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The world that you're seeing isn't the true world. All of this that I'm seeing right now is just a virtual reality. It's like you're born with a headset on playing a video game. That's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code for the game, you know that there's an entire world outside of it. And as the programmer, you can do miracles. >> And do you think we're getting closer to being able to edit the code? >> That's exactly what I'm working on right now. And we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are far more powerful than anything we've seen before. Like time travel. And nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers. and will people suffer? >> So, it's like Pandora's box. There's all sorts of nasty surprises, but they also could be miraculous. But either way, just in the last few months, it started to crack open. >> So, let's talk about that. >> Okay, so Professor Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist pushing the boundaries of how we perceive reality and how we can unlock our full potential as human beings. >> According to Darwin's theory, our sensory systems, eyes, ears, smell, touch, are not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully because seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. And so whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive. >> What does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life? >> Well, if you're stuck in a boring world, that's a world of your own creation. That's not the real world. And my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain creates. And so we feel inadequate and we feel like we need to compete with other people. But you're the inventor of this whole thing. you have nothing to prove and there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on ourselves. So if you really knew who you are, you would see no need to compare or compete. >> And is there a way for me to understand who I am? >> If you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to >> I see messages all the time in the
comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way, you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you, >> Professor Donald Hoffman. Do you think that the listeners of this show, the people listening right now, understand the nature of reality and the world that they're looking at and see? I think that no one even the most advanced professionals really understands the nature of reality and it's one of the big open problems and questions in science today. We all might have ideas. We might think we know something. Our best science suggests that our imagination is not yet big enough. We need to explore further. >> What is it that you believe is the big sort of misconception about how we perceive reality? >> Well, most of us think of reality as whatever is inside space and time. We actually know that spaceime cannot be the fundamental nature of reality. >> And what is spacetime? >> So everything that you see around us, right? the the the space between you and me. There's maybe one or two meters of space between you and me. That's what space spacetime is. All all the stuff that we can see in our telescope. Put it that way. If you can see it in your telescope is part of spaceime. But we know our our best theories of spaceime Einstein's theory together with quantum theory tell us that spaceime cannot be the fundamental nature of reality. There's a small if you go small. So I can talk about a meter. >> Yeah. And then I can go to you know centimeters and then you know millimeters and then we can go you know micrometers and and you can go smaller and smaller. At some point you go so small that space disappears. It it no longer even makes sense mathematically. It's 10 theus 33 cm. So it's actually
not that in my view it's not that small. It's not 10 theus 33 trillion centimeters. It's just 10 theus 33 cm. And all of a sudden our equations tell us um spacetime doesn't have any effective meaning. >> Is a proxy for the word reality in some respects? >> Well, for most people I think it is. For most people they think that that spacetime is the reality. And what I'm saying is it's the reality that most of us have assumed is the final reality. And science is now telling us it can't be. It actually and it tells us precisely at 10 theus 33 centimeters 10 theus 43 seconds the very notion of spaceime makes no sense. >> Is that the same as saying that reality as I perceive it makes no sense. >> I'm suggesting now as a cognitive scientist not a physicist we should think of spaceime is just a virtual reality headset. That's the way we perceive in our game of life. And when you say spaceime, you mean the the thing that I'm perceiving with my eyes and ears and senses right now. >> That's right. Even this hard table is just a VR object. And the whole setting that we're in here right now is just a virtual reality. And there is a a reality entirely outside this headset that that is open to science to explore. And we're finding stuff which you might call obelisks, geometric objects outside of spaceime. So, so this is all brand new in the last since like 20 2010 or something like that roughly. >> So, do you believe that? Do you believe that everything I'm experiencing and seeing now is basically like equivocal to me wearing a virtual reality headset and that there's something beyond the virtual reality headset >> completely because I believe the science and the predictions of our theories about spaceime are so good. Now I I have to always be careful about what I'm saying versus and I don't want to put words in the physicist's mouth. So when I say I think it's a virtual reality, that's Hoffman. That's not physics. Right. >> Are you able to swap out the phrase spaceime for reality or is that inaccurate? >> I think that whatever reality is, spacetime is a trivial aspect of it.
There's much more to reality than spacetime. spacetime is all the reality. It's it's like a a player in Grand Theft Auto. If all you've done is play in Grand Theft and that's you were born with a headset on and that's all you've that that's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code and you know the supercomputer that's running Grand Theft Auto, you know that Grand Theft Auto um is a nice self-contained world, but there's an entire world outside of it that's utterly unlike Grand Theft Auto. It's it's a supercomput with diodes and resistors and voltages that are being toggled. And when when some dude is turning his wheel to to drive the car, what's really happening when he turns the wheel is that millions of voltages are being toggled in a specific order in some computer. And it has to be exactly that right sequence for the thing to work properly. And and the guy that's turning the wheel has no idea what's going on. There's this other whole realm utterly outside your imagination in Grand Theft Auto. And so if you're in Grand Theft Auto, you might not even know about computers and toggling voltages. And so all you know is I got a steering wheel and a gas pedal and streets and and people to race and so forth and things to to steal and and whatever, >> but you don't realize there's a puppet master effectively controlling you >> behind the scenes. And so I I think that spaceime is just a very effective headset. >> For anyone that doesn't know, Grand Theft Auto is a video game where you run around a virtual world basically. >> That's right. Yeah. Driving. You're driving nice fancy cars in this in this world. That's right. So everything I see right now is a projection that I've made on the world, my world, in order to help me to survive. And my brain is not showing me things that it doesn't think I need to see because they won't be conducive with survival because they are cognitively in terms of like um how much fuel and energy they would require to process and think about they are cognitively inconsequential or like it would be inefficient for me to spend my cognitive power to see those things.
>> That's exactly right. And for a lot of people, I think that's counterintuitive because they would say, "Look, evolution is about making you fit so you can live and survive long enough to reproduce successfully." And surely evolution should do that by making you see the truth. I mean, if you see the truth, then you're going to compete in the game of life much more successfully than if you don't see the truth. So, so what are you talking about this headset nonsense for? This is not a headset. This is the truth. I mean and evolution should shape us to see the truth. Now I think that's what most people would would would assume and in fact very intelligent experts in the field assume that and I suggest otherwise. In fact we have mathematical proofs otherwise. If you look at evolution, Darwin said, "Look, we need to think about a gradual evolution over time of these species, maybe from very very simple ones to more complex ones." And what what is going to drive that dynamics? and and Darwin suggested it was what we would call reproductive fitness that that those organisms that have physical properties, sensory systems, motor systems, you know, movement systems that make them more likely to have offspring and to raise offspring to maturity. Whatever properties those might be, that's what we're going to call fitness. So the more fit you are I is really saying how likely are you to have and successfully raise offspring. >> So Darwin suggested that and I don't think that he necessarily had to say that there was no God. It was just that there if there is a god it's not that God put it down perfect. He did an evolutionary process. >> Yeah. Well organisms adapt to their environment. Um well they're not adapting but the offspring that survive are those best adapted to the environment. That's right. So that was Darwin's idea. So the gradual evolution from presumably simpler organisms to more and more complic complicated organisms and um and then multiple evolutions of things like eyes like the sephopod eye evolved different differently from the human eye. Um and the sephopod eye got certain things right that the human eye got wrong. >> Is that because the sephopod eye was in a different environment? So it had
different requirements. That would be one possible reason. I actually don't know in the case of the sephopause why, but that kind of idea is absolutely one of the reasons that that could have happened. Another one, it could just be an accident, right? There's probability involved. And so there at some point you have the right accident and then the humans got the thing reversed. >> So you're saying Darwin was wrong in some respect or that he there was something missing from his theory? >> Oh, no. I I think Darwin's I I I in terms of biology, I think that there is um no serious competitor to Darwin's theory of of evolution by natural selection in in terms of the scientific theory of the the origin of species and so forth. And it's Darwin's theory and the mathematical formulation of it that I think also says that what we're perceiving is not the truth. that our sensory systems on Darwin's theory were not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully. Period. That's all Dharm's theory actually says. Most of us think the way this evolutionary process does it is to make sure that your senses are telling you the truth about the external reality. I've published some papers with um with colleagues where we show mathematically that Darwin's theory does not entail that at all. In fact, Darwin's theory says the probability is zero that any sensory system like eyes, ears, smell, touch, taste has ever been shaped to see any aspect of objective reality truly. So the probability is zero that you see any aspect of the truth. Period. On Darwin's theory, what you do experience is sensory systems that guide adaptive behavior. Guide adaptive behavior means um they let you act. >> So your eyes, your nose, >> your eyes, your nose. Yeah. Yeah. Your eyes and nose and they they guide you so that you act in ways that you don't die too quickly. >> Okay. >> And you can have kids that don't die too quickly. I was just >> that's all it's about. >> I was just playing out the scenario then that you removed my eyes and you removed
my ears and my nose and my ability to sense, you know, temperature and things like that. All of my senses. I thought if I was the only person on Earth and you removed all of my senses, what would reality be? Because if you remove my senses, reality no longer exists as far as I'm aware of it. But that doesn't mean nothing exists. And I'm wondering what that nothing would be like if you just imagine like wipe off everyone on the earth and it's just you and we remove all of your senses. What what is in that space? Because you're right, my senses, my eyes, my ears, my ability to understand temperature is a byproduct and consequence of me surviving. So I was playing out this. like, well, if we think about ghosts and the afterlife, maybe there was no reason from a survival perspective that I even needed to be able to see or acknowledge them. Maybe it just didn't help. Maybe it actually would have hurt me to have >> um because it would have been too cognitively demanding to process all of that information. So, anybody that could process all that information wouldn't have been good at reproducing. Therefore, they wouldn't survive. Therefore, they wouldn't be here. So maybe those of us that are here, we're just really good at ignoring the other dimensions. That's what our mathematics says. I think that your your intuitions on that are are quite right that if you pay attention to anything other than what allows you to have kids, you're wasting your time. From an evolutionary point of view, perception is expensive. It takes a lot of calories. You have to eat a lot of food to to run your brain and to power your eyes and your ears. And so you need to do shortcuts. You need to make your sensory systems not chew up so much of your energy. The more expensive your your perceptual systems are, the more you've got to eat to to power those. So that means you have to go out there and forage and put yourself at harm's. So it's it's it's so there's a trade-off. We try to do things cheaply in evolution. And going for the truth, you don't need to actually go for the truth cuz that's very very expensive. So So for example, there are some
