Scientist Donald Hoffman Says Everything You Know Is a Lie—And Reality Isn’t Real (Fan Fav)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Donald Hoffman

Episode: Scientist Donald Hoffman Says Everything You Know Is a Lie—And Reality Isn’t Real (Fan Fav)
Host: Tom Bilyeu | Guest: Donald Hoffman
Release Date: November 1, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this mind-bending episode, Tom Bilyeu sits down for a second conversation with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman to challenge everything we think we know about reality. Hoffman’s radical scientific proposition: space and time are not fundamental, physical objects are not truly real, and consciousness itself is “outside the headset” of our lived experience. Using analogies like Grand Theft Auto, Hoffman explains how the universe is more like a virtual simulation—one designed for evolutionary fitness, not the truth. The duo dive into the implications of this hypothesis, touching on consciousness, evolution, AI, physics, the search for God, and theories at science’s leading edge.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Donald Hoffman's Core Thesis: Reality as Interface

• Space and Time Are Not Fundamental

  • Conventional View: Most scientists assume the physical world is primary; consciousness emerges from neural and physical processes.
  • Hoffman's View: Our best sciences—quantum field theory, general relativity, and evolution—suggest physical objects and space-time are not fundamental reality. Instead, they’re like a “user interface” or VR headset.
  • "Space time is doomed. We need a deeper notion of reality." (Donald, 01:59)

• Grand Theft Auto Analogy

  • The world we perceive is as divorced from “base reality” as a GTA gaming experience is from the actual code underneath.
  • "What you see when you walk around the room and interact with stuff...is as divorced from reality as the computer programmer is from the gamer who plays his game." (Tom, 07:21)

2. Science Within the “Headset”

• Science’s Successes and Limits
  • Our science has made us “wizards of our headset,” but that tells us little about the code or reality beneath (Donald, 08:25).
  • Physicists like Nima Arkani-Hamed are already searching for structures “beyond space-time” (Donald, 10:33).

3. What Is Consciousness?

• Consciousness Is Fundamental, Not Emergent

  • Consciousness is not derived from physical systems; instead, physical systems are icons or portals for interacting conscious agents.
  • "No physical object, including my body, is conscious. Strictly speaking, my brain isn't conscious, because my brain...doesn't even exist unless I render it." (Donald, 23:34)

• Conscious Agents as a Vast Social Network

  • Reality is like Twitter—a colossal network of conscious agents interacting, with our “space-time” just a simplified interface.
  • “Space time...is just our visualization tool. The reality we're interacting with is nothing like the visualization tool.” (Donald, 18:24)

4. Evolution and Perception: The Helpful Lie

• Evolution Optimizes for Fitness, Not Truth

  • Perception simplifies, filtering overwhelming data so we survive and reproduce—not to depict objective reality.
  • "All evolution cares about is fitness, payoffs." (Tom, 28:45)

• The Mystery: What’s Actually Evolving?

  • The deeper dynamics at play are unknown; Godel's Incompleteness Theorem provides a possible answer: reality is in perpetual, unending self-exploration.
  • "Consciousness is like a kid in a candy store, but it’s an infinite candy store." (Donald, 31:03-33:00)

5. Godel’s Incompleteness & Endlessly Unfinished Reality

• No End to Mathematical (or Conscious) Discovery

  • Godel proved no system can encompass all mathematical truths; this maps to reality as unceasing self-exploration.
  • "It's Godel's all the way down...unbounded exploration, that's just a fact." (Donald, 40:44)

• Godel as a Meta-Theory

  • There’s no “Theory of Everything”—just endless frontiers. “Maybe Godel's theorem would be this meta theory...that tells us why the joy of exploration will never cease.” (Donald, 58:58)

6. Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

• Can AI Become Conscious?
  • Not in the Conventional Way: If consciousness is not emergent from matter, classic AI—seen as complex computation—is not conscious by default.
  • But... We do have “low-tech” ways of opening portals to consciousness (e.g., sexual reproduction creates new conscious agents). If we understand the process, we could in principle create new portals (perhaps via AI), not “generate” consciousness from computation.
  • "Our interface has proven that it's got the technology to open new portals." (Donald, 90:49)

7. Life, Death, and What Survives the Headset

• Death as Unplugging from the Interface

  • Death may be analogous to removing the VR headset; what’s left of self or personality is unknown, potentially not persisting.
  • "If space time isn't fundamental, death may be nothing more. What we call death is just unplugging from the headset." (Donald, 93:56)

• Self as a Collection of Conscious Agents

  • Insights from neuroscience (split-brain patients) show “personality” is composite, arising from interacting conscious agents.

8. The ‘God’ Question & Spirituality

• God as the Sum Total of Conscious Agents?

  • If mathematics reveals a “largest agent” or agents, that could be defined as “God”—but this requires new, precise definitions.
  • "Maybe there is always one largest agent that's being formed...then I could say that's God. If not, maybe it's polytheism." (Donald, 75:27)

• Toward Scientific Spirituality

  • Hoffman urges humility and dialogue between science and spirituality, calling for precise, testable theories of what has traditionally been “the spiritual realm.”
  • "We are at a convergence point in human history...take the best insights from the spiritual traditions...and the best tools from science...to take the first step outside the headset." (Donald, 75:24-76:50)

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Notable Quotes & Key Moments

• On Space-Time as a VR Experience:

  • “Einstein just figured out a way to describe Grand Theft Auto. He did not figure out a way to describe the actual underlying code.” (Tom, 07:38)

• On Science and the Limits of Perception:

  • “We have really, in the last four or five centuries, gotten to be wizards of our headset…But just because you're a wizard of Grand Theft Auto does not mean that you know anything about the circuits and software that are running the game.” (Donald, 08:25)

• On Death:

  • “Death may be nothing more. What we call death is just unplugging from the headset.” (Donald, 93:56)

• On Artificial Intelligence:

  • "They're stuck in a reductionist paradigm. That whole framework is the wrong framework. Space time is doomed." (Donald, 69:18)

• On the ‘God’ Hypothesis:

  • "We may be able to, for the first time ever, formulate a precise hypothesis about what we mean by the word God, and start to do science." (Donald, 75:09)

• On Humility and Exploration:

  • “We should be very modest about all of our claims here. I'm probably wrong, right, about all of this, right? But as a scientist, what I want to do then is to say, well, how can we go about trying to figure out where we're wrong as fast as possible?” (Donald, 51:32)

• On Meditation as a Method:

  • "I meditate for several hours. Three hours a day, typically. My intention is to let go of everything I know." (Donald, 106:01–108:58)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:59–05:08 — Primer on Hoffman's theory and why it diverges from physicalist approaches.
• 07:21–08:25 — VR/Grand Theft Auto analogy unpacked; science as 'wizard of the headset’.
• 16:24–20:12 — What does it mean for consciousness to be fundamental? Space-time as interface.
• 23:34–26:20 — Rendering reality; physical bodies are not conscious entities.
• 30:00–36:45 — Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and the infinite exploration of consciousness.
• 42:50–47:40 — The relationship between mathematics and consciousness; qualia and “scrambling theorem.”
• 56:58–58:57 — The search for a 'theory of everything' and Godel as a meta-theory.
• 63:24–70:07 — Can AI be conscious? Why reductionist AI models miss the point.
• 90:02–91:18 — AI/robotics as potential new portals to consciousness.
• 93:34–96:05 — Death as unplugging; living vs. non-living through interface theory.
• 106:01–109:11 — Hoffman's daily practices for insight: meditation, discipline, and study.
• 116:36–117:21 — Donald shares how to connect and learn more.

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Final Thoughts

Donald Hoffman's conversation with Tom Bilyeu explores one of the most radical and intriguing models of reality to emerge from science and philosophy. Instead of taking the material world as a given, Hoffman invites us to see it as a simplified virtual interface, with consciousness as the true ground of being. The implications—scientific, spiritual, and practical—are profound, hinting at future possibilities for manipulating reality and understanding ourselves at a deeper level.

Whether or not you’re ready to see life as “just a simulation,” this dialogue is a compelling ride through scientific humility, metaphysical imagination, and the ever-expanding candy store of conscious experience.

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Transcript

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[Tom]

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here for a second round with Donald Hoffman. Welcome back.

[Donald Hoffman]

Thank you very much, Tom. It's great to be here, dude.

[Tom]

I am so excited to spend more time with you. I was listening to the first interview that we did, which by the way, everybody, you're going to want to watch that one. To really understand everything that Donald's about. We'll give you a quick primer here, but we're going to cover new ground in this. But the reason that I'm so excited was honestly, man, trying to wrap my head around your take on consciousness and the way that basically we're living in a constructed reality that we're essentially in the matrix whether we want to be or not. And I get that, and I was into it and I love it. But some of the implications of that have only hit me now that I've had time to like, you know, take a step back, really think about it, interact with other people, dealing with what they call the hard problem of consciousness. So for us to be able to dive into that, though, give people the three minute primer on why your take is so different than everybody else who takes a really sort of physicality based approach to consciousness.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right? So most people who are looking at how consciousness is related to the physical world, like our brain, are assuming that somehow the physical world is primary. It's the source of all cause and effect in reality. And therefore consciousness is an effect of physical causes, presumably neural activity in the brain, for example, but maybe also computer activity in an artificial intelligence that's sufficiently complicated. And my take is that our best science today, quantum field theory, Einstein's theory of gravity and evolution by natural selection, all three of our best scientific theories today are telling us that space time is not fundamental and that physical objects in space time are not fundamental. Reality and science is good enough. Our best scientific theories are good enough to tell us where they stop, but they are not good enough of course, to tell us what's beyond, that's up to us as creative scientists to try to guess what is a deeper theory of reality that goes beyond space and time. But when we project it back into space and time, that deeper reality needs to look like gravity and quantum field theory and evolution by natural selection. And so basically what I'm saying is that my brilliant colleagues, and these are my friends, they're brilliant, I'm not putting them down anyway. But when they assume that physical objects like neurons or computing systems cause consciousness, I think that they're running against what our best scientific theories are telling us. They're telling us space time is doomed. We need a deeper notion of reality. And for most science, it's no problem to work in space time. But when we're dealing with consciousness, the fiction that physical objects have genuine causal powers, which is a useful fiction most of the time for everyday neuroscience, it's a very useful fiction. I use it myself. But for consciousness, that's when the fiction comes back to bite you. And just, just a quick idea. If you're playing a virtual reality game like Grand Theft Auto, but in a VR souped up multiplayer version, it's a perfectly useful fiction to think that the steering wheel causes the car to move around to the left or to the right and so forth, perfectly harmless fiction. But if you're a software engineer looking to upgrade the actual software that runs the program, that fiction, if you were stuck in that fiction, you would not be equipped to do the upgrade that you needed. In other words, if you're trying to look at the reality outside the headset, you can't just live with the notion of cause and effect inside the headset. You actually have to expand your horizons to understand a deeper notion of cause and effect. And that's what I claim we have to do with consciousness. It's useful most of the time to talk about physical objects as though they have causal powers, perfectly harmless. But when it comes to consciousness, it's the single big obstacle that's stopping progress in its tracks.

