Transcript
00:00:00 Whatever reality is, it’s not what you see.
00:00:04 What you see is just an adaptive fiction.
00:00:12 The following is a conversation with Donald Hoffman,
00:00:14 professor of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine,
00:00:17 focusing his research on evolutionary psychology,
00:00:21 visual perception, and consciousness.
00:00:23 He’s the author of over 120 scientific papers
00:00:27 on these topics and his most recent book
00:00:30 titled The Case Against Reality,
00:00:33 Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.
00:00:36 I think some of the most interesting ideas in this world,
00:00:39 like those of Donald Hoffman’s,
00:00:41 attempt to shake the foundation
00:00:43 of our understanding of reality,
00:00:45 and thus they take a long time to internalize deeply.
00:00:50 So proceed with caution.
00:00:52 Questioning the fabric of reality
00:00:54 can lead you to either madness or to truth.
00:00:58 And the funny thing is, you won’t know which is which.
00:01:02 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:01:04 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:01:06 in the description.
00:01:07 And now, dear friends, here’s Donald Hoffman.
00:01:12 In your book, The Case Against Reality,
00:01:14 Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes,
00:01:17 you make the bold claim that the world we see
00:01:20 with our eyes is not real.
00:01:21 It’s not even an abstraction of objective reality.
00:01:24 It is completely detached from objective reality.
00:01:29 Can you explain this idea?
00:01:30 Right, so this is a theorem
00:01:32 from evolution by natural selection.
00:01:34 So the technical question that I and my team asked was,
00:01:38 what is the probability that natural selection
00:01:41 would shape sensory systems
00:01:43 to see true properties of objective reality?
00:01:46 And to our surprise,
00:01:47 we found that the answer is precisely zero,
00:01:49 except for one kind of structure
00:01:51 that we can go into if you want to.
00:01:52 But for any generic structure
00:01:54 that you might think the world might have,
00:01:56 a total order, a topology, metric,
00:02:00 the probability is precisely zero
00:02:02 that natural selection would shape any sensory system
00:02:05 of any organism to see any aspect of objective reality.
00:02:08 So in that sense, what we’re seeing
00:02:11 is what we need to see
00:02:16 to stay alive long enough to reproduce.
00:02:18 So in other words, we’re seeing what we need
00:02:20 to guide adaptive behavior, full stop.
00:02:23 So the evolutionary process,
00:02:26 the process that took us from the origin of life on Earth
00:02:30 to the humans that we are today,
00:02:33 that process does not maximize for truth,
00:02:37 it maximizes for fitness, as you say, fitness beats truth.
00:02:41 And fitness does not have to be connected to truth,
00:02:45 is the claim.
00:02:46 And that’s where you have an approach
00:02:49 towards zero of probability
00:02:51 that we have evolved human cognition,
00:02:55 human consciousness, whatever it is,
00:02:58 the magic that makes our mind work,
00:03:00 evolved not for its ability to see the truth of reality,
00:03:06 but its ability to survive in the environment.
00:03:09 That’s exactly right.
00:03:10 So most of us intuitively think that surely
00:03:14 the way that evolution will make our senses more fit
00:03:18 is to make them tell us more truths,
00:03:21 or at least the truths we need to know
00:03:22 about objective reality, the truths we need in our niche.
00:03:26 That’s the standard view, and it was the view I took.
00:03:27 I mean, that’s sort of what we’re taught
00:03:30 or just even assume.
00:03:31 It was just sort of like the intelligent assumption
00:03:33 that we would all make.
00:03:34 But we don’t have to just wave our hands.
00:03:37 Evolution of a natural selection
00:03:38 is a mathematically precise theory.
00:03:41 John Maynard Smith in the 70s
00:03:44 created evolutionary game theory.
00:03:45 And we have evolutionary graph theory
00:03:48 and even genetic algorithms that we can use to study this.
00:03:50 And so we don’t have to wave our hands.
00:03:52 It’s a matter of theorem and proof and or simulation
00:03:55 before you get the theorems and proofs.
00:03:56 And a couple of graduate students of mine,
00:03:59 Chester Mark and Brian Marion,
00:04:01 did some wonderful simulations that tipped me off
00:04:03 that there was something going on here.
00:04:06 And then I went to a mathematician, Chetan Prakash,
00:04:08 and Manish Singh, and some other friends of mine,
00:04:13 Chris Fields.
00:04:14 But Chetan was the real mathematician behind all this.
00:04:17 And he’s proved several theorems
00:04:18 that uniformly indicate that with one exception,
00:04:21 which has to do with probability measures,
00:04:25 there’s no, the probability is zero.
00:04:28 The reason there’s an exception for probability measures,
00:04:30 so called sigma algebras or sigma additive classes,
00:04:36 is that for any scientific theory,
00:04:40 there is the assumption that needs to be made
00:04:43 that whatever structure,
00:04:48 whatever probabilistic structure the world may have
00:04:51 is not unrelated to the probabilistic structure
00:04:55 of our perceptions.
00:04:56 If they were completely unrelated,
00:04:57 then no science would be possible.
00:04:59 So this is technically the map from reality to our senses
00:05:05 has to be a so called measurable map,
00:05:07 has to preserve sigma algebras.
00:05:08 But that means it could be infinite to one,
00:05:10 and it could collapse all sorts of event information.
00:05:14 But other than that, there’s no requirement
00:05:17 in standard evolutionary theory
00:05:18 for fitness payoff functions, for example,
00:05:22 to preserve any specific structures of objective reality.
00:05:25 So you can ask the technical question.
00:05:27 This is one of the avenues we took.
00:05:30 If you look at all the fitness payoffs
00:05:32 from whatever world structure you might want to imagine.
00:05:37 So a world with say a total order on it.
00:05:41 So it’s got end states and they’re totally ordered.
00:05:44 And then you can have a set of maps from that world
00:05:48 into a set of payoffs, say from zero to a thousand
00:05:50 or whatever you want your payoffs to be.
00:05:52 And you can just literally count all the payoff functions
00:05:56 and just do the combinatorics and count them.
00:05:58 And then you can ask the precise question,
00:05:59 how many of those payoff functions preserve the total order?
00:06:04 If that’s what you’re looking for,
00:06:04 or how many preserve the topology?
00:06:07 And you just count them and divide.
00:06:08 So the number that are homomorphisms
00:06:11 versus the total number, and then take the limit
00:06:14 as the number of states in the world
00:06:16 and the number of payoff values goes very large.
00:06:19 And when you do that, you get zero every time.
00:06:21 Okay, there’s a million things to ask here.
00:06:24 But first of all, just in case people
00:06:28 are not familiar with your work,
00:06:30 let’s sort of linger on the big bold statement here,
00:06:35 which is the thing we see with our eyes
00:06:41 is not some kind of limited window into reality.
