine is like the first, like really good theoretical framework for computer science. And the universal Turing machine that, that Turing described in some of his papers is sort of our notion of a universal computer. But there's a well known limit to what Turing machines can do. Take again all the integers 1, 2, 3, up to infinity, also minus 1, minus 2, and so forth and ask, think about all the functions from the integers to the integers. For example, the square function. So the square of 2 is 4, the square of 4 is 16, and so forth. How many functions are there? It turns out it's a bigger infinity. It's not accountable, it's a bigger infinity than the integers. But Turing proved that the set of computable functions is countable. So when you're programming, you're using only computable functions, but they're a much smaller infinity than all the possible functions. So right now, in our current technology, when we build these computer simulations, we should know that we're using a probability 0 subset of all the functions that are actually available. And maybe later on we'll figure out how to do something more interesting with all these other functions. But then as we go again, Cantor's hierarchy, I think that in other words, the, the kinds of rules they're gonna, are going to be very, very
- [53:27]
Donald Hoffman
hard
- [53:27]
Annik Harrison
for our heads to understand. You can write down, if you take a class in theoretical computer science, you can study non computable functions so that you and almost every function is non computable. Okay. As I just said, the computable functions are probability zero. The set of all functions is. Most of those functions are not computable. But in a theoretical computer science class you will actually spend some time actually studying, you know, how to construct and prove that a certain function is not, not computable. Like the halting problem is not, is not a computable, it's not a computable function. It doesn't. And so, but it's really hard for us. Even though almost every function is not computable, almost every function we can think of is computable. So here we are stuck with the
- [54:21]
Donald Hoffman
limitations of our headset.
- [54:23]
Annik Harrison
And so thinking out of the box in the simulation idea is really going to be mind numbing because to really think out of the box, you're going to have to learn how to think about non computable functions. And that is not trivial, that's not. But that's. So I just wanted to throw that out there to just open up how complicated this can be and why the exploration could be.
- [54:48]
Tom Bilyeu
To get a theory of even just the everything of space time, we have to get into non computable functions.
- [54:54]
Annik Harrison
I don't know if we will or
- [54:55]
Donald Hoffman
not, that's an open question.
- [54:56]
Annik Harrison
But we should be open to that possibility.
- [55:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting.
- [55:00]
Annik Harrison
And certainly to explore consciousness. I see no reason why we should. A priori, I would say this. If someone claimed that the computable functions were all we need, I would say the burden of proof is on. You
- [55:15]
Tom Bilyeu
talk about something I have not even considered. I don't know that I can wrap my head around that one yet.
- [55:19]
Donald Hoffman
I have a hard time.
- [55:20]
Annik Harrison
I mean, I took a class and I looked at that non computable function, the halting problem. And you have to really, I mean you have to be sober, you have to be well rested and you have to think really hard. At least with my apparatus you have to think really, really hard to even grasp it. It's not trivial, intense.
- [55:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so when we have a hypothesis that makes predictions we need to be able to solve. We were talking about this a few minutes ago. We need to be able to solve problems or our hypothesis needs to predict outcomes of things that we can observe but not yet explain
- [55:53]
in.
- [55:53]
I can't remember if you mentioned this in your paper, but I have heard you talk about this. So dark matter, dark energy, we don't know what the hell it is, but we know that the universe would not hold together if it wasn't for that. Or it wouldn't be racing apart at the way that it's racing Whatever, it wouldn't function the way that it functions now. What does your consciousness as fundamental agent tell us about dark energy?
- [56:20]
Annik Harrison
Well, nothing specifically.
- [56:21]
Donald Hoffman
Right, so that's.
- [56:22]
Annik Harrison
That, that's a big open question. In fact, one, one of the, my collaborators is a, is a student working right now on dark energy experiments,
- [56:32]
Donald Hoffman
a
- [56:32]
Annik Harrison
brilliant student named Ben Knepper.
- [56:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Because he thinks it will yield results tied to consciousness as fundamental.
- [56:38]
Annik Harrison
No, I think it's just because it's a good thing to do at this stage in your career to get that kind of experience and, you know, actually spend time hunting with real experiments for dark matter so you learn the ropes.
- [56:48]
Donald Hoffman
I think it's.
- [56:48]
Annik Harrison
It was. And so he's doing that. And who knows? You know, our, our current techniques may or may not find dark matter. We, we just don't know. But it's no surprise from a point of view that says that space time is not fundamental to say that there could be influences on our headset that are not explicitly represented by the headset itself. They're only seen as influences on the headset. And so one way that we're going after this in our own mathematics is we have this Markovian dynamics of these conscious agents.
- [57:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you take a second to explain to people what Markovian dynamics are?
- [57:35]
Annik Harrison
Yeah, Markovian dynamics is fairly simple in concept. It says that it. What you do next. So suppose I'm, suppose I'm on just say a sidewalk and it has. There are different. I could either step one step to the right or one step to the left and there's some probability, maybe I choose to step to the right with probability of 2/3 and to the left probability of 1/3. And so you can see where would I go over time. But the key thing about it is that my, the step I'm going to take now only depends on where I am now. So where I'm going to end up next only depends on where I am now. So there's a finite memory. I don't have to know everything I've done in the past to know what's going to happen next. I only need to know where I am now. And that's the key Markov property that you only need to really know the current state. Don't have to know the whole history to have all the information about the probabilities for what's going to happen next.
- [58:40]
Tom Bilyeu
The, an analogy that I heard that I was really helpful in understanding is if you think of it as airports, some airports have more connections to other cities than other airports. You're. So if you're asking, let's say that there's five airports in question. One is isolated and one is a hub to all the rest. And then the other ones only have one or two links, whatever. Going back to your idea of if I'm on the isolated airport, there's only one option. So you don't need to know where I was before all of that. If you know I'm on the isolated one, you know I'm flying back to the only thing it's connected to, which is the other hub, right? Now, when I'm at that hub, that has, let's say, five options. Now it's just a probability curve of which one I'm going to go to. But once I go to another one of those airports, then it's like, okay, well, I could go, you know, to Cincinnati, I could go to New York,
- [59:36]
I could go to la, or I could go.
- [59:40]
Let's say those are the only connections. But when I'm in Hawaii, if Hawaii forces me to route through la, then you know where you're going to go. I was like, okay, that, that at least gives a simple understanding of, oh, this is a relatively simple concept that sets aside all the history. And so from a computational standpoint, that becomes very important because when people about booting up a simulation of the universe, you very quickly to track every element that could possibly interact with every. If everything could interact with everything, it becomes impossible. And you would have to have a computer the size of the universe itself in order to track like a one for one atom, basically. But I think I'm understanding this right, that Markovian dynamics eliminates a lot of that computational need, because I don't have to. There is a small set of things, and once I know the probability distribution over time, it completely stabilizes. And so when I know if I'm at airport C, I know the exact probability of where they're going to go next.
- [60:41]
Donald Hoffman
That's right.
- [60:41]
Annik Harrison
So Markovian dynamics helps simplify things by demanding only a finite memory, instead of an infinite memory of the past history of what you've been doing. But you can make the memory as
- [60:54]
Donald Hoffman
big as you want.
- [60:54]
Annik Harrison
So it's really not, not too much of a limitation either. So it's a nice formalism.
- [61:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Why do we care about it?
- [61:02]
Annik Harrison
Well, most of us don't have to deal with infinity anyway in terms of past history. So we can only. We can just use finite histories. And, and that's, and that's quite good.
- [61:12]
Donald Hoffman
And it.
- [61:13]
Annik Harrison
Another reason to be interested in Markov dynamics is we talked about computable functions. Well, Markovian kernels are computationally universal. So anything that can be computed with a neural net or with universal Turing machine can be computed with Markovian kernels. So they give a nice network kind of modeling for dynamics, but they also give us universal computational abilities. And they're not limited to computable functions
- [61:41]
Donald Hoffman
because the
- [61:45]
Annik Harrison
sets on which the probabilities are defined need not be computable sets. So they actually give us a window toward going beyond computation. I'm not there right now, but that window is there in the future if we need to go there. Hopefully that will go there. But. So our current model is a Markovian model of conscious agents. And then what we have to do is we can then show that space time is just a projection of this dynamics. And so you only there's a lot
- [62:17]
Tom Bilyeu
of states really fast before you move on. So just re anchoring people that these conscious agents, the states that they can be in are coffee, elation, desire, headache. So when we're talking Markovian dynamics, we're talking about moving from one of those qualia states to another. A human headache versus a dolphin headache, et cetera, et cetera. So help me understand why that's important that I can like, if I'm in the state of blissed out coffee, taste that I have a certain probability of going somewhere else that, that feels counterintuitive. It feels like my wants and desires are really what's going to drive the next state, not the state that I'm currently in.