[Tom]

Okay, who. You did it perfectly. Now I want to like really drill into that quickly so that people understand where we're going to be going from here. So we spent almost two and a half hours together last time with me doing, with my pea brain, doing my best grapple with these topics. And finally I was able to understand a couple things that I'm going to lay out now that open up what this interview is going to be about, and it's going to be very interesting. We're going to cover things like AI and whether that becomes conscious faster than light travel, which I think your theory predicts all kinds of very interesting things. So to say that analogy in my own words, maybe from a lay perspective, so people get what you're saying about Grand Theft Auto because this is the key to. To understanding the consequences of your theory. So when you think about what's really going on as a computer programmer is trying to make this game called Grand Theft Auto, you're dealing with algorithms and mathematics and moving electrical currents around a Xbox or whatever. And so ultimately your goal is to move electrons and things like that around this machine that then creates this supply supposed experience. Right. On a TV that I can interact with. Okay. When you understand that the difference between the reality that that programmer has to deal with, which looks nothing like it's literally numbers, it's all code, all math. Math designed to move electrons around. Okay, that's not exactly right, but that's close enough. And that reality versus what you see, which is that, oh, look, I'm driving with the steering wheel. What you're saying is what you see when you walk around the room and interact with stuff and you think about space time and Einstein and relativity is as divorced from reality as the computer programmer is from the gamer who plays his game. Now, it took me a very long time to understand that's what you're trying to get people to understand. And then it was one thing that was like a real key in the lock for me was somebody asked you a question. It was so great. And they said, donald, this is wonderful. I love it. But now predict. We have the same conversation in 10,000 years. What are we going to know then? And you said, oh, that space time isn't real, and so we can create space time ourselves. Because space time is. Space time is the Grand Theft Auto game. It's not the code underneath. So once you understand, Einstein just figured out a way to describe Grand Theft Auto, he did not figure out a way to describe the actual underlying code. And so if. If the space time is just Grand Theft Auto and we know we can manipulate Grand Theft Auto, we can now manipulate space time. And you said, we'll have this conversation from Alpha Centauri. And I was like, oh, my God. Even if you just get excited about the chills, even if you just get excited about our ability to manipulate what's in the headset, right? Manipulating space time, traveling faster than light, changing fundamental physics, things like that, then even that would be interesting, Let alone the other part that you're saying, which is, oh, you might actually be able to figure out what the underlying code is.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's exactly right. And so one way to think about it is science, for all of its incredible breakthroughs and wonderful theories, has only been studying our headset. Science has not yet been studying objective reality outside of our space time. Virtual reality that from an evolutionary point of view was just evolved as a way for us to play the game of life and stay alive long enough to reproduce, not to show us the truth. So we have really, in the last four or five centuries, really gotten to be wizards of our headset, wizards of the Grand Theft Auto game. But just because you're a wizard of Grand Theft Auto does not mean that you know anything about the circuits and software that are running the game. And for someone who thinks that they know everything when all they know is Grand Theft Auto means they, they're still stuck in the headset. Science, I want to claim, has the tools. We have learned the right tools as we've studied our headset. We are ready to use those same tools to venture outside the headset, outside of space and time. So science has the right tools. We just have to open up, you know, open our minds to the fact that we're just playing a game inside space time. It's just a virtual reality. There's an entire world out now. The best physicists are already there, like Nima Arkani Hamed and many of his collaborators who are saying space time is doomed. We're looking for the reality that's beyond space time in which in fact, the very language of quantum theory and relativity theory don't hold. There are no, what they call Hilbert spaces. So there's no Hilbert space there. In what they're finding, there's no quantum theory. You need Hilbert space.

[Tom]

What is Hilbert space? I've never heard of that.

[Donald Hoffman]

Oh, it's, it's a mathematical structure that is used to describe quantum states and their evolution. It's called Hilbert space. And so, so what? They're looking.

[Tom]

You're saying they don't exist?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. So these physicists are saying, look, we're finding structures beyond space time. And these structures don't care about Hilbert space and they don't care about locality and space and time. They don't care about so called unitarity, which is important for quantum theory. These are deeper structures. They project into space time and give us unitary and locality, unitarity and locality in space time. In other words, they project to the right things in our headset, but they're deeper and they have symmetries that you cannot see in space time. And when physicists find symmetries that are in the data but can't be captured in space time, they're very, very interested. So the best and brightest physicists are boldly stepping outside of the headset. But the question is, where do you look? What kinds of ideas? I mean, if it's not space and time, how do you come up with an idea about what reality is? So we just have to try ideas, make them rigorous, make them precise, and then project them back into our headset. That's the key. We know how to test things within the headset. So we're going to make theories of reality outside of space and time with mathematically precise models of how they map into space and time, and then we can test. So this is not just waving your hands and blowing steam, you know, this is not that. This is. We want rigorous theories outside of space time that have mathematical projections into space time that lead to testable predictions. I right now am studying the physics of scattering amplitudes for the, like, colliders. They smash protons together, and they have gluons smash into each other, and gluons go flying out, and you can predict the probability of these particle events. So my goal is to start with a theory of consciousness outside of space time, mathematically precise, show exactly how it maps into space time, and then hopefully predict those scattering amplitudes to 10 decimal predictions to, you know, 10 decimal places of accuracy. Then that doesn't mean I'm right, But at least now I'm doing the right thing to be testable.

[Tom]

Okay, I want to ground everybody in why I've gotten so hyped on this. So do you read science fiction much?

[Donald Hoffman]

A little bit. I'm mostly just very saddened by that right now.

[Tom]

Very saddened to hear that. But. So one of the things that I find so enjoyable about science fiction is they really play with big ideas. And I'm reading a book. It's the second book in the Three body problem series. And in that they're basically, alien invasion is happening, and they're trying to figure out, like, what they do and the way that the aliens stop them from making progress. Spoiler alert for anybody who plans to read the series is that they. They send these photons that can basically interrupt the large colliders to give them impossible to interpret data. And so they shoot these things to the colliders and they. They just give them completely nonsensical data. And the reason they said that is they're like, if you can't make the. The breakthroughs at the fundamental layers of science. You can't progress. So for anybody who is feeling like, okay, these guys are drifting off into the ether, why is this interesting? How does it relate to my life? First of all, I'll say that you're a cognitive scientist that, you know is your background. So this starts with, hey, I'm trying to understand consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness. And it's leading me to this place that challenges the very substance of reality. And that matters because, by the way, we might be able to manipulate more of this stuff than we think, but we're still in this presentation layer, the headset. So now as I begin to unwind some of this stuff, it's when we think about the fact that, okay, I'm guessing the scientists, the quantum scientists, the reason that they're now looking elsewhere is they cannot make what they see mathematically make sense with the models that they have of space time. And for them to make that leap outside is going to be brutally difficult in terms of. Science doesn't progress as the truth is revealed. Science progressed. I think it was Neils, Bohr, we talked about this last summer, Planck, that said, basically, the old people have to die because they just, they can't update their model of the world. And then the next generation grows up just believing it to be true. So how are we holding out hope for people to step outside of that and what methods are they using to discover this stuff? Is it going to be in the collider? Because that's all headset.

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[Donald Hoffman]

right. So I can tell you what the physicists are up to a little bit on this and why I'm interested. As you said, I'm not interested in particle physics for its own sake. I'm a cognitive scientist. I'm looking for the simplest thing that I could possibly do to test a theory of consciousness in which consciousness is fundamental and space time is just a headset.

[Tom]

I think you have to explain that. We talked about it in the last one, but it's worth it. When you say that consciousness is fundamental, what do you mean?

[Donald Hoffman]

All right, so by consciousness, I just mean simple things like having a headache or smelling garlic or hearing the sound of a trumpet or having an itch or feeling a mood, like, you know, love or hate or something like that. So simple feelings or sensory experiences that I could imagine even a mouse might have. Like, a mouse might smell cheese and it might enjoy the taste of cheese.

[Tom]

I think everybody can get behind that, though. But aren't you taking it way farther down to, like, there is an entity, I don't know what word to put around it. Its entire experience is either green or nothing.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right. So I actually, then when I try to get a model of consciousness on its own terms, as a scientist, I have to write down a mathematical description of what I mean by having conscious experiences and acting on them, and entertain the possibility of very simple consciousnesses that might have, as you say, just one or two conscious experiences, like green or nothing or something like that. And look at how these kinds of consciousnesses might interact and so forth. And so I've been with my colleagues Chetan Prakash and Chris Fields and Manish Singh and others, working on mathematical models of dynamics of consciousness. It's much like a vast social network like the Twitterverse, where you have lots of social entities that are interacting, tweeting and following and so forth. It would be like that. There's not just one consciousness, there are many, what I call conscious agents that are interacting, and there's so many of them that it's overwhelming. It's too much for any one conscious agent to talk to all or interact with all the other conscious agents. And just like with social data, if you're, you know, like with the Twitterverse, if you're trying to understand what's happening there, well, there's tens of millions of users, literally billions of tweets. You can't read the tweet, all the tweets, or interact with all the users. If you want to understand what's going on, you need a visualization tool, maybe a VR headset where you can sort of see what's trending in the United States, and then zoom in to what's happening in Moscow, and then zoom out to what's happening over in China, and then zoom down to a particular street. And so what you want is simple graphics, simple eye candy, Little objects that are colored, that are doing different things that somehow let you grasp what the billions of tweets and tens of millions of Twitter users are doing, but in a way that you can. So it's got to dumb things down, Put it in a colorful, simple eye candy format that you can understand. And that's the big idea. I'm claiming that that's what space time is. Space time, the sun and the moon, physical objects. Everything that we see inside of space and time is just our visualization tool. The reality we're interacting with is nothing like the visualization tool. There's nothing like space and time. It's a whole network of interacting conscious agents outside of space time, a vast social network. And we've made the rookie mistake of assuming that our headset VR, our visualization tool, is the final reality. It's just a rookie mistake. It's like someone who's played Grand Theft Auto so long, they have no idea there's a reality besides Grand Theft Auto. We're like that right now.

[Tom]

All right, so let's go back to this idea of consciousness entities, which I find interesting. It took me a while to grasp this one. So the easiest one is inside the human brain right now. There are two hemispheres. If you split the corpus callosum we discussed this last time, you get two different personalities. You've also got the microbiome, which conceivably all the microbes are conscious. And so when you inside of all of our cells, there's hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria, which are living organisms inside of our cells. So it is very objectively true to look at a human and say you're not a single entity. You are a collection of trillions of entities that we just sum up as, like, that's Donald, right? But in reality, it's not. And if I go in and mess with the consciousness, like, if I go in and mess with your microbiome, it'll change your personality, which. Which is crazy. And I can't believe it's true, but nonetheless is true. I can affect your energy output by going and messing with your mitochondria, which, again, have their own DNA. It's not like it's just a cell in your body. This is its own entity that happens to be inside of your Cells. And as we begin to recognize that humans already are just a collection of these much smaller consciousness, but they come together. I get where you're going now. I don't yet know the implications of that or what we're going to take away from it, but my relationship with you has been like, hey, this crazy statement that I can't fathom is true. I really want to write you off as a nut job, but I can't because, like, all of these things, like, do make sense. It's just I so can't imagine what life outside the headset is. But the more time I have spent with the ideas, the more it's like, okay, these are starting to coalesce for me. So cool. I just wanted people to understand that consciousness thing. I certainly don't understand it yet, how it exists outside of the headset, but I can't deny that already, even in the headset, we're a collection of smaller consciousnesses, right?