00:06:45 It is completely detached from reality,
00:06:47 likely completely detached from reality.
00:06:49 You’re saying 100% likely.
00:06:52 Okay, so none of this is real in the way we think is real.
00:06:57 In the way we have this intuition,
00:07:00 there’s like this table is some kind of abstraction,
00:07:05 but underneath it all, there’s atoms.
00:07:07 And there’s an entire century of physics
00:07:09 that describes the functioning of those atoms
00:07:12 and the quirks that make them up.
00:07:13 There’s many Nobel Prizes about particles and fields
00:07:19 and all that kind of stuff that slowly builds up
00:07:23 to something that’s perceivable to us,
00:07:25 both with our eyes, with our different senses as this table.
00:07:29 Then there’s also ideas of chemistry
00:07:33 that over layers of abstraction, from DNA to embryos,
00:07:38 the cells that make the human body.
00:07:42 So all of that is not real.
00:07:46 It’s a real experience,
00:07:48 and it’s a real adaptive set of perceptions.
00:07:52 So it’s an adaptive set of perceptions, full stop.
00:07:56 We want to think that the perceptions are real.
00:07:58 So their perceptions are real as perceptions, right?
00:08:01 We are having our perceptions,
00:08:03 but we’ve assumed that there’s a pretty tight relationship
00:08:06 between our perceptions and reality.
00:08:09 If I look up and see the moon,
00:08:11 then there is something that exists in space and time
00:08:15 that matches what I perceive.
00:08:18 And all I’m saying is that if you take evolution
00:08:24 by natural selection seriously, then that is precluded.
00:08:29 That our perceptions are there.
00:08:31 They’re there to guide adaptive behavior, full stop.
00:08:35 They’re not there to show you the truth.
00:08:36 In fact, the way I think about it is
00:08:38 they’re there to hide the truth
00:08:40 because the truth is too complicated.
00:08:42 It’s just like if you’re trying to use your laptop
00:08:45 to write an email, right?
00:08:47 What you’re doing is toggling voltages in the computer,
00:08:50 but good luck trying to do it that way.
00:08:52 The reason why we have a user interface
00:08:54 is because we don’t want to know that quote unquote truth,
00:08:56 the diodes and resistors and all that terrible hardware.
00:08:59 If you had to know all that truth,
00:09:02 your friends wouldn’t hear from you.
00:09:04 So what evolution gave us was perceptions
00:09:08 that guide adaptive behavior.
00:09:10 And part of that process, it turns out,
00:09:12 means hiding the truth and giving you eye candy.
00:09:16 So what’s the difference between hiding the truth
00:09:20 and forming abstractions,
00:09:22 layers upon layers of abstractions
00:09:26 over low level voltages and transistors
00:09:30 and chips and programming languages
00:09:35 from assembly to Python that then leads you
00:09:38 to be able to have an interface like Chrome
00:09:41 where you open up another set of JavaScript and HTML
00:09:45 programming languages that lead you
00:09:47 to have a graphical user interface
00:09:49 and which you can then send your friends an email.
00:09:53 Is that completely detached from the zeros and ones
00:09:58 that are firing away inside the computer?
00:10:01 It’s not.
00:10:02 Of course, when I talk about the user interface
00:10:04 on your desktop, there’s this whole sophisticated
00:10:10 backstory to it, right?
00:10:11 That the hardware and the software
00:10:13 that’s allowing that to happen.
00:10:15 Evolution doesn’t tell us the backstory, right?
00:10:17 So the theory of evolution is not going to be adequate
00:10:20 to tell you what is that backstory.
00:10:23 It’s gonna say that whatever reality is,
00:10:27 and that’s the interesting thing,
00:10:28 it says whatever reality is, you don’t see it.
00:10:31 You see a user interface,
00:10:32 but it doesn’t tell you what that user interface is,
00:10:36 how it’s built, right?
00:10:38 Now, we can try to look at certain aspects
00:10:42 of the interface, but already we’re gonna look at that
00:10:45 and go, okay, before I would look at neurons
00:10:47 and I was assuming that I was seeing something
00:10:49 that was at least partially true.
00:10:52 And now I’m realizing that it could be like looking
00:10:54 at the pixels on my desktop or icons on my desktop
00:10:59 and good luck going from that to the data structures
00:11:02 and then the voltages and I mean, good luck.
00:11:04 There’s just no way.
00:11:06 So what’s interesting about this is that
00:11:08 our scientific theories are precise enough
00:11:13 and rigorous enough to tell us certain limits,
00:11:17 but, and even limits of the theories themselves,
00:11:20 but they’re not going to tell us what the next move is
00:11:23 and that’s where scientific creativity comes in.
00:11:25 So the stuff that I’m saying here, for example,
00:11:28 is not alien to physicists.
00:11:31 The physicists are saying precisely the same thing
00:11:33 that space time is doomed.
00:11:35 We’ve assumed that space time is fundamental.
00:11:37 We’ve assumed that for several centuries
00:11:39 and it’s been very useful.
00:11:40 So all the things that you were mentioning,
00:11:41 the particles and all the work that’s been done,
00:11:43 that’s all been done in space time,
00:11:45 but now physicists are saying space time is doomed.
00:11:47 There’s no such thing as space time fundamentally
00:11:51 in the laws of physics.
00:11:54 And that comes actually out of gravity
00:11:58 together with quantum field theory,
00:11:59 which just comes right out of it.
00:12:01 It’s a theorem of those two theories put together,
00:12:05 but it doesn’t tell you what’s behind it.
00:12:08 So the physicists know that their best theories,
00:12:11 Einstein’s gravity and quantum field theory put together
00:12:15 entail that space time cannot be fundamental
00:12:17 and therefore particles in space time cannot be fundamental.
00:12:20 They’re just irreducible representations
00:12:22 of the symmetries of space time.
00:12:23 That’s what they are.
00:12:24 So we have, so space time, so we put the two together.
00:12:27 We put together what the physicists are discovering
00:12:29 and we can talk about how they do that.
00:12:32 And then we, the new discoveries
00:12:33 from evolution of a natural selection.
00:12:35 Both of these discoveries are really in the last 20 years.
00:12:38 And what both are saying is space time
00:12:41 has had a good ride.
00:12:43 It’s been very useful.
00:12:44 Reductionism has been useful, but it’s over.
00:12:46 And it’s time for us to go beyond.
00:12:48 When you say space time is doomed,
00:12:50 is it the space, is it the time,
00:12:53 is it the very hard coded specification of four dimensions?
00:12:59 Or are you specifically referring
00:13:01 to the kind of perceptual domain
00:13:05 that humans operate in, which is space time?
00:13:07 You think like there’s a 3D, like our world
00:13:12 is three dimensional and time progresses forward.
00:13:15 Therefore, three dimensions plus one, 4D.
00:13:18 What exactly do you mean by space time?
00:13:20 And what do you mean by space time is doomed?
