What's Outside The Simulation w/ Donald Hoffman

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: "What's Outside The Simulation?" w/ Donald Hoffman (May 15, 2026) — Episode Summary

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Tom Bilyeu welcomes back cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman to delve into the controversial idea that our reality may be akin to a virtual simulation. The pair unpacks the implications of recent physics—theories that challenge the fundamentality of space-time—and discuss the nature of consciousness, the observer, and the potential to "edit the code" of reality. Together, they probe the limits of what science can reveal about the base reality and what, if anything, may exist outside our perceptual "headset."

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Space-Time is Not Fundamental Reality

• Opening Thesis: Hoffman argues that physics has reached a consensus: space-time ceases to be meaningful at the Planck scale and is therefore not the base layer of reality.

  • [01:00] “We have not yet modeled the observer that's collecting the data in science… Quantum theory has no universally accepted model of the observer, and we haven't had it for now a century.” (Donald Hoffman)
  • [03:08] Hoffman references renowned physicists:
    • “Neymar Khani Hamed… says flat out, space time is doomed. It cannot be fundamental.”
  • Current physics efforts center around "positive geometries"—mathematical shapes that underlie phenomena previously framed within space-time, suggesting a deeper structure to reality.

• Planck Scale Limitation:

  • [05:32] “When you let go of the wrong framework and space time is just the wrong framework for principled reasons…” (Donald Hoffman)
  • [07:14] “The very notion of space time itself has no operational meaning at all at what's called the Planck scale… That means that spacetime is a wonderful framework...but we knew a priori that they can't be the final word.” (Donald Hoffman)

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2. Simulation as Metaphor and Beyond

• Tom’s Experience in Game Development:

  • [09:30] Tom finds profound overlap between video game rendering and how quantum mechanics “renders" the world only when measured.
  • [10:40] “The universe only renders what is being measured or interacted with… in a game, there’s a speed at which it checks with the code. And so the fact that the real universe also has a tick speed and a finite pixel size is just wild.” (Tom Bilyeu)

• Divided Physics Community:

  • [12:08] Hoffman clarifies that, while some physicists accept observer-based rendering, others maintain more classical interpretations (de Broglie-Bohm, Cubism/Quantum Bayesianism).
  • [13:16] “The quantum wave function really just describes the degrees of belief of the observer and nothing else.” (Donald Hoffman)

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3. What is "Base Reality"?

• The Nature of the Observer:

  • [14:24] Hoffman aligns with Leibniz, Wheeler: Reality’s foundation is a network of observers or “monads,” with physics needing a mathematical model of these observer-participants.
  • [14:57] “My own personal view is yes, they need to be conscious. But the mathematics… allows a non conscious interpretation.” (Donald Hoffman)
  • Tom worries people’s metaphors will trap them: [17:09] “They’re going to be so trapped in the words and images… they’re gonna have a very hard time getting to a more foundational truth.”

• Mathematics of the Observer:

  • [20:12] For Hoffman, “the fundamental thing is abstract… a set of possible experiences and a matrix that says, what's the probability of the changes of experiences? That's it.”
  • The mathematics is a Markov chain: state transitions define an observer’s possible experiences.

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4. Computational Universe and Consciousness

• Tom’s Confession:

  • [20:24] “So I think the universe is computational… the only thing that matters is that the universe is computational in the exact same way that a video game is.”
  • Tom sees reality’s local irreality as analogous to the way game engines handle vast game worlds with limited resources.

• Can We "Edit the Code"?

  • [23:53] Hoffman: Just as a programmer outside Grand Theft Auto can alter the game in miraculous ways from outside its rules, so too could we—if we understand reality’s “code.”
  • “There is software outside [the headset] and science is eminently up to the task of getting that software and figuring it out.”
  • Once humanity understands the first layer of software outside space-time, “technologies we have right now will look completely antiquated… You can do miracles because you’re not stuck in the game. You transcend the game.” (Donald Hoffman, [25:10–27:35])

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5. Models of 'You' and Death, Identity, and Continuity

• Three Models of Self:

  • [31:42] Tom proposes three models for “you”:

    1. Matrix-style: “You” exist both inside and outside the simulation.
    2. Pure computation/ NPC: “You” are only the avatar; there’s no you outside the game.
    3. One fundamental consciousness: “You” are an instance of this; dying is returning to the One.

  • Hoffman identifies most with the third, but notes all of these are provisional scientific theories (“every scientific theory starts with assumptions”). He assumes “there is one consciousness, and it has all these complicated branchings… that whole thing is the fundamental layer.” [33:04]

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6. How Consciousness "Computes" Reality

• Computational Frameworks:

  • [36:54] Tom frames computation as both energetic and mathematical, giving us “run-time code” that defines our experience.
  • [38:06] Hoffman: Markov chains can simulate everything a Turing machine can, so the framework supports this computational worldview.

• Personal Identity:

  • [41:28–44:11] Hoffman: “I have no neurons unless they’re observed… My body… those neurons would exist only in [the observer’s] perception… The render is really a render and nothing is there.”

• Meditative Detachment:

  • Hoffman draws on meditation to argue for the detachability of the “self” from all preferences, achievements, or even the body. The true “you” is “the silence that’s looking at all this stuff.”
  • [46:00+] “For some reason, this one consciousness chooses to… get lost, completely identify with the kid… and really cry when someone steals my toys, really cry when someone dies, really… But then I can step back and go, wow, that was a perspective on the deeper me, whatever I am.”

• Memory and Continuity:

  • Tom challenges whether there is continuity of self across transitions—if “memories” survive, does “you” survive?
  • [48:47] “What is the mechanism by which memories are formed?”
    • Hoffman: “It would be in the memory of the transition probabilities of these [Markov] matrices.”