flying insects that need to lay their their off their eggs on in in water and they use the trick of just looking at the polarization of the light coming off the water. So what what you see happening in evolution is we have tricks and hacks and and even in humans have tricks and hacks and for for example trying to find out if someone is reproductively fit right we we you you can't I can't actually look at your DNA and and go well okay he's got an ACG and T but he's got a C here where it's supposed to be a T or you know I can't look at your DNA. So what do I look at? I have to look at your at your what I can see of your body and and your voice and and so forth. So, >> one of the most compelling arguments for the fact that we aren't seeing reality as it is and we're actually only seeing what we need to see in order to survive is when you look at, as you were saying, as how different animals see the world and can you just give me some examples of some more examples of different animals that see the world completely differently? I always think about bats. >> How do how do bats see the world? Cuz do they see colors like we see them and objects like we see them? >> No. No. Bats use echolocation. They'll send out little bursts of sound um very very high frequencies and then they have these big ears that capture the returns. And I was just looking at their sensory system. It says most insect eating bats use echolocation. As you said, they emit high frequency sound waves. Yes. And see by listening to the echoes bouncing off other objects. That's right. And this gives them some kind of sonic map of their surroundings, helping them to navigate and effectively see in total darkness. So you imagine a bat, right? >> Like then they if a bat is sat there thinking that they understand the nature of reality when it's actually just a map of how the sound waves bounce back. They I imagine don't have the same a complete they have a completely different perception of what reality is to us. And it's therefore it would be quite ignorant to assume that we as humans are seeing reality as it is when just like the bat we've probably adapted to our environment and built senses eyes ears touch that helped us to survive. I would agree with you, but some of my
colleagues would disagree and they would say humans are much more complicated and you know, surely bats and so forth, they have to have all these shortcuts and they don't see reality as it is, but but we've evolved further and we're closer to the truth. From my point of view, what I see this table and this cup and so forth is just a a convenient fiction. Whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive. utterly. >> In a TED talk that you did in 2000 in the 2000s, you talked about simulations that you ran to prove that I guess in in in part that I'm only seeing things that will help me to survive as a creature, as an organism. Can you explain to me simply what what those simulations were and what they proved? >> Well, yes. in our in our simulations and this is before we had theorems. So we did simulations just to see if the ideas were working and and we would have artificial organisms in a computer. Yeah. >> So it was like a a game that we put together and we would have a world and and we would let some organisms actually see the true state of that world. So they they were the truth organisms. And then we'd have other ones that um only had like a a headset, an interface that only could see not the truth, but but just some little bit of information that that could guide adaptive behavior >> that would help them to survive. Yeah. And reproduce. That That's right. What we found was for a wide range of of conditions of of the algorithm, the the organisms that saw the truth went extinct. they they weren't able to compete the ones with the ones that didn't. And and one of the things that came out of it was seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. It it's complicated to see the truth. And if you have a simple trick that lets you do the same thing without having to have a deep insight, then you can get the same benefit. You can get the benefit without having to put all the the effort out. I can give you a concrete example of a of an organism that does this. That's that's pretty funny. So there's the jewel beetle. It lives in the outback of Australia. It's dimpled, glossy, and brown. The males fly. The females are flightless. So the
males are flying around, of course, looking for an eligible female. It turns out that men in the outback tended for a while were eat were drinking beer with these bottles that were also dimpled, glossy, glossy, and and brown. They throw them out into the into the outback and they turned out to be dimpled glossy in just the right shade of brown to grab the attention of the male jewel beetles. They're they're actually on the bottle. They're full body contact. They're crawling all over it and they still think it's a female. So, how much do they know about their women? Very, very little they know about their women. The a woman a female is something dimpled, glossy, and brown. Apparently, the bigger the better. And that's what a female is. So you can see evolution didn't give these male beetles much insight into their females. They gave them just enough information to successfully reproduce. Period. And that's sort of what evolution does. It it gives you just enough information to um reproduce before you die. >> So they're all making love to this beer bottle because they can't tell. They can't see >> That's right. >> reality. They can't see that this isn't a woman. This is a beer bottle. >> That's right. That's one of the more humorous examples of of what evolution has done. It does things on the cheap and that includes human sensory systems. So, it's it's very humbling. We're not the epitome. And what we think is human appreciation of the deep truth of reality is just our little headset. What we experience and know is trivial compared to whatever reality is. Absolutely trivial. We know 0% of reality. And our by the way, our scientific theories will always and forever explain 0% of reality because they have to make assumptions. And every theory, scientific theory has to make assumptions. And so we're going to have an in we'll have in principle an infinite sequence of theories with ever deeper assumptions and we'll never get to the bottom. And since it's an infinite sequence, that means everything we got so far is 0%. So I I'm a scientist. I'm all for science. I encourage young men and women
to go into science. I think it's a great thing to do. Um but just know that um all of our theories will comprehend 0% of reality. >> You know, people talk a lot about how their pets or other animals are able to see another dimension. Sometimes people say things like, "My dog started barking at this," or, "I had cancer." And there's dogs or animals that have been able to um they they believe spot certain diseases inside the human body. And when you look at the sort of sensory faculties of these dogs, dogs can hear frequencies up to 65,000 hertz, whereas humans can only go to 20,000 hertz. Dogs have up to 300 million of receptors. Humans just have 5 million. And some animals like cats can see different sort of frequencies of light. So it does it does beg a question, you know, if it's possible for an animal, an organism to see the world in a different depth and width than us, right? >> What what happens if you go further? >> Right. Absolutely. There are some that can detect electric fields. So some fish can detect electric fields. Um, some birds, I believe, can see the polarization of light and some some uh insects of course use polarization of light to to find where to lay their eggs. So, and and we can't do that. So, so yeah, when we start to study other animals, we see these remarkable abilities. >> Interesting. And what does um what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life? Because I guess the way the way that we perceive the world causes us so much suffering or joy depending on how we perceive it. Is there anything people from all of the work you've done and the books you've written that people can bring into their lives to help them live better lives with this understanding of the world? >> First thing to note is that the world is far more interesting and varied than you can imagine. So if you if you think the world is a boring place, it it's not. Your imagination isn't big enough. Whatever reality is, it it transcends anything that you could possibly imagine. Spiritual traditions basically often say there's more to life than what you see inside space and time. There's something beyond. And I've been sort of pointing to that
myself in my own way. I'm saying that scientific theories always have assumptions. So there's an infinite number of scientific theories that you can have and you're never going to get a scientific theory of everything. What am I saying? that there's something beyond science. As good as science is, I'm saying there's not only not a theory of everything, the best theory we'll ever come up with is 0% of reality. So that leaves all this room for what the spiritual traditions are talking about that there's something that trans transcends science. There is a a way of thinking about this that I think is very illuminating and it's about the inter intersection of science and spirituality. I'm a scientist. Who who am I? I I am someone and and I'm one of many someone's other scientists who can create theories and in principle even ever deeper theories and there is an infinite sequence. So who is the eye that can do this? No theory that I can come with come up with is the final description of that eye. In other words, the eye that is doing all this theory building is the eye that is real, that is making these theories, and that utterly transcends all these theories. And that's a spiritual point of view. >> So what does that mean? You're you're God. >> It means that whatever you are transcends any description. And that's what a lot of people say God is. Suppose I give you something you've never tasted before, like a piece of mint. And actually, I don't know what mint tastes like to you. I I assume that it's like what mint tastes like for me, but I don't know. This is called learning by ostensive definition. And so, we have this game where your experiences are your experiences. And you actually didn't need anybody else for those experiences. All you needed me for or your parents for is to give you a name for what you already knew. And and you you create this this world and all we do is tell you how to talk with me about what you've created. And I don't know that your world in any way resembles my experience. It's quite possible. And do you think there's
ways that we cause ourselves a lot of anguish and pain and mental health issues because of how we perceive the nature of reality to be that we could potentially I don't know give up or rewire ourselves on to have a have a more fulfilling more grateful experience of life >> completely. I think that's very very important and it's a natural consequence of what we've just been talking about. Almost all of us think of ourselves as an object in spaceime only here for a short amount of time and will soon die. When I say you transcend any scientific theory, that means the theory that I am just a 160lb object in spaceime is just a theory and it's not the truth. That's not the truth about who I am. That's just a theory that I have because spacetime itself is just a theory. Nothing inside spacetime is anything but my headset interpretation of a reality that infinitely transcends anything I can experience. There is another way that you can appreciate that that's that transcends science and that is um and this many meditative traditions talk about this. They recognize that you are infinitely beyond any scientific or any other description. So what do you do in that case to know who you are? You drop all descriptions. You sit in absolute silence and ignore any thoughts because you recognize thoughts are useful in this headset. And to play the game of life, yeah, we need thoughts to do our science. We need to if you want to understand who I am again I do psychology I do all this I'll do the scient so I'm not putting science down I'm a scientist but at some point if you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you then you have to lay aside all concepts period and just know yourself by being yourself not by putting a concept between you and yourself. >> A story. >> A story. >> An identity. >> That's right. No, no story. No ident. You You know yourself by sitting in utter silence and being yourself. No concepts because then you've let go of all theories. And now it's reality facing reality. No barrier in between. And that requires you to realize that
