← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Reality Is An Illusion: Exit the Matrix and Design Your Dream Life! | Donald Hoffman (Replay)
02:12:34
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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm excited to have Donald Hoffman join us to challenge our very sense of reality. His book the Case Against Reality asks if we can even trust our senses and reveals why our perceptions may be entirely questionable. In this episode, Donald explains how reality is an illusion, how we can recognize the truth of that and and how our senses guide our adaptive behavior. I hope you guys love listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. And if you do, please leave a review on our podcast. It really is the best way to support us so that we can help get the show out to more people just like you who are trying to reach their true human potential. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Donald Hoffman, welcome back to the show.
- [01:46]
Donald Hoffman
The Thanks a lot Thomas. Great to be here dude.
- [01:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Excited to have you back. So I'm obsessed with the Matrix and the idea that we're living in a false reality. Now I know you don't believe that we are actually in a simulation, but do we recognize the truth of reality?
- [02:02]
Donald Hoffman
Well, our best science tells us that space time is not fundamental. This is the conclusion of both physics and evolution by natural selection. So the physicists tell us that spacetime is doomed, it's not fundamental. And they're finding new structures beyond spacetime like the amplitude Hedron that actually make the math easier in space time for the things they need to do. And then evolution by natural selection also agrees with the physicists that space time is not fundamental.
- [02:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's explain that. So when you say that space time isn't fundamental, what do we mean exactly in like the simplest or we'll get into the geeky, like deep stuff in a second. But for the audience that hasn't heard you talk before.
- [02:43]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [02:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Does that mean.
- [02:45]
Donald Hoffman
Well, we tend to think of space and time as the basic level of reality. Everything that could possibly be is inside space and has some some time. The big bang was the start of it all. And who knows what the end will be? Maybe a big crunch or just petering out in low entropy and low temperature, we don't know yet. But that we think, or we thought is the basis of all reality. So space and time are the basic stage on which all of reality plays out.
- [03:21]
Tom Bilyeu
And how can it not be though?
- [03:23]
Donald Hoffman
That's the weird thing.
- [03:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Does that mean that whatever is real and we should probably give people your headset metaverse explanation, which speaks dear to my heart. But before we do that, does that mean that whatever is real is non physical?
- [03:41]
Donald Hoffman
Well, so the word real is a little slippery. So in some sense my headache is real. Right, because it's a real experience, but it real in the sense that the physicists are talking about it. When they thought that space and time were fundamental, they were thinking that this was the fundamental ground of all possible realities, like in a Newtonian universe. And even in Einstein point of view, Einstein thought that space and time was the grounding reality for everything. And now we realize that the four dimensions of space time, or even ten dimensions of string theory or something like that is not going deep enough. There are structures entirely beyond space time and entirely beyond quantum theory. So these new structures are not like little structures sitting inside at small scale.
- [04:33]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't think we can get the structures yet. People are going to be super lost. So, okay, the idea of the headset I think is a really core concept. So yeah, somebody asked you once, like in the future we're going to start using different metaphors. What metaphors do you think we're going to use? And you said the metaverse. As somebody trying to contribute to the metaverse, my ears perked up on that one. Right. Why will that become such a useful metaphor for. For this moment and how we perceive things?
- [05:00]
Donald Hoffman
Right. Because the way that evolution speaks on this is it says that our perceptions of objects in space and time is really just like a virtual reality headset. It's there to help you play the game of life without knowing what's on the other side of the headset. What's on the other side? What's the hardware and software that's running the game. You don't have to know that to play the game. And in fact if you were trying to play a game of, like, Grand Theft Auto and virtual reality and you had to toggle millions of voltages per second to drive your car, you would lose when you were competing with someone who could just turn a nice little simple steering wheel and press on an artificial gas pedal. So evolution gave us senses that allow us to survive by hiding the truth and just telling us how to act. So, as the evolutionary theorists would say, our senses guide adaptive behavior.
- [05:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Why does natural selection as a theory, predict that? Because I understand the theory, I guess, well enough at a high level, but I never would have guessed that it actually says that it makes a prediction anyway, that you, whatever is real. The only thing I can tell you that evolution has selected for is not that. So where, like, would. Is this something that Darwin himself saw in his theory, or would he be surprised?
- [06:29]
Donald Hoffman
I think Darwin would be surpr. And in fact, many evolutionary theorists today are surprised.
- [06:36]
Tom Bilyeu
And, and so how do we know this isn't just a kooky interpretation of natural selection by Donald Hoffman?
- [06:41]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly. So the, the way we pursue this is it turns out that Darwin's theory has been turned into a mathematically precise theory. It's called evolutionary game theory. So John Maynard Smith started that in, in the 1970s. And so we now have, instead of, you know, Darwin's theory, which is, you know, it's imprecise in the sense that it's not a mathematical model. Evolutionary game theory, evolutionary graph theory, are mathematically precise. So we can now prove theorems and we can ask technical questions. So what is the probability that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal any true structures of objective reality? That's a clean technical question. And it turns out that evolutionary game theory is precise enough to address that question.
- [07:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so I know I've gotten hung up on that a lot. And I think for people of my cognitive ability, we will have to accept that as the miracle of this conversation. Otherwise we'll derail on that. Because I don't understand how his theory can be turned into a math equation. And I worry that for you to explain it to me would take an entire semester and cause me to tear my hair out.
- [07:55]
Donald Hoffman
But, but.
- [07:56]
Tom Bilyeu
So if we can accept. Unless you're thinking it looks like you may have a way to.
- [08:00]
Donald Hoffman
I can give you a hint. I can give a little hint. It's when we say evolutionary game theory, think about game theory. How do you play Monopoly and win? How do you play various games? So it turns out you can look at different strategies that someone might have you know, I'm going to go for Park Place, I'm going to go for Boardwalk, I'm going to try to. There's all different strategies. And you can then write down mathematically, okay, if you take this strategy, what is the probability that you will do well against someone who's taking this other
- [08:27]
Tom Bilyeu
strangers all about most offspring.
- [08:29]
Donald Hoffman
And so the strategies are ways to survive long enough to reproduce. And so you can look at different strategies for playing the game of life. So for example, some organisms will have millions or thousands of offspring and, but they don't care about the offspring. Most of them will die. But if 1% of them make it, you're good. Humans tend to have just a couple, a handful of offspring and we put a lot of effort into them. So those are different strategies. And so as you look. So some strategies, for example in perception, humans really have focused in our evolution on vision and hearing and less on smell and taste and so forth. Other organisms focus on things that we don't even have, like echolocation in bats. So different organisms will take different strategies. The game of life is how do I live long enough to reproduce and how do I raise my offspring to maturity? Do I just make lots of them and let them fend for themselves and most of them die but a fraction will make it, or do I make just a few of them and really help them for 20 or 30 years until they can go on their own? Or more of these days, or more those days.
- [09:47]
Tom Bilyeu
So by, from evolutionary game theory's perspective, what is the most successful creature on planet Earth?
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Donald Hoffman
Well, probably bacteria. Interesting, right? Well, yeah, there, there's a lot more bacteria than us and, and maybe viruses if they're more. So from that point of view, right, the, the, the winner is the one who, you know, survives long enough to reproduce and reproduces for a long period of time. And you know, cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years. So, you know, they're, they're certainly candidates. I'm not saying that they're the final answer, but that kind of thing would be humans are, you know, relative newcomers.
- [10:28]
Tom Bilyeu
And I actually really like the theory that humans are bacteria's way of moving around, which is pretty interesting when you think that we're outnumbered by the bacteria in our guts, on our skin and all of that stuff. It's pretty interesting. I should have guessed that answer, but I didn't. But that makes a lot of sense.
- [10:45]
Donald Hoffman
Right? Right. So, so this gives you the idea when you're playing a game, there's lots of strategies Especially in a complicated game, there's lots of strategies. And it's not that there's going to be one best strategy. It's rather that if Tom is using this strategy, what strategy should I use to counter Tom's strategy and so forth? Same thing in business, right? It depends on who your competition is, what strategies you're going to take, and what is the governing system and so forth, like the laws and so forth, that will all determine your strategy. So you can use game theory and turn it into a tool for studying evolution as a game where your bacteria are trying to play the game of life one way, humans are playing the game of life another way. Every different organism, every different plant is playing the game of life with a different kind of strategy.
- [11:34]
Tom Bilyeu
That's really interesting. It's funny, this is the third time I've interviewed you and I've never pushed on this because there was something about I couldn't wrap my brain around it. So I'm glad you took the time. What's fascinating to me is every species has its own umvelt.
- [11:48]
Donald Hoffman
Yes.
- [11:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Which is a really fascinating concept. So I looked this up once and every time I say this stat, I think I must be wrong because it just seems way too far off. But humans are able to perceive 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. And I was like, how is that possible? That's so like every. Everything that we see and think of as the, the known world is 0.035%. That is like vanishingly small.
- [12:19]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right. So our, our window on the, on the world is trivial compared to what could in principle be available. And so the, the question that you can then ask in a technical fashion is what is the probability that a strategy of seeing truth true structures about objective reality? Would that strategy help you to survive long enough to raise kids? And so we can ask that as a technical question. Evolution has the tools to do that. And the key concept is something called a fitness payoff. So fitness payoff is like if you're playing a game, there's a certain way that you get points in the game. If you're playing a video game, right, you have to shoot things down or avoid getting hit and to get points. And if you get enough points, you get to the next level of the game. Well, fitness payoffs. If you get enough fitness payoffs, what that corresponds to is you're surviving long enough to reproduce and you don't go to the next level of the game, but your offspring and your DNA in your offspring go to the next level of the game. So here's the big idea. We can ask these fitness payoff functions that govern our evolution, they do depend on whatever the world is and the world structure. So they do depend on the world. They depend on the organism. You know, what's fit for me is not fit for a benthic fish. Being 5,000 meters under the water would kill me. It's just what the benthic fish wants. So the fitness payoffs depend on the true structure of the world, depends on the organism, you know, Hoffman versus a fish and the action, feeding, fighting, fleeing and mating and so forth. And you can then ask, what is the probability? Now this is the key technical question. What is the probability that a randomly chosen fitness payoff function that's governing my evolution has information about the true structure of the world? Right? Because it's that fitness evolution tells us those fitness payoffs are what determine how your senses are going to evolve. They're going.
- [14:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So what's the base assumption there that reality is so complex. In fact, I want to press, I want to take a second to really elucidate the example you gave about Grand Theft, which I think is so brilliant. What's actually happening in Grand Theft Auto is electrical currents are toggling on and off gates on the computer and that somehow makes things happen on your screen that you can interact with and score points and all that.
- [14:58]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
But at like if you look at a chip, it is so complicated that trying to like zap electrodes in the right order, literally impossible.
- [15:09]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
And so everything that we, we as the average non computer programmer think of as a computer is really just the gui. It's the interface. And so you're there at a really abs. Really abstracted level. It is so abstract is to be nonsensical compared to what's actually happening at the electrical communication level with the machinery itself sending signals to your tv.
- [15:33]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
- [15:34]
Tom Bilyeu
And if real life has that same level of complexity, then I get why it would need to be so abstracted that as to be just nonsensical compared to what reality really is. Something I think breaks in people's intuition. It certainly breaks in my intuition when I think though that there has to be some sort of mapping. So the example that you've said many times, which I think is really on point, is if people are going to make fun of you, what they will say is, oh, you don't think any of this is real? Go ahead and step in front of that train and see if it kills you. And of course it's going to. So the representation of the train is pointing at something that will change your state from alive to dead. Now, whether all of that is so, again, abstracted from what's actually happening at a electrical level, I don't even know what to liken it to. But nonetheless, stepping in front of a train will flip you from alive to dead, whatever that means in the underlying reality. So do you think at all about, like, do you care what it's mapping to? Or are you just, like. It doesn't matter. It's too complicated. We're not there yet.
- [16:49]
Donald Hoffman
Well, I do care, and that's why I'm interested in this particular theorem, right? Because my interest is I'm seeing a world of space and time and objects with colors and shapes and motions. How is. Is that the true world? Is that the. The true structure of objective reality? Or is this as divorced from reality? Is what we're seeing as divorced from the fundamental reality as my Grand Theft Auto VR headset is from the voltages inside the supercomputer that's running it.
- [17:15]
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- [17:45]
Donald Hoffman
That's the simple question, right? So when I talk about things outside of space time, it's just like, suppose someone had played Grand Theft Auto since they were one day old and their parents had left them in a headset their whole life. And when they're 25, the parents say, guess what? You've been in the headset your whole life. And that person probably can't even. What could possibly be outside of my headset? I've lived my whole life inside this headset, and you pull it off and you realize, oh, wow, there's a whole world that's entirely outside of what you're in. That's the question we're asking. Has. Has evolution shaped us with just a little headset? A VR headset that guides adaptive behavior but shows us none of objective reality. That's the technical question, and the answer is very, very clear. The probability is one that we don't see the truth at all.
