Is Reality Real? - New Science On How The Universe & Consciousness Aren't Real | Donald Hoffman PT 2 (Fan Fav)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode: Is Reality Real? - New Science On How The Universe & Consciousness Aren't Real | Donald Hoffman PT 2 (Fan Fav)
Release Date: January 1, 2026
Guest: Dr. Donald Hoffman, Cognitive Scientist
Main Theme: The fundamental nature of reality, the primacy (or not) of consciousness, and whether space, time, and physicality are illusions—a probing, mathematical and philosophical discussion about the “simulation” hypothesis.

---

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu and cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman delve into the nature of reality, discussing whether consciousness is the fundamental substance of the universe, or if we live inside a simulation with its own rule set. Hoffman brings forward his mathematical approach to "interface theory," challenging the traditional understanding that physical objects and space-time are fundamental, suggesting instead that consciousness may give rise to our experience of physical reality. The episode oscillates between technical explanations, wild philosophical questions, and grounded personal doubts, exploring Godel’s incompleteness theorem, the persistence of objects, the problem of free will, and how mathematics can (or can’t) point to ultimate reality.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Simulation, Consciousness, and Space-Time

• Tom Bilyeu opens by summarizing Hoffman's theory: we’re living in a simulation; consciousness, not matter, is fundamental; space-time is a derived illusion.
• Quote:

  “Donald believes we're all living in a simulation for real…that consciousness is the fundamental element of nature. And Einstein's idea of space-time is an illusion that arises from the simulation.” – Tom Bilyeu [00:33]

2. Can We Kick the "God Problem" Down the Road?

• Tom shares his intuition: maybe we just exist in someone else’s simulation, and you still need a “god-like” or external creator, pushing the dilemmas of consciousness and origins further down the chain.
• He likens the creation of our universe to programming in Unreal Engine—using pre-made physics assets to get a “working” simulation.
• "It could be that there...I exist in somebody else's simulation that exists in the real world...but space time being born of a 13 year old just trying to...you could literally go to the Unreal Engine Store and be like, give me Einstein's physics, right?” – Tom Bilyeu [02:04]

3. Why Pursue Consciousness as Fundamental?

• Hoffman: He’s not confident, but it’s his leading hypothesis—driven by a desire to account for conscious experience, especially since current neuroscience can’t explain how matter leads to consciousness if spacetime isn’t fundamental.
• "It's just my leading theory." – Donald Hoffman [05:15]
• "If spacetime is doomed, that whole story of consciousness is out the window." – Donald Hoffman [06:12]

4. If Space-Time is Doomed, Physicality is Too

• If local realism is false (per quantum theory), then physicality isn’t fundamental—nothing “physical” exists unperceived, so neurons or particles don’t ontologically exist when nobody’s observing.
• "I don't have neurons right now. If you looked inside my skull, you would see neurons, you would render them. But there are no neurons, right? So neurons do not exist when they're not perceived." – Donald Hoffman [06:47]

5. The Problem of Processing and Qualia

• Tom struggles: for subjective experience (qualia) to occur, there must be “processing” going on.
• Hoffman affirms this “processing” isn’t necessarily computational or physical: Markovian dynamics can be non-computational (e.g., the Halting Problem).
• Quote:

  "Do you have an example of something that...that's non computational?" – Tom Bilyeu [10:41]
  "Well, so...the halting problem...there's no algorithm that will tell you whether a particular Turing machine will halt or not on any particular...inputs." – Donald Hoffman [13:47]

6. Persistence: The Moon Still Exists Even When Unobserved?

• Tom: For realism, the moon (or any object) must persist for all observers, even if not perceived. This “persistence” is a baseline requirement for any convincing simulation model.
• Hoffman: Agrees that interfaces must yield consistent experiences (for shared reality), but questions if persistence is always necessary for all types of conscious entities (e.g., E. coli may have much simpler “interfaces”).
• Quote:

  "Every time I look at the moon, it's going to be the same. Every time you look at the moon, it's going to be the same..." – Tom Bilyeu [18:21]

7. Actions, Free Will, and Life as Cycling Through Qualia

• Tom pushes: In Hoffman’s consciousness-first model, does it feel like our lives and desires (wanting food, sleep, love) are just consequences of cycling through possible qualia?
• Hoffman: It's complicated; he sees free will as potentially “scale-free”—every level of consciousness (from parts to the whole) may express genuine choice, not dictated top-down.
• Quote:

  "...a mathematically consistent notion of free will that doesn't say either or, but both..." – Donald Hoffman [34:03]

8. God, the One, and the Problem of Uniqueness

• Both probe whether Hoffman’s mathematics uniquely require a universal consciousness (“the One”), or if it’s just one hypothesis. Hoffman admits the data don’t require it, but his model unexpectedly suggests it.
• Quote:

  "The mathematics, I wasn't intending it, but the mathematics points to a single major consciousness that I can never describe." – Donald Hoffman [36:37]

9. On the Form of Consciousness and the Role of Mathematics

• Tom attempts to pin down whether math is prior to consciousness or vice-versa.
• Hoffman maintains that there are infinite ways consciousness can express itself (“make headsets”), and that rules can emerge from the “Markovian dynamics” he models mathematically. The math can construct specific experiences (headsets) from vast conscious dynamics.

10. Death, the Headset, and the Afterlife

• Tom asks Hoffman whether he’d prefer to stay in the Matrix with knowledge or rejoin the One (consciousness) after “taking off the headset.”
• Hoffman: Intellectually open to the idea that consciousness persists beyond death; emotionally still attached to his “avatar,” and admits human fear of death is evolutionarily hardwired.
• Quote:

  "At death we take off the headset and maybe we lose a lot of stuff that was in the headset, but we don't, but we're still aware...we're just not tacked into the headset anymore." – Donald Hoffman [50:14]

11. Mathematics as a Guide and the “Grounding” of the Theory

• Hoffman’s latest paper (publishing June 24, 2026) attempts to mathematically map properties of consciousness (as Markovian dynamics) to physical properties (mass, spin) in particle physics—making specific, testable predictions.
• Quote:

  “We’re showing how specific properties of the Markovian dynamics of conscious agents map to specific properties of particles like mass, spin, momentum and energy...mass is the entropy rate of recurrent communicating classes of conscious agents.” – Donald Hoffman [59:49]

12. Time’s Arrow and Evolution as Interface Artifact

• Hoffman explains that time's arrow and resource competition are artifacts of the interface; Markovian dynamics of consciousness don't require an arrow of time, and our sense of causality emerges from information loss in projection, not fundamental reality.
• Quote:

  "That limited resource of time is not an insight into reality. That's an artifact of projection from a timeless conscious agent dynamics." – Donald Hoffman [67:11]

13. Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and Psychedelics

• Tom presses about whether NDEs and psychedelic experiences can be regarded as glimpses “outside” the headset.
• Hoffman: If space-time is not fundamental, NDEs might reflect genuine contact with a larger conscious reality—but data must be approached with rigor and skepticism.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Difference Between Intellectual and Emotional Understanding:

  "Intellectually I'm open to that point of view. Emotionally I fear death. So even though intellectually it seems quite reasonable, I have the Darwinian fear of death that's wired into me..." – Donald Hoffman [50:14]

• On the Limits of Mathematics and Ultimate Reality:

  "Ultimately, the reason why I said I'm in deep waters is because I know that ultimately I can't answer you...the one agent...transcends any mathematical description." – Donald Hoffman [35:18]

• On Scientific Humility:

  "I hope anybody listening to this understands how the scientific method works...you shouldn't hold yourself accountable to always being right. You should hold yourself accountable to always learning and getting a little bit better." – Tom Bilyeu [62:57]

• On the Value of Thought Experiments and Math:

  "Why we do science the way we do it, with mathematical precision...because for two reasons, if our ideas are good, we probably don't understand all their implications...The math will come back and it'll be our teacher." – Donald Hoffman [71:42]

• On the Limits of Experience and Imagination:

  "If I ask you to imagine a new color that you've never seen before, you can't do it...so, in the headset, we get all these hints of realms of qualia utterly outside anything that I can concretely imagine." – Donald Hoffman [76:11]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Main intro, simulation hypothesis recap: [00:33]
• Consciousness vs. mathematical rule set: [02:03 – 05:16]
• Non-physical processes, Turing’s Halting Problem explanation: [10:46 – 14:13]
• Persistence in simulation (Moon thought experiment): [15:44 – 18:50]
• Free will and Markovian dynamics: [31:43 – 36:37]
• Mapping consciousness dynamics to particle physics: [59:38 – 62:57]
• The arrow of time as an artifact of interface: [67:11 – 76:11]
• Discussion on NDEs and the scientific method: [77:21 – 82:40]

---

Additional Resources

• Follow Donald Hoffman: Twitter @DonaldDHoffman
• Paper release announcement: Coming June 24 (watch Donald’s Twitter)
• Google Scholar: For Hoffman's publications

---

Summary Tone

The conversation is intellectually adventurous, candid about philosophical and scientific uncertainty (“deep waters”), rigorous about the need for precision, and both open and skeptical about bold, speculative claims. Both Tom and Donald oscillate between technical explanatory modes and accessible metaphors (video game programming, user headsets, Twitterverse) to explore heady subjects.