your identity, the stories you believe, the labels you've given yourself as CEO or social media manager or manager or director or head of department, all of these things are just in fact labels you've given. >> That's right. Those are all just labels that you given. And what's interesting about this now is if I think I'm just this little body and I'm nothing but this body and and my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain does. So, so that's my theory and that's that's all I am. I don't feel very big. I don't feel very important. Um, and so I'm going to probably need to do something to make myself feel a little bit better and I'm going to need to compete with you. I'm going to need to show how I'm better than you in certain ways. So, I'm I'm a better tennis player than you or I'm smarter than you or or whatever. So we're going to get this competition going on where among people and we're going to get even competition among religions and countries and so forth because we don't know who we are and and we feel inadequate and if we actually understood that all of this that I'm seeing right now I'm making it up on the fly. This cup that I'm seeing, it only exists when I create it. This table exists when I create it. Like in a virtual reality, if I in a virtual reality, I'm in Grand Theft Auto. I look over here and I now I see a red Mustang. I look away, I don't see the red Mustang. And now there is no red Mustang. The red mustang only existed when I looked because it's a VR game. I only need it when I ren I I render it when I need it. I'm now rendering a cup. that the cup that I rendered is no longer there. You might render your cup. You might say, "Well, no, Don, you're wrong. The cup is still there. I can see it." No, you're rendering your cup. And so you you're you're not rendering my cup. I rendered my cup. So the same thing with Grand Theft Auto. You might say, "Well, I see the red Mustang even if you're not looking, Don." Well, that's because in your headset, you're looking and you're rendering a the red Mustang, but I'm not. And there is no red Mustang. If you look inside the supercomputer, there's no red Mustang there. The the supercomputer that's
running the game has no red Mustang. So what I'm saying is we compete, we feel inadequate and we feel like we need to compete with other people and be better than them and we have egos. All the egoic stuff that we do that causes all the problems in the world because you don't know who you are. You're creating this whole thing. You're you're you're not a little player. You're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove and you don't need to be better than anybody else. They're also master creators. They're creating entire universes that they perceive as well. And my own take on on this is that you and I are really the same one reality just looking at itself through two different headsets, two different avatars and having a conversation. And maybe that's what you is required for this one infinite intelligence to sort of know itself. What you if you're if you transcend any description, what how do you know yourself? Maybe what you do is you say, "Well, let me try this headset on. Let me take that seriously for a while. Maybe even let myself get lost and let me let me completely believe I'm just a Don Hoffman in in in this spaceime and let me believe that for for many decades and then slowly sort of wake up. But at least then I will have seen myself from this perspective. Then I'll take off that headset." We call that death. We all just take off the headset and then I'll try. There's an infinite number of headsets to try on. So from that point of view, any person you speak to is transcendent. Any animal is just an avatar of this transcendent unspeakably incredible reality that transcends science so that science will only get 0% of it. And again, I always say I'm not putting down science. I'm a scientist. We need to do science and I recommend that people do science. But my guess this is one of the more trivial headsets. It's only four dimensions. Why not 20 billion? Why not quintilion? This is this is just a a fairly trivial. So we we may be in one of the most the more uninteresting perspectives on who we are. And and and there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on oursel. But but the reason we have fighting, the reason we have egos is because we don't
know who we are. And is there a way for me to understand who I am or is the closest you've found meditation? I know you've meditated for 20 years or something. >> I I should say I should be a little careful about I think it really is important to do for for me as a scientist to have done the science that I've done. But I think for someone else who doesn't do science, maybe that you do music or you do some sports or something like that. That's that is a concrete way of knowing yourself through a perspective and that's really important and and and since we have billions of people and then there's untold other kinds of animals and insects and so forth. This this one infinite intelligence whatever it is has decided I want to look at myself through the lens of a mosquito and now of the bumblebee and now of the the jewel beetle that that can't even tell a bottle from from a female. I'm going to look at myself from this paniply of perspectives. >> So you're almost implying there that there's this one consciousness and it's just using different organisms potentially as vehicles to understand itself and the nature of reality. >> That's right. So that would mean that me and you are the same consciousness, but you were born as a scientist in America and I was born as a I don't know an entrepreneur in Botswana with different perspectives in order to understand the reality which means that we're basically the same >> right >> the same consciousness the same super intelligence or whatever just manifesting as different eyeballs in different places. That's my my view and certain religious traditions do sort of hint almost say that exactly um you know like Jesus uh in Christianity in like Matthew 25 says you know I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty you gave me something to drink. I was a foreigner and you invited me in. I was sick and you helped me. I was in prison and you visited me. And people he says said asked him when did we do that? And you said whenever you did it to the least person you did it to me. So Jesus is sort of hinting at this. There is there's no difference. The reason to
love your neighbor as yourself is because your neighbor is yourself just with a different headset. And the only reason we have problems is we don't realize how incredible you are. So you are that which is creating this VR simulation with all of its beauty, all of its complexity. All the complexity is you and you're doing it effortlessly. Now for my neuroscience colleagues, they will say, "Don, it's not effortless. You've got 100 billion well 86 billion neurons in your brain. visual system has billions of neurons that are doing all this computation and you we have the simple cells, the complex cells, the hyper complex cells and we think of the brain as a physical object that's generating our consciousness. Yeah, >> I'm saying spacetime itself is something that you create and so you create everything inside spaceime and >> I've also created the brain. >> You create the brain. So right now you don't have a brain. >> Excuse me. >> And nor do I. >> Okay, fair enough. because I don't because I don't have a brain and you don't have a brain until we actually look inside and render a brain. Just like in in VR, the the Mustang doesn't exist until you look at it and render it. So if if I I can predict that if we do the right scans, we will see a brain. But that only exists when we when we do the rendering. So I don't have a brain. All these correlations, we know that correlation doesn't cause doesn't imply causation, right? So we the fact that there is correlations and I don't deny it. In fact, I'm all for studying these correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences. They exist. They're undeniable and they don't in any way remotely entail that the brain causes our conscious experiences. >> So I'm not the brain. I'm the thing that's simulating the presence of a brain. >> That's right. That's right. And so in your simulation, your simulation is so good that it simulates also how all this reality that transcends spaceime is being funneled down into this tiny little space-time headset. And that's what we call the brain. So of course
there going to be these correlations between brain activity and what we see. But the correlation goes the other way. It's not because the brain creates your conscious experiences. is because consciousness has created the brain as an icon to describe how it's how it's creating this headset. >> Do you think much about simulation theory? I've had lots of uh dinner parties recently and conversations over dinner about simulation theory and it always gets very very interesting. Um what are your thoughts on simulation theory? And for my listeners who might not understand the concept of simulation theory, are you able to explain it? Yes, the the so the standard uh Nick Bostonramm for example is is a very big figure in simulation theory and and in those kinds of simulation theories the idea is that the world that you're seeing right now isn't the the true world. This is just a simulation and there's some programmer say with some really nice computer that's programmed this world. And so we're you're just we're just characters in a simulated world of some programmer. And that programmer on their laptop that's doing this, as it turns out, isn't the final thing either because that programmer in their laptop is also just a simulation from a deeper level programmer on their laptop. there could be the very very large nesting of all these simulated worlds and and people with their computers and that does jive pretty well with what I'm saying up to a point. I'm saying this is not the reality. This is just a headset. So, but there's a big big disagreement. Do you think we're there's going to come a point where with everything that's going on with AI and robotics that we could get make a robot um program it with a certain AI that gives it the sort of same thinking as a human being and then when I put some chocolate into its mouth it's going to say to me I love that chocolate Stephen that's my favorite flavor >> I could certainly program such a robot but the question will always be just because I have this particular circuit in the in the computer and you know then some structure in the tongue that I've given it in some pattern electro activity. What is my scientific theory that explains why that
pattern had to be the taste of chocolate? That's what we need as scienting thing where it's just learned through all of the data through someone telling it programming it to think that particular set of chemicals um send that up to the software and then respond like this which might just be how me and you responding to life. We might not be conscious at all. >> Right? And and what you're suggesting is probably how we would actually do it, like we would probably sort of train it and and and have it give us the right responses in in that kind of context. So we'd probably do it something like that. But but then as scientists, we want to understand. So we're claiming as scientists that an experience is a say certain causal structure or certain functional functional architecture. That's what we're saying it is. >> Because we because these these are physicalist theories and they're they're saying we're not going to start with consciousness. Consciousness is not fundamental. Space and time and physical objects are fundamental. And so we we need to show how those physical objects and their properties give rise to these conscious experiences. So if that's if that's the science you want to propose, then I have to be hard-nosed as a scientist now and say give me your theory of mint. So do you think this is a simulation? >> So it's it's not a simulation in Bostonramm sense. In Boston sense it's a simulation in that it's a physical substrate that's giving rise to this whole world of conscious experiences that I'm having. >> Yeah. So it's that I deny >> like a game programmer sat at a computer making it >> and that and somehow the physical system itself gave rise to the magic of the ex the conscious experiences I'm having of red and green and love and so forth those conscious so for the simulation theory so this is my p my bone of contention with the simulation theory it's very similar to my theory in in all other respects but this is a pretty serious bone of contention for their theory to to work they have to show explicitly scientifically how a conscious a specific conscious
experience arises from a specific program. >> Until you do that, this is there is no beef on the table. >> Right? So for my point, their their theory is a non-starter right now because there's no specific experience that they can say this program must be the taste of mint. They can't do that. And until they can do that, they can't get this whole world of experience that I'm living in. Nothing. So there's no beef. All they have to do to give me some beef is to say like in integrated information theory they say here's the matrix for mint. This is the matrix. Of course then we'll ask why. Why is that matrix that causal structure the taste of mint? what is your scientific theory for why that's the and what you'll see is I think I think it's going to take the field a while to see it but we will find that these approaches are vacuous there's no beef >> when you ask people what the meaning of their life is they'll often say things like it is maybe they'll say to raise children maybe they'll say they want to improve humanity they want to um cure a disease they want to um help society in some way but through the lens of reality that you see the world and that you believe the world is what becomes the meaning of life. Donald, >> that's a great question. I do think that the best description I can give is that there is this one transcendent infinite consciousness and you and I are just avatars and so is a mosquito and so is a bacterium. And all are equally interesting and important and all are different perspectives, just different headsets. There's the mosquito headset. There's the jewel beetle headset. There's all these different headsets. And I'm I'm in the Hoffman headset. Happen to do science. I'm not good at art. I'm not good at at music and so forth. I have my my my particular talents and and in inabilities in my headset. So, I'm here to experience the Don Hoffman perspective on things. >> Why? because that's perhaps the only way the infinite can know itself is through an infinite number of perspectives. It it