- [63:11]
Annik Harrison
That's right. So, so now we're just talking about the consciousness, not about space, time for, for this question.
- [63:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Right, Right.
- [63:19]
Annik Harrison
So there when we write down a Markovian kernel and say, okay, whatever your conscious experiences are now this Markovian kernel describes what your next conscious experiences will be probabilistically and also what, how you're influencing the conscious experience of others. So, so now we can ask the kind of question you're asking.
- [63:41]
Tom Bilyeu
So is that's happening outside the headset.
- [63:44]
Annik Harrison
This is all outside the headset, right? This is all out.
- [63:46]
Tom Bilyeu
This is.
- [63:46]
So the probability of what I do next is determined outside the headset by Markovian dynamics.
- [63:52]
Donald Hoffman
That's why we're going to get to
- [63:52]
Annik Harrison
this dark energy and dark matter stuff.
- [63:54]
Tom Bilyeu
You are breaking my brain right now.
- [63:55]
Annik Harrison
That's. So that's, that's why I brought this up is because your question was about dark energy and dark matter. So what we have to, to, to get at that from this point of view, what we're going to say is look, most of the states of this dynamics are states that are not represented in space time.
- [64:10]
Donald Hoffman
They're dark.
- [64:11]
Annik Harrison
So there are these influences that you're not going to see.
- [64:13]
Donald Hoffman
When you count up all the matter
- [64:14]
Annik Harrison
and all the energy that you can see inside spacetime, you're going to be missing all the stuff that didn't project into space time. So in fact, probably the dark energy.
- [64:23]
Donald Hoffman
And dark matter is much more than
- [64:24]
Annik Harrison
we've discovered so far. So that's why it's important.
- [64:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So, okay, hold on. This all really does start to feel weird when I remind myself that this is about qualia, right? The sense of it being like something. And so I'm gonna make something up. Dark energy is the energy created. This is why I don't understand how it could be energy. But dark energy is the energy of a qualia that I will never be able to experience. So it's something like an alien drinking blood wine making that up. But it has to be qualia. So it's got to be something to be like that thing, Is that right?
- [65:10]
Annik Harrison
It's even more complicated than that. It's not just one qualia. It's probably, who knows how many countless infinities of qualia, but things like that. Exactly right. That are interacting and affecting the dynamics that we perceive inside of our space time headset. But notice that among the qualia are, for example, the qualia that you are about four feet from me, so your position. So position there's a quality mean. It's very, very different to experience you four feet from me than four inches from me. Those are very, very, so depth and space is quality. And in fact our quality of air,
- [65:48]
Donald Hoffman
it sort of compresses.
- [65:49]
Annik Harrison
If I look at the, like a distant mountain and the moon rising over that mountain.
- [65:56]
Donald Hoffman
The moon looks a little further than
- [65:58]
Annik Harrison
the mountain, but not much, right? Yeah, the moon's a little further. But if you were to, you know, that mountain might be, you know, 20 miles from me. The moon is a quarter million miles from it. So that means you have no idea that it's like orders of magnitude further away. So, so our qualia space of depth is quite compressed compared to what we might call the measured world. So like when you actually, and you see that in, in your, you know, like a Grand Theft Auto, when you're actually looking around, you only see the
- [66:31]
Donald Hoffman
roads around you in a little bit.
- [66:34]
Annik Harrison
But the Grand Theft Auto world, you might be able to drive thousands of miles in a really complicated simulation. You don't see thousands of miles in any one time. You only see a little bit that Your headset allows you to see, but. But because you use that same headset and you're. You're not stuck in that world.
- [66:52]
Donald Hoffman
It's.
- [66:54]
Annik Harrison
There's actually a supercomputer that has a much bigger world than your headset. Right. Than what you see right now in your headset, but it's rendering a little bit in your headset right now. So that's why the mountain and the moon look about the same, because they're headset. We can now, of course, when we go to the moon on a rocket now, it's like going through Grand Theft Auto with your headset on and going places that you couldn't see because they were too far away in your current headset view. But you can get there eventually.
- [67:24]
Donald Hoffman
And so that also is pointing to a world outside of your headset.
- [67:28]
Annik Harrison
Your headset is just what little bit of that world that you're rendering at any one time now. Dark energy and dark matter.
- [67:35]
Tom Bilyeu
You're not really getting outside of your headset to go to Mars. You're getting outside of what you rendered previously.
- [67:41]
Annik Harrison
Well, so at any moment you're only seeing in your headset. Right.
- [67:46]
Tom Bilyeu
But if I go to Mars, I'm still seeing in my headset.
- [67:48]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [67:49]
Annik Harrison
And in Grand Theft Auto, for example, there might be a Porsche that's a thousand miles away and you're gonna have to drive like three hours in the game to get there. So you're not going to see. So it's in the simulation outside of
- [67:59]
Donald Hoffman
your headset right now to get it
- [68:01]
Annik Harrison
in your headset, you're gonna have to do all this work to get it inside your headset. But it already existed in the software, in the computer prior to that. You just don't see it in your headset.
- [68:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Understood.
- [68:11]
Annik Harrison
So that. So all the stuff inside spacetime, the galaxies that we see that are far
- [68:17]
Donald Hoffman
away from us and so forth, that's
- [68:20]
Annik Harrison
not dark matter and dark energy. That's more like the headset stuff that you see in Grand Theft Auto if you go far enough within the game. But then there's this deeper notion that there are some states in the computer that you'll never see in Grand Theft Auto, but they could subtly influence what you are seeing in Grand Theft Auto.
- [68:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Doesn't your thesis necessarily. No, you're not going to say yes to this, but I'm going to finish. Doesn't your thesis necessarily mean that that is some element of the. I like to think of it as a blob that is consciousness cycling through. Why would it be in the same Simulation, cycling through different qualia. But then I don't understand why it would be in the same simulation if it's going to be something I could never possibly interact with. With.
- [69:11]
Annik Harrison
Right. I mean, almost everything that the real consciousness is doing is not in our, in our headset. We have this. What we're perceiving is probability zero of what's going on. It's, it's basically if.
- [69:24]
Donald Hoffman
Yes.
- [69:24]
Annik Harrison
Of all the things that are being experienced in consciousness, what percent of it do we experience?
- [69:29]
Donald Hoffman
Zero percent. Zero percent.
- [69:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, understood. But I, I am in a way experiencing dark energy because it is the thing that makes the universe the way that it is now. So I'm just trying to understand. So the thing that I, that I'm sort of debating in my own head is, okay, when I grant you that consciousness is fundamental, then there's all this internal logic to the space time continuum that I know and love.
- [70:00]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [70:01]
Tom Bilyeu
But I don't know that it's the, the only way for me to apply the sort of same rationale that you use of whether it's Markovian dynamics. Godel's incompleteness theorem is probably the more important because that's the one that really helps me understand AI and what AI is doing. So I'm wondering, okay, if I for a second say you have touched on something that's really important, which is that space time is the simulation. But I don't need to draw the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental thing. That just becomes a debate about whether consciousness can emerge or not. It could be that there. And this feels more right to me when I try to imagine it. But I fully admit what I'm about to say simply pushes God farther down. It kicks the can. So what feels intuitive to me because it's, what I'm doing is that I exist in somebody else's simulation that exists in the real world. And that person, they still need God or something. I have not in any way, shape or form explained that I've kicked the can. But then all the sort of. There's a set of rules. They seem like they're a little too perfect, they're a little too finely tuned. You've got the Fermi paradox, which I'll probably ask you about later. Like all these things are like, yeah,
- [71:28]
this is a little sus.