---

For newcomers:
This episode is a dive into the outer edges of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, using the language of mathematics, computation, and simulation to question whether reality itself is just an interface atop a vast, perhaps “conscious,” unknown. Whether you agree or not, you’ll walk away with your intuitions about physical reality and consciousness fundamentally challenged.

Transcript

[Donald Hoffman]

Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car. See so many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory. And check out the financing options payments to fit our budget. I mean, that's Clickonomics101. Delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip and a click away. And what? No better feeling than when everything just clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Welcome back for part two with the mind bending cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. If you heard part one, you already know. Donald believes we're all living in a simulation for real. A straight up video game. He believes he can prove all of this with mathematics. His belief is that consciousness is the fundamental element of nature. And Einstein's idea of space time is. Is an illusion that arises from the simulation. He believes that the mind creates the body, not the other way around. Every time I talk to Donald, he blows me away and I'm always wondering if he might actually be right. I guarantee you're going to re evaluate everything you think you know by the end of this episode. And speaking of things you know, did you know that Impact Theory has an ad free feed on Apple Podcasts? When you subscribe, not only will you get ad free versions of new episodes, but you'll also get access to curated playlists of the best of Impact Theory in categories like health, relationships, business and finance. And you'll get access to additional bonus content you won't find anywhere else. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts. All right, everybody, buckle up. It's time for part two of Donald Hoffman. I'm your host, Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. So I'm just trying to understand. So the thing that I, that I'm sort of debating in my own head is, okay, when I grant you that consciousness is fundamental, then there's all this internal logic to the space time continuum that I know and love.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I don't know that it's the only way for me to apply the sort of same rationale that you use of whether it's Markovian dynamics. Godel's incompleteness theorem is probably the more important because that's the one that really helps me understand AI and what AI is doing. So I'm wondering, okay, if I for a second say you have touched on something that's really important, which is that space time is the simulation, but I don't need to draw the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental thing. That just becomes a debate about whether consciousness can emerge or not. It could be that there and this feels More right to me when I try to imagine it. But I fully admit what I'm about to say simply pushes God farther down, it kicks the can. So what feels intuitive to me because it's. What I'm doing is that I exist in somebody else's simulation that exists in the real world. And that person, they still need God or something. I have not in any way, shape or form explained that I've kicked the can. But then all the sort of. There's a set of rules, they seem like they're a little too perfect, they're a little too finely tuned. You've got the Fermi paradox, which I'll probably ask you about later. Like all these things are like, nah, this is a little sus. The way that this whole space time is trying to hang together just doesn't really quite complete the circle. Including the. So much of the energy that makes the universe work is this dark stuff. Duh, don't worry about that. Feels like a 13 year old programmer hand waving it away, telling the teacher, like I, I just needed something in order to, you know, make all of this work. And when I do that, everything also falls into place where I'm like, oh, wow, okay. So I get how they're rendering all this in real time using the same principles that I'm now seeing AI use pulling things out of the possibility space. Because as somebody developing a video game, I will just tell you the hardest thing is creating the art assets. So they need something that can render this stuff on the fly and, and creating the art assets that look good but are also optimized for the rendering engine because the rendering engine just gobbles resources. So it's like when I take that view and instead of going there's this magical thing called consciousness, I'm like, I'm still dealing with God. There's a God somewhere doing something, whatever. There's a thing I don't understand, but space time being born of a 13 year old just trying to like, you could literally go to the Unreal Engine Store and be like, give me Einstein's physics, right? And you plunk them in and it would work. He wouldn't even have to know how to program it. He just took it. Well, you know, whatever. Give me what they understood in 2023 and I was dropping in, right? You know, we'll see what happens. Like that still works. Exactly.

[Donald Hoffman]

I agree.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What is it that gives you the confidence that the thing that is giving birth to all of this is consciousness itself?

[Donald Hoffman]

Oh, I'm not confident at all. So Everything.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it your leading theory?

[Donald Hoffman]

It's just my leading theory.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why is it your leading the first.

[Donald Hoffman]

I would agree with you that we could just say that there are some kind of dynamical entities outside of spacetime and be agnostic about the nature of those entities. Just write down their dynamics and then show how it projects into spacetime and we could be good. Absolutely. The reason I'm going after consciousness is two things, very personal. First, we all have headaches and we have conscious experiences, and so we want to understand what consciousness is. Right? And the standard view right now among my colleagues in the neurosciences is that consciousness is something that's created by brain activity or embodied brains, or perhaps, if we're lucky, AIs and so forth. But physics is fundamental, physical stuff is fundamental, and consciousness is a late comer. If space time is doomed, if space time is not fundamental, that whole story of consciousness is out the window.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Is it?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is. Does physicality go out the window? Let me see if I can answer my own question using your words to see if I understand this. Is physicality out the window if space time is doomed? You would say yes, because local realism is proven that it isn't. There is no local realism that all of this is fake. Everything you see and experience, it's all just rendered in real time as you engage with it. Therefore, at least in what we experience. Because local realism isn't true. Physicality cannot be true.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's. That's right. To put it very simply, I don't have neurons right now. If you looked inside my skull, you would see neurons, you would render them. But there are no neurons, right? So neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. So neurons couldn't create consciousness because they're not even there to do it. And nor could particles. You know, particles don't exist when they're not perceived.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's where limited minds like mine get tripped up. Because your analogy is so profound and feels so right. And for this to be a simulation, I say to myself, something has to be running the simulation. And I can't get myself outside of that. Something, somewhere is going to be physical.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's a hard one for me too, by the way. I have all the same knee jerk emotional reactions that everybody else has to this stuff even stronger. So maybe that's why it's good for someone like me to be doing this. Because, you know, I don't. My emotions don't believe any of this. They don't believe it at all. It's literally only the mathematics pushing me, kicking and Screaming at each step to. So I. You have to go with mathematics and what. What the theories are saying. But I don't find it that intuitive. Maybe I will at some point, but I don't find it that intuitive. So. So yeah, you could say, you know, we don't need to talk about consciousness. There's just some dynamical entities outside of space time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But can't consciousness be a part of the simulation?

[Donald Hoffman]

It may. No. For all I know, it may be. So maybe this thing that I called awareness, where this prior to any particular conscious experiences. Now there I'm completely in over my head. I have no idea what to say about that thing. Right. I literally have nothing intelligent to say.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What if awareness is just the qualia of being rendered of your process being run by the central computer?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's as good an idea as I've ever had. But. But I don't feel very confident in this area at all. I mean, the closest we can personally get is the kind of thing I suggested, you know, go into a quiet room, turn off the light, let go of that. Which is not easy, let go of everything and try to just be aware of awareness. Be aware of being aware and try to sit there with that. And what you find is it's a profound experience. The more you just sit there. Being aware of awareness without thinking about. You're not. See, the whole point about not thinking is thinking. You're back into this small computational realm. You're back into this really tiny. Out of all the infinities, you're. You're back in this little tiny infinity. So letting go. So this is not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, we know the headset is computation though, right?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, we don't know for sure. Our current models are. But.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But we have proven local realism not being real mean that it has to be computational.