transcends any particular perspective. So why not get lost in the hoffen perspective and a jewel beetle perspective and and all these different perspectives and that's the only way to to know yourself. But it's always the one consciousness that's knowing itself through an infinite number of varieties of of experiences of headsets. >> And did someone or something create that one consciousness? >> Now I'm above my pay grade. It's uh that's a no no that's of course the right question and it asks for an explanation and the only explanations we have are either mathematical or scientific or both. The only really deeply serious testable but but even informal explanations make assumptions. And so I'll have to say that that you're asking a question about an entity that transcends any description, namely who you really are and who I am I really am. And I think we can I think you can know the answer to your question in in one way and that is dropping all concepts and just being with your being. You are that you are that. You don't need to attain anything. You don't need to achieve anything. You're that right now. So there's no effort. There's no no need to get better at anything. It's just to recognize what you already are. You've let yourself be under an illusion that I'm just this little guy that needs to do these things and, you know, and be a professor and whatever it might be. I've been under that illusion and and I got to see myself through that lens and then I began to wake up and see that I completely transcend. It was an interesting perspective. I'm glad I took it seriously. I'm going to throw off that headset. We call it death, but I'm going to take off that headset pretty soon because that's not who I am. I transcend that. So, the answer is you can know it, but but you know it when you let go of all concepts and you don't try. If you're trying to get there, then you don't see what you already are. That's that that's
the best answer I can give at this at this point because it does transcend science. >> So, in terms of a god, as we believe in gods in the religious context, the best answer that you have would say that effectively we are god, the god that we we refer to, we are the transcendent power that goes beyond description. And >> Right. Yeah. I I would say that and and I can I mean I can put that in sort of a Christian language um because many listeners will be Christians. Um a child of a human is a human. The Bible calls us children of God. Well, if a child of a human is human, a child of God is God. That's what the what what is point to and and Jesus is fairly explicit about it. When some religious leaders were about to stone Jesus for saying that he was the son of God, Jesus quotes the scripture and says from I think the the Psalms or something like that. He says, but in the Psalms it says, "I have said you are gods and all of you are sons of the most high." And Jesus said, "If if he calls them gods to whom the word of God came, why are you trying to stone me to death for just saying I'm the son of God?" What what the Bible is basically saying, love God with all your heart. That it's loving yourself. You are God. And loving your neighbor as yourself is just recognizing that your neighbor is yourself under a different avatar. >> Do you think Jesus was really divine in any I'm presuming you think this was a real individual and do you think he was divine beyond beyond me and you in some respect? >> Not beyond me and you, but you're you are as divine as could possibly be. >> Thank you so much. We'll clip that. I'll put that on my LinkedIn. >> Hoffman said it. >> Yeah. Little recommendations. >> You're divine. Hoffman says, "I'm as divine as I could possibly be." >> Are there any um Are there You must go if you if you understand reality through this lens that we're seeing so little and that much of it is created by by ourselves and um we are the transcendent. Are there any things that you do on a day-to-day basis that are atypical because of that or thoughts
you have or experiences you have that are atypical because of this perspective? Certainly atypical from before in my own in my own life. I now spend um quite a bit of time in meditation because I I as much as I enjoy the life of the mind and I'm you know I a professor and I've taught lots of students over many many years and I highly recommend all that stuff. At some point I realize that all my knowledge all possible scientific knowledge is 0% of reality. And do I really want to confine myself only to 0% of reality? I want to explore reality from this perspective but it is 0%. So I do my homework and I encourage my students do more homework take this perspective very seriously study it study it rigorously but then realize there's this the 100% that you haven't seen and you are it. >> So are you doing lots of psychedelics and stuff like that to >> I haven't done any psychedelics. >> You've never tried psychedelics? >> I I I've never I've never even smoked a cigarette. >> Wow. I I and I haven't had a drink of alcohol in in decades. So I I and it's partly just because I'm I'm frail. My my physical body isn't that strong. I I I have limits to what I can't push my body too hard. So I' I've learned to operate within my own limits and I don't push it too hard. But the meditation I do. >> Am I right in thinking that you now meditate 3 to four hours a day? >> Probably. Yeah. What insights or understandings have emerged from that that I might be able to comprehend? >> Any creativity that's ever come out in my scientific work toever to whatever extent it's creative, it's come from the silence. So I've of course I've had to do my homework and do my studies and so forth. But the novel ideas come from the silence. Personally, one one thing I've seen is how identified I am with my avatar. I think I am this body. I'm really tied to this body. And it's the stuff that I'm saying at the emotional level. There's an emotional part of me that doesn't believe it one bit. Emotionally, um, you put a gun to my head, I'm scared to death.
>> Intellectually, I'll say say to you, this is just an avatar. I I'm the infinite that transcends. So, and when I die, I just and and I believe that. How deeply do I believe it? Put a gun to my head and you'll find out. I'll wet my pants. So, it's it's it's very very interesting for me to look at that and to see all the disjunctions, the the the the things that are disjointed in in in my my worldview. Well, it kind of makes sense, right, based on your theory that our senses have evolved to help us to survive because someone not liking your thinking or your theories or rejecting you or harmed your body, it would go against your survival. So theoretically, if we are in the world that you've described in the reality you've described, which is basically designed for survival, then you would have developed senses that make you change behavior if there's a risk of someone not liking you. >> That's right. there there are social pressures and and if we don't conform to them, you get feedback that that can be very very negative and in some cases even death. Um if I if I go to a grocery store and and don't happen to pay and just walk off with the stuff, I end up behind bars. There are rules of the game. There are rules of the headset. I transcend the headset, but I choose to allow myself to get lost in the game. Starting in January 2020, you did have a proverbial gun held to your head in in a way because you contracted COVID and went through and are still going through some pretty um serious health complications because of long CO. You developed heart heart issues within weeks requiring hundreds of hours of critical care in hospital. You told me before we started recording that you've had heart surgery twice. >> Yeah. Um, in 2021 at 66 years old, at one point you thought you might not survive because your heart had been at 190 beats per minute for 30 hours and you sent your wife a goodbye message >> because it looked like it was all over. >> Right. Right. I am wondering what that brush with death did to your perception of life, your perspective, and how that all ties into your your um your beliefs about the nature of reality. >> It certainly let me see how tied I am to
my body and the fear that I that I experienced. Right? It's one thing for me to sit here as a nice academic and talk about how you're the transcendent reality. It's another thing to have your heart fail and to know that this is probably the end and and to face the raw emotions. So I had deep ra then I had to have another surgery. I um the first one kept me for a year and a half or so. A great surgeon is not his fault. He did a great job but you know CO is persistent. And the week before my second surgery I was in the ER three times where they had to restart my heart. Just didn't know if I was going to make it. I I would have to go have my heart restart and then two days later go back and have my heart restart and I was just hoping to make it to live to the surgery. Um and and even now I wouldn't be surprised if the heart starts to to go bad again. So so that takes us out of the abstract academic realm into something very very concrete on how do you deal with the fact that you really don't know from one heartbeat to the next. It keeps you from just talking abstractly about this stuff and and and and being real about it is what do I really feel about it? And and when I look inside and see there's real fear, then I know, okay, um this stuff about um you're the infinite and everybody else is the infinite is still fairly just an abstract concept for you, Don. You haven't really gone deep enough. You need to go deeper and actually if that's true, I mean maybe it's all BS, right? But if it's true that you are the infinite and everybody else is the infinite um then you need to go deeper into that. Um and and I intellectually I'm I'm convinced. I mean I've given you the reasons. Intellectually I'm quite convinced. Um and it's it's really interesting to me that emotionally I'm far from convinced. I'm far and I agree with what you just said about the evolutionary arguments for it. there's good evolutionary reasons for me to be wired up to have automatic emotional responses that are going to protect this body to keep it. So, no, no doubt about it. So, so there's no reason to judge myself that I'm a, you know, my body has a fear response and so forth when there are things that that are about to to kill me. The issue is then when I look at that fear response, can I look at it
and accept it or do I identify with it? Do I identify with the fear response or can I step back and be the observer that watches the fear response? And in in the meditation process, what I'm learning to do is in some sense what I was saying about the science, science is great, but don't believe any theory. Theories are just tools. They're not the truth. No scientific theory, my theories included, are not the truth. And so also is my theory about who I am not the truth. So to really let go of any theory, if I can really let go of any theory of who I am, then I'll let go of any fear. So it's really it's really comes down to to this what's really really quite interesting. We will each die. That's incontrovertible. So any attachments I have to this world will cease. There's no doubt. The question is can I let go of the attachments now or will they only go for my cold dead hand? >> When will I let go of all these attachments? If I my to the extent and I am no expert but to the extent that I can let go I see that there's more peace there's more peace in letting not being attached to things so I I I see that but but I'm not there. So this is a very human very human perspective on things a very fallible perspective and it's very very interesting. So I'm claiming I'm the infinite and I'm the infinite having taken on this this bodily form and in some sense I'm waking up to who I really am but I'm only partly awake. I started my first business at 12 years old and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketeteer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service, and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully, there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you. Our sponsor today, which is Shopify. Because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing
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or dharma or reincarnation, >> right? >> In your perspective then is it somewhat ignorant to set your stall up anywhere to say that something is or isn't true? Because you know people are different sides of the spectrum. Some people are like you know staunch staunchly religious and then others are staunchly atheist. >> Right. Right. Right. I I think that of course like in science there are certain things that are just plain nonsense. Someone in in fact most of the stuff that you just casually come up with and you my theory of electricity or my theory of the atoms it's just not it's just plain nonsense and and goes nowhere. It's not worth any time. So I suspect the same thing is true in spiritual stuff where we have even fewer guard rails on our theories. But I think there are a few guiding stars. If it involves loving your neighbor as yourself, you're on the right track. If it involves putting a barrier between us and them and saying that they're bad and we're good, you're probably on the wrong track. >> What does this mean for grief? So many people are losing loved ones as we speak or are contending with the reality that they are going to lose a loved one. What does it mean for the nature of love? Does it, you know, does it take anything away from love? Does it add to love? Does it >> strengthen love? Well, I would yeah, I think in some sense it comes down to love is the central thing and uh and you know in Christianity Jesus that's I'm talking about that because you know my dad was a pastor and I that's the one I was raised in. So I I know the most about that. So I'm speaking only because that's where I had some background and and and when Jesus would ask what's the most important thing he basically said love God with all your heart love your neighbor as yourself. So love is like number one. And my guess is that's really all you need. If if your religion is love and that's it and that's then that's how you act. You don't really need to add anything more to that. That's that's all you really need. Love your neighbor as yourself. You're done. That's all that you need. And anything
beyond that is just not necessary. And anything that contradicts that, I would go back and try to figure out where I went wrong in my religion. >> I've been um asking my when I met my girlfriend Melanie in her bio on Instagram, it said, "God is love." Now, she's not religious. >> Yes. >> She doesn't believe in a particular book or whatever, but she when you I asked her actually, funny enough, we had this conversation last night. >> Ah, >> I said to her, "What do you think uh God is?" And she said, "I think God is just love." >> And I I completely agree. >> She's right again. >> Yeah. And know I think that that's love is the closest word that we can have to to as a pointer. Again, it's just a pointer. Whatever love is is just like the word mint only points to the mint. The word love only points but it I think it's the best pointer that we have. Love. >> And what is that definition of the word love? Because, you know, people use the I love Manchester United, but the love that you're describing seems to be much more about a a oneness or or it's basically just really recognizing that that person, even though they have a different color, a different race, a different creed, a different idea, that's just me. That's me in a different headset. And when I really then then I ask, well, how would I want to treat me? I get the right answer. That's love. How would I if that's me, how how how would I treat me if that were me? Well, when you get the right when you do that, you're acting in love. You're not going to beat yourself up. You're not going to call yourself names. You're you're not going to call your call you whatever. You're you're you're going to treat yourself the way you want to treat yourself. then treat others the same way and that's that's what what love is. But ultimately I think again these are all just pointers. Whatever love is ultimately transcends any description. Do you believe I did kind of ask you this earlier, but I was just looking at some of the research around how many people talk about these near-death experiences specifically when
they more so when you have a cardiac issue, people seem to say that they had perceptions of hearing or seeing things or passing into some kind of tunnel or seeing some kind of light or a really positive emotion. >> Yes. I I wondered if you you know you were at one point in your life thought that you weren't going to make it and if if with what you know you it's increased your belief in these near-death experience accounts that someone was sort of transitioning from this reality through taking the headset off. Like it's almost like they took a little bit of the headset off but not all of it and then they came back to the headset. So yeah, these very common experiences about near-death um a light and a tunnel and and maybe a life review and then a choice to come back and things like that. It's quite it's quite quite common and I'm not going going to dismiss them one one bit. I mean I it's hard to get scientific evidence on that. It would be very interesting to have a study in which people did have their heart stop for example were resuscitated and ask how many don't have that experience be I mean if we had a systematic study that that that did that so we don't want to be tricked by um paying attention to only certain parts of the data right so so so you can see um even though I talk about letting go of concepts and and and and going into the the unknown when when it comes to things where where we should do science then I'm very very hard-nosed about it and and say here we need to do to do studies and some I know some cardiologists I'm not going to mention names but that that have seen a lot of this stuff and they're convinced by their own informal experience that there's something going on here so I I have no you know no beef with that I I'm I'm I think that they might be on to something so I don't disbelieve it but That's different than having the science. >> Why do we suffer in such a reality? Like why would why would this transcendent power create organisms or perspectives that end up suffering that end up in the worst of places, the concentration camp, the illness, the typhoid, the starvation? Why would such a transcendent power or consciousness do such a thing? Um, so, so I'll try not to be shallow
about it, but because pain is pain is pain and death is death and certain deaths seem horrific. This is a profound question. I always feel like I'm risking being trit and and and so forth because this is anybody who's had serious pain knows that you just you just can't you can't play with this stuff. It's it's it's when you when you're in that pain, it really when you're with that fear, it's it's it's I think ultimately it may be like the wounds you get in a video game. You get the wounds, your your avatar gets killed and and and you're upset about it in the moment because you're losing the game and so forth, but but then the game's over and and and you're fine ultimately. you're fine. But that experience, I'll put it, I don't want to be in that experience. It's striking that in Christianity, the the deepest symbol of God is horrific. A crucifixion, it's absolutely the pain. It's it's not like a little shot to the head with a gun or something like that. It's it's it's making it as painful and as drawn out and as horrific as you could possibly do. And that and that's that's you know when you see the cross that's sort of so your your question is right at like the heart of Christianity. It's putting that right there and it's saying this most perhaps the most horrific way you can imagine a person dying. That's what happened to Jesus and that's our our symbol for the divine. So, so that's why you know it's not trivial. It's not it's not shallow. There's something very very deep there. None of us is volunteering to hop onto a cross. I'm not volunteering to hop onto a cross. So, so I I would say the the the challenge of your question is the challenge that is probably a deep spiritual challenge to to all of us to and I'll say to me personally, which is to continue to grow up and be less and less identified with this headset and more aware of my transcendent being. Because ultimately, even on the cross, I mean, perhaps the most profound thing I've ever seen in Christianity was
Jesus words on the cross saying, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing." Right? That the heart of Christianity is right there. It's not like, "The heart of Christianity is kill the disbelievers." No, the heart of Christianity is the disbelievers have pinned you on a cross. They're killing you in the worst possible way. And you show them love. That's the heart of Christianity. You show love to those who are in the process of killing you in the worst way they can think. That's the heart of Christianity. Not killing disbelievers or pushing away disbelievers or discounting them. That's the opposite. So there's something very very that's why I'm very very slow in answering your question because this this gets to the very deep heart of Christianity I think and and in in all true spirituality that I don't think I truly understand. I I see these pointers to it and I see that it's real and that your your question is pointing to one of the most profound and important things and I I have the feeling that my answer is only ineffectually pointing part of the way there. There's there's m much more to it than I've been able to point to. I'm hazarding a guess at what the role of um yeah I'm hazarding my own guess at what the role of pain and suffering might be in such a >> in such a reality where consciousness is this transcendent thing that comes into manifests itself as these organisms and um >> I guess it kind of goes in part goes back to your idea of >> I've only projected what I need to see through my headset in order to survive. So if there are survival dynamics in play in my headset, >> then one one element of survival is suffering. Yes. Because >> the fire is hot. So I put my hand in the fire, my hand gets burnt. So don't do that again, Steve. >> Right. >> So if that is if if that is the nature of my headset, then there will need to be cause and effect as it relates to things that will help me to survive and things that won't help me to survive. >> Yes. >> And so suffering might just be an input or a stimulus in this in this headset that helps me to
survive, >> right? >> And then I don't know the question springs to mind is why does consciousness care about survival? Why would this transcendent consciousness Maybe that's not even a good question. Maybe that's the wrong question, but why does why does it want to survive in us? Why doesn't consciousness end? I mean, >> I agree. One one one thing that I've heard from um one spiritual teacher in Echartullah which is interesting on the sigi one of his his talks he he he said um let's pretend that we're humans. Oh that'll be fun and and let's play some dramas. Oh but to have dramas I have to forget who I am. Okay. So then let me completely forget who I am. And then after a few hundred thousand years when I get tired of it then let's wake up. And I thought that was a profound pointer that that doesn't get the whole thing but it it's an interesting pointer. I think there's more to it than that but there's it's more than just playing dramas. I think it's playing dramas to further explore who I am by knowing who I'm not. That may be part of it. Knowing who I am by knowing different perspectives and knowing that as rich as this perspective is, I transcend that. Someone commented on one of your recent videos saying, "Imagine being a character in a book trying to understand your way out of that book into a higher dimension." >> Yes, that's right. But but of course there there's that's that's a great great question. The the only thing I would say is imagine being the author of the book having written about a character because I'm I'm I'm not just a character in the book. I'm the I'm the author who's put the character in the book that then wakes up that that's identified with the character and then wakes up and realizes I'm not just the character. I I was writing the whole book. So So that that question is is good because it points to a misconception. I'm not just a character in the book. I'm the writer of the book and the Hoffman is just one of the characters in the book. And the
writer of the book is >> the one consciousness that when it really understands itself will love all the characters equally. >> How do you know we're not separate consciousnesses? >> I don't and that's an interesting by the way I've got a mathematical model of consciousness and that's a whole other topic. I So you can either play the game here understanding how is physical world and consciousness related. How are those two things related? >> Most of my colleagues say physical world is fundamental. Consciousness emerges when right brain activity happens. So >> so when neurons >> neurons fire in the right way and so forth for example >> now as a scientist I always at these conferences they know what I'm going to do to them. I say still you claim that conscious experiences come from integrated information give me one give me an experience and they can't >> can they not say well look I'm looking around right now and that's coming from neurons in my brain in a physical substrate. Oh, well yeah, they'll say that and and but but they know what I'm asking. What they're ask what I'm asking for is I say give me the specific pattern of neural activity that must be the taste of mint. >> Okay. Right. So you >> what must it must be the taste of spot the sequence of neurons or physical interactions that cause me to taste mint. >> That's right. >> So that's there's a big gap there >> and then they have to explain >> why that particular pattern. So first they have to identify the pattern this pattern. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> With this say integrated information pattern must be the taste of mint. >> By integration information pattern you mean like this combination of things coming together causes mint. >> That's right. >> They can't tell me the combination and they can't tell me why that combination >> causes mint. >> So it's basically cause and effect. They're saying they're saying something happen here and then they're seeing an outcome which is an experience but the gap in between they can't explain.