00:13:24 Great, great.
00:13:24 So this is, by the way, not my quote.
00:13:26 This is from, for example, Nima Arkanihaim Ed
00:13:29 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
00:13:31 Ed Witten, also there.
00:13:34 David Gross, Nobel Prize winner.
00:13:36 So this is not just something the cognitive scientists,
00:13:39 this is what the physicists are saying.
00:13:40 Yeah, the physicists, they’re space time skeptics.
00:13:45 Well, yeah, they’re saying that,
00:13:46 and I can say exactly why they think it’s doomed.
00:13:49 But what they’re saying is that,
00:13:51 because your question was what aspect of space time,
00:13:53 what are we talking about here?
00:13:55 It’s both space and time.
00:13:56 They’re union into space time as an Einstein’s theory.
00:13:59 That’s doomed.
00:14:01 And they’re basically saying that even quantum theory,
00:14:06 this is with Nima Arkanihaim Ed, especially.
00:14:09 So Hilbert spaces will not be fundamental either.
00:14:12 So that the notion of Hilbert space,
00:14:15 which is really critical to quantum field theory,
00:14:19 quantum information theory,
00:14:21 that’s not going to figure
00:14:22 in the fundamental new laws of physics.
00:14:25 So what they’re looking for
00:14:26 is some new mathematical structures beyond space time,
00:14:31 beyond Einstein’s four dimensional space time
00:14:35 or super symmetric version,
00:14:38 geometric algebra signature two comma four kind of.
00:14:41 There are different ways that you can represent it,
00:14:43 but they’re finding new structures.
00:14:45 And then by the way, they’re succeeding now.
00:14:47 They’re finding, they found something
00:14:48 called the amplituhedron.
00:14:49 This is Nima and his colleagues,
00:14:51 the cosmological polytope.
00:14:53 So there are these like polytopes,
00:14:57 these polyhedra in multi dimensions,
00:15:00 generalizations of simplices that are coding for,
00:15:05 for example, the scattering amplitudes of processes
00:15:08 in the Large Hadron Collider and other colliders.
00:15:10 So they’re finding that if they let go of space time,
00:15:14 completely, they’re finding new ways
00:15:16 of computing these scattering amplitudes
00:15:18 that turn literally billions of terms into one term.
00:15:23 When you do it in space and time,
00:15:25 because it’s the wrong framework,
00:15:26 it’s just a user interface from,
00:15:29 that’s not from the evolutionary point of view,
00:15:30 it’s just user interface.
00:15:32 It’s not a deep insight into the nature of reality.
00:15:34 So it’s missing deep symmetry
00:15:36 is something called a dual conformal symmetry,
00:15:39 which turns out to be true of the scattering data,
00:15:40 but you can’t see it in space time.
00:15:42 And it’s making the computations way too complicated
00:15:46 because you’re trying to compute all the loops
00:15:47 in the Feynman diagrams and all the Feynman integrals.
00:15:50 So see the Feynman approach to the scattering amplitudes
00:15:53 is trying to enforce two critical properties of space time,
00:15:56 locality and unitarity.
00:15:58 And so by, when you enforce those,
00:16:00 you get all these loops and multiple,
00:16:03 different levels of loops.
00:16:04 And for each of those,
00:16:05 you have to add new terms to your computation.
00:16:07 But when you do it outside of space time,
00:16:11 you don’t have the notion of unitarity.
00:16:13 You don’t have the notion of locality.
00:16:15 You have something deeper
00:16:17 and it’s capturing some symmetries
00:16:18 that are actually true of the data.
00:16:20 And, but then when you look at the geometry
00:16:23 of the facets of these polytopes,
00:16:25 then certain of them will code for unitarity and locality.
00:16:30 So it actually comes out of the structure
00:16:32 of these deep polytopes.
00:16:33 So what we’re finding is there’s this whole new world.
00:16:36 Now beyond space time that is making explicit symmetries
00:16:42 that are true of the data
00:16:43 that cannot be seen in space time.
00:16:45 And that is turning the computations
00:16:46 from billions of terms to one or two or a handful of terms.
00:16:50 So we’re getting insights into symmetries
00:16:53 and all of a sudden the math is becoming simple
00:16:55 because we’re not doing something silly.
00:16:56 We’re not adding up all these loops in space time.
00:16:59 We’re doing something far deeper.
00:17:00 But they don’t know what this world is about.
00:17:02 Also, they’re in an interesting position
00:17:07 where we know that space time is doomed.
00:17:09 And I should probably tell you why it’s doomed,
00:17:11 what they’re saying about why it’s doomed.
00:17:12 But they need a flashlight to look beyond space time.
00:17:15 What flashlight are we gonna use
00:17:17 to look into the dark beyond space time?
00:17:19 Because Einstein’s theory and quantum theory
00:17:22 can’t tell us what’s beyond them.
00:17:23 All they can do is tell us that when you put us together,
00:17:26 space time is doomed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters,
00:17:30 10 to the minus 43 seconds.
00:17:31 Beyond that, space time doesn’t even make sense.
00:17:34 It just has no operational definition.
00:17:37 So, but it doesn’t tell you what’s beyond.
00:17:39 And so they’re just looking for deep structures
00:17:41 like guessing is really fun.
00:17:43 So these really brilliant guys, generic brilliant men
00:17:47 and women who are doing this work, physicists,
00:17:49 are making guesses about these structures,
00:17:52 informed guesses, because they’re trying to ask,
00:17:54 well, okay, what deeper structure could give us
00:17:56 the stuff that we’re seeing in space time,
00:17:58 but without certain commitments
00:17:59 that we have to make in space time, like locality.
00:18:02 So they make these brilliant guesses.
00:18:04 And of course, most of the time you’re gonna be wrong,
00:18:06 but once you get one or two that start to pay off
00:18:09 and then you get some lucky breaks.
00:18:11 So they got a lucky break back in 1986.
00:18:15 Couple of mathematicians named Park and Taylor
00:18:18 took the scattering amplitude for two gluons coming in
00:18:22 at high energy and four gluons going out at low energy.
00:18:25 So that kind of scattering thing.
00:18:27 So it’s like apparently for people who are into this,
00:18:30 that’s sort of something that happens so often
00:18:32 you need to be able to find it and get rid of those
00:18:34 cause you already know about that and you need to.
00:18:36 So you needed to compute them.
00:18:37 It was billions of terms and they couldn’t do it
00:18:39 even though for the supercomputers couldn’t do that
00:18:41 for the many billions or millions of times per second
00:18:44 they needed to do it.
00:18:45 So the experimentals begged the theorists,
00:18:49 please, you got it.
00:18:51 And so Park and Taylor took the billions of terms,
00:18:53 hundreds of pages and miraculously turned it into nine.
00:18:58 And then a little bit later,
00:18:59 they guessed one term expression
00:19:01 that turned out to be equivalent.