- [18:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Meaning 100%.
- [18:36]
Donald Hoffman
100%.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so if the probability is 100% that you are seeing a very false version.
- [18:44]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
The, the thing that, that seems to predict to me is that the underlying reality is so complicated that at least in this form, I don't know how else to refer to that. In this form it would. With our umvelt, our ability to process data, whatever, it would not make sense to try to, to deal with the reality that it's far more efficient to create an abstraction layer. But if underlying reality is dead simple, that doesn't seem like it would hold true. So do we just presume that there is extreme complexity?
- [19:21]
Donald Hoffman
Well, it turns out that the extreme complexity isn't necessary for this theorem to be true.
- [19:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. Why would you need such an elaborate abstraction if it isn't complicated?
- [19:31]
Donald Hoffman
Well, so it turns out when you actually just look at the math. So suppose the world has some number of states, a billion states or a hundred states, whatever it might. So there's some number of states in the world and you have some number of states of perception. I can see green, red. There's lots of things I can see. When you just do a simple count. Look at all the possible functions from the states of the world to the states of my perception. Just count them. So the world doesn't have to be complicated. It could have just 100 points or a thousand points. When you count all the functions that are the fitness functions and ask how many of those functions actually contain information about the structures in the world, it turns out that very quickly the proportion goes to zero. So even if the structure isn't that complicated, maybe there's only one structure in the world. That's all it has like a total order, something, you know, one is less than two is less than three. What is the probability that that total order. So the world could be very simple. It only has one simple structure, total order. And the world only has, you know, maybe, you know, a million states. So it's not a very complicated world. A million states. What is the probability that the fitness payoff functions that govern my, my evolution would preserve the total order? Information would actually be able to tell me about the total order. And the math is quite simple and the answer is zero.
- [20:52]
Tom Bilyeu
But that has to predict something like. So when, when I make the base assumption that it's, it's because it is too complex. So to give people, I want to start putting definitions of some of these words. So when you say state, let's say lights on, lights off. So we all live where Earth has two states. The sun is up, the sun is down. That's one temperature would be another State could be hot, could be cold, barometric pressure, could be high, could be low, could be wet, could be dry. Like, we can just. So there's a lot of different things. And so to your point about the fish, they're dealing with massive pressures. If they were to come up where there's no pressure, they would disintegrate or not be able to move or whatever. Just like we crush down to the, you know, like a tiny can.
- [21:34]
Donald Hoffman
So they would explode and we would crush. Right, exactly. Right, Right.
- [21:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So, okay, that. When you say states, that's one example.
- [21:41]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
- [21:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Don't understand how if everything were static, it were one state, that we would need an abstraction layer to navigate it more effectively than somebody that sees objective reality. So now I'm going to use an example to further illustrate what I mean. I'm going to use an example you gave me the first time. You cannot imagine how many times I've quoted you on this.
- [22:04]
Donald Hoffman
Okay.
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Tom Bilyeu
You said, tom, you have to understand that objective reality isn't like, oh, here's a table, and it's got this nice swirly grain pattern. It's the number of photons reflecting off of that desk and the, the amount of reflectivity and all that. Now, irony of ironies, as I have started working in the metaverse, you realize how complicated the visual world is. The. The.0035% of the visual spectrum that we actually see is insanely complicated to replicate.
- [22:33]
Donald Hoffman
Right?
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Tom Bilyeu
Right, Donald.
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Donald Hoffman
Right. Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's the hardest thing I've done in my life. It's crazy. And I don't even have to fully understand it. I just have to guide the team that understands it. Anyway, when you said that, I was like, whoa, what reality is, is very different than how I experience it. So cool. Complex.
- [22:51]
Donald Hoffman
Right?
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Tom Bilyeu
So now I get why the math works out.
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Donald Hoffman
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
But if it isn't complex. So you don't seem to be struggling with this. What is it that you understand that I don't? Or what is your base assumption that's different than mine that makes it make sense to you that to achieve maximum fitness payoff, you would 100% not retain elements of reality?
- [23:18]
Donald Hoffman
Right. So. So first I, I don't deny that I, I suspect that reality is very complicated. So, so my, My point isn't necessary. Necessary for this. That's right. It's just simply accounting things. So if you, if you look at all the fun to another set, like, so I have functions for, say I have numbers 1 through 10, and that's my base set. And I'm going to map them into numbers 1 through 10. So I can map 1 to 3 and 2 to 5 and so forth. So now if you just do. Okay, if you think about that problem, I could probably figure out, okay, how many different functions are there? Right? So you can write down all. Now you can say, okay, how many of those functions have the property that, you know, they preserve, that one is less than two, is less than three and less than four? How many of them scramble that order? How many preserve that order? How many scramble how many contain information about the 1 list? Less than 2, less than 3, less than 4. So this is called combinatorics. It's a branch of mathematics.
- [24:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, I am unfortunately all too aware of it because of NFTs.
- [24:22]
Donald Hoffman
Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
Which require you to understand this, because you're making, you have to your point. And maybe this is what you're saying. And so maybe I actually, now I'm understanding it. Let me walk you through what we had to discover in NFTs. Okay. So you create all these traits, all these categories, I should say, and then within each category, you have maybe 10 possible eyebrows that it could be eyeball types, hairstyles, facial hair, so on and so forth. That outputs, let's say, 2 billion potential permutations.
- [24:52]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right.
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Tom Bilyeu
But you want to maintain a distribution in the 10,000 that you're actually going to show. So we were all trying to do the math, we're working it out, and I'm like, there's no way it's as simple. There's some problem. And then we showed it to physicists and they fell out laughing and they're like, yeah, it's not that simple. And so they're like, for you to maintain the, the percentage likelihood to get gold eyes, let's say, right out of your 2 billion combinations, they're like, you have to force it down into this thing, which they called the combinatorial or whatever. And so I was like, o.
- [25:29]
Donald Hoffman
And so that really is the point here that even though I agree with you that the universe is probably the real universe, whatever it is, is very complicated, I believe that combinatorics blow up so quickly.
- [25:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
- [25:41]
Donald Hoffman
By the time you just get to a few hundred elements, you know that as you found the thing, the explosion of possibilities is so great that when asked how many of those possible fitness functions would actually be so special that they contain information about the structure of where they came from out of all of the possible fitness functions, that it's
- [26:05]
Tom Bilyeu
not an overly complicated world. It's just the number of potential mapping points and combinations. Exactly Right, Very interesting.
- [26:12]
Donald Hoffman
Because evolutionary theory puts no restriction on the fitness payoff functions.
- [26:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Any possibility there could be as many as you can imagine.
- [26:20]
Donald Hoffman
And there's no restrictions. There's no restrictions. They have to show you the truth. That's not part of the theory.
- [26:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [26:27]
Donald Hoffman
So until so, and by the way, no one knows how to put that into the theory. Right. So I mean, to say that it requires that only the fitness functions that preserve the truth would be a major revision to evolutionary theory. It would be unrecognizable. So when you look then and say, okay, every fitness payoff function is equal likely as any other fitness payoff function, they're all on equal footing. And then you count the ones that actually have information about the truth, they go to zero probability in fast order. Now, there is one I should bring out. There's a group at Yale that has recently published a paper that's trying to push back on this. And what they say is if you have, say, a bunch of like thousands of fitness payoff functions, they're all radically different, then they say that you'll be forced to go to the truth. And the argument that they make is that if our high level cognitions, our beliefs, our goals and so forth are not going to interfere with our perceptions, they claim that then our perceptions have to have a single mapping from the state of the world into the state of our senses. It has to be a single mapping you can't have. Because one thing I could do with a lot of fitness functions is say, well, this fitness function is different from that one. So I will do this kind of mapping from the world into my senses with this fitness page payoff function, then I'll do another mapping with this fitness payoff function. And they say, no, if you're going to have what we call cognitive impenetrability, so what you believe cognitively cannot affect what you see. Okay, that's the argument. Then you must have only one mapping. Well, so that's their assumption.
- [28:17]
Tom Bilyeu
So hold on, let me make sure I understand that. So they're saying that basically, so that your delusions don't create the exterior world, or at least your perception of it, you have to have this mapping so that you're actually detecting and seeing what is real.
- [28:35]
Donald Hoffman
They're saying that if what you believe doesn't affect your senses in a fundamental way, then they claim that that entails that you can only have one mapping from the world, the fitness, the mapping of your senses from whatever the world is into what you're seeing. The colors and the shapes and so forth. There can only be one map that holds regardless of what the fitness payoff functions. That was their claim. And the only reason I bring this up is because this is a recently published paper. The claim is false. It's trivial to show counterexamples. Their fundamental claim is false.
- [29:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Please do as a way just to make sure that I actually understand what they're saying, because this sounds like what they're trying to protect against is hallucinations basically becoming subjectively real.
- [29:26]
Donald Hoffman
Right. So, so I actually think that it's true probably to a large extent that what we believe does not really affect fundamentally what we see. So technical term we use, the geek term is cognitive impenetrability of perception. That's what the philosophers of science will talk about. And cognitive scientists that are, and you can think about scientists might like this because they'll say, look, we want to use our senses in our experiments. I want to, my theory makes a prediction, I have to go look and see if the prediction is true. Well, if my theory that I'm holding would change what I see, then science isn't going to really be objective, right? I mean if I believe this theory and it changes how I see the data, then I might just see the data that confirms the theory and I can't escape. So that's why there's philosophy of science has been very interested in this question. Are our high level theoretical beliefs and just our beliefs as everyday people do, they get in there and somehow fundamentally affect how we see the world. And there is a sort of a way, you could say the way I believe things does change my world, but they don't change like the color I see or the three dimensional structure of the cube here that I'm seeing. I mean they might change it in some way, but not fundamentally like that. So that's the question. And so it's trivial. So when the group at Yale makes this point that if you have lots of different fitness payoff functions and you don't have your high level beliefs interfering with the process of perception, then you can only have one map from the world into your senses. And of course they don't prove that, they just state it without proof. And so it's trivially false. We have made counter examples. It's very, very easy to make counter examples. I can design a system in which I have say two fitness payoff functions and I use one fitness payoff function to make one map from the world into my perceptions, use the other fitness function to make another map. And if I have a system that has no high level beliefs, then the high level beliefs aren't interfering with it. There's a counterexample right there. No cognitive penetration of perception. Multiple maps. But then I can add beliefs and say I know I can have beliefs there as long as they don't interfere with this mapping here. I could have two maps. Why not? So it's, they're, they're the guys that, the group at Yale. They're brilliant experimentalists. And you know, one of them is a really good friend of one of my collaborators. I mean, they were postdocs at MIT together and so forth. So they're brilliant experimentalists, but the fundamental assumption that they're making is just trivially false. And so then how do we see this in our perceptions? The way we see it in our perceptions is we have probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fitness payoff functions that are governing our behavior. So what do we do with all that complexity? What we do is we group the fitness payoff functions into groups that are similar and we make simple little data structures out of them. And those data structures are what we call objects. So this object is good for drinking.
- [32:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you. What, what is a data structure when you say that it's an object? Meaning my mind groups it so that I can differentiate the cup from the coaster from the desk.
- [32:47]
Donald Hoffman
What I'm saying is we're making all this stuff up as a simple way to represent the fitnesses, fitness payoffs and how to get them. So for example, when you're playing Grand Theft Auto, you're playing a game. If you looked inside the supercomputer, there is no red Porsche, there is no steering wheel, there is no gas pedal. In some sense, those are what I call simple data structures. They're coding for the gas pedal and pushing on the gas pedal is coding for, who knows, countless millions of voltage changes happening in exactly the right sequence. In the computer, I have this trivial data structure gas pedal push on it that triggers this whole other thing that I don't want to know about. It's really too complicated. So that's what I mean by these simplifying data structures. My steering wheel is this simple data structure that I can use to interact with who knows how many billions or trillions of voltages and, and make them do exactly the right sequence in the right order.
- [33:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Could I say representation instead of data structure?