• Alzheimer’s and Personal Identity:

  • Tom pushes the point by referencing Alzheimer’s disease: “Do you think of them as the same person?” ([51:27])
  • Hoffman: “They’re someone who’s had their headset destroyed… But they transcend their body and their Alzheimer’s just like you and I transcend our 5-year-old or 15-year-old version of ourselves.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [02:10] Tom: “If this is a simulation like thing inside of a headset, then we might be able to edit the code… even a nuclear bomb would just be firecrackers compared to what we’ll be able to do.”
• [07:14] Hoffman: “The very notion of space time has no meaning operationally at all at 10^-33 cm, 10^-43 seconds, we know it’s over.”
• [09:30] Tom: “The universe only renders what is being measured… that it is always seeking computational efficiency, I was just like, yo, this is too weird.”
• [19:59] Hoffman: “The fundamental thing is abstract. The fundamental thing is literally a set of possible experiences and a matrix that says, what's the probability of the changes of experiences? That's it.”
• [23:53] Hoffman’s Grand Theft Auto metaphor: “If you’re just someone who can’t drive very well, but you wrote the software… you can do miracles because you’re not stuck in the game.”
• [34:41] Tom: “So the closest thing that you can get to right now is that to take off the headset is to return to the one right, one consciousness. Consciousness is fundamental. There is nothing else.”
• [41:28] Hoffman: “I have no neurons unless they're observed... My body... those neurons would exist only in their perception. And they were actually never my neurons.”
• [53:20] Hoffman: “There is one consciousness, it transcends anything. So it just looks at itself from an infinite number of perspectives.”

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Important Timestamps by Segment

• [01:00] – Opening thesis: Model of the observer in science and physics’ “observer problem”
• [03:08] – "Space time is doomed" (major physicists’ view)
• [05:32] – Why space-time cannot be fundamental; Planck scale limitations
• [09:30] – Simulation metaphor: Universe rendering and computational efficiency
• [14:24] – Definitions: Observer, monads, Leibniz, John Wheeler
• [18:09] – Markov chains as mathematical abstraction of observers
• [20:24–23:53] – Computational universe analogy; Grand Theft Auto metaphor
• [31:42–33:08] – Models of self and consciousness (Tom’s three models, Hoffman’s partial agreement)
• [41:28–44:11] – Rendered neurons, the role of perception, identity and transcendence
• [46:00–53:20] – Meditation, detachment from self, memory, Alzheimer's disease, “one consciousness” view

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Episode Tone & Flow

• The dialogue is dense yet playful, often technical but peppered with vivid metaphors from gaming, neuroscience, and philosophy. Tom works to anchor the audience’s understanding through video game development parallels, while Hoffman offers both mathematical abstraction and spiritual/meditative perspectives to invite listeners into a radically new ontology.

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For Part Two: The episode ends with the promise of further exploration, especially regarding the practical consequences and deeper implications of transcending the simulation—be sure to subscribe for the continuation.

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Transcript

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[Donald Hoffman]

We have not yet modeled the observer that's collecting the data in science. So under Newtonian physics, you ignore the observer. In Einstein, you talk about the observer, but the observer is reduced to clocks and measurement pointers. In quantum theory, now the observer becomes front and center because there are two, two different regimes. In quantum theory. There's a unitary evolution when no one's looking, when you don't observe. And then there's what they call the collapse of the wave function when you observe. So all of a sudden in quantum mechanics, the observer comes front and center. But quantum theory has no universally accepted model of the observer, and we haven't had it for now a century.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Donald Hoffman, welcome back.

[Donald Hoffman]

Thank you, Tom. Great to be back.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's great to have you back. So I just recently did a video about the fact that we are living in a simulation, which I am increasingly convinced is true, which made me want to bring you back on. Now, we've talked about your theory before that this is essentially we're in a headset, like a VR and the entire human experience is happening inside of that VR headset. Therefore, even space time is not real.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, I think we're going to diverge a little bit on my sort of blanket statement that this is is a simulation and we'll get into that in a minute. But you've started saying something incredibly provocative and very interesting for me, which is that if this is a simulation like thing inside of a headset, then we might be able to edit the code. And if we think of physics as being the pathway to editing that code, then you've said even Things like a nuclear bomb would just be firecrackers compared to what we'll be able to do in the future.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, yes. Do you really believe that the code is editable? And if it is, have we already edited the code?

[Donald Hoffman]

First, I agree that space time is not fundamental. And I'm a cognitive scientist. And it's really, of course, up to the high energy theoretical physicists to say whether or not space time is fundamental. Right. Not a cognitive scientist, but they've been doing that now for quite a few decades.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They've said, saying that it's not fundamental,

[Donald Hoffman]

that it's not fundamental. So Neymar Khani Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton says that flat out, he says space time is doomed. It cannot be fundamental. And also quantum theory. So space time and quantum theory together are going to have to arise from some deeper framework. There are others as well, Many, many other famous physicists, so many now that are working on this and making progress, that the European Research council has a 10 million euro initiative on what are called positive geometries. And there are now dozens if not hundreds of mathematicians and theoretical physicists who are now starting to look for structures entirely outside of spacetime that can make predictions inside spacetime. And they're finding them. They're finding these things that are called positive geometries.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, really fast. Because I think people get lost at this. And my promise to the audience is that I'm going to try to simplify this stuff to the point where if you understand just a little bit of the concept, it begins to open up a metaphor, if nothing else. And so I've always said, regarding my belief that we're in a simulation, is that it may just be that that's the best metaphor, that it's not literally true. You and I both agree, whatever we say here, over in the fullness of time, will be proven to be incomplete at a minimum.