- [71:29]
The way that this whole space time is trying to hang together just doesn't really quite complete the circle. Including the. So much of the energy that makes the universe work is this dark stuff. Duh, don't worry about that. Feels like a 13 year old programmer, hand waving it away, telling the teacher, like, I just needed something in order to, you know, make all of this work. And when I do that, everything also falls into place where I'm like, oh, wow, okay. So I get how they're rendering all this in real time using the same principles that I'm now seeing AI use pulling things out of the possibility space. Because as somebody developing a video game, I will just tell you the hardest thing is creating the art assets. So they need something that can render this stuff on the fly and, and creating the art assets that look good but are also optimized for the rendering engine. Because rendering engine just gobbles resources. So it's like when I take that view and instead of going there's this magical thing called consciousness, I'm like, I'm still dealing with God. There's a God somewhere doing something, whatever. There's a thing I don't understand. But space time being born of a 13 year old just trying to like, you could literally go to the Unreal Engine store and be like, give me Einstein's physics, right? And you plunk them in and it would work. He wouldn't even have to know how to program it, he just took it, you know, whatever. Give me what they understood in 2023 and I was dropping in, you know, we'll see what happens. Like that still works.
- [72:55]
Exactly.
- [72:55]
Annik Harrison
I agree.
- [72:56]
Tom Bilyeu
What is it that gives you the confidence that the thing that is giving birth to all of this is consciousness itself?
- [73:08]
Annik Harrison
Oh, I'm not confident at all. So everything.
- [73:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it your leading theory?
- [73:12]
Annik Harrison
It's just my leading theory.
- [73:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Why is it your leading theory?
- [73:16]
Annik Harrison
First, I would agree with you that we could just say that there are some kind of dynamical entities outside of spacetime and be agnostic about the nature of those entities. Just write down their dynamics and then show how it projects into space time and we could be good. Absolutely. The reason I'm going after consciousness is two things, very personal. First, I mean, we all have headaches and we have conscious experiences and so we want to understand what consciousness is, right. And the standard view right now among my colleagues in the neurosciences is that consciousness is something that's created by brain activity or embodied brains, or perhaps if we're lucky, AIs and so forth. But physics is fundamental, physical stuff is fundamental, and consciousness is a late comer. If space time is doomed, if spacetime is not fundamental, that whole story of consciousness is out the window.
- [74:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Does physicality go out the window? Let me see if I can answer my own question, using your words to see if I understand this. Is physicality out the window if space time is doomed? Doomed, you would say? Yes, because local realism is proven that it isn't. There is no local realism, that all of this is fake. Everything you see and experience, it's all just quote unquote rendered in real time as you engage with it. Therefore, at least in what we experience. Because local realism isn't true. Physicality cannot be true.
- [74:44]
Annik Harrison
That's right. To put it very simply, I don't
- [74:46]
Donald Hoffman
have neurons right now.
- [74:47]
Annik Harrison
If you looked inside my skull, you would see neurons, you would render them. But there are no neurons, right? So neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. So neurons couldn't create consciousness because they're not even there to do it. And nor could particles. Particles don't exist when they're not perceived.
- [75:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Here's where limited minds like mine get tripped up because your analogy is so profound and feels so right. And for this to be a simulation, I say to myself, something has to be running the simulation and I can't get myself outside of that. Something somewhere is going to be physical.
- [75:20]
Annik Harrison
That's a hard one for me too, by the way. I have all the same knee jerk emotional reactions that everybody else has to this stuff even stronger. So maybe that's why it's good for someone like me to be doing this. Because, you know, I don't. My emotions don't believe any of this. They don't believe it at all. It's literally only the mathematics pushing me kicking and screaming at each step to.
- [75:42]
Donald Hoffman
So I.
- [75:42]
Annik Harrison
You have to go with mathematics and what, what the theories are saying. But, but I don't find it that intuitive. Maybe I will at some point, but I don't find it that intuitive. So yeah, you could say we don't need to talk about consciousness. There's just some dynamical entities outside of spacetime.
- [76:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Why can't consciousness be a part of the simulation?
- [76:05]
Annik Harrison
For all I know, it may be.
- [76:08]
Donald Hoffman
So maybe this thing that I called
- [76:09]
Annik Harrison
awareness, where this prior to any particular conscious experiences. Now there I'm completely in over my head. I have no idea what to say about that thing. Right. I literally have nothing intelligent to say.
- [76:22]
Tom Bilyeu
What if awareness is just the qualia of being rendered of your process being run by the central computer?
- [76:35]
Annik Harrison
That's as good an idea as I've ever had.
- [76:37]
Donald Hoffman
But I don't feel very confident in this area at all.
- [76:39]
Annik Harrison
I mean the closest we can personally get is the kind of thing I suggested, you know, go into a quiet room Turn off the light, let go of that which is not easy. Let go of everything and try to just be aware of awareness. Be aware of being aware and try
- [76:57]
Donald Hoffman
to sit there with that.
- [76:59]
Annik Harrison
And what you find is it's a profound experience. The more you just sit there being aware of awareness without thinking about not. You know, you're not. See, the whole point about not thinking is thinking. You're back into this small computational realm. You're back into this really tiny. Out of all the infinities, you're. You're back in this little tiny infinity. So letting go. So this is not.
- [77:24]
Tom Bilyeu
We know the headset is computation though, right?
- [77:27]
Annik Harrison
Well, we don't know for sure.
- [77:30]
Donald Hoffman
Our current models are.
- [77:31]
Annik Harrison
But.
- [77:31]
Tom Bilyeu
But we have proven that local realism not being real mean that it has to be computational.
- [77:38]
Annik Harrison
No, it doesn't entail. I mean, so it doesn't entail that at all. No.
- [77:42]
Donald Hoffman
Huh.
- [77:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Now I'm broken again. How to make sense of that.
- [77:46]
Donald Hoffman
Right. So.
- [77:46]
Tom Bilyeu
So how can anything.
- [77:49]
How.
- [77:50]
This is interesting. Here's my base where I realize I don't know how to escape this. I feel like for qualia to exist, it must be processed. I will even grant that the processing is simply the Markovial dynamics of. Markovian dynamics of moving from one thing to another, the switching of states. Fine, but it is moving from one state to another, which I will call that processing.
- [78:20]
Annik Harrison
Right.
- [78:20]
Donald Hoffman
It's just not a physical process.
- [78:23]
Annik Harrison
And it doesn't have to be a computational process even. It could be functions that are not computational.
- [78:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So I try not to kill the audience with the things I just can't write.
- [78:32]
Annik Harrison
My. Well, it hurts me too. I'm telling you these things, but not because it's easy for me. My. My head hurts too, thinking about these.
- [78:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have an example of something that. That's non computational? I think you gave one earlier, but I forget.
- [78:43]
Annik Harrison
Well, so the. The standard story that you. If you take a computer science class and study the theory of computation, they'll tell you about something called the halting problems. So this is the, like one of the big problems that entering, I believe, posed it and showed that it was not computational. The question is this. A Turing machine is like a universal. Turing machine is like a universal computer. You can give it a program. Turing thought about putting a tape with some punches on it, essentially. So you have this tape reader and the Turing machine would look at one square on the tape and read that symbol, and then it would change state and then move left or right and write a symbol. And that's all the universal Turing machine could do. And so the question that Turing asked was, suppose we asked the question,
- [79:34]
Donald Hoffman
will
- [79:35]
Annik Harrison
the Turing machine stop after a finite number of moves, will it halt on arbitrary sets of these tapes that you're giving it programs? That's called the halting problem. The question is, is there a Turing machine that can decide. So is there an algorithm that can decide whether this Turing machine will halt or not for any particular given input?
- [80:00]
Tom Bilyeu
So can you tell the Turing machine to stop? Is that the.
- [80:03]
Annik Harrison
Well, well, no. So, so I should say one more thing about Turing machines. So a Turing machine is going back and forth and changing its state. And when it's done, when it actually is like computed the square of a number or whatever it is that it's doing, it. It halts. It goes into what's called a halt statement. So that when it goes into a halt state, that means it's done. It did the computation. So, but, but there are some computations that go on arbitrarily long. Like, I don't understand why you, they. You never come to the end. You. You'd never come to the end of it.