- [33:52]
Donald Hoffman
Absolutely. Data structure is a computer science term, so computer scientists would, would be very happy with that. But, but representation is, is perfectly good. And so the idea then is what evolution has done from an evolutionary point of view is it takes all these fitness payoff functions that govern us, that govern our survival and that we need to respect in order to play the game of life. And we organize them. So an apple is an object. It's a representation of a bunch of fitness payoffs. For example, the apple. If I'm interested in mating, apple's no good. If I'm interested in eating, great. If I'm interested in a weapon, so. So, I mean, I could throw it to someone's head, but it's not going to do much damage. You know, if I'm, you know, so there's if. But if I have a sword, a sword? Well, for, for mating, no good. For eating, not really. I mean, I could use it to cut a coconut in half, but. But I can't eat this. I can't eat the sword. For fighting, great, but not if you're fighting against, you know, a gun and things like that. So every object and we can recognize, I would say on the order of 30 or 40,000 different objects, basic kinds of objects. So what that indicates is that evolution has taken all these hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of fitness payoff functions. And it's not making one map from the world into our senses, it's making a bunch of different maps. And those different maps are what we call objects. And our high level cognition, all it does is, I'm hungry, okay? I won't be looking for tables, I won't be looking for the moon. I'll be looking for apples and bananas and things like that. Those data structures, those representations that have high fitness payoffs for the action of eating. And so visual attention, paying attention to different objects is our way of switching from this representation of fitness payoffs to this representation of fitness payoffs, as I need to be able to do to survive long enough to reproduce. And so that's sort of technical, but it's. The reason I bring it out is because this is brand new. It's gotten a lot of attention from Yale. And so it's an important thing from the scientific side to really lay to rest that there's not one mapping that's required from the world into our senses by evolution. Even if we assume that our beliefs don't interfere with our cognition, our cognitions don't interfere with our perceptions. That doesn't entail that we have to have one mapping. It's just a false assumption. Once you let go of that false assumption, then you are opened up to realize that objects, every object, is just a data structure coding for a whole Group of fitness payoffs. And that's how evolution deals with this.
- [36:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so the reason that I find this so endlessly fascinating is I, in trying. The whole reason I stepped in front of the camera in the first place was I made a very profound change in my life. And I thought, hey, anybody can do this. But it really is about reframing the world. So recoding, re coming up with new references or seeing the cup in a different light, whatever. So it's interesting. So the idea of our beliefs don't influence our cognition or influence the mapping to the the real world. It's probably only at the margins. It's pretty minor, as you said, but I think that there is a lot of difference in outcome in the game of life as we think about it in a modern context, depending on how you code things. But I've struggled with this. So at one point I was going to write a book and I was working with a ghostwriter and I was saying, like, it doesn't matter what's true. All that matters is that it's effective and that the way that you view the world is moving you towards your goals. And this was like at the height of Trump. And the ghostwriter was like, I'm not writing that. And she was like, you need to tell me that you don't believe in like a post truth world. And I was like, that's interesting because no, I don't mean just lie and make things up, but what is guiding my decision making isn't a quest for what's true. It's a quest for what works. And so as I think about fitness payoffs, I get that I'm going to put a pin in the following. For example, when I hear you talk, it feels like you think the level of abstraction is like being in a game headset versus what the game machine is doing itself. That is so different. And so we'll get to that in a minute because that's worth talking about. But even at the layer of, okay, I've got my headset on, I'm locked in. Even there, how you can influence things by how you perceive them is interesting. And we're living in a moment where saying post truth triggers a lot of things. I want to strip all that away, but get people to focus on because really, really, truly in life, what you're talking about with fitness payoffs is how people should look at their own belief system of like, okay, I believe the way that I tell people to judge what is true is what is the thing that allows you to better Predict the outcome of your actions. And so if I believe in gravity, that allows me to better predict how to handle this cup.
- [39:17]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [39:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Because if I hold it over here and let go and expect it to stay there, I'm going to be very disappointed when it crashes to the floor. And so believing in gravity, even if it's fake, is very useful. Stepping on the gas pedal, even if there really is no Porsche, even if there really is no gas pedal, if I'm in the game, like, just assuming that that's how it works, even though it isn't true, it's a total abstraction, you. It's going to help you get towards your goal if your goal is to win that game. So all of that is very interesting. I do think that we can even take something like synesthesia. Where would you say that that's. They're intentionally using cognition? No, but their perception is like.
- [40:00]
Donald Hoffman
I don't know if you know who
- [40:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Dave Grohl is, but drummer for Nirvana, lead singer Foo Fighters, and he is a synesthete of his own claim. Own admission. Yeah. And he said that I forget if he sees or shapes. I think there might be shapes. And for him. And he said that's why it's so easy for him to remember songs, because they have these literal shapes.
- [40:25]
Donald Hoffman
Yes.
- [40:25]
Tom Bilyeu
And so he just has to remember the sequence of the shapes and he can play the song. And that, I mean, that really has an impact. He's able to remember things that I wouldn't be able to remember, for instance, because his perception. Perception is being influenced by the way that his brain processes data. So for whatever reason, two areas of his brain trigger when he hears something, whereas in mine, only one triggers. And so that to me, when I. Again, going back to why I find this so interesting, that to me says, hey, I don't know how much of what you're perceiving is real, but I know that there are consequences to how you categorize. So your idea of data structures is going to matter a lot. And so if you can categorize something as shapes and sound, it's going to be easier to remember if you categorize. Like, for instance, the thing I'm always trying to get people to understand is if you have what I call the only belief that matters, that you can. If you put time and energy into getting better at something, you actually will get better.
- [41:28]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [41:29]
Tom Bilyeu
If you believe that, then you'll pursue improvement. If you don't believe that, then you won't, because it wouldn't make any sense. Right. So you Miss out on fitness payoffs based on your cognitive assessment of how the world works.
- [41:41]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [41:42]
Tom Bilyeu
So all of that's fascinating.
- [41:43]
Donald Hoffman
Okay, Absolutely.
- [41:44]
Tom Bilyeu
And important to understand. Where my brain breaks with your thesis is how different what you perceive is and what the world is like. And I know. And this is where it gets hard, because I think you would say we don't know what's under space time.
- [42:04]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [42:05]
Tom Bilyeu
But what's your best guess? Like as we strip away this layer? And this might be the time to talk about consciousness. But I don't want to lead the witness. What do you. If it isn't space time, stab in the dark for me. What the hell is it?
- [42:21]
Donald Hoffman
Well, I'll tell you what the physicists are doing on this, because the physicists are the ones who are saying spacetime is not fundamental.
- [42:29]
Tom Bilyeu
So it's there. It's a pointer. It's a representation. It's a data structure.
- [42:32]
Donald Hoffman
It's a data structure to something deeper. That's right.
- [42:34]
Tom Bilyeu
But it's. It happens to be the human brain, which is already a data structure. You're already making that up.
- [42:40]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right.
- [42:41]
Tom Bilyeu
But that data structure represents things through space time.
- [42:47]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right. That's our headset. Space time is just our headset.
- [42:50]
Tom Bilyeu
And it only goes down to the. Is that the Planck length? I always hear you quote, size plank
- [42:56]
Donald Hoffman
length is 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.
- [42:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So that is what you're quoting, Right? Exactly. That's the smallest thing that we can measure.
- [43:03]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, that's the smallest thing. That's the smallest scale at which space time has any operational meaning. If you try to go smaller, space time ceases to make any operational sense
- [43:15]
Tom Bilyeu
at all because gravity insists that below, that things have condensed to too fine of a point. It becomes a black hole.
- [43:21]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly right. You create a black hole. Okay. So, so, and if you think about
- [43:26]
Tom Bilyeu
it, and we know that isn't true, like, why can't that just be true? Smaller than that is a black hole.
- [43:31]
Donald Hoffman
Yay. Yo. Well, we know it's. We know that at the Planck scale, you. You Space time stops and you get. You. You get black holes.
- [43:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So what's the problem?
- [43:42]
Donald Hoffman
Well, black holes are singularity means we don't know what's happening. So you get infinities popping up.
- [43:48]
Tom Bilyeu
But black holes are real, right?
- [43:51]
Donald Hoffman
They're.
- [43:51]
Tom Bilyeu
They're real as a data structure.
- [43:53]
Donald Hoffman
They're, they're, they're, they're real stopping points in our understanding.
- [43:56]
Tom Bilyeu
But they're in the universe.
- [43:58]
Donald Hoffman
Well, they're.
- [44:01]
Tom Bilyeu
I know. This gets complicated. Universe is a representation.
- [44:04]
Donald Hoffman
Oh, yeah. So.
- [44:05]
Tom Bilyeu
And So I want to start hitting.
- [44:06]
Donald Hoffman
Penrose and others have been studying the properties of black holes. Right. Penrose won the Nobel Prize very recently for his, his wonderful work on black holes. And so there's a lot of work that's being done to understand the properties of black holes. For example, the amount of information you can store in a black hole doesn't depend on its volume, only the surface area.
- [44:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I don't understand that.
- [44:28]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, right, right. This is, it's very, very strange, but that turns out to be true in everyday space. The amount of information that you can store in this volume here is not dependent on the volume. It depends on the surface. The surface area. That's the universe we live on. So that's led people to this holographic kind of.
- [44:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, every word out of your mouth. I'm like, we actually are in a simulation. We haven't even talked about the non local things are not locally real. Right, we'll get to that.
- [44:57]
Donald Hoffman
Because that's the new Nobel Prize this year.
- [44:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Which is insane. And literally just says you're in a simulation and it's the same as rendering. And when you look at something, it renders. When you look away, it, it doesn't. And we can prove it mathematically.
- [45:09]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, that's right.
- [45:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Way too fascinating. We'll get to that. But first I want to understand like black holes. The word real gets very slippery in this conversation.
- [45:18]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [45:19]
Tom Bilyeu
But black holes are observable.
- [45:21]
Donald Hoffman
Yes, we talked. Right. So, so the idea is that the notion of space time at like instead of 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, say 10 to the minus 40 centimeters, what would that mean? It does, it has no meaning. It has, there's nothing you can do with it. So, so black holes are fine. They're, they're, they're objects there that are at the end point of what space time can do. But if we say but I thought spacetime was fundamental, that means I should be able to talk about what's happening at 10 to the minus 50 centimeters. And you just cannot. There's no operational meaning. And in that sense.
- [45:53]
Tom Bilyeu
So you're saying whatever is fundamental will be able to tell you exactly what's happening inside of a black hole.
- [45:58]
Donald Hoffman
Well. Or it will tell you that this whole framework in which black holes appear is the wrong framework.
- [46:03]
Tom Bilyeu
And thusly, black holes are just a data structure for something else that is describable. Once you get outside, once you get
- [46:10]
Donald Hoffman
out of space time and you know, it's hard for us to think outside of space time. Like, yeah, can we can we beat
- [46:16]
Tom Bilyeu
this point to death for a second? Because this one was a breakthrough for me when I realized I always thought of the Planck plunk length as like so infinitesimally small that like we should all be in awe. And you're like, that space time breaks down that early is just ridiculous. And I was like, okay, that's a different frame of reference.
- [46:36]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, it's a very shallow data structure. If it was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters that it broke down, I'd be, I'd be impressed. 10 to the minus 33. We got cheated. This is a really shallow data structure. It's only four dimensions. I can't even imagine something in five dimensions. I can't even imagine a new color that I've never seen before. So, so we've been given this really. We think that we're in many cases, we think we're the epitome of intelligence and the, the smartest thing in the universe. My, my feeling is we've been shortchanged, really. Shallow data structure, only three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. We got a cheap headset.
- [47:13]
Tom Bilyeu
And so when. That's a fun way to say it when data breaks down like that, right? What? So I always forget the guy's name, so I wrote it down, but. Nima Arcani.
- [47:25]
Donald Hoffman
Hamed. Right, right.
- [47:27]
Tom Bilyeu
So I've heard you talk about him a lot. So I started doing some research on him. And if I'm understanding what he's saying correctly, is basically when you have a data structure that falls apart that early, which was again a total reframe for me because I thought of that as like, oh my God. But apparently when you understand this better, you realize that's a pretty early tap out. So when a data structure falls apart that early, that tells you that it's proximal, which I'm interpreting as it's the finger pointing at the moon. It is not the moon itself.
- [47:59]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
- [48:00]
Tom Bilyeu
And so now you know, you're looking at a pointer. And so that seems to be the thing that his whole case rests on for space time being doomed. That if your data structure falls apart that early, you know, there's no way this is the fundamental thing that's one
- [48:17]
Donald Hoffman
of the big pointers, the other big pointer, a couple other big pointers he gives is that when you let go of space time and you start computing particle interactions, like two gluons hit each other and four gluons go spraying out the kind of thing that happens at the Large Hadron Collider all the time. If you compute it inside of space time. That one I mentioned. Two gluons in, four gluons out. Hundreds of pages of algebra for one interaction. Why is it so complicated? Because it's the wrong data structure. It's an ugly, nasty data structure.
- [48:47]
Tom Bilyeu
And the thing that you're doing the algebra on is in what way they
- [48:51]
Donald Hoffman
scatter inside space time. You have to do. To make all the math work out, you have to have these Feynman diagrams with virtual particles.
- [48:57]
Tom Bilyeu
People are trying to. They're trying to say, okay, a theory of everything, which you are saying does not exist and will never exist, but we'll get to that later.
- [49:05]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [49:06]
Tom Bilyeu
So if there were a theory of everything, though, we should be able to know everything so finely that I can tell you. Oh, if they collide at this energy with this directionality, it will scatter exactly like this.
- [49:18]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. With these probabilities, you have probabilities of their. Of their scattering.
- [49:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. And so they're just like, oh, my God. It's a dizzying amount of math.
- [49:26]
Donald Hoffman
That's right.