[Donald Hoffman]

Sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I think that the idea that we're living in a simulation is such a profoundly accurate metaphor that it's very useful. So when we talk about them discovering these positive geometries, my understanding is basically you have Richard Feynman, who creates this really brute force math equation to describe what happens when particles collide. And it's this just ridiculously complicated math math equation that people will spend an entire career on a single equation. Then you've got Arcanum Hamad. I forget.

[Donald Hoffman]

I can never thank you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He realizes, oh, wait a second. These can actually be simplified into a single geometric shape. And when you calculate the volume I think it is right of that simple shape, all of a sudden, in a very fast way, you can figure out how particles will interact when they collide.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's. That's exactly right. When you let go of the wrong framework and space time is just the wrong framework for principled reasons that we can talk about that are very, very simple. It's, it's actually very straightforward to understand why spacetime cannot be the fundamental base level of reality.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How do you say it?

[Donald Hoffman]

The first step is that spacetime is just a scientific theory, right? And every scientific theory is just a theory. It's not the truth. Every scientific theory starts with assumptions. And it says, if you grant me these assumptions, then I'll explain all this other stuff. But it can never explain its own assumptions. So we get space time by making certain assumptions, like Einstein assuming that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames and so forth. But it doesn't explain its own assumptions. And so we will always need a deeper theory to explain the assumptions of a previous theory, but the new theory will always have its own assumptions. So science is a very humble enterprise in a way. We always know that our assumptions are not the final word. Now, a great scientific theory gives you not only the tools to explore what it can explain, the scope of what it can explain, it'll also give you the tools to explore the limits of its own assumptions. That's what a great theory. And it turns out that Einstein space time together with quantum theory, so quantum field theory and gravity together give us the tools to show where their assumptions stop and their assumption. So what they show is that the very notion of space time itself has no operational meaning at all at what's called the Planck scale. 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. And so that means that spacetime is a wonderful framework. Brilliant. And Einstein's contributions are brilliant. So is quantum mechanics. There's nothing wrong with these frameworks, but we knew a priori that they can't be the final word, because it's just a scientific theory. Theories are just theories. And so. But in this case, the theory is so good, it says this stops at the Planck scale. It has no meaning, no operational mean, if you want to be very, very clear about that. If you want to measure things that are smaller and smaller and smaller, you need to have smaller and smaller wavelengths of light or radiation, right? To resolve them. So your microscope is using smaller and smaller wavelengths of light to resolve things. But Einstein and quantum theory together tell us that as you get smaller and Smaller wavelengths, the energy is going up. And as the energies are going up, Einstein says energy is mass, mass is going up. Curved space time is being curved by the mass. Eventually the mass is so great that you create a black hole. And so the very thing that you're trying to measure gets destroyed in a black hole. And if you get frustrated and say, well, I'm just going to try put more energy, make it a smaller wavelength, the black hole just gets bigger and bigger. So it really means that the very notion of space time has no meaning operationally at all. And at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, we know it's over. Now, most physicists don't need to worry about this, right? What they're doing is within the normal range of physics that we can do every day. But the high energy theoretical physicists are the ones for which this is a serious issue because they're looking at the very, very high energies and they're looking at the limits of the current theory. And they're the ones that are, that the European Research Council is funding with the 10 million euro initiative to say, okay, we're what's next. We knew that spacetime stopped at the

[Tom Bilyeu]

Planck because they really want to get beneath that minimum size.

[Donald Hoffman]

We need a deeper theory. There has to be some deeper scientific theory that gives rise to space time. So space time in that sense will be emergent from a much deeper framework. And we already get the hint that that's happening to us because we're finding these positive, they're finding these positive geometries to make the computation simpler.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so do you see? Actually, okay, I have a follow up question there, but I really want to ground the audience isn't technical on why I think at a minimum the metaphor of the simulation is going to be so helpful. So this all started clicking for me when I started doing video game development. And all of a sudden you're making all these decisions and you start looking at the universe and you're like, wait, I'm having to create physics. So you're looking sideways at the real universe and you're like, I am mimicking all of these things that I see in the real world to get this thing to function. And then you start getting to rendering. And once I realized I've got to put all this thought into how the game world renders, and then you find out that there was a Nobel Prize awarded for proving that the universe is not locally real, which is a fancy way of saying that the universe only renders what is being measured or interacted with. So you could say if you look at the moon, it renders because you need to for that perceiving agent, it gets very tricky how you want to define that, because it isn't just about conscious agents, though this may be where we disagree, But I would say it's anything that needs to interact or measure that thing. That's how the universe actually works. That's also how a game actually works. And so I started going, whoa, the fact that the universe effectively only renders what it must render, and that it is always seeking computational efficiency, I was just like, yo, this is too weird. So when we start talking about the Planck scale, if people just go, oh yeah, you don't render anything beyond that scale because you have a pixel size. Now, metaphor, sure, I'm fine with that. But if you recognize that, oh, one of the ways that you can tell that this isn't base reality, let's say, is that it has this finite size that happens to map exactly to the idea of a pixel size or, or a tick speed in a computer. Because when you're doing a game, there's a speed at which it checks with the code. And so the fact that the real universe also has a tick speed and a finite pixel size is just too wild. And so if nothing else, even if that ends up being proven like up, there's something that I'm missing and it gets you part of the way there to understanding it, it still gets you a long way to understanding it. And so as we talk today, I'm going to try to anchor the AUD at a minimum in that metaphor to help them understand why this kind of thing stops people in their tracks when they start hearing how the universe actually operates.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right. Well, I'm on the same page with you, completely on the rendering, only as you need it. But I should be very, very clear that physics today is divided on this issue. So some physicists, they all recognize the high energy, theoretical physicists all recognize that space time is doomed at the Planck scale. So that's not in question. What is in question is what to do about it and what to do with quantum theory. And so there are so called primitive ontology approaches where they still try to have something that's there all the time, whether you render it or not. So the de Broglie Bohm interpretation of quantum theory, for example, has a particle that's riding on the quantum pilot wave, but there really is a particle all the time and it doesn't get rendered on the moment. So I just Want to be very, very clear that even though you and I are on the same pa, the physics community is divided on this. There are others who will say that the quantum wave function really is like for there's a program called Cubism, so quantum Bayesianism that says the the quantum wave function really just describes the degrees of belief of the observer and nothing else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's a complete degrees of belief