00:19:02 So billions of terms reduced to one term,
00:19:07 that so called famous Park Taylor formula, 1986.
00:19:10 And that was like, okay, where did that come from?
00:19:14 This is a pointer into a deep realm, beyond space and time,
00:19:18 but no one, I mean, what can you do with it?
00:19:21 And they thought maybe it was a one off,
00:19:23 but then other formulas started coming up.
00:19:25 And then eventually Neymar, Connie, Hamid and his team
00:19:28 found this thing called the amplituhedron,
00:19:30 which really sort of captures the whole,
00:19:32 a big part of the whole ball of wax.
00:19:34 I’m sure they would say, no, there’s plenty more to do.
00:19:37 So I won’t say they did it all by any means.
00:19:40 They’re looking at the cosmological polytope as well.
00:19:42 So what’s remarkable to me is that two pillars
00:19:48 of modern science, quantum field theory with gravity
00:19:51 on the one hand and evolution by natural selection
00:19:54 on the other, just in the last 20 years
00:19:56 have very clearly said space time has had a good run.
00:20:01 Reductionism has been a fantastic methodology.
00:20:03 So we had a great ontology of space time,
00:20:05 a great methodology of reductionism.
00:20:07 Now it’s time for a new trick.
00:20:10 But now you need to go deeper and show,
00:20:13 but by the way, this doesn’t mean we throw away
00:20:14 everything we’ve done, not by a long shot.
00:20:17 Every new idea that we come up with beyond space time
00:20:20 must project precisely into space time.
00:20:23 And it better give us back everything that we know
00:20:25 and love in space time or generalizations,
00:20:28 or it’s not gonna be taken seriously and it shouldn’t be.
00:20:30 So we have a strong constraint on whatever we’re going to do
00:20:34 beyond space time, it needs to project into space time.
00:20:37 And whatever this deeper theory is,
00:20:39 it may not itself have evolution by natural selection.
00:20:42 This may not be part of this deeper realm.
00:20:44 But when we take whatever that thing is beyond space time
00:20:47 and project it into space time,
00:20:49 it has to look like evolution by natural selection
00:20:51 or it’s wrong.
00:20:52 So that’s a strong constraint on this work.
00:20:57 So even the evolution by natural selection
00:21:00 and quantum field theory could be interfaces
00:21:06 into something that doesn’t look anything like,
00:21:11 like you mentioned.
00:21:12 I mean, it’s interesting to think that evolution
00:21:14 might be a very crappy interface
00:21:16 into something much deeper.
00:21:18 That’s right.
00:21:19 They’re both telling us that the framework that you’ve had
00:21:21 can only go so far and it has to stop.
00:21:24 And there’s something beyond.
00:21:25 And the very framework that is space and time itself.
00:21:29 Now, of course, evolution by natural selection
00:21:32 is not telling us about like Einstein’s relativistic
00:21:35 space time.
00:21:36 So that was another question you asked a little bit earlier.
00:21:38 It’s telling us more about our perceptual space and time,
00:21:42 which we have used as the basis for creating
00:21:46 first Newtonian space versus time
00:21:49 as a mathematical extension of our perceptions.
00:21:53 And then Einstein then took that and extended it even further.
00:21:56 So the relationship between what evolution is telling us
00:21:59 and what the physicists are telling us is that
00:22:01 in some sense, the Newton and Einstein space time
00:22:07 are formulated as sort of rigorous extensions
00:22:11 of our perceptual space,
00:22:14 making it mathematically rigorous
00:22:15 and laying out the symmetries that they find there.
00:22:19 So that’s sort of the relationship between them.
00:22:20 So it’s the perceptual space time
00:22:22 that evolution is telling us
00:22:24 is just a user interface effectively.
00:22:27 And then the physicists are finding
00:22:28 that even the mathematical extension of that
00:22:31 into the Einsteinian formulation has to be as well,
00:22:36 not the final story, there’s something deeper.
00:22:38 So let me ask you about reductionism and interfaces
00:22:43 as we march forward from Newtonian physics
00:22:47 to quantum mechanics.
00:22:49 These are all, in your view, interfaces.
00:22:56 Are we getting closer to objective reality?
00:22:59 How do we know if these interfaces in the process of science,
00:23:04 the reason we like those interfaces
00:23:06 is because they’re predictive of some aspects,
00:23:09 strongly predictive about some aspects of our reality.
00:23:14 Is that completely deviating
00:23:16 from our understanding of that reality
00:23:19 or is it helping us get closer and closer and closer?
00:23:22 Well, of course, one critical constraint
00:23:24 on all of our theories
00:23:25 is that they are empirically tested
00:23:27 and pass the experiments that we have for them.
00:23:30 So no one’s arguing against experiments being important
00:23:34 and wanting to test all of our current theories
00:23:38 and any new theories on that.
00:23:40 So that’s all there.
00:23:44 But we have good reason to believe
00:23:48 that science will never get a theory of everything.
00:23:51 Everything, everything.
00:23:52 Everything, everything, right.
00:23:53 A final theory of everything, right.
00:23:55 I think that my own take is, for what it’s worth,
00:23:58 is that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem
00:24:00 sort of points us in that direction,
00:24:02 that even with mathematics,
00:24:05 any finite axiomatization that’s sophisticated enough
00:24:08 to be able to do arithmetic,
00:24:10 it’s easy to show that there’ll be statements that are true,
00:24:13 that can’t be proven,
00:24:16 can’t be deduced from within that framework.
00:24:19 And if you add the new statements to your axioms,
00:24:21 then there’ll be always new statements that are true,
00:24:24 but can’t be proven with a new axiom system.
00:24:26 And the best scientific theories in physics, for example,
00:24:32 and also now evolution, are mathematical.
00:24:35 So our theories are gonna be,
00:24:36 they’re gonna have their own assumptions
00:24:38 and they’ll be mathematically precise.
00:24:41 And there’ll be theories, perhaps,
00:24:42 of everything except those assumptions,
00:24:44 because the assumptions are,
00:24:46 we say, please grant me these assumptions.
00:24:48 If you grant me these assumptions,
00:24:49 then I can explain this other stuff.
00:24:52 So you have the assumptions that are like miracles,
00:24:57 as far as the theory is concerned.
00:24:58 They’re not explained.
00:24:59 They’re the starting points for explanation.
00:25:01 And then you have the mathematical structure
00:25:03 of the theory itself, which will have the Gödel limits.
00:25:07 And so my take is that reality,
00:25:12 reality, whatever it is, is always going to transcend
00:25:18 any conceptual theory that we didn’t come up with.
00:25:22 There’s always gonna be mystery at the edges.
00:25:24 Right.
00:25:27 Contradictions and all that kind of stuff.
00:25:29 Okay.
00:25:31 And truths.