[Donald Hoffman]

No, it doesn't entail. I mean, so it doesn't entail that at all. No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now I'm broken again, how to make sense of that.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So how can anything. This is interesting. Here's my base where I realize I don't know how to escape this. I feel like for qualia to exist, it must be processed. I will even grant that the processing is simply the Markovial dynamics of. Markovian dynamics of moving from one to thing to another, the switching of states, fine. But it, it is moving from one state to another, which I will call that processing.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right? Yeah, it's just not a physical process. It's. It's. It's go. And it doesn't have to be a computational process even. It could be functions that are not computational.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So I try not to kill the audience with the things I just can't run.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, it hurts me too. I'm telling you these things, but not because it's easy for me. My, My head hurts too, thinking about these.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you have an example of something that. That's non computational? I think you gave one earlier, but I forget.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so the, the standard story that you. If you take a computer science class and study the theory of computation, they'll tell you about something called the halting problems. So this is like one of the big problems that. And Turing, I believe, posed it and, and, and showed that it was not computational. The question is this. If you. A Turing machine is like a, A universal. Turing machine is like a universal computer. You can give it a program. Turing thought about putting a tape with some punches on it, essentially. So you have this tape reader, and the Turing machine would look at one square on the tape and read that symbol, and then it would change state and then move left or right and write a symbol. And that's all the universal Turing machine could do. And so the question that Turing asked was, suppose we ask the question, will the Turing machine stop after a finite number of moves? Will it halt on arbitrary sets of these tapes that you're giving it programs? That's called the halting problem. The question is, is there a Turing machine that can decide. So is there an algorithm that can decide whether this Turing machine will halt or not for any particular given input?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So can you tell the Turing machine to stop? Is that the.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, no. So I should say one more thing about Turing machines. So a Turing machine is going back and forth and changing its state. And when it's done, when it actually is like computed the square of a number or whatever it is that it's doing, it halts. It goes into what's called a halt statement. So when it goes into a halt state, that means it's done. It did the computation. But there are some computations that go on arbitrarily long.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, I don't understand why you.

[Donald Hoffman]

They. You never come to the end. You. You never come to the end of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's some sort of recursive loop in it.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah, that's right. Nature, in fact, probably most. So the question is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So when you say non computational, you mean something that ends up in that loop.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah, where you. Where. The Turing machine never halts.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You give it an input, never thinks.

[Donald Hoffman]

It'S done, and it never thinks it's done. That's. That's so the halting problem, most things are like that. Yeah, I would guess that. Yeah, most tapes are probably. You wouldn't halt would be my guess. But. But that's. That's not an important point here. I think that's the case, but it's not a central point. The fact is that many won't halt. And so the. So the question that Turing raised was something like this. So is there a Turing machine that can tell you if it says, give me. Given this Turing machine and all these inputs, whether this Turing machine, which. On which one of these inputs will it halt? Okay. And it turns out that. That there's no Turing machine that can do that. So it's not a computer Turing machine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That will know which one is going to halt, that.

[Donald Hoffman]

There's no Turing machine that can tell you that whether this other Turing machine will halt or not on all these inputs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. So it can never understand it without running the calculation itself.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, and. And the Turing machine itself would never halt. The one that was trying to do this would never halt. So it's called the halting problem. And, and. And it's. It's. So when you take a computer science class, you'll get a much better explanation than I've just given you, but basically it's. It. You'll see that there's no algorithm that will tell you whether a particular Turing machine will halt or not on any particular. Any possible inputs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is. So when somebody says it's touring complete, does it mean that it halts appropriately, or is that something else entirely?

[Donald Hoffman]

That's something else entirely. Got it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. That's. That's crazy. Persistence.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So this is, I think. I think a key part of my thesis, which is persistence is the hard problem for AI right now. And when I look at the thing that holds AI back from being something that people can implement into their workflows today, it's because it can give you really amazing stuff, but it cannot give you really amazing stuff over and over from different angles and different setups. People are working on it. And by the time this comes out, I'm sure it'll be even better. And a year from now, it'll be a solved problem. But that feels like part of the rule set that you need inside of the headset is to create this sense of persistence. So I wonder if, again, going back to the idea of the headset becomes necessary because you have to create persistence in order for the qualia to be explored. You have to have that. Do you agree with that sense of persistence being a necessary tool of consciousness to explore qualia.

[Donald Hoffman]

First I'll just say, I think a concrete example of the persistence is like I look up at the moon and then I look away and I say, is the moon still there? And you look up and you say, oh yeah, the moon is still there. And then you look away and I look. And so every time I look back, I still see the moon where I expect to see it. That's what we mean by persistence here. And I don't think that we need to have that kind of persistence to have a headset. I think we do. We have that. But, for example, there's E. Coli bacteria. The way I understand what I've read is that it swims along and there's some amino acid or something that is eating. And as long as there's a good gradient of that thing, it keeps going in the direction it's going and eating the stuff. But if things start going south and it's not getting the amino acid or whatever it is it's eating, it's. It's this flagellum that is using to. To move forward. It turns it in the other direction. It. Which makes it. It's like a random turn. So it just rotates the other way and that gives it like a random new. So it's like a random orientation generator. It orients is a completely new generation new direction. And then it starts going. And if it's good, then it goes. And so that's a search mech. It's a very stupid. But it works for the E. Coli. Now does it have. Would. Does E Coli necessarily have persistence? I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. 100.

[Donald Hoffman]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Must.

[Donald Hoffman]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So right before we started rolling, I had the very good fortune of introducing you to another one of my favorite people, Eric Weinstein. And one of the things that he said to you was that you said, I don't have neurons. And he was like, what? And he had earlier made a statement that you couldn't because you had never met him before. There's no way for you to render him upon entrance because he remained consistent to himself, to me. And that's what I mean by persistence. So if I look at E. Coli, let's say I'm the first person to discover it, it will look a certain way. If somebody else, without knowing I discovered it, also discovers it, it will look the same way. If a person.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, I agree with you on that. My question was different from E. Coli's perspective. I was thinking through the headset of E. So E. Coli has its own headset and I'm just wondering for E. Coli. See, it may not need to have this persistence notion, because all it needs to know I'm happy I'm eating.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow. So this is the importance of defining terms. So what I mean by persistence is that you will look the same. So when you look up at the moon and then look away and it gets trash binned in your headset, and then you ask me, is it still there? And I look up and I'm like, yeah, it's still there. Every time I look at the moon, it's going to be the same. Every time you look at the moon, it's going to be the same. And if somebody were to take a photo of that, we would both recognize that photo as being accurate.

[Donald Hoffman]

No, I completely agree with all that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If I'm building out a simulation, I don't go, here is marker for moon represented differently to you, but consistently represented differently for me, but consistently, I go, make the moon persistent. The moon will always look like this. And that way, no matter who discovers it, they would describe it the same. They would see it the same. Like, rather than me have to be like, oh, you're calling it red. And I have to remember that red is different for this guy. And so it's like, how do you know that red is the same? If this is all simulation, it's obviously the same because otherwise you would have to like, program the shit like a thousand different ways. Now you may experience like additional layer of sentiment about a thing that makes the qualia different. And this sort of gets into your hierarchies of infinity. That fine. But going back to neurons, if I smash somebody's head a million years ago, maybe that's too far because the brain's changed. A hundred thousand years ago, neurons would look the same. Even though I don't know what they are. I'm just like, that's when you smash ahead. This is what you see. If I smash that same head today, I'm going to see the same thing. Because even if this is all a simulation, there is a level of persistence.

[Donald Hoffman]

And I completely agree with you on that. I was just raising the question, could we come up with a game that was so simple, it was so trivial, that in some sense persistence was irrelevant? I mean, you either are told bad or good. That's all you're told, bad or good, and you do something random when temperatures drop.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Your wardrobe either works or it doesn't. Doesn't. Premium materials aren't just about luxury. They're functional requirements. Mongolian cashmere, Italian leather, wool Coats that actually keep you warm. That's performance gear. I ordered a Mongolian cashmere sweater from Quince as a gift last month. When it arrived, I was very impressed. Super soft, high quality. Exactly what you'd expect from luxury cashmere, except it was $50 instead of $400. Quince cuts out the middlemen and traditional markups. No department stores, no luxury retail overhead. Same factories producing for high end brands. Same materials, same rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. They just deliver it direct. Their winter lineup has everything you need. Mongolian cashmere sweaters, wool coats, down jackets. Italian leather and suede outerwear built to hold up season after season. Classic styles that don't fall apart after one winter. Plus free shipping on every order, 365 day returns and zero risk. Refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.comimpactpod for free shipping on your order. Plus that 365 day return policy now available in Canada too. That's Quince Q U I n c e.com impact pod, free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/impact pod.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's what I'm saying because you're talking now about behavior. Okay. Which.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if, if we're in agreement on persistence.