[Donald Hoffman]

degrees of belief about what you will see interesting when you, when you observe what you'll find when you observe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Taking a short break but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to. May be a good time for you to define what you think is base reality. And then I'll make a confession about what I think about base reality, which is the right way to say it. And so we're going to need to keep those things apart so really fast. Tell people what you think is outside of the headset.

[Donald Hoffman]

Basically the idea is something that Leibniz proposed in his Monadology. He said we need to start with the observer. He called them monads. And he said we need to have monads and some kind of pre established harmony.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No one knows what a monad is.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah. So it's just an observer. This is just an observing entity. And John Wheeler, who was Feynman's PhD advisor, John Wheeler came to the same conclusion. He basically said we need to restart physics with what he called observer participants. We need to have some kind of mathematical model of those and show.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think they need to be conscious?

[Donald Hoffman]

My own personal view is yes, that they need to be conscious. But the mathematics that I'm working on allows a non conscious interpretation. It wouldn't be a problem. Okay. So I'm personally thinking about it as conscious. But when you look at the mathematics, you don't have to say conscious. You can just say the apparent parents that something is like consciousness or something like that. So it's really when I think about what I'm doing, it's a model of the observing process. And the reason that that's really critical in science is if you think about what science is, it's a bunch of people that are looking at the world carefully with experimental equipment, but we're looking at the world, we're talking with each other, and we're comparing our observations. What kinds of observations do you get? What do I get? What structure of the world would explain our observations so we're not removed from this whole thing? We have to understand how our observations interface with the theories that we're trying to build. And so that's the critical thing. And what's happened in science is we in Newton, we ignored the observer.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let me ask, do you think the universe was rendered prior to biological life?

[Donald Hoffman]

The distinction between biological life and non biological life and non biological entities is an artifact of the headset. I don't think it's a principal distinction. So the answer would then be, I guess, yes, it's prior to biology. I think that the distinction between living and non living is not principled. I think that it's an artifact of the limitations of our perceptual headset.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to remind you that you said that when we get to artificial intelligence, because I've heard you say things about artificial intelligence that would have made me expect a different answer there. Okay, so we. You haven't said the thing yet. So I take the headset off, right? And what's there, what is the fundamental structure?

[Donald Hoffman]

What's really there is a bunch of observers interacting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. It's really that you would call conscious agents.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes, I'll call them conscious agents. But if someone, I should say if someone doesn't like to have consciousness fundamental, then I would just say observers. Just call them observing agents. That's all you need.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. When I think of the words observing agent, I think most people are going to conjure like a thing that is maybe not conscious, but either is an AI entity, is a frog, is a human, is a mosquito. Like they're going to have some sense of like that or a ghost or an apparition or a God. Like they're, they're going to be so trapped in the words and images that they've seen that I fear that the metaphor is going to keep pulling them back into the headset and they're gonna have a very hard time getting to a more foundational truth. So

[Donald Hoffman]

it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'll give. So yours is conscious agents final answer.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you believe?

[Donald Hoffman]

I get, I think the thing that I should say that would probably be the most. Understandable to the widest audience is just simply. I have a mathematical notion of an observer as the foundational notion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give me the most obscure example of an observer.

[Donald Hoffman]

So all, by the way, an observer is very, very simple. Imagine yourself sitting at a stoplight, and you're focused on the stoplight, and you can see red, green, or yellow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Donald Hoffman]

Here's a very, very simple observer that can see three colors, and for a while you see red, and then maybe it turns to green, then maybe it turns to yellow. So for me, an observer is just simply an entity and that can have a range of experiences like red, green, and yellow. And those experiences change. And that's literally all I mean by an observer.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's the concrete that the light is shining on an observer.

[Donald Hoffman]

Anything that you experience is an experience. That itself, the observer is the capacity to have experiences and have those experiences change. So anything that you see, like this table or my hand or concrete or a street, those would all be experiences that an observer can have. But. But the observer is really an entity that has the capacity to have a range of experiences. Maybe three, maybe a million. In the case of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do we agree that a photon detector is an observer?

[Donald Hoffman]

So now we have to actually say, what's an observer versus what is a headset representation of an observer? So when I have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so we're talking about. The headset is off. This is what I'm trying to figure out.

[Donald Hoffman]

Oh, okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so you take the headset off. I. When you say conscious agent, I think I understand his position. I don't agree with it, but I understand his position. When you start going into the caveats, I. Then I'm projecting onto you now I'm like, oh, he's trying to get to what I think is the fundamental thing. But I won't know until I can pin you down on.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right. So the fundamental thing is abstract. The fundamental thing is literally a set of possible experiences and a matrix that says, what's the probability of the changes of experiences? That's it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so that's a mathematical chain.

[Donald Hoffman]

It's a Markov chain, and it's abstract. So when you talk about a photon, a photon detector or something like that, that's a different thing. That's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, photons are already inside the headset.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's already in the headset.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's right.