00:25:32 So there’s this idea that is brought up
00:25:34 in the financial space of settlement of transactions.
00:25:39 It’s often talked about in cryptocurrency, especially.
00:25:42 So you could do, you know, money, cash,
00:25:44 is not connected to anything.
00:25:48 It used to be connected to gold, to physical reality,
00:25:52 but then you can use money to exchange,
00:25:54 to exchange value, to transact.
00:25:57 So when it was on the gold standard,
00:25:59 the money would represent some stable component of reality.
00:26:04 Isn’t it more effective to avoid things like hyperinflation
00:26:12 if we generalize that idea?
00:26:14 Isn’t it better to connect your,
00:26:19 whatever we humans are doing
00:26:20 in the social interaction space with each other,
00:26:23 isn’t it better from an evolutionary perspective
00:26:26 to connect it to some degree to reality
00:26:28 so that the transactions are settled
00:26:31 with something that’s universal,
00:26:33 as opposed to us constantly operating
00:26:35 in something that’s a complete illusion?
00:26:38 Isn’t it easy to hyperinflate that?
00:26:41 Like where you really deviate very, very far away
00:26:49 from the underlying reality,
00:26:51 or do you not never get in trouble for this?
00:26:53 Can you just completely drift far, far away
00:26:58 from the underlying reality and never get in trouble?
00:27:01 That’s a great question, on the financial side,
00:27:04 there’s two levels at least
00:27:05 that we could take your question.
00:27:06 One is strictly like evolutionary psychology
00:27:09 of financial systems, and that’s pretty interesting.
00:27:13 And there the decentralized idea,
00:27:15 the DeFi kind of idea in cryptocurrencies
00:27:18 may make good sense
00:27:19 from just an evolutionary psychology point of view.
00:27:22 Having human nature being what it is,
00:27:25 putting a lot of faith in a few central controllers
00:27:30 depends a lot on the veracity of those
00:27:34 and trustworthiness of those few central controllers.
00:27:37 And we have ample evidence time and again
00:27:39 that that’s often betrayed.
00:27:41 So it makes good evolutionary sense, I would say,
00:27:44 to have a decentralized,
00:27:46 I mean, democracy is a step in that direction, right?
00:27:49 We don’t have a monarch now telling us what to do,
00:27:52 we decentralize things, right?
00:27:54 Because if the monarch,
00:27:55 if you have Marcus Aurelius as your emperor, you’re great.
00:27:58 If you have Nero, it’s not so great.
00:28:01 And so we don’t want that.
00:28:02 So democracy is a step in that direction,
00:28:04 but I think the DeFi thing is an even bigger step
00:28:08 and is going to even make the democratization even greater.
00:28:13 So that’s one level of it.
00:28:14 Also, the fact that power corrupts
00:28:16 and absolute power corrupts absolutely
00:28:18 is also a consequence of evolution.
00:28:24 That’s also a feature, I think, right?
00:28:26 You can argue from the long span of living organisms,
00:28:30 it’s nice for power to corrupt for you to,
00:28:33 so mad men and women throughout history
00:28:38 might be useful to teach us a lesson about ourselves.
00:28:43 We can learn from our negative example, right?
00:28:44 Exactly.
00:28:45 Right, right, right.
00:28:48 Power does corrupt and I think that you can think about that
00:28:51 again from an evolutionary point of view.
00:28:53 But I think that your question was a little deeper
00:28:55 when that was, does the evolutionary interface idea
00:29:01 sort of unhinge science from some kind of important test
00:29:07 for the theories, right?
00:29:08 We don’t want, it doesn’t mean that anything goes
00:29:12 in scientific theory, but there’s no,
00:29:14 if we don’t see the truth,
00:29:15 is there no way to tether our theories and test them?
00:29:18 And I think there’s no problem there.
00:29:23 We can only test things in terms of what we can measure
00:29:27 with our senses in space and time.
00:29:29 So we’re going to have to continue to do experiments
00:29:33 and, but we’re going to re,
00:29:35 we’re going to understand a little bit differently
00:29:36 what those experiments are.
00:29:38 We had thought that when we see a pointer
00:29:41 on some machine in an experiment,
00:29:45 that the machine exists, the pointer exists
00:29:48 and the values exist even when no one is looking at them
00:29:51 and that they’re an objective truth.
00:29:52 And our best theories are telling us no,
00:29:55 the pointers are just pointers
00:29:58 and that’s what you have to rely on
00:30:00 for making your judgments.
00:30:02 But even the pointers themselves
00:30:07 are not the objective reality.
00:30:10 So, and I think Gödel is telling us that,
00:30:13 not that anything goes, but as you develop
00:30:17 new axiom systems, you will find out what goes
00:30:19 within that axiom system
00:30:21 and what testable predictions you can make.
00:30:23 So I don’t think we’re untethered.
00:30:25 We continue to do experiments.
00:30:28 What I think we won’t have that we want
00:30:31 is a conceptual understanding
00:30:34 that gives us a theory of everything
00:30:35 that’s final and complete.
00:30:37 I think that this is, to put it another way,
00:30:40 this is job security for scientists.
00:30:44 Our job will never be done.
00:30:45 It’s job security for neuroscience.
00:30:47 Because before we thought that when we looked in the brain,
00:30:50 we saw neurons and neural networks
00:30:52 and action potentials and synapses and so forth.
00:30:57 And that was it, that was the reality.
00:31:00 Now we have to reverse engineer that.
00:31:01 We have to say, what is beyond space time?
00:31:04 What is going on?
00:31:05 What is a dynamical system beyond space time?
00:31:08 That when we project it into Einstein’s space time,
00:31:10 gives us things that look like neurons
00:31:12 and neural networks and synapses.
00:31:15 So we have to reverse engineer it.
00:31:16 So there’s gonna be lots more work for neuroscience.
00:31:19 It’s gonna be far more complicated
00:31:20 and difficult and challenging.
00:31:23 But that’s wonderful, that’s what we need to do.
00:31:26 We thought neurons exist when they are perceived
00:31:28 and they don’t.
00:31:29 In the same way that if I show you,
00:31:31 when I say they don’t exist,
00:31:32 I should be very, very concrete.
00:31:34 If I draw on a piece of paper,
00:31:36 a little sketch of something that is called the Necker cube,
00:31:40 it’s just a little line drawing of a cube, right?
00:31:42 It’s not a flat piece of paper.
00:31:44 If I execute it well, and I show it to you,
00:31:46 you’ll see a 3D cube and you’ll see it flip.
00:31:48 Sometimes you’ll see one face in front,
00:31:49 sometimes you’ll see the other face in front.
00:31:51 But if I ask you, which face is in front
00:31:54 when you don’t look?
00:31:57 The answer is, well, neither face is in front
00:31:59 because there’s no cube.
00:32:01 There’s just a flat piece of paper.