[Donald Hoffman]

Maybe one help for thinking about your consciousness outside the headset. I might have mentioned this last time. If you just look at your face in the mirror, if you look, what you see directly is just skin, hair, and eyes. That's all you see. And if you looked inside, if someone opened your skull up and looked, you just see neurons and so forth. But what you know firsthand that you cannot see is your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your love of music, your mood, all the rich world of your conscious experiences. Compared to to that rich world, this face is unbelievably simple and nothing like the world of your experiences. If I smile, or you smile, I can guess that you're feeling joy. But a smile in no way resembles joy. A smile is a twitch of a face.

[Tom]

A joy is that. That's where it's like the things we see happening in the quantum realm that make no sense. That to you is the thing that tells you, your brain, the physical tissues, all of that, they are entirely in the VR experience.

[Donald Hoffman]

It's all in the VR experience. That's right. And so, strictly speaking, no physical object, including my body, is conscious. Strictly speaking, my brain isn't conscious, because my brain, in fact, doesn't even exist unless I render it right. So if you're playing Grand Theft Auto, I'm playing a VR version of, I got the steering wheel in front of me, I'm holding the steering wheel. If I look to the side, I no longer render the steering wheel, and there is no steering wheel. When I look here, I render it. And now there is a steering wheel. The same thing Is true. Strictly speaking of neurons and brains, they're there when you render them. They're not there when you don't. It's a VR system that you render objects in space and time as you need them because they're part of your visualization tool. And then you garbage collect them, you delete them when you don't need them. So, strictly speaking, no physical object is conscious. So human bodies aren't conscious. Rocks aren't conscious. So I'm not a panpsychist. A panpsychist is someone who. At least one version of panpsychism is that there are physical objects that obey the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are in some sense fundamental, but consciousness is the reality that's inside the laws. And I'm saying something entirely different. I'm saying that the very laws of physics themselves are really no restraint to consciousness whatsoever. They're just a visualization tool that certain consciousnesses happen to use, but they're no restriction on the nature of consciousness itself at all.

[Tom]

Okay, so before we move off that. I know you don't know, but I want you. You must have flashes of images or favorite metaphors or whatever. So if I buy that this really is a simulation. True, true, true. Like as. As simulated as it's going to get down to the fact that space time is just a part of that simulation, and it is consciousness that is fundamental. Meaning that the complexity of my brain will never give birth to consciousness. My consciousness, which is outside of the headset, it's outside the VR world. It's outside the Grand Theft Auto game. That thing has a need to, from a evolutionary standpoint, based on the gains it gets from certain behaviors, it needed to create a virtual reality so that it wasn't overwhelmed with data. So what is that conscious being that was evolving as it sits outside of this? Where can I scrape through and find the conscious thing?

[Donald Hoffman]

Right. So. Well, the consciousness won't be inside space and time.

[Tom]

Understood.

[Donald Hoffman]

Instead, space and time is inside consciousness.

[Tom]

Yep, I get that, But I'm still imagining a little person outside of the VR. Is that just fundamentally broken?

[Donald Hoffman]

No, I would say that that's probably. Given the current state of human imagination, including mine, that's probably the best thing that we can do, is to think about these entities. And of course, as soon as we think about entities, we place them in space and time. That's how we think. So it's harmless to do that as long as you realize that the space that you're thinking about isn't. They're not Embedded in space. They're the creators of space. That's the interesting thing.

[Tom]

So it's hard for outside space and time. I am eating things, right?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so. So inside space. And so I don't know what we're doing outside of space and time. That's part of what I want to understand is what are we actually doing? We don't see. I don't know what I'm actually doing. I know what I'm doing under a description. Like I'm moving my hand right now, and if I grab a steering wheel in my car, I know what I'm doing under a space time description. But I don't know in ultimate reality what I'm really doing. It's just like the VR player. When they turn the steering wheel in Grand Theft Auto, they know what they're doing. In the language of the game, I'm turning a steering wheel. But what they're really doing in terms of the supercomputer, which in that metaphor would be the deeper reality, they're toggling voltages and magnetic fields and circuits that they have no idea. There's. There's probably trillions of voltage togglings going on for one turn of the wheel. All they see is a turn of the wheel. That's their notion of cause and effect. It's trivial. The real cause and effect is trillions of voltages getting toggled in some, you know, in fractions of a second. It's much, much more complicated. So from an evolutionary. So when I. When we talk about evolution, as you did, you have to be from this point of view, it's very, very important to be careful because now we have to talk about what part of the framework we're talking about. So when I talk evolution, I'm only going to be talking about assuming the headset. I'm within the framework of the headset. Because evolutionary theory is only a headset theory. It's not a theory of consciousness beyond space and time.

[Tom]

Okay? This is where things start to break a little for me. So I'm going to articulate what I think you have said about. Because all of this was born for you, you basically said you have two choices. You can either keep space, time and get rid of evolution, or you can keep evolution and get rid of space time. And your argument goes like this, and obviously stop me where I go wrong, that all evolution cares about is fitness, payoffs. There are certain behaviors that must be taken in order for you to have children, that have children. And there's so much data coming in that, like looking at a desk or a table or something, would simply be a string of numbers that dictate the number of photons reflecting off that coming back. And you could interpret that as different colors and brightness and all that, but in reality, it is just the math of that situation. And what you see around you is something to simplify that so that you only have to render what you're looking at. When you look away, it ceases to exist. There's just the overwhelming complexity. It would paralyze any animal. So the evolutionary strategy that was chosen is this crazy simplification that we exist in, which is very convincing, but it's ultimately a convincing lie and isn't real. So I'm like, okay, cool. I can actually get behind that. Where it breaks down for me is what's actually evolving. Like something needed, this simplification. What is that something?

[Donald Hoffman]

Right, so there's. So there's got to be a deeper dynamics, right? There's some deeper dynamics that in space time looks like evolution by natural selection. That's what it looks like inside of our headset. But, but there has to be some deeper dynamics. And I, I've only had one idea that I've run across that seems deep enough. I'm not saying it's right, but it's. There's at least, but, but this idea will tell you how deep we have to go to at least get a contender. So if consciousness is doing something, if it's quote, unquote, evolving, but not from a natural selection point of view, just by evolving, I just mean it has some kind of dynamics. And the question is why? What is it up to you? What is consciousness up to? Right? Because now the typical stuff of trying to get food and procreation, that doesn't apply outside of space and time, presumably it might not apply. So what's the deeper thing? The only idea that I've seen that's deep enough comes from something called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

[Tom]

Yeah, I struggled with this in the last interview. Now I think I have it mastered.

[Donald Hoffman]

Oh, okay, well, then you're better than me because Godel's theorem is unbelievably deep. But, but, but basically what Godel said, without going into the details, is there is no end in principle, no end to the exploration of novel mathematical structure. Even quote, unquote, God could never know at all. There's always going to be an unbounded inquiry ahead, no matter how much you know, there's unbounded structure left to explore. And if we make the assumption and now I'm just speaking as a scientist, like saying, look, I don't know what the truth is. We put some ideas on the table and see where they go, right? That's how you do science. So maybe everything I'm saying is wrong, but I'm trying to be precise so we can figure out where it's wrong. So if we assume that consciousness is really the fundamental reality, a bunch of these conscious agents, the social network, and if that's all that there really is, then the only thing that mathematical structure can be about is consciousness. That's all it's about, because that's all there is. So Godel's theorem then would say because there's an unbounded and never ending possibility for exploration of mathematical structure. That means there is a never ending and unbounded possibility for the exploration of varieties of conscious experience. In other words, consciousness is like a kid in a candy store, but it's an infinite candy store. I call it Godel's candy store. It's a never ending exploration that is in principle never ending. It's not like you can ever come to the end of it. And so that is deep. I'm not saying it's right, but it's deep enough to be a real contender. Why should consciousness be doing anything at all? Well, here's one reason. Because no matter how much consciousness explores its possibilities, it could never come to the end of its own possibilities. And so it's in a never ending self exploration. And what we call Tom and Don are just parts of this overall exploration of consciousness and all of its possibilities. And you know, our little bit that we're exploring right now, as rich as it seems to us, is trivial, literally trivial compared to all the possibilities that Godel says are out there. And we get some feeling of the triviality. But I can imagine a square. I can imagine a cube. Now go up one more dimension. Imagine a cube in four dimensions. My brain halts and my mind catches on fire. Nothing happens. That's only four dimensions. I can't even go to four dimensions. I mean, how that. That's terrible. It's just an incredible limitation. I can only see three dimensions of color. Red, sort of a red green dimension, blue, yellow and so forth. Light and dark. We have three cone systems and so forth. There are some pigeons that have four color receptors. Presumably they're in an extra dimension of color that I can't even imagine what it's like. Can you imagine a specific color you've never seen before? Try to imagine one specific color you've never seen. So as rich as our world seem, we know that there's rich possibility of conscious experiences that we can't even concretely imagine. But consciousness itself, on this theory, is exploring all these possibilities. And right now we're sort of stuck on this little headset. Three dimensions, small amount of color that we can see and so forth. Just we thought it was the whole world. No, it's just. It's a little headset. It's a prism. Right. For me, I realized I'm sort of stuck. I mean, this is like my imagination is stuck in only three dimensions. My colors are stuck in a certain range. Consciousness itself is exploring the vast possibilities that's going on. So that. Now, here's the challenge. Suppose we chase that down. We say, okay, there's going to be this ongoing dynamics of consciousness coming constantly, going beyond what it knows, exploring the candy store further and further. Well, there's several things to say about that. One is, that's not the candy store. Makes it sound like all fun and games. Right. Oh, but there's going to be a dark side to it. Because going into the unknown means letting go of what you know. And that can be terrifying. So this suggests that consciousness is going to have this thing going on all the time. Of the exhilaration and the terror of going literally into the unknown, where literally, you don't have concepts. All of your current concepts are inadequate. And this is what Godel is saying. These are going to be new structures that transcend. So for those who meditate, when you go into silence, it's both healing and terrifying. Right. If you really let go of all thoughts and go into the void, it can be scary. Like you want to go back into. You grab back on your. It's a life jacket. Right. You grab onto your teddy bear, your thoughts. So there's going to be this. To really go into new conceptual frontiers, you have to let go of old concepts. So there's going to be that aspect to it, which is sort of a spiritual side.

[Tom]

There's that aspect to making progress, I think.

[Donald Hoffman]

So I think that.

[Tom]

What's the central question for you? So. And I'll prime you by telling you my central question.

[Donald Hoffman]

Sure.

[Tom]

The central question in all of this that I find interesting is what is the correlate? So I'm in this VR experience to the advantage of something, and I want to know what that something is. It isn't me as I perceive me, but it's something.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom]

So what's your essential question?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, the answer is, I don't know,

[Tom]

but there's no specific thing that you're chasing.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, what I'm chasing is the idea that we're chasing, that the consciousness itself is only about. Exploring new possibilities of experience.