[Donald Hoffman]

I agree on the persistence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The. Just to say it another way, the simulation is a set of rules, descriptions, assets, like art assets for just an easy way to explain it. And so there's going to be uniformity across everything that uses the headset. They're all going to be the same so I don't have to like create all these individual things.

[Donald Hoffman]

I agree. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Then you have a very separate notion which is the behaviors. We were talking about this earlier. This still really. I don't know how to understand it in your paper and it's probably a good time to now get into the paper. So the paper felt like as a layperson who's interacted with you in an interview format but never having I had your book but again that was more inviting people into popular science. Whereas the paper was like deep mathematics. Felt like a step forward in your guys's certainty of at least how to explain what you think. But one of the ideas in the paper is this action potential. I don't, I can't remember if that's how you described it but. So I want to go back to this idea of the. And this is where I sort of started thinking this makes more sense to me as a 13 year old programming set of rules than it does consciousness giving birth to a set of limitations in order to experience qualia. Because then every computation has to be about qualia, which I may have said earlier, but I want to. I want to say something that I think you actually state in the paper.

[Donald Hoffman]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If this really is consciousness is the fundamental layer, and all consciousness is trying to do is run the girdle's incompleteness serum against all of the qualia that it could experience, and that the headset and our biological experience, which is really just the thing inside the headset, are simply constraints for it to express qualia. All math is. All math is, is. Is the representation of the different elements of qualia. So whether that's probability of given behavior, likelihood of moving from one thing to another, one state to another, that's all math is here to compute. And in the paper you touch on, I'm calling action potential. But that could be my poor memory. Yeah, I feel like I have free will. I think it's an illusion, but I feel like I have free will. But all of this qualia, if it is true that that's what's really happening, and this is just consciousness running through all the different qualia, doesn't feel like that to me. So there's some element of the simulation that makes it feel like I'm living a life and that the qualia is born out of me living a life, not born out of. I don't live a life so that I can experience qualia. But your hypothesis, I think, mandates that my life is the consequence of cycling through qualia and not the other way around. And that's the Markovian dynamics of the likelihood of me going from this state to that state that dictates that that forces my life. Is that accurate?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, not quite. So there's this complicated dynamics of consciousness going on and the coin of the realm of our experiences, and that's the hypothesis. So experiences are being shared and triggered. Think like the Twitterverse, right? But what you're tweeting are experiences, and what you're receiving are experiences.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The consciousness must break into a just metric shit ton of separate entities for this to work.

[Donald Hoffman]

That. That's right. So, and so we. We're gonna have this. It's like the Twitterverse is. Is huge, millions of users and so forth. If you look at my Twitter page, right, there's only a small number of people following me and a small number that I'm following. So I'm getting a tiny picture of Twitter. I'm pre. So the. There, there's a big social network lot going on. If you look at the projection onto Hoffman's little thing. It's just a small little. And if that's all you saw, you wouldn't get a feel for everything that's going on in Twitterverse because I have very specific interests. You'd think that everybody likes consciousness and mathematics and is a geek and they're not. So you'd get the wrong picture about what really is the Twitterverse. And so I would think that all the headsets are just projections like taking the Twitterverse onto one person's Twitter account, their projections onto, you know, a consistent. As you point out, the, the to keep persistence, you might want to have a whole group of them that, that see the same thing and, and can both agree that you all agree that there's a red Porsche or something like that in the game. So. So you could have a bunch of them that have similar projections of. Of the one bigger conscious dynamics. Oh, maybe I should just stop there and see if that's addressed to your.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Question or it has not yet. So what I'm trying to figure out is about action. So I feel like I'm living my life.

[Donald Hoffman]

Oh, am I actually making a choice?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Like what, what do you think? Does my life arise out of me taking action and having wants and desires? In fact, that's probably the base way I would predict based on how it feels that the 13 year old. Because I, I probably make that my things fit better for me if I just assume that you've got a 13 year old who pulled Einsteinian physics off the shelf to put into the program and, and they're just running it based on a set of rules, but it doesn't really matter. But we get to. Here's, here's how it feels that I was given a set of wants and desires and here's where evolution comes in. So I want to survive long enough to have kids that have kids and then everything in my life is just an echo of that. It's like a hilariously limited amount of rules that you have to give to me sort of based around how I stay alive, the desire to stay alive, what I want to quench, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, so on and so forth. And then you just let me go. And when you, when you think of like a human as, as a character in a video game has certain stats so you marry those wants and desires with those stats and then you just let them go and you see who they bump into and oh, you had childhood trauma. And so that's going to, it's going to change your stats. But it's like you just watch how all that plays out. And so you get. And I think this is why people are really going to struggle with this isn't an emergent phenomenon. Because all, like, when I think about building the game, I am just beating it into the head of the team. We want the community to create emergent phenomena that rises out of the nature of the rule set and the technologies, right? So I'm not trying to create the emergent phenomena and then hope that the technology is born of that which is basically what you're pitching, I think. And so I can get behind it when I think, oh, this is just Girdle's incompleteness theorem. So there's an infinite number of things to cycle through. And as long as I grant you that consciousness, for whatever reason, has a desire to cycle through all of that, then everything does make sense. It plugs in and it works. But then I'm like, wait. The only part of that, that then I don't know how to conceptualize because it could just be that I'm trapped in my headset and I just. I'm not thinking about it, right? But what I don't know how to conceptualize is that I am living a life. And so to your point that whatever exists outside of the headset has got to explain what's in the headset. And I am living my life. I'm not just cycling from random qualia to qualia to qualia. The qualia that I experience seem mapped so perfectly to the actions that I take, which are clearly influenced by how I feel that I get. But it manifests as I'm feeling tired, therefore I go to bed, therefore I have the experience of the softness of the sheets versus the consciousness saying to itself, I would like to cycle through the softness of sheets now. So either this is the consciousness has, like an agenda and it knows how to create the simulation in a way that's going to yield the best outcome. And so it, like, sat there like, oh, what would be the best way? Like, how it creates humans in the way that it creates humans? It creates life in the way that it creates life. It creates day, night, cycle, which already creates, like, so many limitations on us and shapes our fundamental evolution and all of that. I'm just like, do you really believe that's consciousness that set all that in motion? Or is that emergent phenomena out of a simpler thing, that consciousness? Like, if consciousness just gave birth to the laws of physics, then I'd be like, word, this all makes sense. Consciousness just becomes God fair. Enough. But if consciousness in your explanation is anything other than God, I think I'm confused.

[Donald Hoffman]

So great, great question on the free will and then the nature of the origin of this headset and is it just all pre programmed or is there room for exploration? The.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's not quite what I'm saying. What I'm saying is I know it's pre programmed because the headset which you have agreed with has a set of rules.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right? Well, yeah, that does have a. Well, a set of probabilistic rules.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. But to get there you need rules, you need rules of probability. You need at a minimum, math.

[Donald Hoffman]

Absolutely right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So something somewhere, either math is fundamental or consciousness created math as a way to create a set of rules in order to experience qualia, which. That is hard to wrap your head around, but.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So is that assumption correct? That assertion, I think is a better way. Is that assertion correct?