00:32:03 So when you look at the piece of paper,
00:32:05 you perceptually create the cube.
00:32:08 And when you look at it,
00:32:09 then you fix one face to be in front and one face to be.
00:32:13 So that’s what I mean when I say it doesn’t exist.
00:32:16 Space time itself is like the cube.
00:32:18 It’s a data structure that your sensory systems construct,
00:32:21 whatever your sensory systems mean now,
00:32:23 because we now have to not even take that for granted.
00:32:27 But there are perceptions that you construct on the fly
00:32:31 and they’re data structures in a computer science sense,
00:32:34 and you garbage collect them when you don’t need them.
00:32:35 So you create them and garbage collect them.
00:32:37 But is it possible that it’s mapped well
00:32:40 in some concrete, predictable way to objective reality?
00:32:45 The sheet of paper, this two dimensional space,
00:32:48 or we can talk about space time,
00:32:51 maps in some way that we maybe don’t yet understand,
00:32:55 but we’ll one day understand what that mapping is,
00:32:59 but it maps reliably.
00:33:00 It is tethered in that way.
00:33:02 Well, yes.
00:33:03 And so the new theories that the physicists are finding
00:33:06 beyond space time have that kind of tethering.
00:33:08 So they show precisely how you start with an epileptic hedron
00:33:11 and how you project this high dimensional structure
00:33:15 into the four dimensions of space time.
00:33:18 So there’s a precise procedure that relates the two.
00:33:22 And they’re doing the same thing
00:33:23 with the cosmological polytopes.
00:33:25 So they’re the ones that are making the most concrete
00:33:29 and fun advances going beyond space time.
00:33:32 And they’re tethering it, right?
00:33:35 They say this is precisely the mathematical projection
00:33:38 from this deeper structure into space time.
00:33:41 One thing I’ll say about, as a non physicist,
00:33:44 what I find interesting is that they’re finding just geometry,
00:33:48 but there’s no notion of dynamics.
00:33:51 Right now, they’re just finding
00:33:52 these static geometric structures, which is impressive.
00:33:57 So I’m not putting them down.
00:33:58 This is what they’re doing is unbelievably complicated
00:34:01 and brilliant and adventurous, it’s all those things.
00:34:08 And beautiful from a human aesthetic perspective
00:34:11 because geometry is beautiful.
00:34:12 It’s absolutely.
00:34:14 And they’re finding symmetries that are true of the data
00:34:16 that can’t be seen in space time.
00:34:18 But I’m looking for a theory beyond space time
00:34:22 that’s a dynamical theory.
00:34:25 I would love to find, and we can talk about that
00:34:27 at some point, a theory of consciousness
00:34:29 in which the dynamics of consciousness itself
00:34:33 will give rise to the geometry
00:34:35 that the physicists are finding beyond space time.
00:34:37 If we can do that,
00:34:38 then we’d have a completely different way
00:34:40 of looking at how consciousness is related
00:34:42 to what we call the brain or the physical world
00:34:45 more generally, right?
00:34:46 Right now, all of my brilliant colleagues,
00:34:49 well, 99% of them are trying to,
00:34:53 they’re assuming space time is fundamental.
00:34:56 They’re assuming that particles are fundamental,
00:34:59 quarks, gluons, leptons, and so forth.
00:35:02 Elements, atoms, and so forth are fundamental
00:35:04 and that therefore neurons and brains
00:35:06 are part of objective reality.
00:35:08 And that somehow when you get matter
00:35:10 that’s complicated enough,
00:35:12 it will somehow generate conscious experiences
00:35:16 by its functional properties.
00:35:17 Or if you’re panpsychist, maybe you,
00:35:20 in addition to the physical properties of particles,
00:35:22 you add your consciousness property as well.
00:35:27 And then you combine these physical and conscious properties
00:35:30 to get more complicated ones.
00:35:32 But they’re all doing it within space time.
00:35:36 All of the work that’s being done on consciousness
00:35:38 and its relationship to the brain
00:35:41 is all assumed something that our best theories
00:35:45 are telling us is doomed, space time.
00:35:46 Why does that particular assumption bother you the most?
00:35:50 So you bring up space time.
00:35:53 I mean, that’s just one useful interface
00:35:56 we’ve used for a long time.
00:35:59 Surely there’s other interfaces.
00:36:01 Is space time just one of the big ones
00:36:04 that you, to build up people’s intuition
00:36:06 about the fact that they do assume a lot of things strongly?
00:36:10 Or is it in fact the fundamental flaw
00:36:15 in the way we see the world?
00:36:17 Well, everything else that we think we know
00:36:20 are things in space time.
00:36:23 Sure.
00:36:24 And so when you say space time is doomed,
00:36:27 this is a shot to the heart of the whole framework,
00:36:32 the whole conceptual framework that we’ve had in science.
00:36:35 Not to the scientific method,
00:36:37 but to the fundamental ontology
00:36:40 and also the fundamental methodology,
00:36:42 the ontology of space time and its contents,
00:36:45 and the methodology of reductionism,
00:36:47 which is that as we go to smaller scales in space time,
00:36:51 we will find more and more fundamental laws.
00:36:55 And that’s been very useful for space and time for centuries,
00:36:59 reductionism for centuries.
00:37:01 But now we realize that that’s over.
00:37:04 Reductionism is in fact dead, as is space time.
00:37:08 What exactly is reductionism?
00:37:10 What is the process of reductionism
00:37:13 that is different than some of the physicists
00:37:17 that you mentioned that are trying to think,
00:37:19 trying to let go of the assumption of space time?
00:37:22 Looking beyond, isn’t that still trying to come up
00:37:24 with a simple model that explains this whole thing?
00:37:27 Isn’t it still reducing?
00:37:29 It’s a wonderful question,
00:37:30 because it really helps to clarify two different notions,
00:37:33 which is scientific explanation on the one hand,
00:37:36 and a particular kind of scientific explanation on the other,
00:37:39 which is the reductionist.
00:37:40 So the reductionist explanation is saying,
00:37:43 I will start with things that are smaller in space time
00:37:47 and therefore more fundamental,
00:37:49 where the laws are more fundamental.
00:37:51 So we go to just smaller and smaller scales.
00:37:54 Whereas in science more generally,
00:37:58 we just say like when Einstein
00:37:59 did the special theory of relativity,
00:38:01 he’s saying, let me have a couple of postulates.
00:38:03 I will assume that the speed of light is universal
00:38:06 for all observers in uniform motion,
00:38:12 and that the laws of physics,
00:38:13 so if you’re for uniform motion are,
00:38:16 that’s not a reductionist.
00:38:18 Those are saying, grant me these assumptions.
00:38:20 I can build this entire concept of space time out of it.
00:38:23 It’s not a reductionist thing.
00:38:24 You’re not going to smaller and smaller scales of space.
00:38:27 You’re coming up with these deep, deep principles.