- [49:26]
Tom Bilyeu
If you do it until.
- [49:28]
Donald Hoffman
Until you let go of space time, and then that one that I mentioned, two gluons in, four gluons out. It's one term. You can compute it by hand.
- [49:35]
Tom Bilyeu
It's like when they hit, there'll be a diamond. Yeah, well, because you need to start talking in shapes, right?
- [49:41]
Donald Hoffman
Well, yeah, so. So it's a shape beyond space time whose volumes. So, yeah, it's a shape outside of space time, outside of our headset. And the volumes of this shape actually tell you the probabilities of the various kinds of particle interactions.
- [49:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so.
- [49:58]
Donald Hoffman
And so it turns billions of terms into a handful of terms, and it shows you new symmetries. That's what the physicists really love. It's simpler math, which is great. And then all of a sudden, you see new symmetries that you can't see in space time.
- [50:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, I'm going to try to draw an analogy which is already going to break things, but let me see how close I get. You're in Grand Theft Auto, right? You step on the gas and you go forward and we're just like, oh, my. The math. To predict in what way the car is going to move when you step on the gas pedal is ridiculous. But if we were to be actually looking at the electrical pattern that's stepping on the gas, which would be pressing buttons on your controller in a certain context, if we understood that there's a pattern outside of the headset. So in the. The PlayStation or the Xbox. There's an electrical pattern inside of that that looks. So if you know chess, and I don't, but I'm familiar with the. The idea of chunking. So apparently what chess masters do is they're not looking at the individual pieces on the board, and they just know the patterns. So they're like, oh, that image of where the pieces are in this order, that's this setup. So they've chunked the whole board into like, oh, I know where we're at in the game, and I know what the right next move is. So basically, what you're saying is you step on the gas and it gives you an image of a shape of electrical patterns outside of the headset. If that's what you're saying, I at least understand. I. I don't. I could not give you the math or any of that, but I get like, this representation, this data structure which you think of as being real. Stepping on the gas and the red Porsche goes, is actually this chunk of electrical impulses. If we think of it as a shape or a pattern or a rhythm or however we're going to think of it. But is that what we're saying?
- [52:03]
Donald Hoffman
That could be a helpful metaphor. And I've got another metaphor that may also try to help people, because that's an important point that you're raising. So suppose. Here's another way to think about this. Suppose that I'm looking at a video and I'm seeing all these pixels, and the pixels are moving in really complicated ways. There's red pixels and green pixels and light pixels and dark. And I know that there's something interesting going on. And so I write down all these equations for the motions of these pixels. And. But. But someone says, you know what? There is just this. I've got this little Rubik's Cube, and I'm. All I'm doing is rotating a Rubik's Cube. And. But. But you're only seeing the pixel projection of. If you just could see this 3D object, you would realize how simple it is. But when you only see the pixels and see all the. Then it's. Oh, man, I gotta. I've got to model all the pixels moving on my screen. How do I do that? Well, if you can just let go of the screen behind it, there's this unified geometric object, the Rubik's Cube. And if you just see. Oh, it just rotates rigidly. And that rigid rotation is the only motion I need. It's a rotation here. I have to look at all the pixels.
- [53:13]
Tom Bilyeu
This pixel I'm paying attention to the dots rather than the shape.
- [53:16]
Donald Hoffman
Spacetime. Paying attention to the dots. Right. So in space time, we're stuck on the video screen and we're trying to model all the pixels moving around the video screen. And what the physicists have said, if you let go of the video screen, take it off, you see that these geometric objects like that Rubik's Cube, are outside of it and their structure is much simpler. I'm not saying simple, but much, much simpler. But when it projects into this, really. See, you lost information in the projection, right. That's why you have all these little pixels. You have a 3D object here, a two dimensional screen. So you love. So now it looks really complicated, but
- [53:55]
Tom Bilyeu
so what's happening then when these things collide are they're making a new Rubik's Cube, so. Or they're just rotating a shape that's already there. This is where I have no way to anchor myself.
- [54:08]
Donald Hoffman
Well, so particles are things inside space time, right? Yes, so. So when we look at particle interactions at the Large Hadron Collider, we're looking at the pixels, the motions of the pixels inside space time, the amplitude and other structures that they're finding.
- [54:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. Amplitude is something you say. So fat. I've heard you say this a gazillion times, but I had to look it up.
- [54:32]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [54:32]
Tom Bilyeu
So an amplitude, Hedron, is a shape. Yes, geometric shape.
- [54:39]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [54:39]
Tom Bilyeu
In how many dimensions?
- [54:42]
Donald Hoffman
They can be in small numbers dimensions, but they can go to infinity. So there's lovely, there's different kinds of ampl, different size of amplituhedra, depending on how many particles you want to interact.
- [54:52]
Tom Bilyeu
And that's our rubric, Rubik's Cube.
- [54:53]
Donald Hoffman
That would be the Rubik's Cube beyond the headset.
- [54:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [54:56]
Donald Hoffman
And by the way, this is brand new. This was published in 2013. This is not even 10 years old. So this is, this is all new stuff, this amplitude. So it's no surprise that people haven't heard of it and, and many physicists haven't heard of it. It's truly, truly remarkable. Quantum theorists, in fact.
- [55:15]
Tom Bilyeu
And so how, what makes people think the amplitude, Hedron is actually real, that we have detected the shape outside of the headset?
- [55:22]
Donald Hoffman
Well, I think that the really brilliant physicists would not say, we're done. They would say we've taken a first step outside of the headset of space time, and one of the first structures we found is the amplitude. Hedron, that doesn't mean it's going to be the final answer. They're looking at other structures, something called the cosmological polytope and surface hydra and so forth.
- [55:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Cosmological polytrope.
- [55:50]
Donald Hoffman
Polytope.
- [55:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Polytope. Polytope. What is that? That's another geometric shape.
- [55:54]
Donald Hoffman
It's another geometric shape that Nima Arkani, Hamed, Juan Maldacena and others. A lot of the work has been done at the Institute for Advanced Study and collaborators with the people there. And this is trying see the amplitude Hedron is primarily for flat space time. My understanding. So without gravity, but when you deal with gravity, and Einstein told us that sort of curves space time, then things get a little more complicated. And in that case, I think they're looking at the cosmological polytope for more like cosmological kinds of predictions. So the amplitude. And I'm sure that they're saying that they're not saying the cosmological polytope is the final word. What's really interesting is they've already taken a step beyond the amplitude. Hedron. So there's something called meaning even that
- [56:44]
Tom Bilyeu
they don't think is fundamental or just that it's part of the fundamental.
- [56:48]
Donald Hoffman
They think it's an important step outside of space time. But what surprises the physicists is that the heart of the amplitude is something called a permutation, a kind of permutation called a decorated permutation. It's like shuffling cards, you're permuting cards. So it's a surprise that, that if you let go of space time, things become simple, you get this amplitude, the math becomes simple. And then when you look at the amplitude and ask about its essential character, you find out that behind the amplitude is just permutations, decorated permutations, shuffling cards kind of thing. And so we're at this position. So this is only, you know, in the last couple decades, right, that this has happened. The amplitude, Hedron is 2013, so it's only nine years old. So here we're at this really interesting position in science, in physics. I like to think of it like the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. Remember the scene? It was a great movie. Yeah. And there's a scene where there's the monolith. It's just sitting there, pregnant with meaning. And the apes are looking at it. They're afraid of it, they're beating on it. They don't know what to do with it. You get the sense that they know it's important, but they haven't a clue what it's pointing to. That's where we are. The amplituhedron and the decorated permutations are these monoliths. Outside of spacetime, there's no dynamics. Who ordered this monolith? The amplitude Hedron, just sitting outside of spacetime, it captures all these amplitudes, all the particle amplitudes. It captures the structure of spacetime. Einstein's special relativity, quantum theory and his so called unitarity of quantum theory. So this is deeper. This thing is deeper than spacetime. It's deeper than quantum theory. Quantum theory itself is not deep enough. This structure, the amplitude drone, this monolith is beyond quantum theory, but it codes for quantum theory as projection in space time. So who ordered this? Like just in 2001. A Space Odyssey, the apes. You can imagine. What is this? Where did it come from? Why? What's it going on? We don't.
- [58:59]
Tom Bilyeu
I can imagine me asking that.
- [59:01]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, well, everybody's asking it right now. You know who? It's just a static structure. Physicists like dynamics. We want something. We want to have equations of motion. We don't have that. We just have here's the geometry and here's behind it, this permutation. They're just sitting there. Who ordered that and why? So that's where. So. But the attitude is not one of despair. This is really for the young geniuses who are doing this stuff. This is like fabulous, right? We're the first generation that, not me, but the young physicist, the first generation that really gets to step outside of the headset of space time. They've already found these monoliths, the amplitude decorated permutations.
- [59:46]
Tom Bilyeu
And just to really make that simplistic. Shapes, shapes. And then the shuffling of the shapes.
- [59:52]
Donald Hoffman
That's right, some shuffling that codes for the shapes. There's a shuffling that.
- [59:57]
Tom Bilyeu
When you say codes for the shapes,
- [60:00]
Donald Hoffman
what does that mean? It captures their essential structure in some sense. Even the geometry, the volumes and so forth are redundant. There's this even simpler, more compressed description. Right now the decorated permutation is the most compressed description that doesn't have any extra bells and whistles. The amplitude Hedron, in some sense, the positive grassmanian that they use to build it and so forth. They have extra bells and whistles in some sense. The amplitude Hedron boils it down to its essence. So it's shuffles, permutations. And the big question is why? Why, why this? I mean, if you. In the beginning, God said. Why would God say that? Why? What is it?
- [60:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Let there be shapes.
- [60:52]
Donald Hoffman
Let there be the amplitude Hedon. Let there be shuffles. That doesn't seem quite deep enough, right? This seems like there's got to be something beyond us, some, something dynamical. And there's no clue right now in the physics about a dynamical thing behind the decorated permutations or the amplitude. Hedron.
- [61:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, we just lost me. So I'm guessing that we lost a lot of people. So this is outside of the headset. So we're beginning to get to what we think may be these foundational pillars, but it's so early that nobody really knows what these are yet. Let's go back to the quantum realm for a second. So this is one of my pet peeves that people in the mindset space tend towards magical thinking. And there's something about quantum entanglement, the quantum tubules in the brain or whatever it is that they think about collapsing and all that
- [61:52]
Donald Hoffman
one.
- [61:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Is there anything even inside the headset? Is there anything to be learned from the quantum realm? Does the quantum realm point to anything outside of the headset? And where are we? Like how. How do people not drift into meaninglessness as they begin to pursue this? Because it.
- [62:14]
Donald Hoffman
I.
- [62:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Because I'm so focused on usefulness, right. I get very agitated, might be the right word when people are like, oh, we're quantum entangled and that's what the soul is. And I want to tear my hair up, right?
- [62:30]
Donald Hoffman
So it's one thing just to say those words. It's another thing to have a mathematical model and a mathematical model that actually predicts precise outcomes of precise experiments. And so that's the difference. When physicists talk about quantum entanglement, they're talking serious math and then serious experiments that. Just a week ago, the Nobel Prize was awarded to three of the pioneers in testing one of the key predictions of entanglement, which is that the real world isn't real. See, it's called local realism. The. The belief that we tend to have of local realism. So objects like an electron has a property like its position or its spin, whether or not you observe it has got a value of that because it's real.
- [63:24]
Tom Bilyeu
And we assume.
- [63:26]
Donald Hoffman
We've assumed that, right? That's the reality.
- [63:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Whether you see it or not, it is spinning up or spinning down.
- [63:31]
Donald Hoffman
It's like saying the train is there and it's going to hit you. Even if you don't see it, you close your eyes, it's not going to stop the train from hitting you. So the electron really has its position and really has a spin when that's not observed. And the other assumption is locality. It's Einstein's assumption that nothing, no effects travel faster than the Speed of light, through space, through space time. And so that the two together are called local realism. So it's possible that when we say local realism is false, that it's either the realism that's wrong or the locality. So it could be, you could say, okay, local realism is false because there really are properties that exist, but they travel, their influences go faster than the speed of light. Or you can say, nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But. But. So the realism is false. I believe Einstein, but the realism is false. My attitude is both are false. Local and realism are both false. And that comes out of just the idea that spacetime itself is not fundamental. Right?
- [64:32]
Tom Bilyeu
And so let me say it real simply for people like me, things only exist when you look at them, right?
- [64:41]
Donald Hoffman
You create them when you see them. Like in Grand Theft Auto, I have a VR headset on. I look over there and I see a red Camaro. Is there a red Camaro in the supercomputer? No.