[Donald Hoffman]

I'm not sure. This is. These are deep waters now. So that's why I, I'm myself now having some difficult trouble. So I would say the, the free will question first. I, when I look at our mathematics, I could interpret the Markovian kernel for a given agent as representing the free will choice of that agent. I could, I could interpret it that way. And it. But if I do that, I look at all the others and it's being affected by all the other conscious agents. And you can.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So my probability space is being impacted by the other conscious agents.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. But, but you could say this is my just. My quality are being comp. But my free will is not. But, but here's the, the trick is that groups of conscious agents that satisfy certain conditions are also a conscious agent. So that means if I think about all the individual smaller agents as having free will, then this new agent also has, if I think about having free will, I would need to have a new notion of free will. That, that's really quite an interesting one. It's going to be a scale in some sense a scale free notion of free will that can go for what is a scale free notion that it be true at all scales. No matter how many conscious agents I put together to make a big conscious agent, I would still be able to talk about this agent has free will. But all of the constituents also have their own free will. My guess is that that might be able to be made to work so that the question is, you know, if I say is it only the one big consciousness that has free will and we're all puppets, or do all the little consciousnesses have Free will. The answer might be both, but there'd be this new mathematics that shows in some sense that the free will of the One is made of all the genuine free will choices of the individuals. And so it's not like an autocratic God saying you must do this. It's rather a God exploring all of its own possibilities, so to speak, freely through all of the components which are also freely interacting, but their free interactions are all part of the one freedom of the one. In other words, I think that there could be a mathematically consistent notion of free will that doesn't say either or, but both. And so we get this scale free notion. I haven't written it down yet, but that's why I'm saying that these are deep waters. And this is where we're going to have to. To answer your question, we're going to have to go after some deep mathematical theories of what we mean by, by free will. My guess is that it's possible, but. But we'll have to see that we could have genuine free will at the smaller agent level. And that's not incompatible with free will at higher levels. And even the free will of, of whatever the super. I mean, I can't even describe the, the one agent. It transcends any mathematical description. So we could never actually get this mathematical model in the final limit that I'm describing. But could we get it in smaller infinities that we can deal with and show that it works there? We can't get to Aleph infinity, but we can go maybe in smaller infinities and see if it works there and get some hint. Ultimately, the reason why I said I'm in deep waters is because I know that ultimately I can't answer you. Ultimately I can't get to a final description of the one agent. It literally, our mathematics says it transcends any description. So I have to halt and say, I can't tell you. I can only tell you about projections of that one and the. From the projections, the mathematics points to the One. But I. Our analytical tools fail us. We can't actually go there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can you walk me through how the data, how the projections point to the one and the one being like a, the one God consciousness, It's like a thing.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yes, well, again, I. That's a good question because, I mean, I'm not saying that the data we have uniquely determine this theory, right? Absolutely not. So I would say they point me, as a scientific theorist toward this hypothesis. Here I am with conscious experiences interacting with others that I think have conscious Experiences, my physicalist framework can't explain them at all. And so I'm proposing that there are these conscious experiences that give rise to spacetime as a interface. And when I write down the most simple mathematical model that I can do for that, all of a sudden that mathematics, I wasn't intending it, but the mathematics points to a single major consciousness that I can never describe. So that's the sense in which I say it was sort of pointed, pointed to that. And I would guess that other conscious agents with either interfaces that are not even like our spacetime interface, but. But have mathematical skills and are looking, coming up against the limits of their own interface and starting to realize, oh, I thought this was real, but this is just the interface might, under the hypothesis the consciousness is fundamental, might run into the same thing and then get pointed by their own mathematics to, to a universal consciousness. Like. But, but again, this is, these are deep waters and I'm not secure here at all. But I would say that the free will, I mean I've, I've have good discussions like with Annika Harris and so forth about, about free will. And free will is a standardly understood, probably not, but free will in this new sense in which I'm saying that there could be a scale free notion and a new mathematical model of free will to scale free. Quite possibly there. And to your point about it's not dictated, there's exploration, real exploration going on. I would again agree that there's real. To the extent that I'm talking about all these little agents having their genuine free will, there's genuine real exploration going on, even though it's not contradiction to say as well that the one has, has the free will. See, in other words, in some cases when we think about things, we think it has to be this or that, but when we look at it more closely, we realize that there's a deeper way of thinking about it in which both can be true. And we hadn't thought about it that way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so if those are deep waters, I'm going to drag you to the bottom of the Marianas Trench on this one. Does consciousness have a form?

[Donald Hoffman]

I would say awareness has no form, but assumes all sorts of conscious forms does.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm trying to sneak up on an idea here, and I'm not sure the right way to ask this, but it, like when you talk about the headset is a simulation born of the. Born of consciousness itself. It is emergent from consciousness, right? Because the headset is so specific and acts in a very specific way. And as I Think about AI and the way it pulls images forth out of the possibility space. It does it in a certain way. And you can create different kinds of AI that do it in slightly different ways and they yield different outcomes. And so for the headset that we all experience to be the way that it is, it requires consciousness to be a certain way. And so what I'm trying to get to is when there is no physicality, how does it ever become a certain way? Because the way that consciousness could act would have to pull from a probability space. But if I'm right about that, then math comes before consciousness. And if I'm wrong about that, I don't understand what sets consciousness moving in a specific direction.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, I think that there are countless ways that consciousness can, can create headsets, and it does them all. And so one thing that we have to do, to answer your question, and I'm very interested to do this, but it's going to be hard work, is to actually use the Markovian framework of conscious agents and actually write down a dynamical system of conscious agents that constructs our space time framework, our space time headset. Right. So that's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How would you. Because if there's an infinite number of potential headsets, how would you begin to narrow it down to the headset we actually have?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so what we're going to have to do is think about a really large dynamical system of conscious agents which will never be close to the big one that we really need to get to. So we'll always be starting with a system that's big for us, but trivial compared to the one. But that's all we can do as scientists. So I'll have to start with something that's big for me and then show that it has its own dynamics, which is quite complicated. Now I'm going to make a smaller headset projection of it using part of the agents that are available in it to, to create that. So there'll be maybe, maybe I'll have like a trillion agents interacting, but I arrange for dynamics of say a billion of them to be creating a particular space time headset. And then what I would do so, so I know because Markovian kernels are computationally universal, I can do that. I can use the whole language of, of conscious agent dynamics to create a projection into like a space time headset. I know that they're computationally universal, so I can do that. Now the question is, once I've got that dynamical system and I have some of the agents creating this headset, what happens when I turn that headset and have it look at the whole agent system and in particular the part of the system that creates that headset. So I'm taking a bunch of agents and their dynamics is creating a space time interface. But now I use the interface to look back at the only thing that's available, which are agents. That's all that's available to look at. But I want to look at the agents that were particularly interested that were involved in the creation of the interface. What will that set of agents look like? They'll look like neurons and brains. In other words, why would they need.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To look like neurons and brains?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, for us. For. For. That's. In other words, I'm saying, I thought.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They didn't map like that.

[Donald Hoffman]

Remember, neurons are just artifacts of the, of the interface. There are symbols in the interface.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but pulling from our earlier interviews, and so we definitely haven't talked about it this time, and maybe your thinking has changed or maybe I misunderstood your thinking previously, but it was my understanding, I think I was asking you specifically about the moon. And I was like, but there's gravitational concerns. It can't not represent something underlying. And you said, tom, you're, you're making a mistake. This is all a simulation. Gravity is a simulation. The moon is a simulation. You don't need the moon there to simulate gravity, to move tides or whatever. They can just be program rules. And that's just how it happens. And I was like, whoa. So why then would the, the things that create consciousness and thinking look like neurons in my brain? It doesn't seem like they would need to map like that.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, right. So the moon doesn't need to exist. But, but there's going to be a systematic relationship between the symbols in your headset and whatever the software is. Right? There's going to be a systematic relationship between them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that tells me. God, I'm really trying to guess how you're going to say this. That tells me, I know this is wrong because I know you don't believe in this, but that tells me that there is physicality to consciousness, that wherever it is, that there is some parallel representation, but that for there to be a physical God, am I help. I. I can keep making guesses, but I know that I'm hitting dead ends of things that you disagree with. So what am I getting wrong right now?

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah, I'm not sure yet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So keep guessing then. So, okay, what I'm trying to figure out is for the, for there to be a corollary of producing consciousness, to actually look like neurons or that. Oh, I'm hung up on the word look like. Okay, will it actually look like neurons?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, so consciousness won't look like neurons, but the. One could build, I'll put it this way, you could build an interesting interface such that when the interface looks back at the whole conscious agent network that created would see that as, as if it were neurons and brains in projection. So I'm not saying that's all projection. It's all projection. So I'm not saying it's necessary, but I'm saying I could easily see making that happen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So when we look, when we in the headset smash a brain, look at neurons, we are seeing the representation of what is going on at a deeper level. Is it outside of space time or a deeper, deeper level of the simulation?

[Donald Hoffman]

Outside of spacetime, which is a deeper level of the simulation. Right. It's, it's in. I hope we're using language the same way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Probably not, but you're much more comfortable with that. It's that, that things are not physical even outside the outside of space time. I see it as, it's a maybe different set of rules or something, but that it's still physical. But I accept that, well, there are rules.