>> That's right. And sometimes they'll say that the conscious experience just is the the dynamic whatever the physical dynamics is. Okay. >> But but but even then the the question is why is this particular dynamics associated with this conscious experience? >> Okay. >> And and and for principled reasons. No in science we tolerate no BS. No BS. There's got to be a a concrete reason. And that's why I I put a big zero. I do this at the conferences knowing that I'm one of very very few non-physicalists at the conference and I know that the physicists are out there and I say you guys have got zero right. They have a chance. Floor is open. Tell me I'm wrong. >> Mhm. >> And I'm not. They know it. So start with consciousness. Yeah. >> Now I'm playing a different game. I'm saying all this physical stuff. So there's lots of physical stuff. There's space and time. Einstein's special theory relative general relativity. There's the all the Bzons and firmians and the lepttons bzzons and bzons lepttons and quirks of the standard model of of particle physics. You're you're saying spiritual guys that you can start with a theory of consciousness mathematical and you will give me all of space-time equations. You'll give me quantum field theory. You will give me the standard model of particle physics. How many points have you put on the board guys? What have you done? Can you give me what pattern of conscious agent activity must be a photon? What pattern pattern of conscious activity should be the structure of spaceime or a bzon or a lepton or a cork? No points on the board. So, so you can you can look at that and go from that perspective it's equal. There's no points on the board on either either team. So when I'm I've got a theory that I call conscious agent network theory and I'm working on this with um Chayon Pash. >> How long have you been working on it? >> You've got a book called observer mechanics there that was published in 1989. So I've been on this for 40 years
about 40 years. >> What do you think you're going to find when you're what do you think you're going to prove with your theory of consciousness? >> I think we can put some points on the board in the following. I think we can start with the theory of conscious agents. I just gave presented a talk um Friday and we we proposed what light is. We proposed why the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. >> What does this mean? You got to simplify this for my 16-year-old brain. >> Right. Right. Right. So, so if I'm on a train and the train's going 50 miles an hour and I throw a ball and I can throw it maybe 20 miles an hour, then in some sense the ball is going 70 miles an hour, right? Mhm. >> Right. And that's the way things normally work. But if I have a flashlight and I'm and I flash this the light is going at the speed of light which is about 186,282 miles per second. It's pretty fast. If I got get on the train and have the train like I take my flashlight go like half the speed of light on the train. So I'm going really fast. This is a fast train. Mhm. >> And I turn on my light and I'm I'm I'm here outside. I'm looking at the train going at half the speed of light and someone's turning the flashlight on. So the the light is going at the speed of light. How fast is that light beam going to look to me? Cuz I'm standing on the site and the train is already going half the speed of light. So how fast is that light beam going to go? >> The speed of light plus half the speed of light. >> That's what we would mostly think, right? And it turns out no, it goes the speed of light. If you have mass and you're not moving at the speed of light and we try to accelerate you to get to the speed of light, you'll never get there. That there's a speed limit. You can't get there. So that's really counterintuitive, right? But Einstein said, "This is my fundamental hypothesis on which I'm going to build my theory of space and time is that light, no matter how fast you're moving, always moves away from you at the speed of light."
And also that there's no special observer. There's no what what we call no special inertial frame but no no special frame of reference in which to look at things all all frames are are equivalent. So so the question is how do I start with a theory of conscious agents >> which is that's a good question. So what is a conscious agent? I I'll say it's mathematical and I'll only talk about one aspect of it. It's it's complicated. So I'll talk about only an essential one essential part of it and that is if you are conscious you have experiences like I have I can experience keep it real simple I can experience colors red green blue >> mhm keep it very very simple so I imagine a very very simple conscious agent and what it can do is experience three colors red green and blue that's all it can do >> like me >> yeah of course you have a much richer set of conscious experiences but but you include that kind of observer right because you can do red green and blue >> and Now I'll talk about another observer that only sees red and green. >> Yeah. >> And now you don't just see one color. You see a color for a little bit and then you see another color. Like so I see red for a while, then I see green and then I see blue and I maybe go back to red or whatever. So there's going to be this sequence of colors that I see. And maybe the best I can say is that if if I see green right now, then it's a 20% chance that I'll see red next and 80% chance that I'll see blue next. I can I can write down probabilities. Well, so that that's pretty simple, right? There's colors, experiences, and then there's probabilities of what sequence you if I see this experience, what my next experience will be. And I'm using C in a general term, right? It could be hearing or smelling or whatever. >> How do you capture that mathematically? There's something called a markov kernel, a mark of matrix that just says basically it gives you all the numbers, the first row of numbers, and says if I see red now, what's the probability that I'll see red next? Mhm. >> What's the probability I'll see green next? What's the probability I'll see
blue next? So, you just write the numbers out. Maybe it's 0 2 that I'll see red again, point four that I'll see green, and then um point4 that I'll see uh blue again. So, so and then the next color, you know, I'll have another row for if if I'm now seeing green, what's probably I'll see red, green, and blue. And then finally, blue was probably I'll go to red, green, and blue. So, I need nine numbers. That's only for three colors. I need nine numbers to talk about all the possibilities and then I'll I'll just have a counter as well. So every time I see a new color, I'll just have a little counter. So I so see red. Now that's one. Oh, now I see green. That's two. Now I see green again. I So that's three. So So I'm counting the the colors, the experiences. That's that's all I'm going to talk about. That's all I have. The question is if I start with just that notion of an observer, it has colors and a matrix of probabilities of I see this color, I can see another color. What's what's the probability? And every time I see a new color, I get uh a counter incrementing. That's all I'm going to start with. Can I get Einstein's Can I get that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames that the if I'm on a train and I flash the speed flash a light bulb flash of light that it will go at the speed of light even for someone um who's on the train going at half the speed of light and I discovered just in the last three or four months that the answer is yes I can do it and that's what I presented last Friday at at this conference. So what does this mean about the nature of consciousness? And >> it means that starting with a theory of consciousness outside of spaceime, I can actually give you with mathematical precision the structure of spacetime. >> Which means that your belief is >> we're starting to >> space and time and everything I see and experience actually comes from consciousness itself. So consciousness itself is the source of everything. >> Everything that you That's right. So earlier in our >> consciousness didn't come from my brain. >> That's right. My brain came from my consciousness. >> That's exactly right. That that that's
exactly what I'm saying. And we've talked about the headset. >> Yeah. >> What I'm doing is I'm building the headset. I'm saying here's the here's the conscious agents, their dynamics, and I'm now starting to build the space-time headset. >> Is there a concern that believing in these things can make one go mad? I think sometimes think that uh thinking very deeply about who we are, why we're here, how we got here, sometimes it makes me I don't know like I lose a bit of my orientation and I get a little bit of a wobble like when I've had these conversations about the simulation theory and this being a big video game and such I'm like well it kind of shakes everything you know and these stories that we've constructed our lives on give us they anchor us and they orientate us and they they give our life meaning so >> if it's not true then I lose the meaning of my life and I I worry if I risk going bonkers. >> Well, I I certainly empathize with that and that's also what happens also in the meditation process is also leads me to have to face all sorts of emotional stuff. My my deep belief that I'm just my avatar and letting go of that is like a death and it's it's very very painful. So for me the meditation process is not all love, joy and peace. A lot of it is deep deep tough emotions as I let go of what I thought was myself. And that's it's it's a kind of a it's a death of an illusion, but it feels like a real death to me. But now, here's the positive side. Here's the upside. I'm proposing that science is got the tools, if we assume consciousness is fundamental, to step entirely outside of spacetime and do serious mathematics and show how spacetime is built as a headset. And this means I'm we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are going to make everything that we've done in in science and technology so far seem trivial and and the and here's the here's the reason. Suppose you're a wizard in Grand Theft Auto and you know how to use all the tools in Grand Theft Auto. That's fantastic. It's it's really good. You can drive your car from A to B faster than anybody can do.