[Tom]

Okay, so I'm going to push on that. Let's go into the way that AI researchers think and work. And I know that was your degree, so this ought to be. I'm taking you right home. You have to imbue the robot with directives, desires. Right? So to put it in human terms, it's like there are certain things that humans want to do. We, we're an active species, so we tend to go and explore. We try to take control of our environment. We certainly eat, procreate, like all those. We have the drive to quench thirst, hunger, sex, so on and so forth. So, like, those things are pushing us to go do things even if we don't want to. We find ourselves compelled to seek pleasure, to move away from pain. All right, by default, AI wouldn't have those. So now you've got to give those. Those things. And I love that concept of minus a desire. Any entity just sits or is blown around by physics, right? So obviously we're in the headset now, but like, you've got wind and so, okay, something lighter than the wind is going to move, but otherwise everything just sits. So what is it? Like what. How has this conscious entity, in that question that you just posed, been given some sort of impetus to explore the infinite candies in the infinite candy shop?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, by the way, I'm on board with what you're saying. I think that that's really a good way of thinking about this and that you could think about our. Your life. And my life right now is we're in a simulator, a space time simulator. And we've been given like an AI system. We've been given certain intrinsic desires that we then find. And so my wife is an artist. That's how she's exploring. I am still stuck at third grade stick figures. So that's not how I'm exploring. I'm exploring in a different way. So. So there's billions of humans, and there are billions of different ways that we explore in music, in art, in literature, in science, various kinds of science, meditation. So we're in sports. There are all sorts of ways that consciousness is exploring through us, and there is not like one is the best or that you're.

[Tom]

But what makes consciousness want to go to all the assay to create this VR experience, to run each of us, is sort of an individual experience.

[Donald Hoffman]

In consciousness, the idea would be that that is what consciousness is about, is the exploration of all of its possibilities.

[Tom]

So is that just the miracle? Like, I've now hit the part where you're like, I don't fucking know. This is the miracle.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, yeah. And when we say that, that's something that we have to say is true of any explanation. Any explanation. At some point, we say, if you grant me these assumptions, then with those assumptions, I can explain everything else.

[Tom]

And I totally buy into that. Here is the basic assumption I've always made about the miracle, that the whole point is to say, hey, everybody, I've got this theory. Here's my miracle. Check it out. Theory works, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. This is better than everything. Okay. The only reason I've told you about this thing is so you can tell me how to move the miracle back even farther. Or are you just like, cool, I'm good with that miracle. And now I just want to explore within that where that miracle is.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so I want to do both. This miracle is so new that I need to explore it a little bit. So I want to push on this one. But the miracles I'm proposing are, consciousness is fundamental. So experiences themselves don't come from physics. They are fundamental. So that's a miracle. And second, this other miracle that Godel proved, where he proved it, but it's still a miracle, right? The incompleteness of mathematics that you can. That there's endless exploration, that's just a fact. Which is a remarkable fact. We proved it. But it's nevertheless this. Why should the universe be that way? Why should logic demand that that's. So that's. But it's a satisfying kind of endpoint where we say, that's the way the world is. Here's the theorem that says, that's the way the universe is. And that one theorem tells us why. If you're up to exploration, then have fun, because you will always. There's no getting there. That's the key. There's no arriving.

[Tom]

Can I say Godel complete Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in a real world example? Because this one is. Anybody that watches the first episode, I must ask you 75 questions about this theorem, and I just could not get my head around it. And now the punch line is, as far as I can tell, it's turtles all the way down. So Godel's Incompleteness theorem, as I understand it, says, no matter how much you use math to try to find base reality, you will never find it. There is no end. There will always Be another layer to discover on and on and on and on and on. Literally for infinity, Right.

[Donald Hoffman]

So I can say a little bit more about what Godel was up to on that and how it relates. So Godel was the question they were asking. It was a mathematical question. That is if you write down a bunch of axioms, right, some these things are true, these things are, give me two points, define a line, two lines intersect, give me a few things like that. And then you ask what are all the theorems that you could prove from those assumptions? And so, you know, we did all this in high school algebra and so forth. We would prove different things. What Godel. The big question that mathematicians had, David Hilbert really put this out there was can we, with just grinding through these theorems and proofs, get all mathematical?

[Tom]

Truth is that there's some finite number, there's maybe it's 6.7 million, but we

[Donald Hoffman]

can do it even if it's infinite in principle, if we could just grind forever, would we get all the truths? And that was. So Hilbert asked that question and Godel showed that the answer is no, that no matter how big your axiom system is, how many axioms you've got, he found a way to show here's something that's true, but you can't prove it within your axioms. So you can take that new truth, stick it as one of your axioms. And then he showed, well, there'll be another truth that now pops up. And so this never ends. And so no matter how. So you can't just mechanically grind through and get all the truths. And the key thing about this, which is really interesting for consciousness now is Godel used self reference. It's when you get a, a mathematical system to talk about itself that the problems start to arise. And that's really interesting because what I'm suggesting here is that consciousness is trying to understand itself and all of its possibilities. And because of that self reference, it's a never ending enterprise.

[Tom]

And you can never sort of quietly draw a parallel between math and consciousness. Are they separable or inseparable entities?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's a really deep and important question. I don't know. Here's just my thoughts. I study psychophysics, which is a branch of science which we experimentally and mathematically study conscious experiences, your perceptions of shape and color and so forth. We write down math models and we test people. And in the lab, every conscious experience has structure and we can write down mathematical structure. I've never seen a conscious experience that doesn't have mathematical structure.

[Tom]

And the Structure is derived from what, what neurons are firing and things like that.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, sometimes it has nothing to do with neurons at all. For example, in color space, you can talk about. It seems like red and orange are closer to each other than red and green. That's a structural notion. And we can write down what we call color spaces and they turn out to be these non Euclidean color spaces. Taro Endow and others who did the mathematics on this come up with these really interesting, complicated mathematical spaces which model all the relationships of colors to each other. So we have color experience and their structure. When you see a shape like a ball, we can write down equations that model the 3D shape that you're experiencing. So there's an intimate connection that's been studied scientifically between conscious experience and mathematics. The way I think of it is that consciousness is to mathematics like the living organism is to its bones. For if you're a vertebrate, you need the bones, but you're more than the bones. And so that's the way I think about consciousness can't be reduced to mathematics. I don't think there are others like Tegmark who would say that everything can be reduced to mathematics. Max Tegmark says that kind of thing. You know, he may be right, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that mathematics is the structural aspect of conscious experience. But there's more to the conscious experience than just the structure. And in part because so far as we know, different kinds of conscious experiences can be structurally identical. So. And if that's the case, meaning something

[Tom]

with the same structure could have different qualia feel.

[Donald Hoffman]

Exactly right. That's right.

[Tom]

So is that context dependent? How.

[Donald Hoffman]

See, well, that's now where I'm getting to the edge of my understanding here. It's, it's. I did actually prove a theorem. It's called the scrambling theorem, and I published it in 2006 where I proved that your colors could be scrambled with respect to mine, but we would be functionally identical in every single experiment we could do. So there was no structural thing that I could do to show that your color experiences were different from my color experiences. So your experiences aren't devoid of mathematical structure, but the mathematical structure isn't the whole story about your conscious experiences. That's the best I can say right now. And I agree with you. If that feels like we need to press further on that. I couldn't agree more. We do need to press further on that, and I look forward to. Because I think there some profound insights are yet to be revealed.

[Tom]

So where this all to me, I'm so curious. I'm always trying to find how is something usable? How does this come back? So if it reveals something about myself and how I can move through the world in a way that's more interesting, more fulfilling, more whatever. If it actually. The big thing between last one and this one was the idea that space time is as malleable as video game code and that we really could, even though it would only be an experience in the headset that suddenly things within the headset, like faster than light travel, suddenly become very real. We just have to figure out what the real substance of the headset code is so that we can get in there and begin to make changes. But that to me, forces the question of the me that I perceive as me is inherently an object of the the headset. So there is no me outside of the headset, but there is something outside of the headset. And I don't know if our minds maybe just work so fundamentally differently, but as we talk about this is what I started imagining. Okay, hey, Tom. This is a collection of different conscious beings, and consciousness is the driving force. And it's running through all these experimentations. And so I'm like, okay, cool. There's this thing underneath the 3D and it's, you know, essentially popping up all these different. Well, let me see what the color blue would be like for a kid that grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and went to Harvard elementary. You know what I mean? And like, oh, that's interesting. And then. But, like, needed my entire sort of life and universe to go for it to truly be an infinite exploration of what these different things. So there's a me that they spun up just to know the color blue at the age of 44. And, you know what I mean, have with this exact history. And then there's, oh, over here. I'm going to do that same test, but I want to know what salmon tastes like. When you had the early bad experience with salmon as a kid, but later you fall in love with this girl who's really into salmon. What does salmon taste like then? And so that's like where my mind goes, right? And so now I'm imagining like this consciousness of some kind. Maybe it too is the Borg. And, you know, maybe the Borg is what's feeding its drivers and all of that. But I'm still trying to imagine, like, my brain immediately goes to, there's a thing. And that thing in my mind is basically the most classic looking alien ever. But they have like these long fingers that, like each finger is an entity that becomes this, a conscious entity living in the headset just to go, oh, cool. That's what that experience is like. Do you have any sort of analogy metaphor that you think about this stuff in, or is this just because I have a limited brain? I'm not sure.

[Donald Hoffman]

No, I love your metaphor, and I don't have a better one. And there's a couple things to say about that metaphor, though, which is one, in some sense, a lot of spiritual teachers tell us to relax and enjoy the ride, right? Don't get all anxious, don't get all bent out of shape and so forth. Rich or poor, whatever you might be, enjoy the ride. And in some sense when you do that, it feels right. I mean, it feels like, I mean, of course I'm, I'm exploring, I'm not being lazy, I'm not. But, but, but there's, there's something about, hey, you know, smell the roses, enjoy this thing. You know, you don't want to come to the end of your life and, and not have really enjoyed the ride. And so the idea that it's about not arriving anywhere, but the joy of exploring for its own sake, that's one thing that's on the table here. Is that what it's about? Now? There's another thing I've put on the table though, which is, of course, we should be very modest about all of our claims here. I'm probably wrong, right, about all of this, right? And, but as a scientist, what I want to do then is to say, well, how can we go about trying to figure out where we're wrong as fast as possible? And for me, what I'm doing while I'm exploring these ideas that we're talking about, I'm also trying to say, how would consciousness, precisely this, this vast social network, project mathematically into space time? Clearly, there's a projection. I'm interacting with Tom's consciousness. I'm not seeing that consciousness. I'm seeing skin, hair and eyes. I'm seeing a space time projection. I'm not actually seeing your emotions, I'm not seeing your mood, but I am genuinely interacting with your experiences. It's a genuine interaction. And so there is a projection from this conscious realm into space time. I want to get a mathematically precise model of that projection. The thing about gluons in this large hadron collider, predicting that is just not because I'm so interested in gluons, it's just to make sure that I'm not BSing myself, did I get the mapping right? If I can't predict gluon interactions, then I still have my homework to do. But now, once I get that, here's the kicker. We can take what we understand in the headset and pull it backwards. If we can project from consciousness to the headset, then we can try at least to go from the headset and pull backwards. It's a fallible enterprise, but it may help us to open our minds to the possibilities for deeper theories of what's going on outside the headset. So the reason I'm doing this is because I can't even imagine a specific color that I've never seen before. I can't imagine in four dimensions. In other words, I take it as a given that I'm deeply, deeply limited in my imagination, and I need all the tools I can get to help me step outside of my headset and try to guess the unfathomable outside of there. So that's why we want to get this mathematically precise mapping into space time and then pull it back to give us a guide that can help us to not just be wildly speculating about what's going on in the realm of consciousness, but to have more tailored ideas that we can test in a loop. I get ideas in my headset, I pull them back to what they might mean outside the headset, take those ideas, play with them, project them back into the headset to get new predictions. So, in other words, if we don't want to BS ourselves, we have to figure out a way to make this an experimental scientific enterprise. And that's the loop. But this is a bigger scientific loop. It goes outside the space time headset to a theory of what's going on in consciousness projecting back into space time, which is the only place where we know that, how to do experiments, and going through that loop. So science is up to the task. But here's the kicker. For me as a scientist, this approach says there will be no theory of everything.