[Donald Hoffman]

So there, there are, there are going to be rules. Maybe physical, I mean, you know, made out of matter inside space and time. That's what I mean by physical. Something that's, you know, made out of particles in space and time. Yeah. By hypothesis, the conscious agents are not inside space and time at all. So they're not physical in that sense. They are rule governed. And I can say that they exist even if I don't perceive them. I could say that they, they exist, whereas stuff in the headset is only there when I render it. So maybe we're not disagreeing. I, I, and I'm not saying it's necessary that when you look, use your headset to look at the agents that create the headset that you will necessarily see neurons. I'm saying that we could easily set up a situation or with some effort we could set up a situation in which that was the case. In other cases you might see only a single neuron. For example, if you're a very simple thing or some other structure depends on the nature of your interface. But for an interface like ours. So another way to put it is here's what I think neurons are. Neurons are our interface, looking at the conscious agents that are constructing our interface. That's what neurons are. They're the interface symbols, headset symbols that our Headset gets when it looks at the conscious agents that are constructing the headset.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I asked a variant of this question earlier, but I don't think we ever got to the answer. So if, as we make all these breakthroughs, would you stay inside the headset? If you, if you could, you, there were two paths before you. Path number one is you completely exit the headset and inside the, the game world, the simulation, you, your avatar falls over and basically appears dead. But you are now like out chilling with the consciousness or you return to the consciousness as maybe you become aware of your oneness with the consciousness. That feels like the right way to sum up the way you see it. Yes.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah, I think that that idea can't be dismissed out of hand. I think it's a very interesting idea and I don't have a better one right now. So. Yes, it feels to me like I'm not my body, my body is just an avatar. If you're in virtual reality, you do feel that? No, I would, Well, I think that I'll say that I'm very much attached to my body and if something hurt my body I would, I would be panicked and so forth. So, so I don't feel like I'm not my body absolutely. But, but when I'm, you know, thinking intellectually and coolly about things, if something actually happens to me, if I'm in a car wreck, it's a different story. But, but just thinking intellectually about it and maybe if I meditated more I would actually feel that way. But, but I don't. But just intellectually it seems, I don't know, I'll have to, I'll just leave it at that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, so I, I asked that part of it because what I'm really trying to get to is if you could return to oneness with consciousness or stay in the Matrix but be like Neo, where now you know how to bend it to your will. Would I, which, which would you prefer?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, my, my guess is at death we take off the headset and maybe we lose a lot of stuff that was in the headset, but we don't, but we're still aware. We're, but we're, we're just not tacked into the headset anymore. That's my, my best guess. And so there I am completely open to being wrong, deeply wrong. But you know, there are near death experiences that, that may or may not point to that kind of thing that, that people have. I'm going to be doing, being part of a, I'm part of A film where they discuss near death experiences. And so I talk about that possibility in the film from, from this point of view. And so if I were a physicalist, it's real clear if the brain is somehow creating consciousness, then when the brain is dead, there's no consciousness. This other view that says consciousness creates space, time and brains as just headsets has open to it that my consciousness, where I put Mayan quotes, the consciousness that's looking through this avatar does not perish when the avatar perishes. That's certainly open to this point of view. That's not what motivated the point of view, but it certainly is open to it. So intellectually I'm open to that point of view. Emotionally I fear death. So even though intellectually it seems quite reasonable, I have the Darwinian fear of death that's wired into me and that's part of the, part of the game.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So there's two buttons before you one, rejoin the consciousness and let's say for now that really is what happens. So you would maintain a sense of awareness, but all of your sense of self is gone forever. Or you stay in the matrix knowing that it's fake, knowing that you're in the headset, but you have special powers. Which button do you press?

[Donald Hoffman]

I, I would probably go for the new stuff. I would probably. Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time feels quite confining to me. I feel like we got a cheap headset and then this is a fairly cheap simulation that we're in and I would love to see what else is on offer. For example, when I'm trying to solve these, some mathematical problems, I can imagine a three dimensional shape, but I can't imagine a four dimensional shape. And we had to do some of the problems we're solving, we have to look at the geometries of things in six or nine or more dimensions. And we can't just sort of imagine it and, and figure out what's going on. We, we have to crawl our way up to the geometry by theorem proof, theorem proof. We actually have to prove our way 1. So we're like blind men filling the elephant with theorems and proofs to understand the geometry. I would love to have a headset where I could just see in a glance everything about nine dimensional space. And you can't do that with our current headset. And why stop at 9 dimensions? Why not be able to just see in 30 or a thousand or a billion dimensions?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you though think that inherent in the way that you think about that, it still requires you to Be you. Because I'll think about this a lot if you've ever seen the movie Freaky Friday. I think about this a lot with my wife. Like, I really, really want to change bodies with her for 24 hours so that she can see what it's like to be me and I can see what it's like to be her. I think I'd be a much better husband if I really understood.

[Donald Hoffman]

Probably so, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But the reality is, the second you change bodies, I would be her, right? And she would be me. There wouldn't be her as me, me as her, right? And so I. My. Even if you're right, here's what I think would happen if you. When you take off the headset, the headset is everything you think of as you. And that even if you're right, that you can meditate your way to moments like that where you're just pure awareness. One, if you're right, all that the consciousness lives to do is cycle through other qualia. So you would either be reincarnated, meaning that you would just pop back up in a new headset, because that's what the consciousness is meant to do, is cycle through all this qualia. And so you would refragment yourself, back off. You would pop up, you'd be reincarnated, you'd live life again, or you would return to the Borg, the beehive, the ant colony, however you want to think about it. You would be reinstantiated as just pure awareness. And all of that loving and clinging and hating and attachment and precious moments and distance, and all that poof, gone. And I find that when people explore these ideas from a religious perspective, they are forgetting that they're mired in the gruesome reality of the human experience. And that to transcend that and be in Heaven, for instance, and never experience pain again or whatever, you would be so different. You wouldn't recognize or relate to anybody in the same way. And so I have yet to hear any theory whatsoever other than regrowing your biological organs, where you actually end up cheating death. Everything else is you die. All of the things you love, poof, go away. Maybe you're exchanging them for something better. But make no mistake, everything goes away.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, these are deep waters again. But here's. Here's another take on it, and that is that if you and I are just the One looking at itself through avatars, the One is learning whatever it needs to learn through these avatars. And that's not lost on the One, it is now part of the One that's in some sense eternal. And so the reason I would, given the choice that you're asking me to make here, my own predilection would be to say, let's go for something entirely different now because in some sense that partly because I'm inquisitive and I would like to. What is it like to live in a five dimensional world? What is it like to have 20 dimensions of color and, and a thousand dimensions of emotion instead of just a few that we have? What, what is it like? My feeling is that we have the training wheel set version right now of this stuff. Really, really small. And, and so my guess is. I, I, one possibility is that look, you and I really are this infinite intelligence, this infinite consciousness. That's what we really are. We're peering through, in this case, very, very simple avatars with very, very simple interfaces. And maybe it's the one saying this is fun, but when I answer your question this way, maybe it's the one saying, yeah, this is great and it's fun, but, but there's so much more to explore in different dimensions. I haven't lost whatever I learned in this little interface. And I'm happy for the relationships and the friends and you know, you know, and all the things I learned about war and hate and religion and, and all that, all that other stuff, you know, all the things that go on here. But that's only a mere, in some sense trivial projection of this entire Cantor's hierarchy of infinities, of potential. This is trivial and the potential is mind bogglingly infinite. And so my attitude, let's get on with it. Nothing is lost by moving on and everything is to be gained. You can see. But again, these are very, very deep waters. I'm not talking theorem and proof here. I'm now speaking very intuitively based. The science is as it is in the very initial steps. I should be very, very clear. I mean, all of science has been about the space time interface until the last 20 years or so. We're taking our very, very first baby steps outside of space time. And so almost surely all of the ideas that we're having are going to look very naive. You know, a century or two from now they'll look back and go, yeah, great generation. They were the generation that stepped outside of the space time interface. Hats off to them, but boy, were their ideas so parochial. They were shedding the interface, but boy, they didn't really understand what they were really doing. That's my guess. All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I actually want to spend more time in the Intuitive. But is there anything from the paper, any sort of grounded mathematics that you think will ground people in your theory more in a way that will keep the intuitive exploration from just spinning off into la la land?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, yeah, so I'll just say in the paper I gave you and it'll come out on June 24, it's going to be made and I'll, I'll tweet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It when, if you made it this far in the interview, read the paper.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah, so It'll be available June 24th and I'll tweet it when it comes out. It might be a couple days before that. I would say that one, one of the interesting things we're doing in that paper is we're showing how specific properties of the Markovian dynamics of conscious agents map to specific properties of particles like mass, spin, momentum and energy. And so I'm not saying we're right, but we now have mathematically precise proposals. So, I mean, for example, these are words that won't make sense, but mass is the entropy rate of recurrent communicating classes of conscious agents.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And just to be clear, what you're saying you can predict now is particle scattering.