- [64:52]
Tom Bilyeu
The average person is going to reject this out of hand. So one, we're going to have to walk through the Nobel Prize. So thankfully you had linked to an article. So I read about it. It melted my brain about an hour before you and I sat down together and I was just like, how the hell is this real or true? I guess because it's not real. And then. So we'll. We'll walk through that. But to give people the analogy, to anchor them, I think you and I disagree about this. And I've always told people, largely because I don't want to argue about it, and I don't really know that I don't think we live in a simulation. The more times I interview you, the more I'm like, maybe we do. Or maybe the way our fitness payoffs get mapped is it is so effectively like a simulation, as you might as well think of it as living in a simulation. So I've written this story with my team. I don't want to overly take credit, but we've created this thing called Project Kaizen. And in Project Kaizen, they're in this thing that we call the Array. The Array is basically quantum foam. And the idea is that it's information theory so that you information can travel faster than the speed of light. And that ultimately the thing that drives people mad in our world is to ask the question, where is the array? Because they're thinking of it as like a quantum supercomputer or something. But in the lore where we play with that question, I don't want to give away what we think is the right answer, but we play with that question a lot. And so one of the characters in the story is literally driving himself mad by asking the question, where is the array? I know if I can generate enough energy, I can rip this veil and I can see through beyond the headset into, like, is this sitting on a desk somewhere? And, like, can we actually discover where that is? And. Okay, so working with that idea, at first, I thought, nah, I mean, this is all just a story. But the more that I look at this in. In this is in real life. Put that in air quotes. In real life, you only render things when the player is looking at it. It's the only way to not melt the computer. So as they move their character's eyes around, they see different parts of the world. It literally comes into existence. It gets rendered when they look at it, and it ceases to be rendered when they look away. So they feel like they're in the seamless 3D environment. But in reality, it's a trick. And so it's only rendering right up to the edge of your field of view. And then outside of that, it's gone exactly as you describe the math. That is what's really happening.
- [67:31]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [67:32]
Tom Bilyeu
That. I mean, it's kind of fun and cool and interesting.
- [67:36]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [67:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so with that analogy, people understand that one.
- [67:40]
Donald Hoffman
I agree.
- [67:42]
Tom Bilyeu
If you try to replicate. So going back to what I was saying about if I try to replicate this table, make it look photorealistic, it is unbelievably difficult. And there are so many elements of, like, reflectivity and depth, of how far the light penetrates and.
- [67:55]
Donald Hoffman
Absolutely.
- [67:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, my God. And it's on and on and on, Right?
- [67:57]
Donald Hoffman
Absolutely.
- [67:59]
Tom Bilyeu
So we know that there are all these things that you can do to recreate reality. One of the things, as you build reality in a virtual environment is you have to deal with rendering only that which you're pointed at, what you measure.
- [68:12]
Donald Hoffman
Exactly. Right.
- [68:13]
Tom Bilyeu
As we look at the quantum world, that holds true in a way that is so weird. I don't know whether to laugh or be creeped out or whatever, but it's utterly fascinating. Okay, so now to the Nobel Prize. So we know that that's how you would have to do it if you want to recreate real. And the Nobel Prize was won for
- [68:32]
Donald Hoffman
showing that the idea of local realism, that things exist and have definite values of their properties and with influences that go no faster than the speed of light, that's false. That assumption of local realism is false. And there are even really interesting quantum setups where you can prove that when I make this particular set of measurements, I know with probability one what I will get, like, on my eighth measurement, I know with probability one what the value will be.
- [69:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Again, probability one means 100%.
- [69:05]
Donald Hoffman
That's right, 100% what I'm going to measure. And yet I also can prove that that value, let's say of the position or the spin, cannot possibly exist until the moment I make the measurement.
- [69:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so let's walk people through that. So Einstein, right? And from two other people basically said, huh, the math predicts that what you just said is true, that I can have two. We end up calling them quantumly entangled particles. But I have two particles, I forget which type, racing away from each other, right to the opposite ends of the solar system, very, very, very far apart. And, and one of them, we know they have to have opposite spin. So one of them is going to be spinning up, one of them is going to be spinning down. And they said they're like socks. So one of them could be the right sock, and one of them is the left sock. So once you measure that, oh, this is the right one, then you know automatically that the other person has the left one.
- [70:10]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [70:11]
Tom Bilyeu
And the Nobel Prize was won for proving that you don't. They're not like socks.
- [70:18]
Donald Hoffman
Right? Right.
- [70:19]
Tom Bilyeu
It's not you. It's not even that you don't know which is which. It's that whichever one you look at first, if that spins up, then you know, instantaneously, the other one is spinning down, but causally, because this one is spinning up, that one must be spinning down.
- [70:34]
Donald Hoffman
Right? Right.
- [70:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so now the part I don't understand, which, by the way, means that these things will react effectively to each other because you measured it instantaneously across the entire solar system in this example, which is way faster than light. My question is, when you measure it, if it wasn't already spinning up or down, what makes it spin up or down? Is it just probability?
- [71:01]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. That's all the physics can tell us right now are the probabilities for this. So, so, and probability is where explanation stops. Right?
- [71:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [71:08]
Donald Hoffman
When you put a probability measure in your theory, you're saying, my understanding stops right here. So I need a probability measure. Because if, if I could tell you how it worked, then I would tell you how it worked Right. Now I can just say, here's the probabilities. And so that's what we get in quantum theory is, and, and so that's why Einstein said, I don't, you know, God doesn't play dice. He didn't like the idea that, that God didn't know all the way down what was going on, that there would be these random probabilities. But yeah, when you do the experiments, it turns out entanglement is real. And that then leads to the conclusion ultimately that local realism is false. And it's truly stunning. But if you think about it in terms of a headset, as you said, I render like in the virtual reality Grand Theft Auto. I render the Camaro when I look and I garbage collect it when I look away, I just delete it. I render particles, I render space time itself. Spacetime itself doesn't exist except as a data structure that we use. And so it's now in terms of a simulation, I should make a distinction between what we're saying here and a different kind of notion of simulation that Nick Bostrom has. So there's a simulation theory of Nick Bostrom and others where they, you know, say, look, this isn't real. It could be just some computer geek that, that did a program, and we're just creatures in the simulated world in this program. And it turns out that that computer, Greek herself is just a program from someone else at a lower level. And there's this whole hierarchy all the way down until you get to some base programmer. But they assume that the base level is a space time world, so they're still stuck on the headset. That kind of simulation theory isn't thinking big enough. You have to let the. And they're also assuming that, that programs can create consciousness, which is another story. No one's been able to show how, how that's even possible. So they're just not thinking big enough. You've got to let go of space time at the base of the entire hierarchy of simulations to really get where the physicists have gone. Space time itself is merely a headset. So, so the standard simulation theory isn't thinking big enough. It's still stuck in the headset.
- [73:22]
Tom Bilyeu
As we strip away the headset, is local realism going to remain false? Or will there be something, a better way to ask it? When we strip away the headset, is God still playing dice?
- [73:35]
Donald Hoffman
I'll put it this way. As scientists making theories, we will always come up short. We will always have a place where we say, in our theory, this is where our knowledge stops. And what, that's what we call the assumptions of our theory. So every scientific theory says, if you grant me these assumptions, I'll explain all this wonderful stuff, but you have to grant me those assumptions. And I can't explain those assumptions. Like even Einstein, he said, let me, grant me that the speed of light is constant for all observers. And grant me that the laws of, of physics are the same for all, all people moving in uniform motion. If you grab me those two things, then I can do all this wonderful stuff. And that's the way all scientific theories work. Grant me this assumption, these miracles, because
- [74:25]
Tom Bilyeu
we don't yet understand these things well.
- [74:27]
Donald Hoffman
And, and it's also, I think, intrinsic to what it means to be a scientific theory. So there's no escaping this a scientific theory. There is no theory of everything thing. That's a flat out statement. There can never be a scientific theory
- [74:43]
Tom Bilyeu
of everything because of Gal's incompleteness girdle's incompleteness theorem.
- [74:46]
Donald Hoffman
But, but even just before Godel's incompleteness theorem, every theory says, grant me these assumptions, please. You have to make certain assumptions to even to boot up.
- [74:54]
Tom Bilyeu
But isn't that just our ignorance?
- [74:58]
Donald Hoffman
Probably so, but our ignorance is unlimited.
- [75:01]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. So I heard you and Yosha Bach.
- [75:05]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [75:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Discussing, and he said something that rings intuitively true to me, which is that we always want to say, oh, we'll never understand that.
- [75:14]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [75:15]
Tom Bilyeu
But we just don't understand it right now. And just like Newton and his whole thing at the end of his life where he was like, the right way to think of me is as a child on the shore playing with the seashell in front of the entire vast sea of undiscovered truth.
- [75:29]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [75:30]
Tom Bilyeu
And his students, though, didn't believe that. Now, maybe out of arrogance, maybe they just sat so icky with them to think that they were so ignorant to so many things, but also to be generous to them, maybe because they believed on a long enough timeline we really would figure things out. Or even if you'll grant me my miracle of as we begin to merge with machines, will we be able to process data in such a more vast way that we're able to see what is true? All of the mismapping of the. Or all of the combinatorial combinations become manageable just because we can crunch so much data. And so. Oh, you might as well look at what is exactly real, do you? Does that? So with that setup, I finally just went and looked up Godel's incompleteness theorem. Because I've tried to hang with you every episode around this and looking at it, it's basically that there are, and this will be the world's most simplistic interpretation, but there are. You can create an equation that you know to be true, but you can't prove it.
- [76:53]
Donald Hoffman
Right?
- [76:53]
Tom Bilyeu
And it's. I. It's beyond me to be able to explain how that's true, but when you read about it, it's like, whoa, okay, so you can really create. It's. It's kind of like the mathematical version of a linguistic trap where it's like the statement on this side of the card or the statement on the other side of the card is false. You turn it over and it says what? The statement on the other side of the card is true. And so now you're trapped because they can't both be right or wrong.
- [77:20]
Donald Hoffman
Right?
- [77:21]
Tom Bilyeu
So it. I can't explain it better than that. But like, without that, if there isn't things that are. If he's right and there are things that are true but that cannot be proven. I get why you say that we'll never have a theory of everything, but if we just don't understand enough yet, then it feels like we will eventually.
- [77:42]
Donald Hoffman
No girdles. Incompleteness theorem is definitive. It says that no matter how complicated your mathematical or scientific theory is, you can always produce a new statement that's true and is not provable within the theory that you've got. So that means it escaped your current theory. Your theory was not a theory of everything because it wasn't a theory of this. It didn't capture this truth. True. So you didn't have a theory of everything. So you say, okay, well, I'll just put it in my theory. So now I've got. Then Godel says, well, sorry. Now with your new augmented system, here's this new. I'll use it to show you there's this new thing that's true but can't be proven. So you don't have a theory of everything. And you add that. And, and what that means is that there is this unlimited realm of truth that's forever beyond our notion of proof of scientific theory. It's unlimited. So there's this. I think of it as like unlimited intelligence. And that is out there. And our scientific theories will. Will get huge and far more interesting and far more complex and cover lots and lots. They'll cover. We'll be blown away. We'll make lots and lots of progress. And. But Godel's incompleteness theorem says, but you will have not even begun to scratch the surface of the unlimited intelligence that's out there. So I'm not. I'm not. By the way, some people say, well, Hoffman, you're, You're. You're. You've walked away from modernism and the desire for logic and truth and rationality, you've gone into postmodernism. And, and you know, and my attitude is no, no, no. Reason is telling us its limits. Reason is saying that logic itself cannot get to all truths. So I'm paying due respect to reason because reason itself is saying its own limits. And in fact, that gives me even more respect for reason because reason is smart enough to tell us where it gets off. So it's not abandoning reason. It's not going into, you know, some postmodernism kind of thing where anything goes. No, not anything goes. Reason is saying, yeah, use your logical systems. But your logical systems must of course be internally consistent. So Godel's theorem is not Godel's inconsistency theorem. It's Godel's incompleteness theorem. Our logic can be consistent. If it is consistent, then it's necessarily incomplete. If it were inconsistent, then it's mostly useless. Right, It'd be mostly useless. So is Godel's. So what Godel really showed is our, our theories are either inconsistent or incomplete. But we call it Godel's incompleteness theorem because that's. We don't think about inconsistency. It's really the incompleteness. And so it's truly respecting reason to recognize that reason itself says where it gets off. And it points to, as Newton pointed to, this unbounded intelligence that reason can always happily explore, fully knowing. It will always be a trivial foray into the unknown. A trivial foray into the unknown. And yet somehow it's important for us to do that foray. So as a scientist, this is not just abstract stuff for me. I take reason very seriously. It says I have limits and there are unbounded truths beyond reason. So I take time to just sit in complete silence and let go of reason and see what happens. Maybe I can touch that unlimited intelligence. Maybe I am that unlimited intelligence under a headset. That's an interesting possibility, which many spiritual traditions have pointed to, that we are that unlimited intelligence. So that we then have this interesting back and forth between rigorous logic. Not anything goes rigorous logic on the one hand, and then complete letting go of all concepts, going into complete silence, where there's this incredible intelligence that's, it's literally infinitely greater than our scientific intelligence and having them go back and forth. I think the, the best science in the future will be from those who can do that. Be absolutely hard nosed in your math and your experiments. Absolutely hard nosed. It's not everything goes. It's, it's rigor and then go into complete interior silence to get the true tap into this unlimited wisdom, unlimited intelligence, and go back and forth somehow. My feeling is that's what all this is pointing to, that we should have our feet in both realms. And for some reason, having feet in both realms is really what we're up to, what this is all about.