00:38:30 Same thing with his theory of gravity, right?
00:38:33 It’s the falling elevator idea, right?
00:38:35 So this is not a reductionist kind of thing.
00:38:37 It’s something different.
00:38:39 So simplification is a bigger thing than just reductionism.
00:38:45 Reductionism has been a particularly useful
00:38:47 kind of scientific explanation,
00:38:49 for example, in thermodynamics, right?
00:38:51 Where the notion that we have of heat,
00:38:53 some macroscopic thing like temperature and heat,
00:38:56 it turns out that Neil Boltzmann and others discovered,
00:38:59 well, hey, if we go to smaller and smaller scales,
00:39:02 we find these things called molecules or atoms.
00:39:04 And if we think of them as bouncing around
00:39:06 and having some kind of energy,
00:39:08 then what we call heat really can be reduced to that.
00:39:14 And so that’s a particularly useful kind of reduction,
00:39:19 is a useful kind of scientific explanation
00:39:21 that works within a range of scales within space time.
00:39:25 But we know now precisely where that has to stop.
00:39:28 At 10 to the minus 33 centimeters
00:39:30 and 10 to the minus 43 seconds.
00:39:32 And I would be impressed
00:39:34 if it was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters.
00:39:37 I’m not terribly impressed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.
00:39:43 I don’t even know how to comprehend
00:39:44 either of those numbers, frankly.
00:39:47 Just a small aside,
00:39:49 because I am a computer science person,
00:39:51 I also find cellular automata beautiful.
00:39:54 And so you have somebody like Stephen Wolfram,
00:39:57 who recently has been very excitedly exploring
00:40:02 a proposal for a data structure
00:40:04 that could be the numbers that would make you
00:40:07 a little bit happier in terms of scale,
00:40:09 because they’re very, very, very, very tiny.
00:40:12 So do you like this space of exploration
00:40:15 of really thinking, letting go of space time,
00:40:18 letting go of everything and trying to think
00:40:20 what kind of data structures
00:40:21 could be underneath this whole mess?
00:40:23 That’s right.
00:40:24 So if they’re thinking about these as outside of space time,
00:40:27 then that’s what we have to do.
00:40:29 That’s what our best theories are telling us.
00:40:30 You now have to think outside of space time.
00:40:32 Now, of course, I should back up and say,
00:40:36 we know that Einstein surpassed Newton, right?
00:40:40 But that doesn’t mean that there’s not good work
00:40:41 to do on Newton.
00:40:42 There’s all sorts of Newtonian physics
00:40:44 that takes us to the moon and so forth,
00:40:46 and there’s lots of good problems
00:40:47 that we want to solve with Newtonian physics.
00:40:49 The same thing will be true of space time.
00:40:52 It’s not like we’re gonna stop using space time.
00:40:53 We’ll continue to do all sorts of good work there.
00:40:56 But for those scientists who are really looking
00:40:59 to go deeper, to actually find the next,
00:41:04 just like what Einstein did to Newton,
00:41:06 what are we gonna do to Einstein?
00:41:07 How do we get beyond Einstein and quantum theory
00:41:09 to something deeper?
00:41:10 Then we have to actually let go.
00:41:13 And if we’re gonna do like this automata kind of approach,
00:41:18 it’s critical that it’s not automata in space time,
00:41:21 it’s automata prior to space time,
00:41:23 from which we’re going to show how space time emerges.
00:41:25 If you’re doing automata within space time,
00:41:28 well, that might be a fun model,
00:41:29 but it’s not the radical new step that we need.
00:41:33 Yeah, so the space time emerges from that whatever system.
00:41:36 Like you’re saying, it’s a dynamical system.
00:41:39 Do we even have an understanding what dynamical means
00:41:42 when we go beyond?
00:41:45 When you start to think about dynamics,
00:41:48 it could mean a lot of things.
00:41:50 Even causality could mean a lot of things
00:41:53 if we realize that everything’s an interface.
00:41:58 Like how much do we really know is an interesting question.
00:42:01 Because you brought up neurons,
00:42:02 I gotta ask you yet another tangent.
00:42:05 There’s a paper I remember a while ago looking at
00:42:07 called Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
00:42:11 And I just enjoyed that thought experiment
00:42:14 that they provided, which is they basically,
00:42:16 it’s a couple of neuroscientists,
00:42:18 Eric Jonas and Conrad Cording,
00:42:22 who use the tools of neuroscience
00:42:24 to analyze a microprocessor, so a computer chip.
00:42:30 Now, if we lesion it here, what happens and so forth,
00:42:32 and if you go and lesion in a computer,
00:42:35 it’s very, very clear that lesion experiments on computers
00:42:38 are not gonna give you a lot of insight into how it works.
00:42:40 And also the measurement devices and the kind of sort of,
00:42:42 just using the basic approaches of neuroscience,
00:42:44 collecting the data, trying to intuit
00:42:47 about the underlying function of it.
00:42:49 And that helps you understand that
00:42:52 our scientific exploration of concepts,
00:42:57 depending on the field,
00:43:00 are maybe in the very, very early stages.
00:43:05 I wouldn’t say it leaves us astray,
00:43:08 perhaps it does sometimes,
00:43:09 but it’s not anywhere close to some fundamental mechanism
00:43:14 that actually makes a thing work.
00:43:16 I don’t know if you can sort of comment on that
00:43:18 in terms of using neuroscience
00:43:20 to understand the human mind and neurons.
00:43:24 Are we really far away potentially
00:43:26 from understanding in the way we understand
00:43:30 the transistors enough to be able to build a computer?
00:43:33 So one thing about understanding
00:43:37 is you can understand for fun.
00:43:40 The other one is to understand so you could build things.
00:43:45 And that’s when you really have to understand.
00:43:49 Exactly.
00:43:49 In fact, what got me into the field at MIT
00:43:53 was work by David Marr on this very topic.
00:43:57 So David Marr was a professor at MIT,
00:43:59 but he’d done his PhD in neuroscience,
00:44:02 studying just the architectures of the brain.
00:44:05 But he realized that his work, it was on the cerebellum.
00:44:10 He realized that his work, as rigorous as it was,
00:44:15 left him unsatisfied
00:44:16 because he didn’t know what the cerebellum was for
00:44:19 and why it had that architecture.
00:44:21 And so he went to MIT and he was in the AI lab there.
00:44:25 And he said, he had this three level approach
00:44:29 that really grabbed my attention.
00:44:30 So when I was an undergrad at UCLA,
00:44:32 I read one of his papers in a class and said,
00:44:34 who is this guy?
00:44:35 Because he said, you have to have a computational theory.
00:44:37 What is being computed and why?
00:44:40 An algorithm, how is it being computed?
00:44:42 What are the precise algorithms?
00:44:44 And then the hardware,
00:44:45 how does it get instantiated in the hardware?