- [80:33]
Tom Bilyeu
There's some sort of recursive loop.
- [80:34]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [80:35]
Annik Harrison
That's by its nature, in fact, probably most. So the question is.
- [80:39]
Tom Bilyeu
So when you say non computational, you mean something that ends up in that loop.
- [80:42]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [80:43]
Annik Harrison
Where you, where the Turing machine never halts.
- [80:45]
Tom Bilyeu
You give it an input, never thinks
- [80:46]
Annik Harrison
it's done, and it never thinks it's done.
- [80:47]
Donald Hoffman
Done. That's.
- [80:48]
Annik Harrison
That's so the halting problem.
- [80:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Most things are like that.
- [80:52]
Annik Harrison
Yeah, I would guess that. Yeah, most tapes are, are probably. You wouldn't halt be my guess. But, but that's, that's not an important point here. I think that's the case, but it's not a central point. The, the fact is that many won't halt. And so the. So the question that Turing raised was something like this. So is there a Turing machine that can tell you if it says, given this Turing machine and all these inputs, whether this Turing machine, which one of these inputs will it halt? Okay. And it turns out that there's no Turing machine that can do that. So it's not a computable function.
- [81:31]
Tom Bilyeu
There's no Turing machine that will know which one is going to halt.
- [81:34]
Annik Harrison
There's no Turing machine that can tell you that whether this other Turing machine will halt or not on all these inputs.
- [81:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. So it can never understand it without running the calculation itself.
- [81:44]
Annik Harrison
Well, and the Turing machine itself would never halt. The one that was trying to do this would never halt. So it's called the halting problem. And so when you take a computer science class, you'll get a much better explanation than I've just given you. But basically you'll see that there's no algorithm that will tell you whether a particular Turing machine will halt or not on any possible inputs.
- [82:10]
Tom Bilyeu
You've got this idea that Godel's incompleteness theorem says it's this infinite thing and that there's always going to be more to explore, that you will never be able to have a theory of everything. And when you ask yourself, why would this be the case? Or how does that tie into consciousness? And maybe I'm getting this slightly wrong, but my interpretation of what you said is that, that it's possible that given that consciousness is basically exploring itself and we are all of the permutations that it must run through to basically have the negative take, I know that not to be me. And that helps me understand who I am. How close am I getting?
- [83:00]
Donald Hoffman
That's, that's, I think, a very, very good first approximation with the proviso that we understand now, based on what we've talked about in Godel's incompleteness theorem, that everything that we are saying now are just words, and they're only pointers into a realm that's, that's unlimited and infinitely beyond anything that even our words can point to. So even when I use. So I talk about consciousness as being more fundamental than space time, but even then, if I step back and go, okay, to be really consistent, I have to admit that even a theory of consciousness is not a theory of everything. And it may not even be the right language. It's just the next baby step in our scientific.
- [83:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Could consciousness be more fundamental than spacetime? Wouldn't the thing that the guys, the local realism, which requires you to look at something, state that if consciousness were more fundamental than space time, it would already be observing itself.
- [84:00]
Donald Hoffman
So the way to think about it is, maybe an analogy is you're wearing a headset and you're playing Grand Theft Auto again, but there is no real car out there. The steering wheel is just in your head. It's all in your perceptions. All of that is in your. So the entire physical world, quote unquote of Grand Theft Auto is made up in your mind, made up in your consciousness.
- [84:31]
Tom Bilyeu
So my.
- [84:31]
My consciousness, or whatever consciousness is, is creating the, the virtual world.
- [84:39]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. The way I think about it. And again, you know, words have limitations. But the math model we're working on, on consciousness indicates that there is one Unlimited consciousness that cannot be modeled, but we can talk about projections of it. That one big consciousness can have projections. And we're having a projection into a 4D space time format and there's a tom projection and a non projection, but we're just projections of this one unlimited consciousness that, that's, that's utterly outside of space and time. And this is probably not a particularly sophisticated projection. As I was saying, 40 space time only goes to 10 to the -33 centimeters. Pretty trivial. So this is, we're probably. This is, you know, consciousness not being too serious. This is like a trivial projection, but it's just doing whatever it needs to do. We're doing some science. We're talking, we're learning to love each other, which maybe, you know, who knows, that might be the big thing. Maybe, maybe it's learning to know yourself beyond any concepts and to know that everybody else is really you under a different avatar and to, to learn to love. I mean, I, I don't know what the final answer is, but this is the kind of question that comes up and the kind of answer that comes
- [85:55]
Tom Bilyeu
up that feels a little bit wishful thinking isn't the right way. But that feels like a very specific to you prognostication.
- [86:05]
Donald Hoffman
Absolutely. When I. Beyond the map path.
- [86:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, when I hear you describing that, I think of war games and Jacob learning like, oh, there's no way to win at thermonuclear war. The only way to win is to not play. Great ending to a movie. But like, when I think about, okay, wait, why would, why would consciousness this grand consciousness that the math seems to point to, why would it need to understand itself? Why would it need to discover love? It's like. And I think about this a lot and we talked about this in the last, the last time we were together, I was saying, when you've got a machine and you're trying to like get AI to do something, you have to give it directives, you have to tell it to do something, but somebody had to tell it to do that thing. So who is telling consciousness, oh, you should care about love.
- [86:59]
Donald Hoffman
Well, and I, I completely agree with you, Tom. I think that the things I just threw out should probably be thrown out. Right. But the idea is we don't have good ideas in this space. So the reason I'm. So when I put these ideas out, I'm not wedded to them in the least. But I'm saying better to have something on the table that we can say, ah, that's not it, than to have Nothing on the table. Because at least we can say, okay, that's not it. But, but so why isn't that it? What's wrong with that? And then we can try to, to play with and say, well, how can we get something better? So I put some bad, bad pieces on the table because I don't have anything better to. So it's poverty in my imagination. But I'm hoping by putting bad pieces on the table and having people go, no, that's not it. I would go, yeah, that's not it. So what is it? What, what is a better idea? But of course that's a never ending process. Godel tells us that in some sense we'll always be putting bad pieces on the table. And that's so we have to learn to live with that. We have to learn to say, I'm not going to get the final theory of everything. No matter. Even if you're an Einstein, which you put down on the table, we're eventually going to say here's the limits of that. And that's going to be always the case with scientific theories. It's just that in the things I just threw on the table, the limits are so obvious and so clear that you can just sort of say right away that that doesn't seem right. And I had a nice lunch a few days ago with Annika Harrison when I was putting these ideas and she had exactly the same attitude, which is she said it sounds too romantic. Don and I agree with, but it's better to put something on the table and get a negative reaction so that we start to say, okay, well what are better places to go in this. But always realize that Godel is telling us this very humbling thing. You'll never get a theory of everything. And that means there'll always be the feeling of yeah, but there's more. Yeah, but there's more even if you're Einstein. Yeah, but there's more.
- [88:53]
Tom Bilyeu
So consciousness, what? One I want to understand as we look at that recent Nobel Prize winning for realizing that local reality isn't a thing, if there is this uber consciousness, how would it not cause the like constant collapsing? If, if consciousness is more fundamental than space time, how is it not causing this constant collapse down to being observed? Because if consciousness is, is the thing that gives rise to that, it would by nature be aware, right?