[Commercial Narrator]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. But I was just trying to figure out if you would agree that that is because. Okay, let me briefly say what I think it is, and then let's do back and forth and see if we can figure Something out. So I think the universe is computational. And I said I had a confession about when you take the headset off or when you exit the simulation. I think the second you exit the Matrix, in my language, you have to confront the only question that matters. Why is there something instead of nothing?

[Donald Hoffman]

Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That, that is quite literally every science, every inquiry, every question, what are God's thoughts? All of it is going to wind up with, how is it possible that there is an unmoved mover, something that always was and always will be is just there? Like, it is very hard for us to grapple with. My only answer is, I have no idea. So I'm. I am only attempting to grapple with, I'm in the Matrix. I don't think there's any way out. I don't think there is removing the headset, and I will attempt to convince you of that in our time together today. So for me, part of what I'm trying to figure out is there's some set of assumptions that you have that make you interested in this whole conversation. And I think the ability to edit the code is part of what drives you. Whereas for me, the thing that drives me is understanding how the world works, so that as a human, I know how to make the most of this experience.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it. Anyway, period. So my confession about the what's outside the headset is so I can get people to understand, okay, we're in the Matrix, we're in the headset, and the only thing that matters is that the universe is computational in the exact same way that a video game is computational.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The reason the universe is not locally real is for the same reason that a video game world, which feels gigantic to like, think about how big a Minecraft world is, is 8. 8 times the size of planet Earth. Once you take a measurement inside the game, say this is a meter in the game, and then compared to the size of Earth, it's about eight times bigger. So the, the worlds are just staggeringly large, yet it's all processed on one or two chips. And so it's things that feel disparate in the game are actually being processed in the exact same spot. So getting people to understand that, I think, is precisely why we're like, wait, how could this gigantic thing called space time communicate over distances that would require it to break the speed of light? But it's not actually because it's all being processed in the same place. So that is where I think, if you come back to that, that this is literally functioning like a video game. And video games are basically a simulation inside of a simulation, right? Then it will all start to make sense. But the second you ask what's outside the simulation and can we access it? Then I'm like, that doesn't. It doesn't even make sense.

[Donald Hoffman]

First would say, yes, I like your idea about computation being the driver of the interface. And the Markov chains are computationally universal. So anything that can be done with the universal Turing machine can be done with Markov chains.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And really fast. I just want to explain. I had to look all this stuff up. So for anybody that's like, markov chain, what the hell is that?

[Donald Hoffman]

Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I feel your pain. A Markov chain is the mathematics that explain how one thing transitions to another.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. I guess the direction that would be helpful right now would be to point out that in the video game, say, Grand Theft Auto or something like that, right, you have a car that you're driving. You see a steering wheel, you have an avatar. You see your avatar hands gripping the wheel. You see other people driving their cars, you see their avatars, but you are not your avatar. You are outside the game altogether. You're sitting somewhere with a Coca Cola or something like that, playing the game. But the avatar in the game is not you. It looks like you. And if you get immersed in the game, then you can identify with the avatar temporarily. So you do want to learn how to play the game. Well, if you want to be an expert in the game. But you can also step back and say, there's a world entirely outside the game. And in the metaphor I'm pushing here is it's not only possible to say that it's possible to actually look at the code. There is software outside of the virtual reality game, and science is eminently up to the task of getting that software and figuring it out. So that's what I'm up to. I'm saying, yes, I agree with you, Tom. We should learn how to live in the simulation, to live good lives, enjoy ourselves. But it's not at all hard to think about the possibility that we can step out of this, because I am not the Hoffman avatar. I transcend that. You're not the Tom avatar, whatever you are. The Tom avatar is a trivial headset projection of something far more interesting, far more powerful than the little Tom and the little Don that are sitting right here. These are little avatars stuck in the rules of this game. We transcend the game, and it's possible, because we transcend the game, for science to transcend space, time, and to actually find the first layer of software that's rendering this headset. And so the theoretical physicists are doing this right now. They're finding the positive geometries. They're still scratching their head. What does this mean? We're just starting, though. I'm proposing a Markov chain approach to this, which I'm saying this is a mathematically rigorous framework that will give us the software that can exactly render curved space time of Einstein, quantum field theory, non locality, all of these things will come out of a deeper layer of software. And it's eminently within the power of science to rigorously write down this first layer of software outside of these, outside of this game, outside of this VR game and show exactly how this VR game is rendered. And I want to do that simply because I'm a geek scientist. I just want to understand it. But you can easily see the technology that would come out of this, because if you are the person. So if you're a wizard in Grand Theft Auto, you know how to drive the car as fast as you can in the rules of the game, and so you're the wizard in the game. But if you're just someone who can't drive very well, but you wrote the software, right? You couldn't actually play the game very well, but you wrote the software, you know the code. You can do stuff that's miraculous to the wizard. You can take the air out of his tires, you can take the gas out of his tank, you can make his car turn into a donkey and have him going five miles an hour. You can do anything. You can do miracles because you're not stuck in the game. You're not the avatar in the game. You transcend the game. And so that will be one of the big evidences from science that you are not your body. When we can actually transcend space time and play with space time like a game writer can play with the game that they've written. So that's what I'm after. I'm saying, and then you can't think big enough about the technologies that will come out of it, right? If you can play with space time, you're not stuck inside the rules of spacetime. So Einstein's laws can't go faster than the speed of light. That's true in the headset. It's not true. If you're writing the code, you can do whatever you want. And if you can start to play with time and space because you know how they're rendered, then you can do miracles. So that's why I say all the technologies we have right now will look completely antiquated as soon as we get the first layer of software outside the headset. And there's absolutely no reason why science should be limited to space time mathematics. Absolutely none. And the reason is because you are not stuck in space. You're not an object in space time. Your mind, your abilities transcend space time because you yourself are rendering space time right now. So the proof of that will be when we actually write down the code, show how the space time is rendered, and then start to play with it like we're playing with a toy. That will really show.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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[Donald Hoffman]

on Autotrader right now?