- [83:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so let's push into that a little bit. So this takes us into consciousness. Never been enamored with the consciousness debate, but the way that you propose some interesting ways of looking at it I do find intriguing. So you've got this idea that Godel's incompleteness theorem says it's this infinite thing and that there's always going to be more to explore, that you will never be able to have a theory of everything. And when you ask yourself why would this be the case? Or how does that tie into consciousness? And maybe I'm getting this slightly wrong, but my interpretation of what you said is that it's possible that given that consciousness is basically exploring itself and we are all of the permutations that it must run through to basically have the negative take. I know that not to be me, and that helps me understand who I am. How close am I getting?
- [84:12]
Donald Hoffman
That's, that's, I think, a very, very good first approximation with the proviso that we understand now, based on what we've talked about in Godel's incompleteness theorem, that everything that we are saying now are just words and they're only pointers into a realm that's, that's unlimited and infinitely beyond anything that even our words can point to. So even when I use so I talk about consciousness as being more fundamental than space time. But even then, if I step back and go, okay, to be really consistent, I have to admit that even a theory of consciousness is not a theory of everything. And it may not even be the right language. It's just the next baby step in our scientific experiment.
- [84:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Why does consciousness be more fundamental than space time? Wouldn't the thing that the guys, the local realism which requires you to look at something, state that if consciousness were more fundamental than space time, it would already be observing itself?
- [85:12]
Donald Hoffman
So the way to think about it is maybe an analogy is you're wearing a headset and you're playing Grand Theft Auto again, but there is no real car out there. The steering wheel is just in your head. It's all in your perceptions. All of that is in your. So the entire physical world, quote unquote of Grand Theft Auto is made up in your mind, made up in your consciousness.
- [85:43]
Tom Bilyeu
So my, my consciousness or whatever consciousness is, is creating the, the virtual world.
- [85:52]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. The way I think about it. And again, you know, words have limitations. But the math model we're working on, on consciousness indicates that there is one unlimited consciousness that cannot be modeled. And, but we can talk about projections of it. That one, that one big consciousness can be, can have projections. And we're, we're having a projection into a 4D space time format and there's a Tom projection and a non projection, but we're just projections of this one unlimited consciousness that's, that's utterly outside of space and time. And this is probably not a particularly sophisticated projection. As I was saying, 40 space time only goes to 10 to the -33 centimeters. Pretty trivial. So this is, we're probably, this is, you know, consciousness not being too serious. This is like a trivial projection, but it's just doing whatever it needs to do. We're doing some science. We're, we're, we're talking, we're learning to love each other. Which maybe, you know, who knows, that might be the big thing. Maybe, maybe it's learning to know yourself beyond any concepts and to know that everybody else is really you under a different avatar and to, to learn to love. I mean I, I don't know what the final answer is, but this is the kind of question that comes up and the kind of answer that comes
- [87:07]
Tom Bilyeu
up that feels a little bit wishful thinking isn't the right way. But that feels like a very specific to you prognostication.
- [87:17]
Donald Hoffman
Absolutely.
- [87:18]
Tom Bilyeu
When I.
- [87:18]
Donald Hoffman
Beyond the math.
- [87:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, when I hear you describing that, I think of war games and Jacob learning like, oh, there's no way to win at thermonuclear war. The only way to win is to not play great ending to a movie. But like when I think about, okay, wait, why would, why would consciousness this grand consciousness that the math seems to point to, why would it need to understand itself? Why would it need to discover love? It's like, and I think about this a lot and we talked about this in the last, the last time we were together. I was saying when you've got a machine and you're trying to like get AI to do something, you have to give it directives, you have to tell it to do something, but somebody had to tell it to do that thing.
- [88:06]
Donald Hoffman
Thing.
- [88:07]
Tom Bilyeu
So who is telling consciousness. Oh, you should care about love.
- [88:11]
Donald Hoffman
Well, and I, I completely agree with you, Tom. I think that the things I just threw out should probably be thrown out Right, but the idea is we don't have good ideas in this space. So the reason I'm so when I put these ideas out, I'm not wedded to them in the least. But I'm saying better to have something on the table that we can say, ah, that's not it, than to have nothing on the table, because at least we can say, okay, that's not it. So why isn't that it? What's wrong with that? And then we can try to play with and say, well, how can we get something better? So I put some bad pieces on the table because I don't have anything better to. So it's poverty in my imagination. But I'm hoping by putting bad pieces on the table and having people go, no, that's not it. I would go, yeah, that's not it. So what is it? What is a better idea? But of course that's a never ending process. Godel tells us that in some sense we'll always be putting bad pieces on the table. And that's so we have to learn to live with that. We have to learn to say, I'm not going to get the final theory of everything. No matter. Even if you're an Einstein, which you put down on the table, we're eventually going to say, here's the limits of that. And that's going to be always the case with scientific theories. It's just that in the things I just threw on the table, the limits are so obvious and so clear that you can just sort of say right away that that doesn't seem right. And I had a nice lunch a few days ago with Annika Harris and when I was putting these ideas and she had exactly the same attitude, which is she said it sounds too romantic. Don and I agree, but it's better to put something on the table and get a negative reaction so that we start to say, okay, well what are better places to go in this? But always realize that Godel is telling us this very humbling thing. You'll never get a theory of everything. And that means there'll always be the feeling of yeah, but there's more. Yeah, but there's more. Even if you're Einstein. Yeah, but there's more.
- [90:05]
Tom Bilyeu
So consciousness. What? One I want to understand as we look at that recent Nobel Prize winning for realizing that local reality isn't a thing. If there is this uber consciousness, how would it not cause the like constant collapsing? If, if consciousness is more fundamental than spacetime, how is it not causing this constant collapse down to being observed? Because if consciousness is, is the thing that gives rise to that, it would by nature be aware. Right?
- [90:42]
Donald Hoffman
So to really give a technical answer to that, but we're going to have to have is a mathematical theory of consciousness first, right? So what do we mean by consciousness? And write down equations for how it is dynamics. And then we're going to have to say, where is consciousness? Is it inside space time? See, most of my colleagues who are studying consciousness, my cognitive neuroscience, these are brilliant, brilliant researchers and friends, but they're thinking of consciousness as inside space time, as being made by the brain or being made by an AI computer that's complicated enough, or made by integrated information or microtubule quantum collapses or global workspace kind of architectures on the right broadcast architecture there. So there's something inside space time that's generating consciousness. So that's the, I would say 99% of my colleagues and friends. And by the way, they're brilliant, but they're thinking inside spacetime. That's almost all the work is inside space time. And consciousness is stuck inside spacetime. I'm saying we need a theory of consciousness outside spacetime because our best science tells us that spacetime is a trivial data structure. It's a shallow, trivial data structure. Why should we try to shoehorn consciousness to be something inside spacetime? Why not think about, again, the VR case with my headset? All that I'm perceiving is actually not really there. It's actually in my consciousness. Let's turn things around. Space time and particles, and the physical world is just a little tiny data structure inside consciousness. So to have that kind of model. So consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness then uses tiny little headsets in its interactions with itself. And space time is just one trivial little headset that conscious agents use to interact with and, and probably has far more interesting ones than, than spacetime. So to answer your question, we then really have to say our mathematical model of consciousness, and how does that precisely project into our little space time headset and give us the laws of quantum field theory, the laws of general relativity, evolution by natural selection. We have to get so all the stuff that we've done inside the headset. Science has been inside the headset. Until the last couple decades. All of our science has been studying the pixels in our headset and the structure of our pixels with the amplitude. Science is taking a step outside the headset and saying, what is beyond space and time? Okay, so that's really incredible. And then they say the deepest thing we found are these decorated permutations. That's the deepest thing we found so far mean it's the final answer. It's just as far as we've gotten. So what we need to do is take a theory of conscious consciousness. We call it conscious agents in my case, or conscious units. Annika likes me to use conscious units instead of conscious agents because agency involves maybe the notion of a self. And there doesn't have to be a notion of a, you know, like a human kind of self in these agents. They. They could be selfless in some sense, but conscious how? Well, so my. Myself is.
- [93:57]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, don't most people define consciousness as it is like something to be you?
- [94:02]
Donald Hoffman
Right. The self, though, is like, I'm Don Hoffman. I was born in such a year. My parents were such and such. I got educated. It's a story.
- [94:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [94:09]
Donald Hoffman
But in some sense, if I just let go of the story, if I forgot my story, I would still be conscious. If I forget who I. If I forget everything that I've done, give me a little drug and I
- [94:20]
Tom Bilyeu
just see it's an experience.
- [94:23]
Donald Hoffman
I'm still conscious. And so the self, in terms of a little story and, and what's interesting is we put so much emphasis in the story. And me versus you and. And I've got more than you, or I'm smarter than you, or, or I'm faster than you. Even little kids, you know, my car is faster than my daddy can beat up your. Yeah, that kind of thing. So we're always comparing our stories. So, so there's no self in these conscious agents, in the sense of this little image of myself that I'm defending and showing that it's better than your daddy or your car, whatever it might be. So, so, so I call them conscious agents, but we could call them conscious units. But the key thing is that that has to be mathematically precise. Even though we understand that our mathematics will always be just our current baby step. But nevertheless, you need to be mathematically precise. And we have to show precisely a mapping into space time. Then we can start to answer your question about how is this local realism thing related to properties of consciousness.
- [95:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, the reason we have to map in spacetime is because we know that spacetime, even if it's just a sort of cheap simulation, it does come from whatever is more foundational than that.
- [95:32]
Donald Hoffman
And that's where all our data is. The only place our headset lets us look is inside the headset. So we have to. I mean, if we're going to do experiments to test our theories, we're stuck with this little Tiny trivial data structure called space time. And all of our experiments have to be done in space time. We have to measure them inside space time. So that's why we have to take our theory of consciousness and project it into space time. Now what's interesting is that the physicists have gone beyond spacetime and found these monoliths. As we talked about the monolith that's sitting there, the math fluhedron and so forth, and then the decorated permutation monolith, but no dynamics. So the physicists are going to eventually want a dynamics, right?
- [96:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Why if you have no space and time, why would something need to move?
- [96:19]
Donald Hoffman
Now physicists like Nima, I won't put it on him. If I were the physicist and said, you know what, here's the final answer. It's the amplitude Hedron and a decorated permutation. Live with it. That's all there is. And some 20 year old kid taking a graduate class will go, give me a break. You want me to just live with that? I'm going to look deeper, I'm going to probe deeper, I'm going to find something behind that. And that's what science always does. So we're not. So none of the physicists, I mean of course we have a big party and are really happy about the amplitude and the decorator. It's an incredible accomplishment. But the attitude is going to be what's next? And in principle they're going to want a dynamics, not time. So you can have dynamics without what we call time, as in space time. So the notion of dynamics or sequence is a far more general notion than just the notion of time as we see it it in, in terms of space time. So we wanted dynamics in that more general sense of something where there are sequences, where there are, it's not just
- [97:23]
Tom Bilyeu
a static object because there are things that we see in our headset of space time that leads us to believe that sequencing is, must be a part of whatever is fundamental.
- [97:35]
Donald Hoffman
Well, possibly, yes. That and possibly because we, I think would be impatient or unhappy with a theory that just says God said this object and that's it, there is this object, live with it. That's the final answer. No scientist would be happy with that. Why did God say that? Why couldn't God said something else? And why did it have to be static? Why couldn't there be some dynamics, not a space time dynamics, but some kind of, of something happening? Why, why can't. So now the answer may be that the geometry is all there is and there is no dynamics. But we're not going to just accept that at face value. We're going to have to be taken there kicking and screaming, right, and made, you know, to, to believe that because nothing else works. But so that's why I think that the physicists themselves are going to look for dynamics behind the decorative permutations. So what a theory of consciousness has to do then if it wants to connect with space time is it has to show how it maps onto decorated permutations. Right? You need a dynamical theory of consciousness and you must show how it maps into decorated permutations. Then the physicists say, if you give me the decorated permutations, I can take you all the way into space time and you can predict scattering at the Large Hadron Collider and so forth. And so that's what our team has just done in the last 10 weeks. We, we discovered a new bit of mathematics that the dynamics of conscious agents is so called Markov chains, Markovian dynamics, a very, very simple kind of probabilistic dynamics. And so a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, we decided to look, okay, how do you map Markov chains into decorated permutations? So we could put a dynamics behind the amplitude and as far as like we could tell, there's nothing published in terms of a general theory. There are special little cases where they've looked at something. But you know, a general theory, take any Markov chain, map it into decorated. Permission.