[Tom]

Why not?

[Donald Hoffman]

Because Godel's theorem says you just, there's too much.

[Tom]

You can't bring it all together.

[Donald Hoffman]

Any theorist is going to have a finite set of assumptions, and the implications of that will be finite.

[Tom]

But you could have such a deep theory of so many things that, I mean, there's always a new sort of theorem to discover. But does that in any way, shape or form break? Because here's my understanding of why people are searching for a theory of everything. You've got Einstein, Newton, dealing with the macro world, and then you've got the quantum dealing with the microscopic world. And for whatever reason, all of your predictive models, when things are big, they work just fine. All of your modeling when it's small works just fine. But when you try to make either one of them work together, then it falls apart. But we are. I could see sort of closing the loop on that. That becomes an everything. Right? Even though it's actually just a very small subset.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom]

It's the headset. And so it's not the, you know, the true theory of everything, but if it allows you to unify sort of the known universe, that seems like it would be incredibly useful. And I'm assuming there's some. There is something for us to understand, like that loop you were talking about that goes and takes in consciousness, comes back into the headset that we could create a loop. So I'll make this more concrete again, thinking maybe more as a writer than as a physicist, for sure. But so when I was thinking about, okay, the Big Bang and things expand, what are they expanding into? And the idea that a universe could sort of pop in and out of any exists. Like, how is all this possible? And one idea that's put forth is that basically the everything. So I'll hesitate to call it the universe, but the everything, whatever that is, is like foam. And every bubble is a universe. And the bubbles sort of come and go. And you're in the bubble. All you see is the bubble. The bubble to you seems like everything. But if you were to actually puncture through that bubble out. Now I'm in the, you know, the bigger matrix of space stuff. And so you. You begin to understand how you get a temporary limitation. But actually, then once you see what's beyond you, like, oh, I get it. And then Godel's incompleteness theorem answers the question of, okay, but what's that goop sitting in? Oh, it's sitting in this space. What's that space sitting. Oh, it's sitting in this. Oh, fucking girdle, right? And you just, like, it just. It goes on and on forever. But you would like, at some point being able to predict seven, you know, bubbles on. It's like, do I really need to go to the infinite? There's just as long as. If the. You poke through one bubble and all of a sudden all physics are backwards and it doesn't make sense. Okay, that would be problematic. But assuming you're just puncturing through to the next thing, that's exactly like where you currently are, seems like you could come up with something unifying.

[Donald Hoffman]

Ish. Right. So instead of turtles all the way down, it's girdles all the way down. Right. It's just endless exploration. And Godel's theorem could be like the deep meta theory. It's not the theory of everything, it's sort of a meta theory that tells us why we will constantly be exploring for new theories. So if you were looking for the deepest theory from this point of view, maybe I'd have to think about it, but maybe Godel's theorem would be this meta theory that explains why all the concrete theories will never be the final theory of everything. And so in that sense, maybe with Godel we have a candidate for this meta theory of everything, which explains why the joy of exploration will never cease. Which is an interesting. But I agree this is a really interesting thing to try to understand as scientists. And we can use some of the tools that we've been learning from deep learning, so deep neural networks and so forth, where we get the agent based models of interaction for exploration and learning. So those, those tools that like DeepMind at Google has some papers recently where they've come to the same conclusion that my team has come from evolution. They found that instead of giving deep neural networks a strict model of the world that they want them to make reasons in or to make guesses in or to live in, they just give them, as you were saying, some payoffs, some positive and negative rewards for their behaviors. And they don't tell them about the world, they just let the deep neural network explore, explore and they build their own worlds. And it turns out they don't build worlds which mimic the truth, they build virtual realities which are a dumbed down user interface that let them get the most rewards and they don't see the truth. So we actually. So there's some papers, I can give you a link to Some papers from DeepMind in the last couple of years where they've stumbled onto the same thing that evolution has stumbled onto, that the exploration never leads to the truth, that leads to an easy interface which sort of doesn't maximize but which satisfies. It gives you what you need in terms of the rewards. I would like to say one thing, that an objection that people will have at this point, some people will go, this is crazy, of course we see the truth. I know enough truth not to get hit by that car. And we know enough truth to build computers and to send rockets to the moon. So this is completely nuts to say that we don't know the truth. And from what we've said now, people might be able to understand what I'm about to say, or guess what I'm about to say. It's sort of like if you're in one of the really neat little programs right now that, where you can build stuff, so they're building games like Roblox or Trove or Fortnite or Minecraft, and you can become a master in one of those worlds. Right. And, and so you might say, you can imagine a person saying, well, what do you mean? I'm not in reality? I can build these wonderful worlds, I can build all these tools, I can do all this great stuff in Minecraft, or Rope, you know, in these various worlds, of course. But, and yeah, within that quote unquote reality of Minecraft, yes, you're seeing that reality and you are building things in that reality and it requires intelligence and so forth, but you're not seeing again the circuits and the software and the voltages. That's the real reality outside your Minecraft world. And so that's, that's, that's the answer to someone who says, well, I know enough about reality not to get hit by a car and to build a computer and to send, you know, rockets to the moon. Yes, well, you're in your Minecraft world and we've become very, very good at that Minecraft world. But it's still a rookie mistake not to realize that Minecraft is just, Minecraft is not the final reality. And so the kinds of arguments that really hold a lot of psychological weight. And the reason I'm talking about this is these ideas really grip our imagination and it's hard for us to let go of them. So that's why I wanted to bring that up.

[Tom]

So talk to me. So you've got so many people trying to get to general artificial intelligence. You have Elon Musk going around warning people, hey, you're going to make something that is going to be so much smarter than you, it's just absolutely going to rip the planet apart. You've got people talking about AI becoming conscious. In your understanding of what consciousness really is as a fundamental element, could a robot or an AI ever become conscious?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, the answer is not in the way that it's typically thought, but in a completely different way. Yes, but in the way that it's typically thought. Absolutely not.

[Tom]

And so how do people typically think of it?

[Donald Hoffman]

Right, so the way it's typically thought of is again, within a physicalist framework. So space, time and particles and energy are fundamental. Everything is made of quarks and gluons and protons and neutrons and so forth. And, you know, it's the Big Bang story. Big bang was 13.8 billion years ago. Space time emerged, particles and energy, and there was no life for hundreds of millions, billions of years. No consciousness for maybe hundreds of millions, billions of years after that. So consciousness and life are late comers. They're not fundamental from that point of view. The right way to think about things is how does matter and particles get into complicated enough patterns of interaction such that life and then consciousness emerge from that framework? That's the right way to think about it. I'm rejecting the entire framework. Space time is doom. That whole framework is the wrong framework. But, and it's not me as a cognitive scientist saying, I'm saying it's physics, it's. Physicists are saying space time is doomed. Like Nima, Arkani, Hamed and others are saying that because of gravity and quantum field theory and the way they interact, there are no local observables in space time, none in our space time. There is nothing that can be precisely measured anywhere in our space time. In other words, space time is an inadequate framework for what we need to do if we're as scientists. It's just the wrong framework. There's got to be a deeper framework and space time has to be emergent. So the whole reductionist paradigm. Wrong. The reason. So reductionism is the idea that to understand complicated things like you and me, we need to understand simpler things like chemicals. And to understand them, we need to understand even simpler things like just particles. As we go down to smaller and smaller regions of space and time, we get to the better, better understanding the more fundamental principles. That's sort of the reductionist. And by the way, that's been spectacularly successful for centuries. And we owe our current science to the success of reductionism. So I'm not against reductionism. It's been successful. It's worked so far because we've been studying our headset. And it's true that as you go closer and closer to quote, unquote, the pixels of your headset, you're understanding more and more fundamentally how the headset works. I'm not saying that spacetime has pixels, by the way. I mean, physicists would say that would violate Lorentz and brains. There are no pixels of spacetime. Space time just ceases to make any sense at 10 to the -33 centimeters, 10 to the -43 seconds, it just falls apart. It's not that there are pixels, it just makes no sense. So reductionism worked, but it stops because spacetime isn't fundamental. And so the very notion of smaller ceases to be operational. There is no smaller. In fact, as you try to probe smaller and smaller past 10 to the minus 33, you create black holes that just get bigger and bigger and bigger. So you literally. Reductionism literally blows up in your face. In physics, it blows up in the form of a black hole. So reductionism has worked, but reducing consciousness. So we're trying. So my brilliant colleagues, and these are my good friends who are working on this, right. In cognitive neuroscience, they're trying to reduce consciousness to patterns of matter. So there's integrated information theory, causal computational architectures that have certain kind of integrated information. The claim is they're identical or give rise to consciousness. Or Penrose and Hameroff. There are certain quantum states in microtubules that if you have a coherent gravitational collapse of these, orchestrated collapse of these, somehow consciousness arises, or there's global neuronal workspace. If you have the right broadcasting architecture for certain kinds of information, then that becomes conscious. So these are all reductionist theories of consciousness. You start with space time and physical stuff, and somehow consciousness emerges. And I'm saying those guys are incredibly brilliant. But because space time is doomed, all approaches to consciousness which assume that space time isn't doomed, which assumes that space time and matter are fundamental are themselves doomed. So those approaches to consciousness just haven't really understood what the physicists are telling us. And what I'm claiming evolution by natural selection is telling us. Space time is the wrong language, particles are the wrong language. The only reason reductionism has worked is because we were studying our headset. And in the headset, yes, going smaller and smaller in the headset, worked up to a point until the very notion of small ceased to make any sense. And that's where it stopped. So where do we so with AI now? So there's a long way to your question, but I can't answer your question simply because the issues are so deep here.

[Tom]

Sure.

[Donald Hoffman]

So the standard view of AI and consciousness is, of course, we can build machines that will be conscious. The brain is a machine and it's conscious. So we have a real example. Here's a carbon based machine inside your own head that's creating consciousness. So who cares if it's carbon or silicon? We can build a machine with the right. So we're just trying to reverse engineer the dynamical patterns of neural networks in the brain, or microtubule quantum collapses, whatever they might be, whatever the physical magic is that somehow gives rise to consciousness will do that. I'm saying that all of those approaches can't work because space time is doomed.