[Commercial Narrator]

Really?

[Donald Hoffman]

At a playground?

[Commercial Narrator]

Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers. Wow, your search can really get that specific. Really?

[Donald Hoffman]

And you just put in your info and boom, car's in your budget.

[Commercial Narrator]

Mom needs a second. Honey, you can really have it delivered. Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car.

[Donald Hoffman]

Mommy, I think your kid is walking up the slide.

[Commercial Narrator]

Kyle.

[Donald Hoffman]

Again?

[Commercial Narrator]

Really? Auto trader? Buy your car online? Really?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Before we can go farther, we have to define you because this is one of the areas that when I'm listening to you talk, I always want to be like, oh, wait, wait, wait. We got to, we got to define that because I want to know what you mean. Okay, so we're going to do this in, I think, a very specific way. So there's the vision of the Matrix, and you've got Thomas Anderson inside of the Matrix, but the him that's outside of it is literally in a pod. He's bald, he hasn't moved his muscles ever. He's never used his eyes. But he's in a knowable location and you can go and find him. And that's the real world. And when you take the red pill, you send a disruption signal that they can track and they can go get him. So that would be a, a version of you, which is startlingly similar to the U in the headset. But you're outside the game. Then you've got my version, which is you're an npc. You are a program. You're pure computation. You're hard coded. You have no free will. Like you're. You're just doing NPC video game stuff. It feels like you have free will. I got that. But nonetheless. And so there is no you outside of the game. The idea of outside of the game plus you is literally nonsensical. So if you think of a character in a game, that character only exists because there is a program that is running that person and person in quotes. Of course, if you tried to take that character's code and run it even in a different game on a similar engine, it wouldn't work. If you then tried to take it and run it out in the real world, it's literally just like code. It would just sit there on a piece of paper. You wouldn't even have a sense that it represented an npc. It would literally just be lines of code. And so then we've got a third option, which is what I thought you were going to say, which is consciousness is fundamental. It is one thing. There is one consciousness, which in my defense, I've heard you say a gazillion times, right? And if there is one consciousness, it is basically broadcasting into the headset these experiences for whatever reason. And I've heard you and many other people say it's the universe trying to understand itself from all these different angles, which, if that is the final take, then we can go down that road. Okay, so those feel like the three options of you, right? So one being distressingly close to how you see yourself in the headset. One being. There is no you. It's. You're the you in the game, is it? Period, end of story. There's no taking the headset off.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's your view, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's my view. And then there's the. Well, it's sort of you. But consciousness is one fundamental thing, and the you in the headset can't really be experienced outside of the headset. That's a headset only exclusive. And so I've heard you say dying is removing the headset and realizing that you're part of the one.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. Does one of those accurately reflect your view, or is there a different.

[Donald Hoffman]

I would say that the third one is the closest to my view.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, but it's only close. It's not precise.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. Well, put it this way, it's the closest that I can come right now. To saying something precise about what I think.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so you know there's something wrong, but you're not yet sure what that is.

[Donald Hoffman]

In the following sense. That every scientific theory is always provisional. That my view is that every scientific theory starts with assumptions. And you know that that can't be the final word. So when I say I'm going to assume as a scientist, I'm saying I'm going to assume that there is one consciousness and that it is usefully described by an infinite set of different kinds of Markov chains that are all related and we can, in a way we can talk about. So that's going to be my theory. So there is one consciousness, and it has all these complicated branchings into subconsciousnesses and even smaller subconsciousnesses. And that whole thing is the fundamental layer. And then from that I can create our space time. Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. I could create one with five dimensions, a billion dimensions of space. I could create things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Any headset that you can want is right now. And I'll trust you because I'm not sure what the answer is going to be. But is right now the right time to go into how consciousness gives birth to the mathematics that give us the artificial but useful within the headset? Space, time.

[Donald Hoffman]

Sure. This is I perfect. It's never going to be easy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But okay, so we'll put. Let's really pin down. So the closest thing that you can get to right now is that to take off the headset is to return to the one right, one consciousness. Consciousness is fundamental. There is nothing else.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Everything else is a layer on top of that. Now, before we get to the mathematics, do you believe that the metaphor of the headset is meant to communicate something that is inherently computational?

[Donald Hoffman]