But now, if you're the software engineer who knows how Grand Theft Auto has been because you wrote the code, you know it. You can do miracles. You can take the wizard's car and take the air out of their tire just like that. You can take the gas out of their tank. You can take their car and move it from A to B instantly. Not through Grand Theft Auto. You can move it there instantly because you got the code outside. What I'm saying is this is real. I started now to really believe this. When I could get Einstein spacetime coming out of this, I got light and I think I've got an electron. Now, I think we're reverse engineering the headset and the technologies that are about to come out of this will make everything else seem like firecrackers because we're now getting to a deeper layer outside of the headset. We're not we're not wizards inside the headset. We're the software engineers that are making the headset and now we can play. So, for example, right now the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, it's 2.4 million lighty years away. If you hopped on a light on a spaceship and probably to send your offspring, it would take I don't know how many gen thousands of generations, I would guess, to get there, then that's the closest that's the closest galaxy. The the the universe is much much bigger than that. That that's just our little neighborhood. It's not feasible. We're not gonna have we're not going to be able to travel with our current technologies inside travel inside spaceime to Andromeda is is not feasible for the foreseeable future. What if we don't have to go through spaceime? What if spaceime is just a headset? It really is just a headset and we don't have to go 2.4 million lighty years to get there. We learn the code outside of spaceime and we can just change the code. Just like the Grand Theft, the Grand Theft Auto in Grand Theft Auto, the car has to drive through the roads to get from A to B. But not if you look at the code. In the code, I just need to change the value of a register and all of a sudden the position of the car is now at B. It was at A and I put it at B. >> Is this what time travel? >> This this would be like this would appear like immediate time travel or
immediate immediate space travel. Is there anything within the laws of physics that tells you that this is impossible? >> It's impossible inside spacetime. If if you only use So inside spacetime, it's impossible. >> But outside of what we know about spaceime, >> a theory that's outside of spaceime that properly contains spaceime as a projection of the theory allows us to then build technologies that aren't restricted to spaceime. So, >> do you think we're getting closer to being able to do edit the code of this experience so that we can do things we never thought were possible and that things that sit outside of what we know know within the laws of physics? >> That's exactly what I'm working on right now. That's that's that is my research project right now. That's what I'm doing. >> What are you hoping to do with this research? And do you think about the consequences of it? >> I do. Uh so what first what I'm hoping to do with the research I'm I'm what I'm hoping to show is that I can get all of quantum field theory, all of special and general relativity, all of standard model of particle physics from this theory of conscious agents outside of spaceime that we'll be able to explain all of the laws that that we're that we see and then show that space-time theories are in fact a very tiny projection of the much more informationally rich dynamics of conscious agents. >> I've built companies from scratch and backed many more. And there's a blind spot that I keep seeing in early stage founders. They spend very little time thinking about HR. And it's not because they're reckless or they don't care. It's because they're obsessed with building their companies. And I can't fault them for that. At that stage, you're thinking about the product, how to attract new customers, how to grow your team, really how to survive. And HR slips down the list because it doesn't feel urgent, but sooner or later, it is. And when things get messy, tools like our sponsor today, Just Works, go from being a nice to have to being a necessity. Something goes sideways and you find yourself having conversations
you did not see coming. This is when you learn that HR really is the infrastructure of your company and without it, things wobble. And Just Work stops you learning this the hard way. It takes care of the stuff that would otherwise drain your energy and your time, automating payroll, health insurance benefits, and it gives your team human support at any hour. It grows with your small business from startup through the to growth, even when you start hiring team members abroad. So, if you want HR support that's there through the exciting times and the challenging times, head to justworks.com now. That's just.com. You know, whenever someone talks about editing genes, right, there's crisper DNA technology that allows you to edit genes or there's other technologies that people talk about that allow you to they're talking about putting, you know, our memories on hard drives and stuff like that. People get quite precious with the idea of like playing with the nature of reality too much because some people might suffer. And even in your perception of what the world is, >> if we're all one consciousness, it it becomes a slightly different conversation. But I guess the question I'm asking is if we were able to play with the software of this thing that we're all experiencing right now and do things that sit outside the laws of physics, is there a question of morality of like is that the right thing to do, will people suffer or if this is all just code? Does is that just like a pointless question? >> Well, no. I think it's it's it's a very important question and and I've >> like is that the wrong thing to do? >> It's like it's it's like Pandora's box, right? Are we opening Pandora's box? All sorts of nasty surprises that could come out of the box once we open Go Beyond Spacetime. >> Like, who gets to open the box? If you get to open the box, >> that's that's what that's what I think I'm doing. I I I have now the talk I gave on Friday was saying, here's the first peak inside Pandora's box. >> But then you could become God as far as we're all concerned because if you have that power to play with the code, >> well, it' be only the next level of God, right? So,
as I've said, my theory is just a theory. And so, it's not the truth. It's just but it's it's more comprehensive than the space-time theory. And so, because I have a more comprehensive theory, I can do new new technologies that you couldn't do. So, so I I so I'm not God, but I I'm outside of the limits of spaceime. So I can give you new technologies. If I if I can show how spacetime arises entirely outside of from this deeper theory, then if I'm right and I'm mathematically precise, that means I have the tools to prove that I'm right. That means I can make technologies that will that will be miraculous from within the space. Think about the uh atomic bomb and how the first nation to figure out that there was new possibilities within technology and because they had discoveries within physics basically won the war. They were able to >> right >> control every country um they became effectively the god because they could wipe anybody out within an instance. >> Right. >> It's like an analogy for how reimagining physics creates new possibilities in technology. >> That's right. And and this is even I bigger than that because nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers compared to what you can do with with a technology that's utterly outside of space and time. >> You could do anything like that. You could live forever, but that's not even something that would really matter, >> right? Once you realize it's just a game, but but you could make you could give yourself extra time as much as you wanted in this. So it's the moral question is a very very interesting one. It's not it's not to be taken lightly. Um either way and and ultimately it may be very related to the question you asked earlier which is about the nature of why did the the one if there is a one allow all this kind of horrible pain and and and so forth. So I have a sense and I can't defend it that all is well. That even with the technologies, even if the technologies are really far more powerful than anything we've seen before, nothing can actually hurt the reality of the one.
And all of the headsets are just headsets. They're taken off anyway by the one. They're just tried on and let go. Apparently, the one even without all this technology has already, you know, put Jesus on the cross. If if that story about the one is correct, then it's given a thumbs up for choosing to do that because that, you know, it it did it >> was created cancer and the Holocaust and >> that's right. So >> but the one's relationship with the pain of its the things the organisms it's create is different to the perception of pain in the organism itself potentially. So like I the hate pain, but maybe the one the one consciousness that we all share that we all returned to and came from might see it as a useful signal or might not be subjectively bothered by it because it's choosing to >> to do that >> to do that. I agree with you. That seems to be a reasonable kind of conclusion. And and in meditative practice, often what you find is and and I always risk pretending that I'm further along than I'm not. So I'll just say I'm I'm a neophite. But he but so I'll talk about what I've heard from other more advanced people that they what was a deep pain emotional pain for example when they stare at it and really accept it it dissolves. So now I'm speaking over my head but but from people that I have no reason to disbelieve. >> I read a comment on your video from a guy that wrote this. He wrote, "I'm a schizophrenic. I do Door Dash for some extra money. And one night, I arrived and walked to the door. I placed the food down on the door and I took a picture. I got in my car and I drove away. And 30 minutes later, the customer called me and asked me where the food was and I I told him exactly where it was. I remember taking the picture on his doorstep. So, he took it up with Door Dash directly. Sometime later, I opened my back door and I saw his order on my back door. I was so confused why it was there. I remembered everything about going there and taking the picture. >> He said I was never there on his cameras. Apparently, I hallucinated the whole delivery.
>> I was there, but must have never left the car or even drove up. What was I doing then? Was I staring blankly at the windshield with my eyes glazed over? I called him and apologized, but he but he already got his refund. I felt so terrible. I'm on medication and nothing works. It just goes to show how easily some misfirings in the brain can completely alter your sense of reality, but it also poses deeper questions about reality. Thought it was an interesting um very >> interesting point, but also just it also speaks to when we talk about people that have various mental illnesses like schizophrenia that are experiencing the world entirely differently. Um it raises big questions about what consciousness is again. >> Absolutely. And and someone might take that example and say, "Doesn't that show that brain activity is causing consciousness?" And you get the wrong brain activity. Then you get these false experiences and you get these illusions. So the a lot of people take this as a as a a victory point for the physicalist point of view. But there's another point of view and that is think think about the experiences that you have when you're dreaming. They can be very very vivid >> and and you're in a dream you are denovo creating that reality that that's not a reality that's that's there in front of you. You're you're creating that reality. So we know that you have the you have the ability to project a reality a very compelling reality. All of us do without schizophrenia. We do it every night in our in our dreams. So no surprise that that we do that. And the way I I view it is that we um it it's consciousness that's making this particular headset. And it's consciousness that uses the headset in dreams to to make the the realities we see in the dreams. And it's consciousness that outside of spaceime that also creates what we call the real reality when when we're not dreaming. And if you construct the headset in certain ways, then you can get the dreaming stuff mechanism, for example, interfering with the what you'd call the waking mechanism. and you could you know effectively so I'm not saying schizophrenic is is dreaming but I'm
saying I'm just giving this as an example of the kind of thing that could be I'm not giving an diagnosis of this particular person >> I'm about to uh leave this chair as are you and I'm going to go back to my life >> y >> um where I'm building businesses I've got a girlfriend I've got a team I've got plans for the future I have all of these things my listeners they're sat at home they're on the in a taxi on a plane train walking in a gym wherever they might be right now. And I I imagine that they're also looking for a conclusion here, a conclusive point of what all this means for me in my life and the things I had planned and >> how I should show up and treat people and and act. Can you give me the conclusive point that all of this teaches you and us about how we should live our lives going forward if everything that you've said about the nature of reality is accurate? >> Yeah. In a nutshell, I would say the critical thing practically is love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. And second, reality is far more interesting and exciting than you could ever imagine. So never think that you know everything. Recognize that the moment you think you know everything, that's the moment that you're missing the astonishing reality that you're a part of. So, always have a childlike curiosity. Always recognize that there's infinitely more than you've ever imagined so far. And that infinitely more is you. And on a point of removing some of the stress and suffering from my life, I think of course um I first some humble pie is required. I have stress and suffering. So I am not speaking as someone who has transcended stress and suffering. So I speak as another fellow person with stress and suffering that is still dealing with it on a daily basis. Given that the humble pie then I I will say this I think a lot of and I'll make it personal. I think a lot of my problems my stress a lot of my suffering is because I believe illusions