[Tom]

Okay, so before we move on from that. So. But we can create new consciousness.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom]

If my wife and I get together, it's a loving night, it's warm, nine months later, we've got a new consciousness. So how is that not. Are you saying that all the elements from the egg and the sperm, all of it, there was consciousness there the whole time? And so there is no point where it just gets. The cells divide sufficiently such that consciousness arises. It's been conscious the whole time.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so remember that cells and eggs and sperms and so forth are just icons in our interface.

[Tom]

Yes.

[Donald Hoffman]

They themselves have no consciousness themselves. There's little symbols that we use as pointers to a realm of consciousness that we have to reverse engineer to figure out what's going on.

[Tom]

Is there a moment, though, where the realm of consciousness goes? I am now inserting the consciousness element into this child?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, I think so. In the. Well, into the. Our interface. Inserting the consciousness into our interface.

[Tom]

Yes. But they're inserting the consciousness into that specific part of our interface, which at this moment is an infant or a zygote or wherever, whatever point consciousness is imbued.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right? Yeah, I would say that. Yeah, I would agree. I would say that there's a point in which a new portal in our interfaces is opened up into consciousness. So, for example, I have a portal into Tom's consciousness. It's not perfect, it's fallible, but it's real. I can guess if you're interested, I can guess. If you're hurting, I can guess. But it's a genuine portal into your consciousness. But, of course, my experience is not your consciousness. Your consciousness is separate. And so our interface does give us genuine portals into the consciousness of others. My cat, I have less access, my mouse, even less microbe. My interface has given up. My portal has become really dumb. It's not because there's no consciousness out there. It's that my portal has got too much noise or is just not opened up to it. So, yes, when we have babies, we are, in a way that we don't understand, opening new portals into the realm of consciousness. So I want to understand that it's very much like if someone is building something in Minecraft and, you know, they put things together. But if you're really inquisitive, you'd like to know what was really going on inside the computer that looks like me building this thing that I see in my Minecraft world. And that's what I want to do so in Minecraft, there are different things that are in some sense portals to a whole bunch of code that's going on in the computer that's allowing me to build this stuff.

[Tom]

Okay, let me start making some guesses here on where you're going. So I'm assuming that you're chasing this problem because ultimately you want to be able to figure out, hey guys, guess what? Space time is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it. And if we get the right way to look at it, we will have all just an avalanche of insights may be usable in the way that quantum discoveries have given birth to modern life. Most people don't put two and two together together. They just think maybe the atomic bomb or something like that, but that there's real. Your cell phones, gps, like all of it has to do with physics. So if we can get to the underlying physics of whatever gives birth to the simulation now, we could have a whole new avalanche of insights that allow us greater manipulation of the. The world or whatever it is precisely that's driving you. Which brings me back to the collider. You're paying attention to that because you. If I understand how these things explode, then I can backtrack it and understand how they came together in the first place. Which in your prediction is going to take us outside of the simulation into the world of consciousness. Which do you imagine that world has physics and desires. Like does the consciousness must have something propelling it to do things.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right. The only idea I've got there is this idea from Godel of just infinite exploration.

[Tom]

Undoubtedly that is the. Okay, so this is going to bring us to God here because I feel like you've already said this is a magic moment or a miracle moment. So something has given the spark of desire to consciousness to explore Godel's infinite. Like, look at all the different manifestations that consciousness can take. And so we are all but one sort of pop up of a very specific kind of consciousness. And who knows, there could be a Brazilian of these things all over the known and unknown universe.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right?

[Tom]

So as we're doing that, it begs the question of in your mind, is there such a thing as God?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, this gives us possibly a chance to have a language which for the first time ever, we might be able to formulate a precise hypothesis about what we mean by the word God and start to do science.

[Tom]

So, for example, do you have a hypothesis around that?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, yes. So I have a precise definition of a conscious agent. And one definition I could give for God would be the Agent, which is the combination of all the conscious agents, the single. So suppose it turns out that mathematically, when I look at the mathematics of conscious agents and how they combine to form new agents, suppose that the mathematics tells me there is in some sense always one largest agent that's being formed. I don't know if that will be the case. I don't know. But suppose. Then I could say that that's God. Suppose it turns out that, no, what's going on is that there are many, many quote, unquote, maximal agents, but there's no single maximal agent and they're not identical. Then that would. Then it might be a polytheism. But the nice thing about this is we could see the word God has been used in contradictory ways for thousands of years by various traditions. And we fight to the dust over a term literally that's not well defined because your God is not the same as my God. And it's a tragedy of human history that hundreds of millions of people have died because of differences over what we mean by the word God. And what I would like to see is sort of a humble approach to that term, saying, look, my tradition has its ideas, your tradition has its ideas. Clearly, since we all disagree, at most one of us is right and possibly all of us are wrong. So why don't we come together, take all of our best ideas and then try to sift through, and here's where science can help, where we take the ideas and try to make them precise, mathematically precise. Because that's when you find out if things gel, if they're consistent or if they actually. You're talking nonsense, right? You know, if you say a is true and not A is true, well, you're talking nonsense, right? So can we do something like that and evolve ideas about the notion of God and have a scientific spirituality where God becomes something that we don't assume that we know. We're not dogmatic. I know what God is. We're humble. We say, these are the best ideas we've got so far. Let's try to make them precise so we can figure out precisely where we're wrong and then evolve it. So I see this direction going forward, the possibility of a scientific spirituality where we take a lot of the spiritual insights that the spiritual traditions, the mystical traditions have had for thousands of years, and we take the tools that science has learned by studying our headset, and we use those tools to take the first step outside the headset that the spiritual traditions have been telling us. Look, you guys are stuck in the Headset. You're stuck in the headset. Well, they're right. But by studying the headset we got the tools we needed to actually step outside the headset in a way that can be precise and we can figure out what we're doing and make precise theories. And so I see science and spirit, we're at this really interesting convergence point in human history where there's been a war between science and spirituality. In effect, they've been at odds. These are non physicalists over here, the spiritual side. These are physicalists over here, the scientists. Scientists have all the hard nosed tools. It's all woolly and imprecise over here on the spiritual side. And so they've been at odds at each other. Right. But now let's take the best insights and I'm not saying that anybody's right or wrong, I'm just saying let's take the best insights from the spiritual traditions and be willing to call nonsense nonsense and take the best tools from science and also call theories nonsense that are nonsense and try together to make precise theories about the spiritual realm and our position. You know, what are we here for? What is life about? These deep, deep questions that are all important to us and see where it goes. And you're right. I think that as we do this, we're going to understand if this idea that there's a network of conscious agents outside space time and we begin to really understand how in part it works and how it relates to space time. The technologies that we're going to get are stunning. The analogy I would think of is like this again, going back to Grand Theft Auto. You can imagine being someone who is a wizard at Grand Theft Auto. We all just look in awe at what this wizard can do and that's truly impressive. But now the software engineer comes along who actually knows the software of the game and he can take the gasoline out of the tank or let the tire out of the airs of the wizard's car. So now the wizard is nothing compared to someone who knows how the software works outside of Grand Theft Auto. Once we get outside of space time and we understand how this network of conscious agent works and how space time is just a visualization tool. We will be in the position of that software engineer that can actually just give the Grand Theft Auto wizard a flat tire. We'll be able to. He could change the road. He could change the dimensions of the road. He could make buildings disappear. He could make space and time shift in any way he wants. That's the kind of Pandora's box Potentially that we're going to open up here. It's both as a scientist and a human being. It's exhilarating and scary as all get out. That in the wrong hands is incredible power.

[Tom]

Yes. There's so many sort of layers of guesses between us and there. But if, if people have the ability to essentially edit the Matrix and anybody can do it, then that's going to certainly go into some pretty interesting places. Before we ponder that though, I want to ask you, what do you think of Einstein's statement that I want to know God's thoughts, everything else is just details?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, there's a sense in which I very much on board with Einstein in some sense the attitude is who cares that there are so many kinds of quarks and who cares that there are so many kinds of gluons and that the mass of the electron is such and such. And I mean, that's not what it's really about. I mean, we need to understand those things, but not for their own sake. What Einstein and theoretical physicists are really after is they're trying, as Einstein said, I want to understand the mind of God, right? I want to understand what are the big deep principles that would lead to the laws that have as their consequences. There are these kinds of quirks and these kinds of gluons and so forth. So it's the deep, deep insights, the same kind of thing that you and I are chasing here when we are talking about ideas like Godel's incompleteness theorem and Godel's candy store like these, even if that's not the right idea, it gives you a flavor for the deep kind of idea that we're after that we think of. This could be a deep enough idea that it could be a guiding principle for a lot of the details that we see. So it's in that sense that I would agree completely with Einstein on that. Now, I think Einstein was very much attached to space and time.

[Tom]

Seems fair.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah. He was perhaps the person with the most profound original insights ever about space and time. I don't know if he ever let go of space time. Maybe in his later years maybe he did, I don't know. But most of us, it's really hard. The avant garde of physics right now are letting go of space time. If you just Google space time is doomed. Google that phrase, you can find videos by Nima Arkani Hamed, for example, and he can tell you exactly why state of the art physicists today are saying space time is doomed. So the mind of God, whatever it is, is not space time itself. It's something deeper. But they don't know what that something deeper is what the physicists are doing because they don't have any. They don't have any idea what's beyond space and time. What they're doing, which is really brilliant, they're saying, let's take the mathematics of the models that we do have in spacetime, quantum field theory, gravity, let's look at that mathematics and see that mathematics is like a light into the dark beyond space time. And they're flashing that light into the dark as far as they can let that light go. So they're trying to see what the structure of our current theories might tell us, to guide us in our ideas beyond space time. But ultimately we're going to need to make a creative leap. We're going to have to just. And this is the fun of science, you make a creative guess, you make it mathematically precise and then go back and say, okay, here's my guess about what's behind space time. Then you have to project it back into space time where you can test it. And so the physicists are doing, and I'm reading their work very, very carefully because I need to build on their work. I'm trying to plug my theory of conscious agents. I want to show that the long term behavior of conscious agents, so called asymptotic behavior. So this is a dynamics on graphs, it's a Markovian dynamics, and it has an asymptotic behavior. It turns out I believe I can show that that asymptotic behavior plugs into structures that the physicists are finding called cosmological polytopes, amplitude, socahedra and so forth that have the same kind of permutation properties that the asymptotic behavior of consciousness does. So the asymptotic behavior of consciousness leads to certain permutations to classify it. Permutations turn out to be these fundamental thing that the physicists have found beyond space time that's as deep as they've gotten. There are these things called permutations beyond space time that lead to what they call on shell processes, which they can then lead to predicting the scattering amplitudes. So that's the thread I want to pull. Start with a theory of consciousness where it's a vast social network of consciousnesses. Its asymptotic behavior is what the flashlight of physics has seen. The permutations, that's as far as they can go.

[Tom]

What's asymptotic mean?