I would think that's. That's perfectly fine. The, the idea that I've got is that there are all these conscious agents, but we can write down mathematically what, how we're going to describe them. And that mathematics allows us to think of them as computational. We don't reduce them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So computational is a very important word to me in that. Computational is making clear that this is being run on something. That energy is somewhere being consumed in order to run the. All the code that is going to say the Donald Hoffman inside of the headset has all of these different properties. The way your cells divide, the way that your DNA comes together to form your physical structure, that you're a part of the human species. Like all of that has to be computed. And then there are things like physics and weight Distribution, aging, like all of that stuff goes into the you that's inside of the headset. So to me, when I say computational, that's what I'm talking about. It's mathematics. It's energy to run the computations. And you're taking inputs which have been coded somehow, some way. So this in your. If you say yes to this, what you're saying is consciousness writes computer code. And once that code is written, then it can be run, it can be computed quite literally. And that's why it has to be efficient, because so much effort from my thinking is that goes into making it efficiently computed. Does all of that feel true, or did I get something wrong?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's all true from a perspective. So the idea would be that the very notion of computation of a universal Turing machine, a universal notion of computation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, when you say a Turing machine, do you just mean inputs become outputs?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, in computer science, we have the notion of automata theory and formal automata and hierarchy of them. And so we have a notion of the various kinds of levels of computational sophistication that you can have. And the ultimate is a universal Turing machine, which can compute anything.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so what makes something a universal Turing machine?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so this is. Alan Turing was the one who defined it. It's a machine that has a finite set of states and a finite set of transition rules, has a start state, a set of halt states. And you can show that if it has a certain level of complexity in the transition rules effectively, and if it hasn't potentially infinite tape, you have as much tape as you need for what you're doing, then it's in some sense, computationally universal. Everything that can be computed can be computed by a universal Turing machine. And also the universal Turing machine can sort of simulate any particular Turing machine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So basically, it has the rules by which it knows how to run the computations.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. What Turing did that was brilliant was he made this very, very simple. He basically had a small set of states and a start state, some halt states, and then a set of transition rules. And in fact. So when I said that Markov chains are computationally universal, you can effectively model Turing's machines with a subset of Markov chains. So they include Turing's notion of computation as a subset of. Of the possible Markov chains. So it's now the notion that you were bringing up are very, very important physical notions about energy and time and the effort that's required for certain computations. But that will be now a headset specific aspect of the computation as Seen through a headset.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, but remember, we're trying to get to you. We're trying to figure out how you define you. And what I'm saying is the computation is necessary to have any intelligible sense of you that people will understand. I think part of the reason that people find this conversation interesting is it's dealing with death. And so, hey, if I'm in a computational universe, maybe I can transcend this. Maybe there's a way for me to get out of the matrix. Maybe there's a way for me to skip around to my code and be young again or whatever. I have a whole story that one day I will tell you about a guy that is obsessed with figuring out if you can flip the database entry for him, it's on his wife from zero, which means dead to one for alive.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I think this is all what haunts people and. Or what makes this conversation so interesting.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And where I always terminate is that there is no getting out of the quote unquote matrix because at some point you have to accept, computational or not, we are biological creatures. And I can completely disrupt who you think you are with chemicals. So imagine what I can do with a chemical that can make your ego feel like it's dissolving. Now, imagine how startling it would be to not even be computational in nature anymore. You're just one with the consciousness. Like that would be. So it wouldn't be you. Like, part of what makes you you is that you're scared of spiders or that you love ketchup or, you know, whatever, all of that is gone. And so what would it even mean to say you at that point? Okay, and that's where it's like, I want to start drawing distinctions. One, because I think it makes the. The setup of what this is, what's possible, what's not possible. We can actually have the conversation. But then it also brings up the sort of finiteness of the you factor. So, for instance, some people will find great relief from death anxiety at uploading their consciousness. But once they really think about it, they'll realize they have no experiential connection with that duplication. So it would be the exact same as cloning you, but you can't experience the clone. The clone's going to go do its thing and be its own separate entity that has literally nothing to do with you other than from a starting point, you guys are identical. And so that's where I want to really ground this.

[Donald Hoffman]

Very good. That. Great points. So I, I would say a couple things. I'LL put something out there that's sort of stunning to start off with. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and I will, I will claim that I have no neurons unless they're observed. The rendering thing that you were talking about before. So my body.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let me, let me stress test that. I would say that you don't believe you have no neurons. I think what you really mean is they are encoded, they're just not running. So the computation to make them turn an input into an output is dormant.

[Donald Hoffman]

And so there we might disagree because I'm actually saying like retinal ganglion cells, that's the kind of neuron that's in me. Retinal ganglion cells do not exist unless they're perceived. They literally do not exist. There is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let me try one more time. Okay. When you think of computer code and that code turns into a character, Right. I will agree that we're simulating eyeballs or we're simulating vision, we're simulating sound. And so you could certainly say that the eyes, they're not real at all ever. But what I'm getting at is are you saying that those never exist? So those cells never, never exist and they are merely a simulated thing?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's. That's right. They. If some neuroscientist looked inside my brain with some kind of correct apparatus, they would see neurons.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Donald Hoffman]

And that would be their perception. Those neurons would exist only in their perception. And they were actually never my neurons. So. So I'm literally saying the render is really a render and nothing is there. So the chemical, we talk about chemicals in space and time and so forth, neurons, I'm saying those absolutely do not exist except in the instant of a render. So if a neuroscientist opens a brain and looks, then that neuroscientist has neural experiences and that's all that neurons are do you're actually dealing with is something much different than neurons.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But is the non visual mathematics of the neurons firing still running? And that's what makes you, you and it's just the visual layer that fails to render. Or are you saying that the, the thing we call Donald Hoffman is entirely a broadcast signal that is received and that's what animates you?

[Donald Hoffman]