- [89:30]
Donald Hoffman
So to really give a technical answer to that, what we're going to have to have is a mathematical theory of consciousness first, right? So what do we mean by consciousness? And write down equations for how it is dynamics. And then we're going to have to say, where is consciousness? Is it inside spacetime? See, most of my colleagues who are studying consciousness, my cognitive neuroscience, these are brilliant, brilliant researchers and friends, but they're thinking of consciousness as inside spacetime. It's being made by the brain or being made by an AI computer that's complicated enough or made by integrated information or microtubule quantum collapses or global workspace kind of architectures. And the right broadcast architecture there. So there's something inside space time that's generating consciousness. So that's the. I would say 99% of my colleagues and friends. And by the way, they're brilliant, but they're thinking inside spacetime. That's almost all the work is inside space time. And consciousness is stuck inside spacetime. I'm saying we need a theory of consciousness outside space time because our best science tells us that spacetime is a trivial data structure. Structure. It's a shallow, trivial data structure. Why should we try to shoehorn consciousness to be something inside space time? Why not think about, again, the VR case with my headset? All that I'm perceiving is actually not really there. It's actually in my consciousness. Let's turn things around. Space time and particles, and the physical world is just a little tiny data structure inside consciousness. So to have that kind of model. So consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness then uses tiny little headsets in its interactions with itself. And space time is just one trivial little headset that conscious agents use to interact with and probably has far more interesting ones than space time. So to answer your question, we then really have to say our mathematical model of consciousness, and how does that precisely project into our little space time headset and give us the laws of quantum field theory, the laws of general relativity, evolution by natural selection, we have to get so all the stuff that we've done inside the headset. Science has been inside the headset until the last couple decades. All of our science has been studying the pixels in our headset and the structure of our pixels with the amplitude. Hedron Science is taking a step outside the headset and saying, what is beyond space and time? Okay, so that's really incredible. So, and then they say the deepest thing we found are these decorated permutations. That's the deepest thing we found so far. It doesn't mean it's the final answer. It's just as far as we've gotten. So what we need to do is take a theory of conscious consciousness. We call it conscious agents in my case, or conscious units annika likes me to use conscious units instead of conscious agents because agency involves maybe the notion of a self. And there doesn't have to be a notion of a, you know, like a human kind of self in these agents. They could be selfless in some sense, but conscious how? Well, so my. Myself is.
- [92:44]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, don't most people define consciousness as it is like something to be you?
- [92:50]
Donald Hoffman
Right. The self, though, is like, I'm Don Hoffman. I was born in such. Such a year. My parents were such and such. I got educated. It's a story.
- [92:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [92:57]
Donald Hoffman
But in some sense, if I just let go of the story, if I forgot my story, I would still be conscious. If I forget who I. If I forget everything that I've done, give me a little drug and I
- [93:08]
Tom Bilyeu
just see it's an experience.
- [93:11]
Donald Hoffman
I'm still conscious. And so the self, in terms of a little story. And what's interesting is we put so much emphasis in the story and me versus you, and I've got more than you, or I'm smarter than you, or I'm faster than you. Even little kids, you know, my car is faster than my dad used to can beat up your, you know, that kind of thing. So we're always comparing our stories. So, so there's no self in these conscious agents, in the sense of this little image of myself that I'm defending and showing that it's better than your daddy or your car, whatever it might be. So, so, so I call them conscious agents, but we could call them conscious units. But the key thing is that that has to be mathematically precise. Even though we understand that our mathematics will always be just our current baby step. But nevertheless, you need to be mathematically precise and we have to show precisely a mapping into space time. Then we can start to answer your question about how is this local realism thing related to properties of consciousness.
- [94:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, the reason we have to map in space time is because we know that space time, even if it's just a sort of cheap simulation, it does come from whatever is more foundational than that.
- [94:20]
Donald Hoffman
And that's where all our data is. The only place our headset lets us look is inside the headset. So we have to. I mean, if we're going to do experiments to test our theories, we're stuck with this little tiny, trivial data structure called space time. And all of our experiments have to be done in space time. We have to measure them inside space time. So that's why we have to take our theory of consciousness and project it into space time. Now, what's interesting Is that the physicists have gone beyond spacetime and found these monoliths. As we talked about the monolith that's sitting there, the map, Plutuhedron and so forth, and then the decorated permutation monolith, but no dynamics. So the physicists are going to eventually want a dynamics, right?
- [95:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Why?
- [95:01]
If you have no space and time, why would something need to move?
- [95:07]
Donald Hoffman
Now, physicists like Nima, I won't put it on him. If I were the physicist and said, you know what, here's the final answer. It's the amplitude and a decorative permutation. Live with it. That's all there is. And some 20 year old kid taking a graduate class will go, give me a break. You want me to just live with that? I'm going to look deeper, I'm going to probe deeper, I'm going to find something behind that. And that's what science always does. So we're not. So none of the physicists, I mean, of course we have a big party and are really happy about the amplitude and the decorator. It's an incredible accomplishment. But the attitude is going to be what's next? And in principle they're going to want a dynamics, not time. So you can have dynamics without what we call time, as in space time. So the notion of dynamics or sequence is a far more general notion than just the notion of time as we see it in terms of space time. So we wanted dynamics in that more general sense of something where there are sequences, where there are. It's not just a static object because
- [96:13]
Tom Bilyeu
there are things that we see in our headset of space time that leads us to believe that sequencing is, must be a part of whatever is fundamental.
- [96:23]
Donald Hoffman
Well, possibly, yes, that and possibly because we, I think, would be impatient or unhappy with a theory that just says God said this object and that's it.
- [96:38]
Annik Harrison
There is this object.
- [96:39]
Donald Hoffman
Live with it. That's the final answer. No scientist would be happy with that. Why did God say that? Why couldn't God said something else? And why did it have to be static? Why couldn't there be some dynamics, not a space time dynamics, but some kind of something happening? Why can't. Now the answer may be that the geometry is all there is and there is no dynamics. But we're not going to just accept that at face value. We're going to have to be taken there kicking and screaming, right? And made, you know, to, to believe that because nothing else works. But. So that's why I think that the physicists themselves are going to look for Dynamics behind the decorated permutations. So what a theory of consciousness has to do then if it wants to connect with space time is it has to show how it maps onto decorated permutations.
- [97:32]
Annik Harrison
Right?
- [97:32]
Donald Hoffman
You need a dynamical theory of consciousness and you must show how it maps into decorated permutations. Then the physicists say, if you give me the decorative permutations, I can take you all the way into space time and you can predict scattering at the Large Hadron Collider and so forth. And so that's what, what our team has just done. In the last 10 weeks, we, we discovered a new bit of mathematics that the dynamics of conscious agents is so called Markov chains, Markovian dynamics, a very, very simple kind of probabilistic dynamics. And so a few weeks ago, a
- [98:03]
Annik Harrison
couple months ago, we, we decided to
- [98:05]
Donald Hoffman
look, okay, how do you map Markov chains into decorated permutations? So we could put a dynamics behind the amplitude. And as far as we could tell, there's nothing published in terms of a general theory. There are special little cases where they've looked at something. But you know, a general theory take any Markov chain, map it into decorated. Permission.
- [98:26]
Tom Bilyeu
The Markov chain is just the long tail, knock on effect of things bumping into each other essentially, right?
- [98:33]
Donald Hoffman
Just probabilistic, you know, this happens with that probability. This happens with that probability. All the probabilities have to sum to one.
- [98:38]
Tom Bilyeu
What are the probability of when the cue ball hits the, the balls on the pool table that they will end up in this configuration?
- [98:46]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. In the case of conscious agents, I should be explicit. It's like it's a social network, right? This is now consciousness. So it's a network of agents. And in some sense the probabilities are what's the probability that this guy is going to talk to that guy or these three guys or those five guys. And so it's sort of like network linkage. Google has a lot of links, a lot more than Hoffman. So Google has a lot of things that are talking to Google. Hoffman has a very few things. Apple has a lot of things talking to them. So those probabilities are sort of saying it's network probabilities. What's the probability that, that sometimes it's your influence and too as well. Google has huge influence because of all the networks, all the connections. It's got much more than someone who only has five followers. Right. Google has millions or hundreds of millions. So, so those, so and, and then there's, you know, if you think about it, someone tweets and then that gets picked up, and who picks it up and who retweets it and who likes it and so forth. So you see all the. It's all probabilities, right? You're is someone does something and it ripples through the whole network probabilistically. And you can't know exactly, even though Tom is a follower of somebody else, doesn't mean that Tom's going to tweet everything. What does Tom like? Or maybe Tom just missed that he had something else that day. So it's all probabilistic. And so you see these evolving probabilities on this network, and that's what Markov chains are really good at. They're looking at literally. So the theory of conscious agents. Think social networks like Twitterverse and so forth, and how influences propagate in the Twitterverse. And then. So what we found about 10 weeks ago was we invented, apparently, as far as we can tell, new math, a precise way to take any Markovian dynamics and map it into decorated permutations so that we now have a map from the dynamics of conscious agents into decorated permutations. The physicists then, and decorated permutations for
- [100:41]
Tom Bilyeu
people that don't know is the shuffle one. But it's shuffling that can go either direction. So I have the good fortune that you were explaining this to me before we started rolling. I don't want people to think that I'm more clever than I am. But decorated permutations, you said.