[Donald Hoffman]

Long term behavior. So I'll be very, very concrete with an example. Suppose that you're in your car on the freeway and you're driving and there's hundreds of people on the road with you. Everybody, it's a conscious person turning the steering wheel, pushing on the gas, hitting the brake, and so forth. Now imagine you're up in a helicopter, you know, half a mile up, and you're looking down. You're the Channel 7 news, and what you see is a bunch of little specks, little dots moving on the freeway. You don't see any consciousness. You could think of it as particle flow, a bunch of particles. Well, there's a little. The particles are all stopped here. There's a traffic jam and now their fluid is flowing. You could use like fluid dynamics, the kind of math that physicists use to describe that. Because that's the long term behavior. You're looking at it from far, far away. You don't see the consciousness. So you're looking at long term behavior. Not the little turn of the wheel, the stepping on the brake of each person. You're looking from very far away. That's asymptotics, looking at the long term from a far away distance. So that's why physics has never seen consciousness. First, they're studying our headset, not consciousness. And second, the headset itself has only been designed to show us the asymptotic behavior of consciousness because that's how we data compress, right? That's. This is data compression. I can't see all the Twitter users and what they're tweeting. I see trends. Trends are the asymptotics. And so it turns out when you look at the trend behavior of consciousness, you get these things that we mathematicians call permutations. And that's as far as the. So that's what I'm coming from my side. Consciousness asymptotics leads to permutations. The physicists pointing from the headset of space time into the dark, their flashlight gets to permutations. So we're meeting in the middle. So that's what I'm trying to do is to bridge that gap. It'll take a couple years. I'm not a physicist, so I'm just learning as much as I can. And I'm working with physicists, but, you know, there's a lot of conceptual work to do there. But then this will get back to the question you raised earlier about artificial intelligence. Because once we understand how this whole thread gets pulled that I just described from consciousness through asymptotics into space time, we can reverse engineer space time. And we can open new portals in the interface into conscious agents. The conscious agents are there. We'll be able to rejig our interface to open new portals and see new aspects of this social network of conscious agents that we've never seen before. And maybe some of the technology that we use to do that will look like circuits and software. I don't know. We'll see. And if it does, it would be. Then in some sense we might say, sure, AI with circuits and software has opened. We now have consciousness in that AI. But it will be different. It will be not that the circuits and software in silicon was the founding thing and it created the consciousness as an emergent property. Instead, we just. Circuits and software are the language of the interface that we use to describe this much deeper thing we did that opened up a hole, opened up a portal in the interface that looks like circuits and software in our interface. But that's not the truth. That's just what it looks like in our interface. The deeper thing is something with conscious agents and how they operate that will. That we'll learn.

[Tom]

So let me make sure I understand that. So are you saying that there is. We can create entities that meet some sort of requirement as to open a portal to conscious beings?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's what the one that we know

[Tom]

how to do now is sexual reproduction and I guess asexual reproduction, depending on where you draw the line of consciousness. But we can make puppies, we can make humans.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom]

And those, the act of that somehow, some way meets some criteria that then.

[Donald Hoffman]

Exactly.

[Tom]

Okay. And that there is some configuration that we could do with robotics or AI or a combination thereof that would open a similar portal.

[Donald Hoffman]

You got it exactly right, Tom. We have, as you just pointed out, we have proof that our interface does have the technology to open new portals. It's pretty low tech.

[Tom]

Where do we have that proof when

[Donald Hoffman]

you have a kid? Okay, it's a low tech. Right, right, it's low tech.

[Tom]

But we know it happens.

[Donald Hoffman]

We enjoy the process, but we have technology. In other words, our interface has proven that it's got the technology to open new portals.

[Tom]

Well said.

[Donald Hoffman]

Now the question is, if we can understand what's really going on there, we should be able to do it. And it may look like AI. And this may also be an answer to a very, very deep question about alien intelligences. Where are they? Well, we're looking at our headset, of course, we can't see them.

[Tom]

That's interesting.

[Donald Hoffman]

They're out there.

[Tom]

That's really interesting. That's really interesting.

[Donald Hoffman]

We may we may. I'm not saying we won't find some of them out there. Our headset may give us access to certain alien intelligences on planets around Alpha Centauri and so forth, but. But it's going to be trivial compared to all the consciousnesses that are out there. That's what a headset is for. It's there to hide all of the consciousnesses because it would be overwhelming to interact with them. So that's where they are. They're all around us. We're like ants that don't see the guy with the raid can coming at them. They just can't see it. Right. So they're all around us, but we are stuck on our headset and we think that we're the. The epitome of advancement and knowledge and so forth. It would be funny. And it may be the case that every. That that's a rookie mistake that every consciousness goes through in its simulator, that it thinks it because its headset is only going to give it the best access to itself and others like it and less access to others. And so in its own eyes, it will always be the wisest in its environment. And so it may be a rookie mistake that every simulator that consciousness creates has that we all have to go through this phase of going, oh, we're the best, we're the greatest, we're the epitome of evolution. And then we slowly realize, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm in a simulator. And there's this infinite range of other possibilities of consciousness, some so profound that if I could see them, I would be inclined to fall down and worship them. Who knows? But it's a really humbling position. So we go from being the top of creation, the smartest. The brain is the most incredibly complicated thing we've ever found in the entire universe. That point of view to, oh, wow, we've made a rookie mistake here. There are consciousnesses out there that are far more mind blowing than anything I could even concretely imagine. So it's a very, very different kind of thing. And this also, by the way, puts a different spin on the question of life living versus non living.

[Tom]

How so? I struggled with this the first time I heard you bring it up. Dead. Still feels dead to me. How does it? Right, because you're saying the very thing that I perceive as them is the consciousness coming through the portal. And if I could retract down that bit of consciousness, it would be just like dealing with Timmy.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, in that direction. So that's the right direction. And by the way, you know, I don't know the answer, so you might be closer than me. So when I say the right direction, close to what I'm thinking, and maybe you're right and better than mine. An analogy, I think that's useful. Here is again, a virtual reality. And I like, you know, say you go with a bunch of buddies to a virtual reality arcade and put on headset and bodysuit and to play virtual volleyball. And so you find yourself immersed in a beach scene with the beach volleyball court and so forth. And you start playing beach volleyball for a little while. And then your friend Joe says, excuse me for a minute, I'm thirsty. I'll get a drink. So he takes off his headset and body suit to get a drink, and his avatar collapses, motionless on the sand. From the point of view of the VR game, he's effectively dead. He's unplugged, but he's just unplugged from the headset. He's not dead. And so if space time isn't fundamental, death may be nothing more. What we call death is just unplugging from the headset. Now, what the consequences of that are for consciousness, for example, maybe consciousness survives what we call death, but maybe the notion of a self, of me, maybe that doesn't survive, I don't know. This is going to be. I don't want to be doctrinaire about this. I want to be open to, you know, first having bold ideas. You have to be crazy, have drink beer, have some ideas. And then when you're sober, you go back and you start to know, okay, that looked really great when I, you know, when a gin and tonic. But now it doesn't look so great when I'm sober, right? So you have to do explanations, but then go back. So we want our mathematical model of consciousness to give us insights. What is a self? What is this thing that I call a self? Will that survive detachment from an interface? Or is that itself somehow wedded to the interface? What is the relationship between my interface, my spacetime interface, and my notion of self? I'm really attached to this body, but this body is just a symbol, you know, I am not this.

[Tom]

I want to get into something really fast. So one thing that I find very confusing, not confusing, I understand it. And there's some part of my brain is rejecting it. So what I like about the reductionist model of quantum mechanics and all of that is that there is something beyond what all shorthand to personality. So a gluon is a gluon is a gluon. Right. It's just a particle, and it acts in a certain way according to certain laws. And I can get that. Things acting in a certain way according to certain laws as they group up into more and more complex things. Those more and more complex things are now the amalgamation of all these different laws. And they look like humans. Oh, my gosh, look at that. But as I break them down, they die. The immune system stops fighting off bugs. They return to a different anatomical state, let's call it dirt. And now they're reacting in a different way. But then those could be consumed by something that ends up becoming a piece of, you know, the egg. And then the egg is re fertilized. And now you actually become something again. And so we're just. We're these cells set number of particles that sort of take different forms, break apart, take a different form again. And it makes sense to me largely because there are things beyond personality. Personality is only associated with things that take a very particular form. The sort of living biological things, as we would call it. And the individual pieces exist outside of that. And that's reflected back to me because if I go and give somebody brain damage, they will act fundamentally different, right? Deny somebody oxygen for a certain period of time, but then don't let them die, and they will be fundamentally different. And so it's like everything in the simulation. I fully understand that. But having lived in the simulation, all of that makes a lot of sense. Now, when I try to imagine, come up with a metaphor, whatever, where consciousness is primary, and this may just be a failing of. My brain is so primed to think of consciousness as being an element of personality that it just falls apart as I tried to imagine. Okay, wait. While this consciousness is in this body, it has personality. And I can fuck up its personality and make it act fundamentally different. But hey, when you come back out, one of two things has to be true. Either its fundamental nature was different than its manifestation as Timmy. And so it was like, hey, you were Timmy for a while. Oh, you got damaged, but you're still you. And Timmy's messed up now, but I can pull you out and you'd be just like you were before. But if I, as little Tommy, come and re. Engage with the consciousness that was part of Timmy, I wouldn't recognize this person at all. So even if they're in Timmy normal, they come out of Timmy Timmy still normal, I still wouldn't get this person or the consciousness because. And this is where again, my brain just immediately starts grabbing a hold of metaphor. So my brain goes oh, okay, cool. I get this. The consciousness is like a puppet master and the very act of taking on the body, right? So pregnancy, cool. You got a baby. At some point, the puppet master brings consciousness to that puppet. And now that consciousness gets to experience the girdle's infinite candy store range of states of consciousness, of qualia, and goes, oh, wow, cool. What a neat ride. As I experiences, oh, this gets damaged. It just changes my experience of what this looks. This is what Sally was like before the brain damage. This is what grapes taste like to her now that she's had catastrophic brain injury. How interesting. And, like, that's where I'm like, one of those two interpretations is way off because I can't reconcile them both now because I've lived my entire life in the headset. It just makes so much more sense to me that individual parts act one way. When they come together, they act another way. I mean, it's just. That's the human body, right? If you're just looking at bacteria, it feels very different. If you're just looking at mitochondria, it's very different. If you're looking at me without bacteria, different me without mitochondria, I'm dead. First of all. And it's only as you bring all these together that I actually act the way that I act. So I understand how I am this. I am, you know, a totality. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's very poetic and super interesting. A small G God, right? Of something that is like the accumulation of trillions of things that have come together in this pretty amazing form, right? That is delicate and precious and would never want anything to happen to it, but obviously does not rule the universe. And, you know, just trying to get through the day. But, you know, very interesting is you, if you define God as a collection, little G. God as a collection of these individual consciousnesses that have come together to create. Create this sort of symphony that we recognize as a cheetah or a person or a gorilla or whatever that I get that to me, is very interesting. When I start thinking as consciousness as fundamental, I start. I make the mistake that I read that as personality as fundamental.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right. The first interpretation is the one that I. I agree with you about that the consciousnesses come together to create new varieties of consciousness. And it's a very novel and creative process. And all I mean, when I say consciousness is fundamental is that it's not space and time and physical stuff. That's the fundamental thing. It's that these kinds of consciousnesses that can combine to create new forms of consciousness. That's the direction that science needs to go to try to understand what's really the fundamental dynamics of what's going on. How is it that two consciousnesses, when they interact, create a new consciousness? And there, by the way, we can get some information, like from split brain patients that we talked about last time, right. There are people that have the commissure. Yeah, the corpus callosum is cut. And in one case, the left hemisphere believed in God and the right hemisphere was an atheist. Left hemisphere wanted to be a draftsman, Right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver. Completely different personalities. So what consciousness is doing in that case is what happens when I put an atheist together with a believer in God and make the believer in God also want to be a draftsman and the atheist also want to be a race car driver. What kind of new consciousness do I get when I put those two together and put a corpus callosum between them and force them to live together in a lifetime? What new. How do they. So the adjudication of that. And we all sort of sometimes will feel like, you know, it's Friday night. Part of me wants to do this. I'd like to, you know, kick up my heels and have some fun. Part of me wants to be a geek and study some more physics, whatever it might be. Maybe those are really two separate consciousnesses, Two separate conscious agents that are negotiating and in the process, a new consciousness exists.