[Donald Hoffman]

This is going to be for particle scattering. And by the way, the reason I'm going after particle scattering is not because I have some fetish for high energy physics or something like that. That's the simplest place that we can make our first connections with the interface. Particles are the most elementary things that our interface has. That's why I'm going there. They're the simplest thing. I'm not going for brains first because those are countless quadrillions, trillions, whatever of particles. And so that's not the place to start. Let's see if we can get the mathematics and the experimental data for individual particles. So our paper is proposing, and maybe just so the people can show that we're wrong, we'll see. But we have, we say that mass is so called entropy rate of the recurrent communicating classes. And that has, that then tells us what are massless particles and what are massive particles. And so we're getting very specific predictions that we're going to be making about momentum and spin and, and energy and mass. So, so that's why. So this is where rubber hits the road, right? I'm talking all this high flu and stuff about consciousness leading to the interface. Well, the right, the right questions are, so what is the, what is the mass of an electron? What part of your conscious age of dynamics is going to map into what we call mass? What is the spin. Why is there a hyperfine structure in the energy levels of the orbitals of electrons and so forth? We're getting hints at answers to those kinds of questions about like, the hyperfine structure. So it's really quite interesting. So, so again, I would be stunned if we're right, but at least we're precise. So that we can now begin the whole process of saying, okay, at least these hypotheses are precise, so now we can show their limits, try to prove where they reach their limits, and then move on. Or to show that this is just fundamentally wrong headed, there's nothing worthwhile. Maybe our definition of mass is just plain wrong. We'll see. But as it's intriguing, it's intriguing enough that I have a particle physicist who put his name on the paper with us. Doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't mean that he's convinced that we're right. But we have a real particle physicist who, who thinks that it's, it's. If it's wrong, it's not obviously wrong and it's worth pushing on. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. I mean, I hope anybody listening to this understands how the scientific method works. I am constantly trying to tell my team, hey, you need to be fearless in the predictions that you make because you shouldn't hold yourself accountable to always being right. You should hold yourself accountable to always learning and getting a little bit better. So the fact that you're willing to make a precise prediction, your paper is full of mathematics and it's there for anybody to check. So people will be able to help you find the edges. Which is something I've heard you talk about and I really respect about you, is that one, you obviously approach everything with humility. But two, you actively want people to find the edges of your hypothesis, your theory, so that you know where it's wrong, so that you can adjust and get more right. Which is far more interesting, especially if you sincerely want to understand what's outside of that headset. It's like, well, I would rather realize I'm wrong, find out how to get right so that I can actually begin to explore that possibility. Space versus right. Think I'm right, but really I'm wrong and nobody ever helps me come to understand why. I really, I really like that. And I hope everybody listening takes that on in their own life. I think that that's really important. Okay, so I wanted to make sure that you had a second to lay out the grounding there, that this is something that you're seeing in particle physics, that there really Is a there there to pursue because the intuitive space for somebody like me who's not a mathematician, who while I use the scientific method in business, I definitely do not consider myself a scientist. But pursuing the intuitive things, pursuing the thought experiments feels true to Einstein's encouragement to all of us lay people to focus more on imagination than knowledge.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To really understand how to begin to think through these things. So one of his famous thought experiments was that in a falling elevator you would feel like you were weightless.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that ends up being. It took him years, but he ends up finally putting that together with some other ideas that he had intuited, including if you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn on the flashlight, what happens? And in that spirit you said something as you were describing the consciousness and you as an instantiation of that, only to go back to the One. And you said well, the One is still learning what it needs to learn. And I am like a dog with a bone with that idea. What do you mean needs to learn what? Like when I think about a human.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right, right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It needs to learn things to stay alive because it's been given these drives by evolution. But what has set up the, the. The consciousness that isn't physical.

[Donald Hoffman]

Right, right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To need anything.

[Donald Hoffman]

My guess again. We're. We're way in over my head. But Mike, here we are. Might as well take you the joy of exploration.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's just pre programmed how it is.

[Donald Hoffman]

It's just yeah that the, the One is the only thing that there is. But it's infinitely changing, infinitely. It's self exploration. It's really infinite self exploration and looking and enjoying and ever expanding its understanding of itself. It's. That would be my, my.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you conceptualize it as still moving towards pleasure.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well that, that, that pleasure is just in some sense it's different than an evolutionary thing. So, so an evolution and I should say also concretely wise different. This dynamics of conscious agents does not need to have an arrow of time. So there's. That's really interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why? Because that doesn't seem true. Okay.

[Donald Hoffman]