- [100:56]
Okay.
- [100:57]
When people think about shuffling a deck, they think about card one going into the third position. They don't think about card one going, if there's five cards going the other way. So instead of going 1, 2, and ending up at 3, it goes 5, 4, and ending up at 3. So same number of moves, but you've gone in a different direction. And am I explaining that right?
- [101:22]
Annik Harrison
Yeah.
- [101:23]
Donald Hoffman
The idea of the two different directions is important, but it's slightly slight. Just a slight difference. So Suppose I have five cards, just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
- [101:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [101:33]
Donald Hoffman
And they're in order. And now I'm going to shuffle them. And I say, okay, one went to position three now, but five went to position two. So one going to three is sort of shuffling forward. Right. You went to a bigger number, five going to two, you're going to a smaller number, you're going backward. So a normal permutation, that's fine. That's what a normal permutation is. A decorated permutation says you only shuffle to a bigger number. So if you want five to go to two. What you're going to do is you're going to have five go to seven, because seven minus five, five is the biggest number. Seven minus five is two. Okay, but if five had gone to one, then we'd actually go five goes to six because six minus five is one. So it's a wraparound. So only. So if you already. If one is going to three, then you just do the normal thing. One goes to three. But if some permutation is going to a smaller number, like three goes to one, then you actually have to say three goes to six, because a total of five and five plus one is six. So that's called a decorated permutation. So it's just a permutation with this extra little twist. It's not a big deal, frankly. It just turned out that you needed that extra twist to fully capture the particle physics scattering of particles. So when you do that, what's stunning is for some cases, so in the approximation in which all particles are super symmetric and massless, so they have. They're all traveling at the speed of light. They're massless, so they travel the speed of light. In that simple case, the decorated permutation is everything. That's it. And when you let go of supersymmetry and you have massive particles, then all you have to do is you have the decorated permutation. Plus you need to add information about the mass and the spin. But the decorated permutation is really doing the heavy lifting. So that's the stunning thing is to the physicists, which is. And you see it in the writings when, you know, when you read like Nima Arkani Hamed has the book, you know, Grassmannian geometry of scattering amplitudes with a bunch of. When they talk about the decorated permutations, you can see in the way they write, they're like, who ordered this? You would never have guessed that it would be something like that. So. But here's an interesting thing. It turns out that decorated permutations are the most compact way to capture a Markovian dynamics. It's an incredibly compact way of capturing the dynamics. It basically is telling you. What decorated permutations in a dynamical system are telling you is your social network. Who are you connected to?
- [104:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Who are you interacting with, only shuffling in one direction?
- [104:28]
You better capture.
- [104:30]
Donald Hoffman
You better capture that. If you want to go into the details.
- [104:35]
Tom Bilyeu
It's so foreign to me. I don't know how much the details, but that's really strange. So that's where we get into the math. Fair enough. I'LL accept it as true.
- [104:47]
Donald Hoffman
We can do the math if you want, but.
- [104:49]
Tom Bilyeu
But, but the last time that we did the math, it actually ended up being really fascinating. So let's try it. Let's see. Let's see how far we get before my brain snaps in half.
- [104:58]
Donald Hoffman
Okay, so the key thing about these decorated permutations that gives them this extra power.
- [105:02]
Annik Harrison
Yep.
- [105:03]
Donald Hoffman
Is that there's two ways to map to yourself. Right. So if, if you shuffle the cards, but card number one stays number one, then one goes to one. Right. But with the decorative permutation you could say, well, if there were say five cards, then you could say, well, one goes to one, but also one goes to six is another way of saying that you stayed yourself because 6 mod 5 is 1, 6 minus 5 is 1. Yep. So there are so called.
- [105:33]
Tom Bilyeu
What happens if I want to move
- [105:35]
five to position four? That's really nine and you said that seven was the max, so.
- [105:40]
Donald Hoffman
Oh no. So the, the max would be 10.
- [105:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, right, got it, got it, got it.
- [105:45]
Donald Hoffman
So if you have five cards, the maximum number would be 10. For N cards it's two N. Right, understood. So for five, so if there are five cards, five could either map to itself five to five or five goes to 10.
- [105:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [105:58]
Annik Harrison
Because that would be.
- [105:59]
Donald Hoffman
So the one is called the first decoration of the identity, because it's the identity move, five went to five and the other is called the second decoration of the identity. And. And there's another branch of mathematics where they're called loops and co. Loops. But anyway, what. So the way it matters in terms of the physics now in, in physics, when you have the first decoration of the identity, it corresponds to what they call a zero dimensional space. So in some sense the thing doesn't exist. It's a zero dimension. And when it maps to itself in the second kind of identity, then it's
- [106:35]
Annik Harrison
its own one dimensional space, a separate one dimensional space.
- [106:39]
Donald Hoffman
So the reason for the decorate permutation is to capture that distinction between something that is alone in the sense that it's essentially empty versus alone in the sense that it's just a one dimensional space, a line versus just a zero dimensional point. You needed to capture those two things. And so it does. But for the Markov dynamics, it captures something about social networks that's interesting. Either I'm alone, I'm the identity, I'm alone because I'm talking to myself and so I'm only talking to myself, or I'm alone because I'm not even talking to myself. And so the case in which I'm not even talking to myself is the first declaration of identity and the one in which I'm only talking to myself and nobody else, that's the second. And as soon as I'm talking to anybody else, then I get a non trivial permutation and that then what you do is you assign I'm in the social network and I'm number two. And suppose that my decorated permutation assigns me to five, there's only five member. That means that my social network, everybody in my social network is captured between two and five total. So for example, number one is not in my social network.
- [107:58]
Annik Harrison
Yep.
- [107:58]
Donald Hoffman
Right. So what the decorative permutation for dynamical system is doing is it's capturing. Now it could be that, for example, when I go 2 to 5, maybe 4 isn't in my network, but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to say everybody that's in my network is captured between 2 and 5, inclusive of 2 and 5. And when you look at the whole decorated permutation, you'll figure out that four wasn't in the social network of two. You can figure it out from the decorated permutation. So that's why it's such that it's a really compact representation of everything. So eventually we may actually use this in social network theory. Our new mathematics of decorated permutations for dynamics may actually end up being a very compact representation of social networks. I haven't even thought about that yet,
- [108:45]
Tom Bilyeu
but that could be as you're explaining it, I was like, are they going to run this math for predictive models for social networking?
- [108:52]
Donald Hoffman
Well, it is right now the most compact mathematics that we can use to describe social networks and the dynamics of social networks. Basically the dynamics of who are you actually interacting with. So this is a brand new tool that has never been, as far as I know, we invented it. So we have a paper that we're about to submit for publication in two or three weeks where we present this and I did give a professional talk at Stanford a month or two ago where I presented the map.
- [109:22]
Tom Bilyeu
How people put this shit together, like this is so abstract for me. I am clinging on by my fingernails and I would not want to have to explain decorated permutations to anybody. But that's really interesting that, I mean, so we're caught in between two things. One, talking about the things that we can predict and how utterly fascinating it is when you can actually map out this is what happened.
- [109:46]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [109:46]
Tom Bilyeu
And then talking about how, oh yeah, everything that you're mapping is totally fake. It's. It's really interesting. But that's one of the things that I've always. I. Cognitively, I don't have that ability. It doesn't come naturally to me.
- [110:00]
Donald Hoffman
Me either.
- [110:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, I have to loop around this stuff so many times just to get like the real basics. But the idea of being able to understand a system so well that you can predict this goes back to what I was saying. My, my whole thing in life is when you can accurately predict the outcome of your actions, things get very interesting. And so anything, I mean, that like, gets. As of right now, I can't digest that enough to make it usable in my life. But it hints at this idea of you really can map out if I do this, this and this. Even as it gets more and more complicated, you really can predict what the outcome is going to be. And the closer that you can get to that, the more effective you will be in your life. Especially because so much of what one does in business, it's all human psychology. And so if you have a way, I mean, and this really gets into. Right now, Impact theory is investing hugely into AI. AI and what we're doing in terms of our funnels, AI in terms of what we're doing in the gaming side, and acknowledging that even though you have a wall of data that as a person you can't not work your way through, there really is. There are patterns in that data.