- [99:38]
Tom Bilyeu
The Markov chain is just the long tail knock on effect of things bumping into each other essentially.
- [99:44]
Donald Hoffman
Right? Just probabilistic, you know, this happens with that probability. This happens with that probability. All the probabilities have to sum to one.
- [99:51]
Tom Bilyeu
What are the probability of when the cue ball hits the, the balls on the pool table that they will end up in this configuration?
- [99:58]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. But in the case of conscious agents, I should be explicit. It's like it's a social network, right? This is now consciousness. So it's a network of agents. And in some sense the probabilities are what's the probability that this guy is going to talk to that guy or these three guys or those five guys? And so it's sort of like network linkage. Google has a lot of links, a lot more than Hoffman. So Google has a lot of, lot of things that are, that are talking to Google. Hoffman has a very few things. Apple has a lot of things talking to them. So in those, so those probabilities are sort of saying it's network probabilities. What's the probability that sometimes it's your influence. And too as well, Google has huge influence because of all the networks, all the connections, it's got much more than someone who only has five followers. Right. Google has millions or hundreds of millions. So, and then there's, you know, if you think about it, it. Someone tweets and then that gets picked up and who picks it up and who retweets it and who likes it and so forth. So you see all the. It's all probabilities, right? Someone does something and it ripples through the whole network probabilistically, and you can't know exactly, even though Tom is a follower of somebody else, doesn't mean that Tom's going to tweet everything. What does Tom like? Or maybe Tom just missed that he had something else that day. So it's all probabilistic. And so you. You see these evolving probabilities on this network, and that's what Markov chains are really good at. They're looking at literally. So the theory of conscious agents. Think social networks like Twitterverse and so forth and how influences propagate in the Twitterverse. And then, so what we found about 10 weeks ago was we invented, apparently, as far as we can tell, new math, a precise way to take any Markovian dynamics and map it into decorated permutations. So we now have a map from the dynamics of conscious agents into decorated permutations. The physicist, then.
- [101:51]
Tom Bilyeu
And decorated permutations for people that don't know, is the shuffling. But it's shuffling that can go either direction. So I have the good fortune that you were explaining this to me before we started rolling, and I want people to think that I'm more clever than I am. But decorated permutations, you said. Okay. When people think about shuffling a deck, they think about card one going into the third position. They don't think about card one going, if there's five cards going the other way. So instead of going 1, 2, and ending up at 3, it goes 5, 4, and ending up at 3. So same number of moves, but you've gone in a different direction. And am I explaining that right?
- [102:34]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. The idea of the two different directions is important, but it's slightly slight. Just a slight difference. So, so Suppose I have five cards, just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and they're in order. And now I'm going to shuffle them and I say, okay, one went to position three now, but five went to position two. So one going to three is sort of shuffling forward. Right? You went to a bigger number, five going to two, you're going to a smaller number, you're going backward. So a normal permutation, that's fine. That's what a normal permutation is. A decorated permutation says you only shuffle to a bigger number. So if you want five to go to two, what you're going to do is you're going to have five go to seven, because seven minus five five is the biggest number, seven minus five is two. Okay, but if five had gone to one, then we'd actually go five goes to six because six minus five is one. So you, it's a wraparound. So only. So if you already, if one is going to three, then you just do the normal thing. One goes to three. But if some permutation is going to a smaller number, like three goes to one, then you actually have to say three goes to six because the total of five and five plus one is six. So that's called a decorated permutation. So it's not. Not. It's just a permutation with this extra little twist. It's not a big deal, frankly. It just turned out that you needed that extra twist to fully capture the particle physics scattering of particles. So when you do that, what's stunning is for some cases, so in the approximation in which all particles are super symmetric and massless, so they have. They're all traveling at the speed of light, they're massless, so they travel the speed light. In that simple case, the decorated permutation is everything. That's it. And when you let go of supersymmetry and you have massive particles, then all you have to do is you have the decorated permutation. Plus you need to add information about the mass and the spin. But the decorated permutation is really doing the heavy lifting. So that's the stunning thing is to the physicists, which is, and you see it in the writings when, you know, when you read like, like Nima Arkani Hamed has the book, you know, Grassmannian Geometry of Scattering Amplitudes with a bunch of. When they talk about the decorated permutations, you can see in the way they write, they're like, who ordered this? You would never have guessed that it would be something like that. So. But here's an interesting thing. It turns out that decorated permutations are the most compact way to capture a Markovian dynamics. It's an incredibly compact way of capturing the dynamics. It basically is telling you what decorative permutations in a dynamical system are telling you is your social network. Who are you connected to? Who are you interacting with only shuffling
- [105:39]
Tom Bilyeu
in one direction, you better capture.
- [105:42]
Donald Hoffman
You better capture that. If you want, I can go into the details.
- [105:47]
Tom Bilyeu
It's so foreign to me. I don't know how much the details, but that's really strange. So that's where we get into the math. Fair enough, I'll accept it as true.
- [105:58]
Donald Hoffman
Right. We can do the math if you want, but.
- [106:01]
Tom Bilyeu
But the last time that we did the math, it actually ended up being really fascinating. So let's try it. Let's see. Let's see how far we get before my brain snaps in half.
- [106:10]
Donald Hoffman
Okay, so the key thing about these decorated permutations that gives them this extra power. Yep. Is that there's two ways to map to yourself. Right. So if, if you shuffle the cards, but card number one stays number one, then one goes to one. Right. But with the decorative permutation you could say, well, if there were say five cards, then you could say, well, one goes to one, but also one goes to six is another way of saying that you stayed yourself because 6 mod 5 is 1, 6 minus 5 is 1. Yep. So there are so. So called.
- [106:45]
Tom Bilyeu
What happens if I want to move five to position four? That's really nine. And you said that seven was the max.
- [106:52]
Donald Hoffman
Oh no. So the max would be 10.
- [106:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, right, got it, got it.
- [106:57]
Donald Hoffman
So if you have five cards, the maximum number would be 10. For N cards it's two N. Right, understood. So for five, so if there are five cards, five could either map to itself five to five or five goes to 10. Yep. Because that would be. So the one is called the first decoration of the identity, because it's the identity move, five went to five and the other is called the second decoration of the identity. And. And there's another branch of mathematics where they're called loops and co loops. But anyway, so the way it matters in terms of the physics. Now in physics, when you have the first decoration of the identity, it corresponds to what they call a zero dimensional space. So in some sense the thing doesn't exist, It's a zero dimension. And when it maps to itself in the second kind of identity, then it's its own one dimensional space, a separate one dimensional space. So the reason for the decorate permutations, to capture that distinction between something that is alone in the sense that it's essentially empty versus alone in the sense that it's just a one dimensional space, a line versus just a zero dimensional point, you needed to capture those two things. And so it does. But for the Markov dynamics, it captures something about social networks that's interesting. Either I'm alone, I'm the identity. I'm alone because I'm talking to myself and so I'm only talking to myself, or I'm alone because I'm not even talking to myself. And so the case in which I'm not even talking to myself is the first decoration of the identity and the one in which I'm only talking to myself and nobody else. That's the second second. And as soon as I'm talking to anybody else then I get a non trivial permutation and that, then what you do is you assign. If, say I'm in the social network and I'm number two and suppose that my decorated permutation assigns me to five, there's only five member. That means that my social network, everybody in my social network is captured between two and five total. So for example, number one is not in my social network. Yep, right. So what the decorative permutation for dynamical system is doing is it's capturing. Now it could be that for example, when I go 2 to 5, maybe 4 isn't in my network, but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to say anybody that's in my network is captured between 2 and 5, inclusive of 2 and 5. And when you look at the whole decorated permutation, you'll figure out that four wasn't in the social network of two. You can figure it out from the decorated permutation. So that's why it's such that it's a really compact representation of everything. So eventually we may actually use this in social network theory. Our new mathematics of decorated permutations for dynamics may actually end up being a very compact representation of social networks. I haven't even thought about that yet. But that could be.
- [109:58]
Tom Bilyeu
As you're explaining it, I was like, are they going to run this math for predictive models for social networking?
- [110:04]
Donald Hoffman
Well, it's, it is the right now the most compact mathematics that we can use to describe social networks and the dynamics of social networks. Basically the dynamics of who are you actually interacting with? So, so this is a brand new tool that I, you know, has never been as far as I know, we invented it. So we have a paper that we're about to submit for publication in two or three weeks where we present this and I did give a professional talk at Stanford a month or two ago where I presented the map.
- [110:34]
Tom Bilyeu
People put this together. Like this is so abstract for me. I am clinging on by my fingernails and I would not want to have to Explain decorated permutations to anybody. Right. But that's really interesting that, I mean, so we're caught in between two things. One, talking about the things we can predict and how utterly fascinating it is when you can actually map out this is what happens happens.
- [110:58]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [110:58]
Tom Bilyeu
And then talking about how, oh yeah, everything that you're mapping is totally fake. It's, it's really interesting. But that's one of the things that I've always, I, I, cognitively, I, I don't have that ability. It doesn't come naturally to me.
- [111:12]
Donald Hoffman
Me either.
- [111:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, I have to loop around this stuff so many times just to get like the real basics. But the idea of being able to understand a system so well that you can predict. This goes back to what I was saying. My, my whole thing in life belief is when you can accurately predict the outcome of your actions. Things get very interesting. And so anything, I mean, that like, gets. As of right now, I can't digest that enough to make it usable in my life. But it hints at this idea of you really can map out if I do this, this and this. Even as it gets more and more complicated, you really can predict what the outcome is going to be. And the closer that you can get to that, the more more effective you will be in your life. Especially because so much of what one does in business, it's all human psychology. And so if you have a way, I mean, and this really gets into right now, Impact theory is investing hugely into AI, AI and what we're doing in terms of our funnels, AI in terms of what we're doing in the gaming side, and acknowledging that even though you have a wall of data that as a person you can't, can't work your way through, there really is, There are patterns in that data.
- [112:25]
Donald Hoffman
Oh yes.
- [112:26]
Tom Bilyeu
That are highly leverageable. And in fact, one of the things like as, as you're talking, and I don't think you share my obsession with this, but you might. My obsession with physics is getting people to understand that when Einstein wrote down his general relativity and special relativity, it gave us the modern world in ways that I don't think people fully understand. From being able to zoom to GPS to atomic energy. I mean, it's really spectacular. Once you're able to better understand the nature of reality, you can do things with that because it makes predictions. I can't remember if we were talking about that before or after we started rolling, but that ability to, oh, that theory makes this prediction and you can begin to think in novel ways. And so I, for A while I was teaching a course that I called Business Decision Making. It's the worst title ever. Nobody knows what that means, but it actually is the only thing in business that matters. You have to be able to go, should I do this? Should I not do this? What will happen if I interpret the world this way versus that way? And people that succeed in business, they get, get very good at knowing how to think through the problem. To think through the problem, you have to understand the nature of things. And so my whole thing was, hey, are you doing social media? You better understand the nature of social media. What's the nature of social media? It's human psychology plus the algorithm. And so, like, if you master both now, you can really do something. Right. The problem is that both of those data sets are so massive, right, that you're really taking your best sway and getting into this stuff is for me, if we really can peel through the headset and start getting into. No, no, no, that all these things, that's a really low fidelity thing. This will scare people. But as you, if you're the first person to poke through that, oh my God, you have, I mean, not to take the dark example, but, but we ended World War II by being the first to understand atomic energy and how to split the atom. There are way more uplifting and positive examples, but that's just the one that will stick out in everybody's consciousness. But being able to. In fact, this is something that I, I don't know if you know Eric Weinstein, but talking to him, he's looking at, okay, what's that next breakthrough and what's it gonna let us predict? And so that's his whole, like, obsession is we've got people playing at very high levels. And if he's right and he understands something that other people don't understand, it's going to make predictions. And we don't know where those predictions go.
- [115:19]
Donald Hoffman
Right.
- [115:19]
Tom Bilyeu
They could be good, they could be terrifying, could be life changing in a good way, in a bad way, but getting people to understand. Like, you need to be obsessed at, at least at the headset level, you have to be obsessed with better predicting, what this means. So anyways, you're talking about decorated permutations and stuff. It just gets me thinking about large data sets, how we simplify that, what that's going to mean in my world, in terms of business intelligence, identifying an audience, understanding what will convert really matters. Like it, it plays out in a really real way.