[Tom]

This is where I come back to. I'm so into that idea from Einstein, and this may not be what he meant, and maybe I'm just doing a poetic interpretation, But I want to know God's thoughts or the mind of God. Everything else is just details. Is like, I want to know what, what imbued these conscious entities with any propellant, like what makes them step through the portal. Are there times where they're like, fuck it. No, I don't want to step through the portal. I just want to do my version of a Friday night chilling over here, you know, because when you think about two conscious entities coming together, one it is. They are. You get very distinct and predictable types of consciousness depending on whether it's right hemisphere or left hemisphere. So it is obviously not. You can very quickly oversimplify. But it. They're different, right? One side is going to be prone to religiosity and the other side would be pretty prone to not like, that's predictable. You wouldn't get. I forget which is right or left. But like, whichever has the propensity for religiosity. You're never going to get it that the other side has a propensity. Like if I told you, hey, VS Ramachandran, who studied the hell out of this, like, hey, one of the sides is religious. He's not going to be like, oh my God, I have no idea. It's 50 50. He's going to be like, oh, that's the left or the right, whichever it is. So no, it's like this is so tied to, to the physicality that exists in my headset that it's like teasing out what is the, the, what is the thought of God? What is the thing? Like, what's the game being played here? Like, why, why is there a puppet master? You know what I mean? Like, it's exactly so interesting.

[Donald Hoffman]

Absolutely, Tom. And that's the spirit in which scientists are. And I'm approaching this right, we're saying let's. We try to reverse engineer exactly these kinds of things. What do we find from the neuroscience, the split brain patients? What clues can we get to what's really going on outside the headset? So, but the first thing you have to do is realize I have to think outside the headset. So I have to let go of the reductionist view and say, how are neurons doing this? And saying, instead, let's talk about consciousness on its own terms. What's consciousness doing? And the neural structures that I'm seeing, I have to think about them. Okay, this is just my virtual reality interface. How can I reinterpret all these neural networks and what they're doing in terms of what networks of conscious agents are really doing? In other words, it's much harder work.

[Tom]

You must spend a lot of time thinking about this. Do you have a method for getting breakthroughs? Is it really a gin and tonic? And then go organize your ideas. Is it go jogging? Like, how do you do this?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, it's. I, I have several things I do on a daily basis and I'm grateful to my wife for giving me some space to do it. I meditate for several hours. Okay, three hours a day, typically.

[Tom]

Whoa. And you are pursuing the lack of thought, or you're pursuing to let your mind chase a thought.

[Donald Hoffman]

Entire silence, nothing but silence. And watching what happens there is very. The idea from my geeky point of view about it is if I'm going to go beyond the interface, then I've got to let go of the interface entirely. Any concept, any thought that I have is by definition still in the language in the interface that I'VE got. So going into utter and total silence is not easy. And it's both exhilarating and terrifying because there are no security blankets when you let go of all thoughts. And if you. So one thing I do is I watch myself and I watch the terror. And I watch my mind jumping back and clinging to the things that it knows. But then I also notice that I've been doing this for 18 and a half years. And the process, to me, the best metaphor I can think of for it is to describe it as like metamorphosis. So you think about, you know, a caterpillar goes into a chrysalis and then comes out a butterfly. How beautiful. It's all lovely and so forth. But what really goes on is that inside the chrysalis there's a war. The immune cells of. Of the caterpillar fight to the death. The cells inside that are responsible for turning it into a butterfly. And it's only when the immune cells of the caterpillar are completely overwhelmed that the transformation takes place. And everything that the caterpillar knew, eating green leaves, crawling on a bunch of different legs, having little furry spikes come out of you, having a mouth. Everything that it knows, it has to let go. Talk about terror and the analogy of the terror. And that seems to be the immune system is fighting this until the immune system is completely overwhelmed. It's not like all peace and love. It fights until it can't fight anymore. And that's the way meditation seems to me. It seems like the letting go of what I know. Letting go of the caterpillar and seeing what new forms of consciousness might come and seeing how I might be transformed is both exhilarating and terrifying. But it's certainly transforming. So that's one thing that I do set.

[Tom]

Do you set a different intention when you sit down to meditate. Like today, I'm going to try to think about, like, what these conscious agents look like. No, I seek only silence. And everything else happens.

[Donald Hoffman]

My intention is to let go of everything. I know. That's the one. Intention is let go of this headset. Let go of this headset.

[Tom]

And what do you do when you're grocery shopping needs pop into your head?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, I can tell you what I did, what I've done for a lot of the time. I. You beat yourself up. Go. You know, it was stupid. Why don't you. How come you can't be in this. And then eventually I just. You. Over years and years and years, you learn to just go, c' est la vie. Back to silence. C' est la vie back to silence and just go back there and. And the weird thing about it is the caterpillar can't know what it's turning into. And it has no idea what it's like to have wings and a proboscis instead of a mouth and to drink nectar instead of eat leaves. It can't know. It has to go completely into the unknown. And so it's being good with letting go of everything that's known and letting yourself venture into the totally unknown. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect is I spend as much time as I possibly can studying mathematics, listening to what the physicists are saying. Nima Arkani Hamed gave a course at Harvard in fall of 2019 to the graduate students on the state of play in scattering amplitudes. I've literally transcribed by hand on my computer, 17 of his lectures, word for word, and I'm studying them. I'm not a physicist, but I. And I don't have the talents that these guys do, but I have incredible motivation and I really want to understand this stuff. So. And I've got a physicist friend, Chetan Prakash, who's really good. So Chetan and I meet and he helps me through it. He's also interested and we're working on this mathematics together. So I spend hours every day studying, studying physics, studying mathematics, of course, studying cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, the tools that are needed here. This is a truly multidisciplinary task to go all the way from the theory of consciousness through its asymptotic behavior, through cosmological polytopes, into these on shell diagrams, into space time and quantum field theory, and then to the large hadron, but then eventually to climb up to life and chemistry and neuroscience and psychology to get the big picture. I mean, I can't get the whole thing, but I'm just trying to get the thread that goes all the way through. That's my goal. Can I pull a thread all the way through that we can then start to build on? And so it's truly multidisciplinary. And so I have to think out of the box all the time. So the meditation is very, very helpful to just let go of the box completely. But then the weird thing about this, and this may be some clue as well, to something deep about the whole picture. There seems to be reward for absolute silence, no concepts whatsoever, and absolute precision, on the other hand, and there's no reward for sloppy thinking in the middle. So. But silence and precision, See, and we see this in quantum computation, which is really Quite interesting. In quantum computation, when you build a quantum computer, on the one hand we use the most absolute precise theory and mathematics we've ever had, quantum, quantum theory to build, use quantum information theory, we build these. So this is just like the epitome of sharp thinking. And everything has to be precise. And once you set up the quantum bits and gates and start the computation, now the other side happens, you have to let go completely. You can't intervene, you can't touch the thing in any way. If you interfere in any way, you destroy the computation. So you have on the one hand, absolute precision, the best that you can do in your interface. And then you step away and you don't touch it with anything in your interface at all. And that's when the horsepower is unleashed. And after that, and that's where the quantum computation power comes. And then at the end you can look at the quantum bits and gates and get a small thimble full of the whole rush of computational that went on there. So there's this very interesting thing that I'm trying to understand it. Precision. Doing the best precise thinking you can with the current cognitive tools that you've been given, letting go of those cognitive tools all together, going into complete silence. Those two seem to be really critical. And somehow they come together in quantum computation precision. And then don't touch anybody who's a programmer for classical computing. Right. You know that if you write a program, you like to put little tracers in the program to see what it's doing while it's computing, you know, to debug it, to see, you know, what went wrong. You can't trace a quantum computer that way. If you trace it, you brought, you break the power. It's really weird. So there's that kind. You can see why I'm thinking out of the box. I'm really trying to think in terms of metaphors. How does this, this weird thing about quantum computation relate to my own experience as a scientist doing precise thinking, or best I can with no thinking in meditation? How does that relate to quantum. This is the kind of the out of box analogies that may lead you nowhere, but it also may lead you to insights. As long as you don't hold on to anything dogmatically. Right. That's the sort of the point. Explore and then be the first to kill off the thing that really don't make sense. Don't hold on to them. So it's an anti dogmatic point of view. And yet the balance is to be as excited and energetic and having fun so that you want to do it right. It's a balance. You have to have the energy to go, I really want to do this today. I'm going to study all this math because I might learn something. I might actually break through here. And on the other hand, to not cling to anything you got. I'm probably wrong. I'm probably wrong, probably wrong. That's the balance to have in all of this stuff. And it's possible, but it's really interesting to see how the mind goes into dogmatism. It goes into safety. I think they're maybe the same thing.

[Tom]

That's interesting.

[Donald Hoffman]

Really could be the same thing. So those are two of the things I do. And then I do a lot of exercise. Like, it's just the case that in this interface, if your body is not physically fit, then you're not going to be at the peak of your mental power. So I have a workout regimen every day of the week. I do either an hour of weight training or an hour and a half of some kind of mild aerobic stuff. And I alternate days. So it's. And then I spend time, you know, with my wife and my family and, you know, kid and grandkids and so forth and enjoy this part of Grinnell's Candy Store.

[Tom]

I love that. Donald, man, this was so much fun. I really, really enjoy spending time with you. I have no doubt we will do around three at some point. Thank you so much for coming back. Where can people get your book? Tell people about the book. Where you want them to connect with you.

[Donald Hoffman]

Oh, yes. It's called the Case Against Reality. You can get it on Amazon or Apple and so forth. The Case Against Reality. And then I've got a Twitter feed at Donald D. Hoffman, I think, but if you just Google my name on Twitter, you can find it. And I put links to most of my. I'll put a link to our podcast here and so forth, but. And yeah, so on Twitter and you know, I have a website at the University of California at Irvine that lists some of my papers and has my email ddhoffci.edu so people can email me. I, you know, I get enough that I can't respond to most of the emails, but every once in a while I can respond so Nice. You know what that's like?

[Tom]

I'm sure I do indeed.

[Donald Hoffman]

Cool.

[Tom]

Well, guys, check them out for sure. Hopefully you enjoyed this and if you loved it, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.