- [111:13]
Donald Hoffman
Oh yes.
- [111:14]
Tom Bilyeu
That are highly leverageable. And in fact, one of the things like as. As you're talking, and I don't think you share my obsession with this, but you might. My obsession with physics is getting people to understand that when Einstein wrote down his general relativity and special relativity, it gave us the modern world in ways that I don't think people fully understand. From being able to zoom to GPS to atomic energy. I mean, it's really spectacular. Once you're able to better understand the nature of reality, you can do things with that because it makes predictions. I can't remember if we were talking about that before or after we started rolling. But that ability to, oh, that theory makes this prediction and you can begin to think in novel ways. And so I, for a while I was teaching a course that I called Business Decision Making. It's the worst title ever. Nobody knows what that means, but it actually is the only thing in business that matters. You have to be able to go, should I do this? Should I not do this? What will happen if I interpret the world this way versus that way? And people that Succeed in business, they get, get very good at knowing how to think through the problem. To think through the problem, you have to understand the nature of things. And so my whole thing was, hey, are you doing social media? You better understand the nature of social media. What's the nature of social media? It's human psychology plus the algorithm. And so like if you master both now, you can really do something. The problem is that both of those data sets are so massive.
- [112:55]
Annik Harrison
Right.
- [112:56]
Tom Bilyeu
That you're really taking your best sway and getting into this stuff is for me, if we really can peel through the, the headset and start getting into. No, no, no. That all these things, it's a really low fidelity thing and this will scare people. But as you, if you're the first person to poke through that, oh my God, you have, I mean, not to take the dark example, but, but we ended World War II by being the first to understand atomic energy and how to split the atom. There are way more uplifting and positive examples, but that's just the one that will stick out in everybody's consciousness. But being able to, in fact, this is something that I, I don't know if you know Eric Weinstein, but talking to him, he's looking at, okay, what's that next breakthrough and what's it going to let us predict? And so that's his whole like obsession is we've got people playing at very high levels and if he's right and he understands something that other people don't understand, it's going to make predictions. And we don't know where those predictions go.
- [114:07]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [114:07]
Tom Bilyeu
They could be good, they could be terrifying, could be life changing in a good way, in a bad way, but getting people to understand, like you need to be obsessed at, at least at the headset level, you have to be obsessed with better predicting, what this means. So anyways, you're talking about decorated permutations and stuff. It just gets me thinking about large data sets, how we simplify that, what that's going to mean in my world in terms of business intelligence, identifying an audience, understanding what will convert really matters. Like it, it plays out in a really real way.
- [114:45]
Donald Hoffman
It does. And I think a metaphor here might illustrate how, how big the potential is. Science of space time has been all in the headset. And we've become wizards of the headset. Just like someone in Grand Theft Auto has become a wizard at using the steering wheel and the gas to go through the space time of the Grand Theft Auto virtual world. But suppose that you learned to think outside the headset. You actually understand the software in the supercomputer that's running it. Then you can take the gas out of the tank of the wizard. You can give him flat tires or her flat tires. You can change the geometry of the roads. In other words, the wizard is trivial compared to what you can do once you have learned how the headset works. So science has just taken its first baby steps outside of the headset just in the last 20 years. We're taking our first baby step once we start to understand the first level of software that's available to us. I'm not saying we're going to get the whole thing. As Godel's incompleteness theorem says, the software is endless. But the way things seem to work is you do get to see layer by layer by layer. So as we go to the first layer of the software, the wizardry inside spacetime is going to look trivial compared. So right now, for example, something like 97% of the galaxies that we can see, we could never go to, they're moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Not because they're moving through space faster than the speed of light. They're not. But space itself is expanding so quickly that if we move through space to try to get to them, the space would be expanding so fast that we
- [116:38]
Annik Harrison
couldn't get to them at the speed of light.
- [116:39]
Donald Hoffman
And so there's 97% of the real estate in our universe is waving at us saying, hi, you can never come see me.
- [116:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that's fascinating. Especially because if space can expand faster than the speed of light, this is more, at least in my limited mind, pointing at, like, something deeper. Yeah, there's something else going on.
- [117:02]
Donald Hoffman
But what if we didn't have to go through space to get to Alpha Centauri?
- [117:06]
Annik Harrison
Yeah.
- [117:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Every time you say this, it turns me on. Like, this is so that's, that's the exciting.
- [117:12]
Donald Hoffman
This is where I'm, I'm really. This is one reason why I'd like to understand our theory of conscious agents outside. I'm not saying the theory of conscious agents is right, but it's the first baby step that I've seen where it's a dynamical system where you can actually talk about, quote, unquote, software that you could tinker with. You could actually do something with it that would allow us perhaps new technologies where we don't go through space to the Andromeda Galaxy that would take us 2.4 million years. Good luck. Even your great, great grandkids wouldn't be alive. But what if we could go around space. Because our headset is just a headset. You don't, you can just change the software. Oh, you want to be at Alpha Centauri or Andromeda? Just change the software. Now you're there, there, because you realize that spacetime isn't the reality. It's just a data structure. You can play with the data structure. As soon as we, the next generation. My generation won't get it. The next generation that really gets it is going to unleash miracles because we will then start to really get the software behind space, time. We will begin to tinker with it, and the possibilities are endless. I can't even imagine.
- [118:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Speaking of imagining, ground me back and how you think about this in your real life. So I know that you got clobbered by Covid.
- [118:36]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [118:37]
Tom Bilyeu
You wrote a goodbye text to your wife, I'm assuming, because it was Covid, and she couldn't come in the room because this was really early. Right. How did that influence that moment for you? Well, like, were you just like, oh, it's all a headset, who cares? Bye, babe.
- [118:53]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, I wish I could say, you know, I'm this really enlightened guy in the science and spirituality. And then, so I was just really calm. And I wish I could say that, but, but I, you know, I was in tremendous pain. My heart had been pounding. Arrhythmia, cardiac arrhythmia, 190 beats per minute, 180 beats per minute for 36 hours.
- [119:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
- [119:16]
Donald Hoffman
I, I, I knew that my heart couldn't do that much longer and they hadn't been able to figure out a way to stop it. And so, like 4 o' clock in the morning, my wife was asleep, but, but I didn't know that I would make it until she was awake.
- [119:28]
Annik Harrison
So I, I texted her.
- [119:29]
Donald Hoffman
I knew I wouldn't wake her up. She has her thing on mute. But I at least wanted to give her a goodbye text because I figured by the time she was up, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be alive. And after I did the text, you know, within an hour after that, so they found a drug that calmed my heart down and was able to keep my heart calm long enough so I could eventually get a surgery which then cured the problem. So, so, so I, you know.
- [119:57]
Tom Bilyeu
What'd you put in the text? You don't have to give me verbatim, obviously. That's super private. But, like, what was the gist?
- [120:02]
Donald Hoffman
It was, well, you know, when you're feeling that bad. You, you, you, I didn't have the wherewithal to say much. It just said, I don't, you know, said, sweetheart, I don't think I'm gonna make it. I love you. And that was it. That's. I just. That was all I had. So there was, there wasn't. So I can imagine someone who's really spiritually adept and advanced might sit there and very calmly. That wasn't me. That was. I was completely shattered. I've been awake for 48 hours with heart beating at. At 180 beats per minute for 36 hours. I was. I was done. And I was scared and I was lonely and I was afraid and I missed my wife and my daughter and my grandkids. And it was. So I have no illusions about, you know, being some kind of spiritual master who is, you know, above it all, you know, I'm just another human being. We with the same problems as everybody else. These are really good ideas, I think are helping me to get a bigger picture. But when it comes right down to it, when push comes to shove, there's something inside me that believes that spacetime is fundamental. It believes that when the body dies, that's it. So it's really interesting. I'm not coherent. There's. Well, put it this way. Maybe intellectually I'm coherent about this, but there's an emotional side of me that hasn't come along. Now I am meditating and I think that slowly the emotional side of me is unraveling. That. That tight, scared little child that's inside of me that thinks this is all it and is afraid of dying and so forth. It's slowly unraveling. I don't know if it'll ever completely unravel. I think I hear people that I have no reason to disbelieve who say that they've completely unraveled it and they're completely unafraid of death. I believe that that's possible, but I'm not enlightened. Yeah. So that was my experience. It was sobering. One thing that comes out of it is I, when I stop and reflect, I'm grateful for each day because I didn't expect to have any of these days.