- [115:57]
Donald Hoffman
It does. And I think a metaphor here might illustrate how, how big the Potential is science of space time has been all in the headset, and we've become wizards of the headset, just like someone in Grand Theft Auto has become a wizard at using the steering wheel and the gas to go through the space time of the, you know, Grand Theft Auto virtual world. But suppose that you learned to think outside the headset. It you actually understand the software in the supercomputer that's running it, then you can take the gas out of the tank of the wizard. You can give him flat tires or her flat tires. You can change the geometry of the roads. In other words, the wizard is trivial compared to what you can do once you have learned how the headset works. So science has just taken its first baby steps outside of the headset. Just in the last 20 years. We're taking our first babysit once we start to understand the first level of software that's available to us. I'm not saying we're going to get the whole thing. I mean, Godel's incompleteness theorem says the software is endless. But the way things seem to work is you do get to see layer by layer by layer. So as we go to the first layer of the software, the wizardry inside space time is going to look trivial compared. So right now, for example, something like 97% of the galaxies that we can see, we could never go to, they're moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Not because they're moving through space faster than the speed of light. They're not. But space itself is expanding so quickly that if we move through space to try to get to them, the space would be expanding so fast that we couldn't get to them at the speed of light. And so there's 97% of the real estate in our universe is waving at us saying, hi, you can never come see me.
- [118:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that's fascinating. Especially because if space can expand faster than the speed of light, this is more, at least in my limited mind, pointing at like something deeper. Yeah, there. There's something else going on.
- [118:14]
Donald Hoffman
But what if we didn't have to go through space to get to Alpha Centauri? Yeah.
- [118:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Every time you say this, it turns me on. Like, this is. So that's.
- [118:23]
Donald Hoffman
That's the exciting. This is where I'm. I'm really excited. This is one reason why I'd like to understand the. Our theory of conscious agents outside. Right. I'm not saying the theory of conscious agents is right, but it's the first baby step that I've seen where it's A dynamical system where you can actually talk about, quote, unquote, software that you could tinker with. You could actually do something with it that would allow us perhaps new technologies where we don't go through space to the Andromeda galaxy that would take us 2.4 million years. Good luck. Even your great, great grandkids wouldn't be alive. But what if we could go around space because our headset is just a headset you don't need. You can just change the software. Oh, you want to be at Alpha Centauri or Andromeda, Just change the software. Now you're there, there because you realize that space time isn't the reality. It's just a data structure. You can play with the data structure. As soon as we, the next generation, my generation won't get it. The next generation that really gets it is going to unleash miracles because we will then start to really get the software behind spacetime. We will begin to tinker with it and it's going, the possibilities are endless. I can't even imagine.
- [119:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Speaking of imagining, ground me back and how you think about this in your real life. So I know that you got clobbered by Covid.
- [119:48]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah.
- [119:49]
Tom Bilyeu
You wrote a goodbye text to your wife, I'm assuming, because it was Covid, and she couldn't come in the room because this was really early. Right. How did that influence that moment for you? Well, like, were you just like, oh, it's all a headset, who cares? Bye, babe.
- [120:06]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah, I wish I could say, you know, I'm this really enlightened guy in the science and spirituality. And then, so I was just really calm and I wish I could say that, but, but I, you know, I was in tremendous pain. My heart had been pounding. The arrhythmia, cardiac arrhythmia, 190 beats per minute. 180 beats per minute for 36 hours.
- [120:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
- [120:28]
Donald Hoffman
I, I, I knew that my heart couldn't do that much longer and they hadn't been able to figure out a way to stop it. And so like 4 o' clock in the morning, my wife was asleep, but, but I didn't know that I would make it until she was awake. So I, I text her. I knew I wouldn't wake her up. She has everything on mute. But I at least wanted to give her a goodbye text because I figured by the time she was up, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be alive. And after I did the text, you know, within an hour after that, so they found a drug that calmed my Heart down and was able to keep my heart calm long enough so I could eventually get a surgery which then cured the problem. So, so, so I, you know.
- [121:10]
Tom Bilyeu
What'd you put in the text? You don't have to give me verbatim, obviously. That's super private. But, like, what was the gist?
- [121:15]
Donald Hoffman
It was, well, you know, when you're feeling that bad, you. I didn't have the wherewithal to say much. It just said, I don't, you know, said, sweetheart, I don't think I'm gonna make it. I love you. And that was it. I just, I just, that was all I had. So there was, there wasn't. So I can imagine someone who's really spiritually adept and advanced might sit there and very calmly. That wasn't me. That was, I was completely shattered. I've been awake for 48 hours with heart beating at 180 beats per minute for 36 hours. I was, I was done. And I was scared and I was lonely and I was afraid and I missed my wife and my daughter and my grandkids and it was so I have no illusions about, you know, being some kind of spiritual master who is, you know, above it all, you know, I'm just another human being with the same problems as everybody else. These are really good ideas, I think, are helping me to get a bigger picture. But when it comes right down to it, when push comes to shove, there's something inside me that believes that space, time is fundamental. It believes that when the body dies, that's it. So it's really interesting. I'm not coherent. There's, well, put it this way, maybe intellectually know I'm coherent about this, but there's an emotional side of me that hasn't come along. Now I am meditating and I think that slowly the emotional side of me is unraveling. That, that tight, scared little child that's inside of me that thinks this is all it and is afraid of dying and so forth. It's slowly unraveling. I don't know if it'll ever completely unravel. I, I, I hear people that I have no reason to disbelieve who say that they've completely unraveled it and they're completely unafraid of death. I believe that that's possible, but I'm not enlightened. Yeah, so that was my experience. It was sobering. One thing that comes out of it is I, when I stop and reflect, I'm grateful for each day because I didn't expect to have any of these days. I didn't mean we discovered the stuff about decorated permutations. Since then, I'm so grateful to be alive for the fun of, you know, seeing this decorated. That's really neat. And of course, things have happened with my grandkids that are fun and so everything is a delight and a. I don't take it for granted. And if I were to face death in the same way again, I'd probably feel afraid and scared and. And so forth.
- [124:01]
Tom Bilyeu
So what do you think happens when we die?
- [124:04]
Donald Hoffman
My. My best guess is we just take a headset off that.
- [124:09]
Tom Bilyeu
But that implies like a keeping of the personality.
- [124:14]
Donald Hoffman
No, it doesn't. It. To me it suggests that the whole story. I was born in such and such a year at such and such a city, in such hospital. My parents did this, I did that. I had that whole story. Maybe something that you say goodbye to.
- [124:29]
Tom Bilyeu
So cognition itself is headset.
- [124:33]
Donald Hoffman
That's right. Or awareness, pure awareness.
- [124:36]
Tom Bilyeu
So awareness and consciousness are different.
- [124:39]
Donald Hoffman
Yeah. So. Well, There's a distinction to be made and I. I'm not going to be sort of hard nosed about the particular words, but you could have a specific conscious experience like the experience of green. But you could. And that would be conscious. A kind of conscious experience. That would be a kind of consciousness. But you could also talk about awareness without any content at all. I'm just aware of awareness. But even that's saying too much. I'm just aware. So I'm not aware of Dawn. I'm not aware of where I live. I'm not aware. I'm just. I'm just aware. And when people meditate and they go into very, very deep levels of meditation where they really let go of all thoughts, then in some sense yourself dies. Well, is dead. I mean, there is no Dawn. There is no I did this degree. There is no I have these. That's gone. And yet in some sense nothing essential is gone, nothing essential left. That's just a story. The essential thing is the awareness. And the real joy of being is the awareness itself. The story is a nice add on. It's icing on the cake. But it's not essential. The real deep joy comes from the pure awareness with no content whatsoever. And so in that sense I think of. But see, there's part of me that is tied to the story. So that was the part that was scared to death in the hospital. There's another part of me that believes and knows that everything's fine. I'm awareness without content. That's what I really am at my Deepest level. But as long as I'm still clinging to the story of Don, then that is going to die when I die. If I don't choose to die to it, while I can choose to die to it, I will be forced to die to it when my body dies. And so there are some spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, who says, in some sense, I'm already dead. The only thing left is the body. So I'm not there. But I don't disbelieve. I mean, I disbelieve most of them, but I don't disbelieve some of them. Right. I think that it is possible in the case, for example, of Eckhart Tolle, I think it's highly probable that he's right. I mean, he really has let go, and he's utterly fearless about death, and I'm not. But I understand in principle why that could be. If I really am not the story, and I've really let go of the story of Don, and I'm no longer identified with. So here's how to know if you've really let go of the story. Am I competing with anybody? Is it important to me to be. Be better than someone? To be better known, to have a better whatever, be smarter, have a better degree, whatever it might be. As long as I'm comparing myself with anybody else and trying, you know, or saying I'm worse, I feel inferior. As long as that's going on to me, then I'm. I'm tied to my story and I'll be afraid of death. It's only when I don't care about comparisons anymore that I've really, truly let go. So. So if someone cuts me off on the road when I'm driving, driving, if I'm upset about that I'm tied to my story, that means I'm not ready to die. So you can just. So when you look at the thing, whatever disturbs you tells you that's the hint. Okay? You're still tied to the apron strings. The baby story that I'm Don, I was born here. I'm struggling to be important because I have such a small. I mean, I'm such a. This small little thing. I'm a little guy inside spacetime. I believe that the avatar of me in this headset is everything that I am. I'm clinging to my avatar. And as long as I'm clinging to it, the possibility of losing that avatar is terrifying. So I'm there. I'm not enlightened. I understand this intellectually. There's something emotional that has to be brought along, it has to be healed or something like that. It's got to be brought along. So, but, but this, it all makes, it's all a good intellectual story for me. And I'm meditating to have it become a true personal story. But, but what it ends up being is that even you think about, even your body is just an icon. It's not who you are. If what we're saying is right, spacetime is doomed. If the physicists are right, spacetime is doomed. Evolution is right. This is just a headset, this is just an avatar. Then I don't even have brains right now. If you look, you'll render brains. But right now I have no brains because they're not being rendered. So neural activity causes none of my behavior, brains cause none of our behavior. And yet we need to study neuroscience, we need more money for neuroscience because that's the part of our interface that is most informative about the software behind spacetime. So if we want to understand the software behind space time, we're going to have to study the complex thing that we call the brain, which is just the projection of this deeper software. That is the best projection we've got. So neuroscience is far more complicated than we're thinking right now. Now we see neurons. We think there are neurons. No, no, no, no. We see neurons. That's a pointer to a realm far more complicated, probably infinitely more complicated. But fortunately we can look at it in steps. So, so we need more for neurals. So I don't have any brains. But we need to study brains because when we render brains in our headset, that's the most information we're going to have in our headset about the software behind spacetime time. So, but still emotionally, we're tied to it. I'm tied to it and we're wired up to this way. So Piaget, the, a very famous child psychologist had talked about what he called object permanence. He said that, you know, we're wired to, at a certain stage of our life, believe that this object exists and will continue to exist even if no one looks object permanence. And you know, he had the example of 18 month old baby, a 17 month old baby. You take a doll, put it behind a pillow and the baby acts as though the doll no longer exists. But at a certain age, you put the baby, the doll behind the pillow. So now the baby will crawl over and try to get it. Okay, so now it's got object permanence. So later studies showed that it came much earlier than Piaget thought, maybe even three or four months. So why is it that I have a hard time thinking of my body as an avatar as opposed to a real object that exists? Why am I having. Well, it's because I didn't choose to believe that. I was wired up to believe that before I even had reason. So when we believe very, very strongly that these things exist, it's not because we came to a rational conclusion about that. Oh, yeah, I thought it through and I know. No, no, no. You believe that when you were four months old. That's why you believe it. And it's no deeper than that. We've just never challenged it. That's the glory of science. It goes back. It can challenge things that we believe since we were three months old, and it can show us that we were wrong. That's the power of science. And then the power of science is also to tell us the limits of science. Because what science tells us with Godel's incompleteness theorem is there is no theory of everything. But that doesn't mean that we should just do whatever we wish and think what random thoughts we want. No, there is. We're rewarded by thinking precisely and also humbly precisely to get as far as our current framework will go and then humbly to realize that it's just a framework and there's a new one beyond. But that will also be rigorous. And that will also be rigorous. So it's, it's really. It's not going into, you know, just whatever you want. You know, it's. It's not like a postmodernist kind of. And again, I don't want to give a. A wrong impression. I think there's a lot of interesting people that have done really brilliant work in postmodernism. But, but the, the. I'll put it this way, the, the gist of it, that some people get that do whatever you want doesn't matter. Logic doesn't really require. I think that that's just plain wrong. I really like reason because it tells the limits of itself. So I love that.
- [133:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Where can people follow you?
- [133:33]
Donald Hoffman
I have a Twitter. Donald D. Hoffman. So D O N a L D D H O F F M A N. You know, that's my Twitter handle. And, and I usually, every time I have a talk, I'll. I'll post a link to it. A new paper, I'll post a link or a new article that I think is really interesting on this stuff, I'll post a link.
- [133:54]
Tom Bilyeu
It's a great feed. I'VE definitely enjoyed it.
- [133:56]
Donald Hoffman
Oh, you have a great for sure.
- [133:58]
Tom Bilyeu
And speaking of things you guys will enjoy, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [134:04]
Donald Hoffman
Peace.
- [134:04]
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