I would say that that Hoffman is a particular rendering program that other people can see and that I experience and that I'm not. Fundamentally, I don't. Most of us identify with our bodies and with the things that are going through our head. But if you start a meditation process, for example, and you Start to just go into silence and you just start to look at your emotions and you look at all the things that are so important to you and you look and you find that you can just sort of step back and say, well, I thought that that was me. I thought that the love of doing this particular thing, which I still love, was me. Well, no, I can step back and I can look at that and say, that is something I could do or not do. But I am not that. I transcend that. So when you actually spend time just looking at yourself, all the things that you think are you, you can step back and say, no, I am more like the silence that's looking at all this stuff. I'm looking at my love of basketball, I'm looking at my love of eating whatever it is I like to eat some pancakes or something like that. I can look at all the things that I think are, or I'm an entrepreneur and this is really, really important to me. That's who I am. I can look at that. And so you know what I did that I can walk away from it. That's not who I am. So there is a sense in which when you go into complete silence and just watch all the emotions, watch all the thoughts and watch other people's emotions and thoughts, you realize, yeah, we're sort of lost in the game. That's not you, that's you lost in the game. And I can step back and just say, okay, well how is the game rendered? How am I getting sucked in? I'm not a little thing trapped in the game. I am capable of stepping back, looking at the whole game disidentifying. So for me, being a professor, doing all the academic stuff, very, very important, getting papers published, I can look back at that and go, well, you know what? I did that. That's not me. It was important to me. I thought it was me for a long time. I identified with it. My whole personal identity was tied up with it. But you know what? At one point I was tied up with toys in the sandbox as a 5 year old. And if someone stole my toy, I fell apart. I was destroyed because someone stole my toy. But now I can step back and go, oh no, that was just that rendering of me. And you know, I went through that render and I can step back. So even my most advanced scientific stuff that I want to do, that's not me, that's just me playing in a sandbox with some toys. And so I can always step back. So my idea is really we transcend this. So Much that we can actually, we're smart enough that we can actually figure out the code that's rendering us and what we thought is ourselves in this thing. We can actually render that code. And if we do that, I mean, here's the proof, right? I'm claiming an empirical thing. We will be able to understand the first layer of software outside of space time. We will be able to build space time, we will be able to build models that work completely inside spacetime. And once we know how to do that, we will have technologies that will look like magic. We will not be bound by the speed of light, we will not be bound by the rules of the game, because we now understand the software behind the game. We're no longer the players in the game. We transcend the game. So I'm claiming Tom transcends spacetime. Whatever Tom is, is not stuck in this body, is not stuck in the entrepreneur game at all. Tom transcends that completely. But for some reason, this one consciousness chooses to go in with both feet, go into the avatar, get lost, completely identify with the kid and the 5 year old in the sandbox and the toys, and really cry when someone steals my toys, really cry when my paper doesn't get published, really cry when someone dies, really. So I really, I'm in the game, but then I can step back and go, wow, that was a perspective on the deeper me, whatever I am. I'm really glad I spent 70, 80, 90 years as Tom Bilyeu. But now I'm stepping out. That was a great ride.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think you'll have memories of that?

[Donald Hoffman]

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to have the memories and look at them. Just like I have a memory of being a five year old crying because someone stole my toy in the sandbox.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What is the mechanism by which memories are formed?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, of course, inside space time we would talk about synaptic connections and so forth. So in the headset we would use that kind of thing in neuroscience, in the Markov chain model that I am working on, it would be in the memory of the transition probabilities of these matrices.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But how would you store that memory? If I have a Ferrari and then I completely disassemble it and I make a blender and if I go to the blender and I say that blender is a dope car, right? The people be like, that's nonsensical. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, but it's the same parts from the Ferrari. And then people be like, sure, but it doesn't drive. And so the thought that those are the same thing, like, not really. So for me, the one consciousness just is completely unrelated to these. You're going to hate this language, these skin suits that it wears inside of the headset. And you may have an image of the one consciousness that is so radically different than what I'm imagining, that we'll just never be able to really have the same conversation. But to me it, we are our biology. And so the second you tell me I transcend my biology, I'm like, oh, it's not me. And while I agree with you on all of the, like, we'll be able to do things that are magical. But for instance, if I went in and gave myself, you know, 190 IQ, I'm not me anymore because I'm not a guy with 190 IQ. And so the second I begin interfacing with the world in that fundamentally different way, my personality would just be fundamentally different. And so would there be remnants? Would there be things that I recognize or somebody else recognizes? Maybe there might be overlap. But it's like that stuff, if I'm a mosquito, I'm not me. Like, it's just the way that data is processed is so fundamentally different. So that's where I'm like, I don't think you remains a coherent statement. In the same way that you say below the Planck scale, spacetime is just incoherent. I would say the concept of you is incoherent outside of the headset.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, I think that's a, an interesting and reasonable point of view. I would just say that if you look back at your life, the five year old Tom, five year old Don, had what they thought they were, things that were very, very important to them. That if you said, look, you take these toys away from me, take my sandbox away from me, you've destroyed my world and what else is there?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have you ever met anybody with Alzheimer's disease?

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think of them as the same person?

[Donald Hoffman]

I, I think of them as someone who's had their headset destroyed and they're not able to, to use this particular headset.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the headset version though, do you think of them as the same headset version?

[Donald Hoffman]

No, but then I don't. So I agree they're not the same. But I also would would say that whoever they are transcends their body and their Alzheimer's, just like you and I transcend our 5 year old and our 10 year old and our 15 year old versions of ourselves. All of those when I was 15, there were things that were very important to me at 15 that are just not important to me now. Things that I would say were absolutely essential, that I'd now smile and say, well, yes, when you were 15, that was important. That was absolutely essential. It's not now, it's not important at all. And so the things that I currently think are very important as an adult. I now think, now I've arrived. No, I've not arrived. This is just another step along the way. This is the one consciousness looking at itself from an infinite number of perspectives. I think that's what's really going on. There is one consciousness, it transcends anything. So it just looks at itself from an infinite number of perspectives and goes, oh, let me really look at myself as a five year old Don in the sandbox. Oh, now let me look as a 15 year old Tom doing a teenage thing and let me look at myself in all these different ways and enjoy that, get lost in it and then wake up and go, oh, I did that. I'm glad I did that. I learned a little bit about me, my transcendence effectively by doing all those different things. So I would put it this way, Tom, the way I look at right now is right now, Tom and Don, there's really just one consciousness through two different avatars. There's a Tom avatar and a Dawn avatar that are talking and they're two different perspectives that the one is taking. And it's enjoying the process of looking at itself through a Tom lens and a Don lens, playing with those perspectives. And at some point it will say, no, I've done that enough, now I'll do something else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's it for part one. Make sure you are subscribed so you do not miss part two. Coming up soon.