- [122:24]
Annik Harrison
I didn't mean.
- [122:25]
Donald Hoffman
We discovered the stuff about decorated permutations since then. I'm so grateful to be alive for the fun of, you know, seeing this decorated. That's really neat. And of course, things have happened with my grandkids that are fun. And so everything is a delight and a. I don't take it for granted. And if I were to face death in the same way again, I'd probably feel afraid and scared and so forth.
- [122:49]
Tom Bilyeu
So what do you think happens when we die?
- [122:52]
Annik Harrison
My.
- [122:53]
Donald Hoffman
My best guess is we just take a headset off that.
- [122:57]
Tom Bilyeu
But that implies like a keeping of the personality.
- [123:02]
Donald Hoffman
No, it doesn't. It. To me, it suggests that the whole story. I was born in such and such a year at such and such a city, in such hospital. My parents did this, I did that. I had that whole story. Maybe something that you say goodbye to.
- [123:17]
Tom Bilyeu
So cognition itself is headset.
- [123:21]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. Or awareness, pure awareness.
- [123:24]
Tom Bilyeu
So awareness and consciousness are different.
- [123:27]
Annik Harrison
Yeah.
- [123:27]
Donald Hoffman
So. Well, There's a distinction to be made. And I. I'm not going to be sort of hard nosed about the particular words, but you could have a specific conscious experience like the experience of Green, but you could. And that would be conscious. A kind of conscious experience. That would be a kind of consciousness. But you could also talk about awareness without any content at all. I'm just aware of awareness. But even that's saying too much. I'm just aware. So I'm not aware of Dawn. I'm not aware of where I live. I'm not aware. I'm just. I'm just aware. And when people meditate and they go into very, very deep levels of meditation where they really let go of all thoughts, then in some sense yourself dies. Well, is dead. I mean, there is no Don. There is no I did this degree. There is no I have these. That's gone. And yet in some sense, nothing essential is gone, nothing essential left. That's just a story. The essential thing is the awareness. And the real joy of being is the awareness itself. The story is a nice add on. It's icing on the cake, but it's not essential. The real deep joy comes from the pure awareness with no content whatsoever. And so in that sense, I think of. But see, there's part of me that is tied to the story. So that was the part that was scared to death in the hospital. There's another part of me that believes and knows that everything's fine. I'm awareness without content. That's what I really am at my deepest level. But as long as I'm still clinging to the story of Don, then that is going to die when I die. If I don't choose to die to it. While I can choose to die to it, I will be forced to die to it when my body dies. And so there are some spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, who says, in some sense I'm Already dead. The only thing left is the body. So I'm not there. But I don't disbelieve. I mean, I disbelieve most of them, but I don't disbelieve some of them. Right. I think that it is possible in the case, for example, of Eckhart Tolle, I think it's highly probable that he's right. I mean, he really has let go, and he's utterly fearless about death, and I'm not. But I understand in principle why that could be. If I really am not the story, and I've really let go of the story of Don, and I'm no longer identified with. So here's how to know if you've really let go of the story. Am I competing with anybody? Is it important to me to be better than someone, to be better known, to have a better whatever, be smarter, have a better degree, whatever it might be. As long as I'm comparing myself with anybody else and trying, you know, or saying I'm worse, I feel inferior. As long as that's going on to me, then I'm. I'm tied to my story and I'll be afraid of death. It's only when I don't care about comparisons anymore that I've really, truly let go. So. So if someone cuts me off on the road when I'm driving, driving, if I'm upset about that I'm tied to my story, that means I'm not ready to die. So you can just. So when you look at the thing, whatever disturbs you tells you that's the hint. Okay? You're still tied to the apron strings. The baby story that I'm Don, I was born here. I'm struggling to be important because I have such a small. I mean, I'm such this small little thing. I'm a little guy inside space time. I believe that the Avatar of me in this headset is everything that I am. I'm clinging to my avatar. And as long as I'm clinging to it, the possibility of losing that avatar is terrifying. So I'm there. I'm not enlightened. I understand this intellectually. There's something emotional that has to be brought along. It has to be healed or something like that. It's got to be brought along. So.
- [127:47]
Annik Harrison
But.
- [127:48]
Donald Hoffman
But this, it's. It all makes. It's all a good intellectual story for me. And I'm meditating to have it become a true personal story. But. But what it ends up being is that even you think about, even your body is just an icon. God, it's not who you are. If what we're saying is right, spacetime is doomed. If the physicists are right, spacetime is doomed. Evolution is right. This is just a headset. This is just an avatar. Then I don't even have brains right now. If you look, you'll render brains. But right now I have no brains because they're not being rendered. So neural activity causes none of my behavior, brains cause none of our behavior. And yet we need to study neuroscience. We need more money for neuroscience because that's the part of our interface that is most informative about the software behind space time. So if we want to understand the software behind space time, we're going to have to study the complex thing that we call the brain, which is just the projection of this deeper software. That is the best projection we've got. So neuroscience is far more complicated than we're thinking right now. Now we see neurons. We think there are neurons. No, no, no, no. We see neurons. That's a pointer to a realm far more complicated, probably infinitely more complicated. But fortunately we can look at it in steps. So we need more for neurals. So I don't have any brains. But we need to study brains because when we render brains in our headset, that's the most information we're going to have in our headset about the software behind spacetime time. So, but still emotionally, we're tied to it, I'm tied to it, and we're wired up to this way. So Piaget, the, a very famous child psychologist had talked about what he called object permanence. He said that, you know, we're wired to, at a certain stage of our life, believe that this object exists and will continue to exist even if no one looks object permanence.
- [130:02]
Annik Harrison
And you know, he had the example
- [130:03]
Donald Hoffman
of 18 month old baby, a 17 month old baby. You take a doll, put it behind a pillow, and the baby acts as though the doll no longer exists. But at a certain age, you put the baby, the doll behind the pillow. So now the baby will crawl over and try to get it. Okay, so now it's got object permanence. So later studies showed that it came much earlier than Piaget thought, maybe even three or four months. So why is it that I have a hard time thinking of my body as an avatar as opposed to a real object that exists? Why am I having. Well, it's because I didn't choose to believe that I was wired up to believe that before I even had reason. So when we believe very, very strongly that these things exist. It's not because we came to a rational conclusion about that. Oh, yeah, I thought it through and I know. No, no, no. You believed that when you were four months old. That's why you believe it. And it's no deeper than that. We've just never challenged it. That's the glory of science. It goes back. It can challenge things that we believe since we were three months old, and it can show us that we were wrong. That's the power of science. And then the power of science is also to tell us the limits of science. Because what science tells us with Godel's Incompleteness theorem is there is no theory of everything. But that doesn't mean that we should just do whatever we wish and think what random thoughts we want. No, there is. We're rewarded by thinking precisely and also humbly precisely to get as far as our current framework will go and then humbly to realize that it's just a framework and there's a new one beyond. But that will also be rigorous, and that will also be rigorous. So it's, it's really, it's not going into, you know, just whatever you want. You know, it's. It's not like a postmodernist kind of. And again, I don't want to give a. A wrong impression. I think there's a lot of interesting people that have done really brilliant work in postmodernism. But, but the, the, I'll put it this way, the, the gist of it, that some people get that do whatever you want doesn't matter, logic doesn't really require. I think that that's just plain wrong. I really like reason because it tells the limits of itself.
- [132:16]
Tom Bilyeu
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out this other conversation with Peter Diamandis. For those that take the time to understand the most likely path forward, there
- [132:26]
will be huge opportunities to help you better navigate what's coming. I bring you futurist Peter Diamandis.
- [132:37]
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