The, the entropy. One can write down a Markovian dynamics in which the entropy does not grow. Straightforward. But it's a theorem three line proof trivial, trivial proof that any projection of that Markovian dynamics that has no error of time, any projection of it that loses information, say by conditional probability, it will give you new dynamics. It'll be a projected dynamics of the original dynamics and that new dynamics will have an arrow of time because of the loss of information. So the arrow of time. So here's my view. Our experience right now of an arrow of time and of the universe with a big bang and then the big, maybe a big Crunch or whatever, or entropy death at the end. That whole arrow of time is not an insight at all into what lies beyond space time. It's an artifact of the projection. And from an evolutionary point of view, right, time is the fundamental limited resource, right? If I run out of time before I get my next meal, if it takes so much time to get my next meal, it's over. If it takes too much time to get my next drink of water, it's over. For me, time is my most fundamental limited resource. So that limited resource of time is not an insight into reality. That's an artifact of projection from a timeless conscious agent dynamics. And that also suggests all the other limited resources, that's all artifacts. So evolution with natural selection is a beautiful theory, but it's the theory of all the artifacts that you see when you do a projection from a realm in which there are no limited resources, there is no competition. But it looks like evolution by natural selection in this projection, it looks like there's an arrow of time. So all of our intuitions right now about learning new stuff, it's going to be very hard for us because our intuitions are deeply shaped right now by our interface where there's an entropy arrow. And in this realm beyond there is need not be an entropy arrow. And so wrapping our heads around what it's like to have the notion of exploration where there's no entropy arrow. Now I'm not saying I wrap my head around it, but I do know that the mathematics is there, that the Markoving dynamics does not have to have an arrow of time in the sense of an arrow of increasing entropy. And that's again a one of the points of doing science with precise mathematics. I get emails quite often from people that I think are very, very bright and have really good ideas and they don't know how to take them and make them precise. And as a result, you can never surprise yourself, you can never like Einstein when he had his idea about, you mentioned the falling elevator and so forth, and, and so he had that in 1907 or something like that, 1906, and it wasn't. He worked for years to take that idea and make it mathematically precise. 1915 and he hit, he learned tons and tons of what at the time was state of the art, fairly new math. It was hard for him. Sleepless nights, pulling his hair out, really working hard to take his good intuition and turn. So he finally wrote down in mathematics in 1915 or. And a year later, a guy named Schwarzschild wrote back to Einstein and said, here's a solution to your equations, and they predict what we now call black holes. Now, Einstein didn't foresee that. He didn't like it. He didn't believe it. He disbelieved in black holes. He wanted to get rid of them. So Einstein's theory came back and surprised him. And that's why it's so important for us to do science. Because what we do is we take our best ideas that we have right now and then we make them mathematically precise. And then the mathematics comes back and it slaps us in the face and says, here are the implications of the ideas that you started with, implications that you simply couldn't think deeply enough about on your own. But the mathematics can take you where your own, you know, just consciousness wouldn't necessarily go. And so here's one of those directions with this notion of conscious agents, the dynamics need not have increasing entropy. And so our whole intuition about an arrow of time need not hold in this realm. So when we talk about the notion of explore consciousness, exploring for the joy of it, we're going to have to rejig how we think about the notion of. For us, exploration is something that happens in an arrow of time. What does it mean for us? Can we wrap our heads around the notion of exploration where we let go of an increasing entropy kind of thing? I don't know if we can. Maybe you just have to let go of this headset altogether to really get that. But is it possible while we're under the limits of this headset, to, to wrap our minds around, we can at least get pointers to that idea. Our mathematics led to this pointer, and I would never even gone there unless the mathematics took me there. So. So that's. So. So I would say that it's just like, you know, the amateur astronomer with a pair of binoculars could be brighter than the guy with the James Webb Space Telescope, but he's never going to beat the guy with the James Webb Space Telescope because the guy's got better tools. And that's what science does for you. You may be smarter than Einstein, but if you don't actually put yourself using the tools of mathematics and so forth, that genius will never actually flower in the sense of reaching all the potential implications of what it means. And so that's why we do science the way we do it, with mathematical precision, because for two Reasons if our ideas are good, we probably don't understand all their implications. And so the math will come back and it'll be our teacher. And second, certainly our ideas have their limits and it's hard for us to understand what the limits are. And in good cases, the math will come back and tell us what those limits are. So, for example, Einstein's theory of gravity together with quantum field theory tell us 10 to the -33 centimeters and space time is over. It has no operational meaning. Who could have guessed? Could you have guessed? Could Einstein have guessed? Oh yeah, I have an idea about space time. But at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters is going to fall apart. Not even an Einstein could guess that. That would only come through taking your ideas, making them, doing the travail. I mean, Einstein really, it was a birthing process. It was very, apparently very, very hard to give birth to general relativity. And many mathematicians working in physics and so forth say the same thing. You're working in the dark, it's hard, you're struggling, and then all of a sudden, if you're lucky, you get that breakthrough and you see things. But then it comes back and you learn the limits of the basic concepts that you started with and then you reboot from a new set of assumptions.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting that you say about the set of assumptions. So as we explore this topic, I realize that I think we still have. We each have slightly different assumptions, though I think that we're talking well about the topic. But take the arrow of time, for instance. So the thing that I find fascinating about the hypothesis that you put forward is for me, anyway, I don't have the math to back it up. This is definitely land of intuition. But what I find fascinating is if you're correct and it's just consciousness is the singular thing. It is for whatever reason joy need to pursue, desire to learn, whatever it's running through all of these qualia and that the tool it uses to do so is this headset. There's an infinite array of headsets, but the one we're in has learned that there's only certain qualia that can be achieved when there is an arrow of time. And that's why I was saying when you first said that, I was like, I don't know that that's true meaning inside the headset for at least certain types of qualia. It is clear, in fact, we, we, the only thing we know is that the qualia that we have access to requires the arrow of time. We presume that there are infinite headsets that provide just unimaginable unknown types of qualia, but the type that we have directly experienced all require the arrow of time.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. And we've been shaped basically by our headset to think that way. And if I ask you to imagine a new color that you've never seen before, you can't do it. I mean, again, it's not because there aren't, I mean, pigeons have four color receptors, presumably. Pigeons are experiencing colors that, that no human has could even imagine. And maybe the mantis shrimp is seeing stuff that the, the pigeon can't, you know, and, and then the birds that see polarization of light, I mean, they're seeing something that I, I, I, what is it like to see polarization of light? I, I don't know. What is it like to have infrared vision like certain pit vipers? What is it like to actually experience an electric field, to sense some electric field for some fish or creatures underwater? I mean, I have no. What is it like to be a bat doing echolocation? I don't know. I literally have no idea. So these are pointers to me that's, I mean, in the headset we get all these hints of realms of qualia utterly outside anything that I can concretely imagine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So talk to me about near death experiences and then I want to get into psychedelics and whether they are simply another form of qualia of what it's like to be a human who's having that experience, or whether that's actually melting the human away and revealing something closer to being the One again. But what can we learn from near death experiences? Do you think it's a, like a sort of half return to the one? Or is it just, well, that's what happens in the headset to the brain when you deprive it of oxygen.

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, from a physicalist framework, clearly the latter is the case. Right. So from a physicalist framework, spacetime is fundamental and consciousness is a product of the brain. And so any experiences of transcendence, of things going beyond the headset have to be just the brain malfunctioning in its final throes of death, Something like that. But if space time is doomed, as the physicists tell us, and it's not fundamental, then that leaves open the possibility, doesn't dictate that near death experiences are genuine insights into some conscious experiences that transcends our spacetime interface, but it certainly is compatible with that point of view. And so I think it's worth, on, on that framework to explore the possibility that there are Some insights. And I would take any of those reports like we take any kind of eyewitness testimony. Right, with a grain of salt. And you try to get corroboration and, and, and discount it. But, but, but on the other hand, you don't want to just ignore the data either. Right. So there's the, the fine line to, to be open to get the insights, but, but not to, to jump on anything just because it sort of fits your preconceived conceptions. Most of our preconceived conceptions are deeply wrong. We thought the earth was flat. We thought the earth was the center of the universe. We thought space and time were fundamental wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So, so you were batting poorly. So, so anything that even for if we think that consciousness will survive death, what we think about that, the way we think about it is probably wrong. And so what we, we have to do is again, be. So that's why I'm being, when I say we're in deep waters here and I'm being very, very careful. It's. These are things that my theory, our theory suggests. But, but I don't want to be at all doctrinaire. I think what I should do is make bold proposals. But they're just proposals and the goal is to be precise so we can figure out where the proposals are wrong. So, so yeah, so in that spirit. Yeah, the near death experiences may have some good data about transitions out of this interface in that, in that spirit.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And there's probalities of what people bring back.

[Donald Hoffman]

Yeah, there are, there are some commonalities. There's a lot of reports of going through a tunnel, a light tunnel, some of like a review. I think Ray Moody or something like that is famous for categorizing a lot of the similarities in near death experiences. A life review. And then of course the reports we have are people who came back. So then they came back and so forth. So there are, there are. But, but there are also some that report, you know, horrific. You know, it's just not all, not, not all reports are, are great. So someone that, that we know personally had a near the death experience and was very, very pleasurable and came back and has no fear of. She claims to have no fear of death now. So I don't know. So yeah, be part of the film that's exploring these near death experiences there it's put out the, I think it's the Langone Medical center in New York. There are some cardiologists who are, you know, they work with patients who die but with new cardiology techniques, they can keep the heart and the body in from deteriorating for quite a long time now, you know, an hour or something or maybe longer, and then they can bring these people back. And so this film is partly directed by a cardiologist or who, who was seeing so many of these experiences that, that he wanted to document what he's seeing in the er, you know, and, and again, you know, I'm not going to be doctrinaire about it, but I think it's data that shouldn't be ignored and how we should interpret it. We should be very careful.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if that stuff is real, the prediction that that seems to make is that not only is there a sense of consciousness that remains, but that there is sensory perception that holds out for quite a while because at least from the things I've heard, people come back with a sense of either it's peaceful or whatever, but that means that they were able to experience that and retain it.

[Donald Hoffman]

That's right. That's right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Donald Hoffman]

This is quite fascinating. Yeah. That again, this is exactly the right scientific way to think about it. This is data. Maybe if it is data, what does it entail about letting go of the headset and what kind of experience we might have afterwards? And is that just a transitional thing or is it more permanent and so forth? Right, right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dude, that is so fascinating. Everything that we've talked about today, the research, all of it has really made me start to question my own thoughts around this idea. The paper is amazing. Where can people follow along with you as you continue this journey?

[Donald Hoffman]

Well, yeah, so I do post on Twitter. My handle is at Donald D. Hoffman. H O, F, F M A N. All one word, lowercase. And every time I publish a paper, I put a link to the actual journal article and then also talks like this podcast, anything that comes up, I will post those. So there I. You can also, if you, if you're a scientist, of course you can just go to Google Scholar and type in my name. If you just. Donaldy Hoffman, Google Scholar, you can get directly to. I have roughly 120 publications.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Awesome. All right everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

[Donald Hoffman]

Peace.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity theft. But Lifelock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US based restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock. Com. Podcast terms apply.