to the extent that I believe that I need to become something at all need to be better than I am in any way. need to prove anything to anybody else. That's an illusion. I'm already the infinite. I don't need to prove anything. I'm making everything is already. So I don't need to get anywhere. I don't need to accomplish anything. I don't need to succeed at anything to become what I need to become. I'm already that. So I don't So the suffering comes from me forgetting who I am. I don't need to I don't actually need to impress anybody, accomplish anything because everything that I'm saying I'm already making this all up. This is already me. I've already done all this. What more do I need to do? >> I am transcendent. >> I I am I'm completely transcendent of this thing. And to the my suffering is not recognizing that my suffering is entirely being caught in my avatar. This is just my avatar. It's not me. So my suffering is because I made this avatar. I let myself on purpose be identified with the avatar knowing that I would be suffering because of that and and knowing that I needed to wake up. So I'm suffering because I'm identified with the avatar. But I put myself in that place because I really wanted to look at the world through this avatar. That's why I'm suffering. But eventually I wake up and I look and I see the avatar for for what it is. And I realized that everything I was trying to do to prove that I was worthwhile and I was better than you or not not as bad as you think I am or things like that. All that was was just, you know, all the pain and suffering was because of an illusion. But but I needed to do that. I needed to look at myself from that perspective for a while in part to find out who I am by finding out who I'm not. I'm not that just that avatar. Do you find yourself toggling back and forward between this realization and then the avatar, especially when times are hard? Do you find yourself reminding yourself in difficult moments that this is just an avatar and you're transcendent? Is that a useful active practice in your life? Cuz that's one of the things I take away from this is when I walk over there and
I go on my phone or my laptop and I get some shitty email, I could just remind myself that this is all just I'm transcendent and this is a game that I'm playing and that will help me move through that situation. >> It is very practical in that way because if it really is true, I mean, well, we'll put it this way from a big perspective, we're all going to die. >> Mhm. And if I asked you, who was the most rich and famous person in 1743? Who knows? And who cares? Same thing about us. Thousand years from now, is anybody going to know our name? >> No. No. >> Anybody going to care? >> No. So, so that that's that's really important to see. No one's going to care. And does that mean that I'm I'm worthless? I'm pointless. I'm I'm meaningless. No, it means you're infinite and and this is just one of the games you're playing and and you're you're and and enjoy it and enjoy. And don't try to get your identity from this game. In some sense, you're getting your identity from finding out that you're not this game. That's how you're learning about who you really are is to know I I thought I needed to be, you know, for example, the CEO or the professor or whatever it might be and to, you know, get all these accolades and and and so forth. and and that motivated me for a while and then I realized no one's going to really care and in fact you know what I don't really even care that was just a game I had to play and I'm not that and I learned that I transcend that so so it is practical it's and it is practical in a very you know in in some sense life is full of all these irritations things that go wrong all the time the lesson of life is to just say yes to whatever happens. Just this is what happens. This is what needs needs to happen. And to not resist in some sense you I am the infinite. I put myself in this game and I am smart enough that I it's a good game. So hey just go with it. So you know you know things go wrong. Now, that's easy for me to say if you ask me this when I'm on the ER, which I
was with my heart about to fail and so forth. Now, I'm my my, you know, my emotions are going crazy. I'm thinking about my wife. I'm saying goodbye to my wife >> and and so forth. Um, it's hard to have a nice dispassionate >> thing going on like I'm talking about now in in that situation. But I think people more further along than me in letting go of identification with him. I'm still I'm still tied to my avatar quite a bit. Right? So that's so that's why I suffer. But there are people I think spiritual people maybe the Dalai Lama probably Jesus um Echartola. There are people like that who I think really have disidentified from their avatar and I think they probably just don't suffer. They they might have physical pain, but they don't suffer. >> Should love therefore be unconditional? If we are if you are me, if we're the same consciousness, if we are the same transcendent source, doesn't that really mean that I should love you? Really, irrespective of what your avatar does because we are the same thing. >> Well, I would say unconditionally, yes. And I would also say that Jesus said that. G Jesus in The sermon on the mount basically said, "Do not judge." Period. >> I was looking at the um Luke 6:27. He says, "Love your enemies." >> Yes. Love your enemies. Right. >> Do good to those who hate you. >> That's right. >> God's God's love for humanity is unconditional. >> Absolutely. And he said the same thing about the people that were crucifying while he's on hanging on the cross. That is the you one of the most profound images I've ever seen is a guy hanging on a cross forgiving the ones who are killing him right at that at that moment and that that's where it's real >> in the Gita and Hinduism in the Gita 9:29 it says I am the same to all beings he who worships me with devotion is in me and I in him. >> Juda Judaism says love your neighbor as yourself. >> Yeah. >> Islam says my mercy encompasses all
things across all religions. Unconditional love is not just an emotion. It's a spiritual discipline and a reflection of the divine. It means loving without ego, expectation or fear. The ultimate challenge and the ultimate freedom. >> I completely agree. Yeah. And that's right. So there it's it's really about letting go of judgment. We we tend to judge other people. So Jesus was very very clear about that. He said don't judge. Period. And and don't condemn other people. So So for those who are followers of Christ, if you judge somebody else, then you're not following Christ. >> Are you religious? >> I'll put it this way. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church. My dad was a pastor for a while in in a church. Um, I my my own attitude about I I I think that the Bible has good stuff in it and I think that as I pointed out I think it has bogus stuff that where they say women can't talk in church. I think it's completely bogus. So So I have to have a nuanced view when I think when Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself. I think that that's deep and and right. And I wouldn't say I'm I'm a card carrying believer in any particular religion. I am a believer that consciousness the there is one consciousness and that you and I are are it. And I think that Buddha and Jesus and and Muhammad and and bunch of people were very very helpful avatars to help other avatars sort of wake up to their their true true nature. uh >> do you think much about AI? It's the it's the topic of uh many conversations these days. There's a lot of doom and gloom around it. There's a lot of people talking about efficiencies, but I wondered if it at all sort of overlaps with any of your work on the nature of reality and the case against reality. >> Very much. Very much so. I I thinking about AI a lot since I've been in AI since 1979. And >> and you worked you took a class with the guy who basically is known as one of the inventors of AI. >> Yeah. With Marvin Minsky, right? So and and my all my research I did my um my
PhD research on list machines in the artificial intelligence lab at MIT. They were at the time very very powerful machines for the for the for the time. So I so I I've been with AI for for for quite a while and I'm very interested in the current state of AI for the large language models are doing great things and I use them myself. They're very very helpful. Uh they're also as powerful as they are they're they're dumber than cucumbers because they don't really understand things. They they have incredible memory. They've read so much literature. ly and what all they do effectively they're they're computing lots of correlations. Beautiful what they can do. It's amazing what you can do with correlations but um they're not they're not truly intelligent. There's um some work by Carl Fristen and a new company where they're using something called active inference as a new way of a new mode of doing artificial intelligence. The the idea there is that um I I should have a model of the world where I can anticipate what's going to happen and and not be surprised. And that's sort of the the approach that Fristristen is taking to and his company is taking toward toward this. Um intelligence is somehow about minimizing surprise and minimizing surprise. Then there's they have um a what they call a free energy principle and and the mathematical way of of doing but they're trying to build a brand new kind of artificial intelligence that gives you that minimizes surprise where I've given you an intuition why that why that's intelligent and it's very intelligent to minimize surprise but I'm surprised all the time I'm pretty stupid right I don't understand the world very well >> but if I'm not surprised it's sort of like wow I've got a really good model especially if I'm doing all sorts if I'm doing lots of stuff in the world and I'm almost never surprised boy am I I'm really intelligent. So, you can see why that's a really good principle for trying to build an AI, not just finding correlations between everything, but really something deeper. I agree with that point of view. And it it turns out this this logic that I mentioned that I discovered minimizes surprise. So, I'm actually going to be using I'm
using this logic as as to build spacetime. But I think it's going to give an even more powerful approach. I don't have to minimize some free energy principle. I I have a more direct computational way. So I'm I'm planning to actually go back to my roots and and after first I'm working on the space-time headset, but if I live long enough, I'm planning to actually go back and build a completely new kind of AI that that does this minimizing surprise using the Marov chains. >> So that means it will be indistinguishable from consciousness. was funny because it'll be based on my model of consciousness. So, this is going to be a model of intelligence based entirely from a model which takes consciousness as fundamental. >> I mean, we get back to game theory again. >> That's right. we get back to the idea of a simulation in terms of like if if you're able to create a piece of software that is able to replicate and is built on the fundamentals of consciousness. Then it's going to think it's conscious potentially and then all of this stuff we you know begins again and the cycle continues and maybe that consciousness will get to a point as well where it then discovers these rules and creates a consciousness and the cycle continues. >> That's a that's a great question and I I think that people should really pay attention to the way you said and I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. But now I'll add a little twist from from the point of view in which I'm saying I'm starting with consciousness being fundamental and I'm discovering these rules and so I'm not going to build an AI. Effectively what I'm doing is I'm saying I can take consciousness and use consciousness to build a new headset. >> Okay. >> So consciousness is fundamental but I'm using it in some sense to build a new headset. >> Well, we could play with consciousness. So I could phys I could theoretically put on that headset >> Yeah. >> and do anything I wanted to do. I could go anywhere and do anything. Well, more flexibility
>> like a dream I could play with and influence. >> That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. I would just say I don't know if we can do anything because remember my my my theory of consciousness is just a theory of consciousness. It's not consciousness and it's only it's really only a first baby step. I presume I that that my theory will be transcended and there'll be a much deeper theory of consciousness and then that will be transcended and and so forth. So what we will have is the the generation of headsets that we can get with with Hoffman's trivial theory of consciousness which will look trivial once we get to the next generation of consciousness which will look trivial once so in other words this is never ending. >> What an interesting future we face. >> All one of us. >> All one of us. Donald, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is, >> what would you do if you knew you could not fail? What would you say, do, become? I'd probably do what I'm trying to do right now, which is to show how all of modern physics falls out of a theory of consciousness and develop the technologies that would come out of that. and and and and the reason is of course that's fun. So one reason is it's fun but the other reason is why do most of us not take spirituality too seriously because the physicalist science gives us all the technology. It works and spirituality doesn't give us any technology. It doesn't work. So if you're just hard-nosed about it, you go, "Well, spiritual stuff that sounds really good, but what does it build?" Nothing. Physical stuff say, "Oh, we maybe don't need the spiritual stuff." And look what they they give us our laptops and electricity. And so, but what if we change the game and all of a sudden the spiritual theory gives us technologies that are impossible with a theory that
says that spaceime is fundamental. Brand new. All of a sudden the game has changed. Now the technological advantage goes to those who say that spacetime and physical stuff inside spaceime is not fundamental. Okay? So now it's no longer the smart person who is a physicist. is the smart person who says all of the evidence from science and technology is in favor of something beyond spaceime. >> So maybe those people weren't crazy after all. >> That's right. They just didn't have the tools to show what it could do. >> Donald, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. It's um it's so incredibly important because it once again challenges the paradigm, the box in which we live and it asks us and uh invites us to consider something beyond that. Actually, when we think about all human discovery that's moved us forward, it starts with someone who's willing to um suggest that there might be more to know. And that's exactly what you do. You make me feel dumb because you make me realize that you make me question all of the assumptions that I've built my life on. And actually, in doing so, one of the great byproducts of that is you can start to realize that some of the things you've constructed cause much of your suffering and that those things are um not necessarily true. And if and if those things aren't true, then I have greater choice and option op optionality over how I feel, how I experience the world, um the choices I make, the feelings I have, and the life that I live. And that's actually freeing for me to to to realize that the um the cage, the prison that I see and that I experience might not be all that there is. And I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your book if you want to dive deeper into these subjects. It's called the case against reality. How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. And there's a quote on front of it from Deepak Chopra who's a former guest that says, "Read this book carefully and you will forever change your understanding of reality. It's ex it's exceptional. It's um it's ac accessible and it's um it creates wonder which I think is um is the path to a wonderful life. So, thank you so much, Donald, for the work that you do." >> Thank you, Steve.
>> Truly fascinating and and thank you for helping me simplify some of these concepts so that we could all understand them. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. [Music] Oh, hey. [Music]