00:44:47 And so to really do neuroscience, he argued,
00:44:50 we needed to have understanding at all those levels.
00:44:52 And that really got me.
00:44:54 I loved the neuroscience, but I realized this guy was saying,
00:44:57 if you can’t build it, you don’t understand it effectively.
00:45:00 And so that’s why I went to MIT.
00:45:02 And I had the pleasure of working with David
00:45:04 until he died just a year and a half later.
00:45:09 So there’s been that idea that with neuroscience,
00:45:12 we have to have, in some sense, a top down model
00:45:15 of what’s being computed and why
00:45:18 that we would then go after.
00:45:20 And the same thing with the, you know,
00:45:21 trying to reverse engineer a computing system
00:45:24 like your laptop.
00:45:25 We really need to understand
00:45:27 what the user interface is about
00:45:29 and what are keys on the keyboard for and so forth.
00:45:34 You need to know why to really understand
00:45:37 all the circuitry and what it’s for.
00:45:40 Now, we don’t, evolution of a natural selection
00:45:46 does not tell us the deeper question that we’re asking,
00:45:51 the answer to the deeper question, which is why?
00:45:53 What’s this deeper reality and what’s it up to and why?
00:45:59 All it tells us is that whatever reality is,
00:46:04 it’s not what you see.
00:46:05 What you see is just an adaptive fiction.
00:46:12 So just to linger on this fascinating, bold question
00:46:15 that shakes you out of your dream state.
00:46:18 Does this fiction still help you in building intuitions
00:46:23 as literary fiction does about reality?
00:46:27 The reason we read literary fiction
00:46:30 is it helps us build intuitions and understanding
00:46:36 in indirect ways sneak up to the difficult questions
00:46:39 of human nature, great fiction.
00:46:41 Same with this observed reality.
00:46:46 Does this interface that we get, this fictional interface,
00:46:49 help us build intuition about deeper truths
00:46:52 of how this whole mess works?
00:46:55 Well, I think that each theory that we propose
00:46:58 will give its own answer to that question, right?
00:47:01 So when the physicists are proposing these structures
00:47:05 like the amplituhedron and cosmological polytope,
00:47:08 associahedron and so forth beyond space time,
00:47:11 we can then ask your question for those specific structures
00:47:14 and say, how much information, for example,
00:47:17 does evolution by natural selection
00:47:19 and the kinds of sensory systems that we have right now
00:47:24 give us about this deeper reality?
00:47:26 And why did we evolve this way?
00:47:30 We can try to answer that question from within the deep.
00:47:33 So there’s not gonna be a general answer.
00:47:34 I think what we’ll have to do is posit
00:47:37 these new deeper theories
00:47:39 and then try to answer your question
00:47:41 within the framework of those deeper theories,
00:47:43 knowing full well that there’ll be an even deeper theory.
00:47:47 So is this paralyzing though?
00:47:49 Because how do we know we’re not completely adrift
00:47:53 out to sea, lost forever from,
00:47:57 so like that our theories are completely lost.
00:48:00 So if it’s all,
00:48:04 if we can never truly deeply introspect to the bottom,
00:48:09 if it’s always just turtles on top of turtles infinitely,
00:48:14 isn’t that paralyzing for the scientific mind?
00:48:18 Well, it’s interesting that you say introspect
00:48:20 to the bottom.
00:48:21 Because there is one,
00:48:26 again, this isn’t the same spirit of what I said before,
00:48:28 which is it depends on what answer you give
00:48:31 to what’s beyond space time,
00:48:32 what answer we would give to your question, right?
00:48:35 So, but one answer that is interesting to explore
00:48:39 is something that spiritual traditions have said
00:48:41 for thousands of years, but haven’t said precisely.
00:48:43 So we can’t take it seriously in science
00:48:45 until it’s made precise,
00:48:46 but we might be able to make it precise.
00:48:49 And that is that they’ve also said something like
00:48:53 space and time aren’t fundamental,
00:48:54 they’re Maya, they’re illusion.
00:48:56 And, but that if you look inside, if you introspect
00:49:03 and let go of all of your particular perceptions,
00:49:07 you will come to something that’s beyond conceptual thought.
00:49:11 And that is, they claim,
00:49:15 being in contact with the deep ground of being
00:49:17 that transcends any particular conceptual understanding.
00:49:21 If that is correct, and I’m not saying it’s correct,
00:49:24 but, and I’m not saying it’s not correct,
00:49:26 I’m just saying, if that’s correct,
00:49:28 then it would be the case that as scientists,
00:49:30 because we also are in touch with this ground of being,
00:49:34 we would then not be able
00:49:36 to conceptually understand ourselves all the way,
00:49:40 but we could know ourselves just by being ourselves.
00:49:43 And so we would, there would be a sense
00:49:46 in which there is a fundamental grounding
00:49:48 to the whole enterprise,
00:49:50 because we’re not separate from the enterprise.
00:49:53 This is the opposite of the impersonal third person science.
00:49:57 This would make science go personal all the way down.
00:50:01 And, but nevertheless, scientific,
00:50:04 because the scientific method would still be
00:50:07 what we would use all the way down
00:50:09 for the conceptual understanding.
00:50:10 Unfortunately, I still don’t know
00:50:11 if you went all the way down.
00:50:12 It’s possible that this kind of whatever consciousness is
00:50:15 and we’ll talk about it,
00:50:17 is getting the cliche statement of be yourself.
00:50:24 It is somehow digging at a deeper truth of reality,
00:50:28 but you still don’t know when you get to the bottom.
00:50:31 A lot of people, they’ll take psychedelic drugs
00:50:34 and they’ll say, well, that takes my mind to certain places
00:50:37 where it feels like that is revealing
00:50:41 some deeper truth of reality,
00:50:43 but you still, it could be interfaces on top of interfaces.
00:50:46 That’s, in your view of this, you really don’t know.
00:50:52 I mean, it’s Gato’s incompleteness
00:50:54 is that you really don’t know.
00:50:55 My own view on it, for what it’s worth,
00:50:59 because I don’t know the right answer,
00:51:00 but my own view on it right now is that it’s never ending.
00:51:05 I think that there will never,
00:51:07 that this is great, as I said before,
00:51:09 great job security for science.
00:51:12 And that we, if this is true,
00:51:14 and if consciousness is somehow important
00:51:17 or fundamental in the universe,
00:51:19 this may be an important fundamental fact
00:51:20 about consciousness itself,
00:51:21 that it’s a never ending exploration
00:51:25 that’s going on in some sense.
00:51:27 Well, that’s interesting.
00:51:30 Push back on the job security.
00:51:31 Okay.
00:51:34 So maybe as we understand this kind of idea
00:51:37 deeper and deeper,
00:51:39 we understand that the pursuit is not a fruitful one.
00:51:42 Then maybe we need to,
00:51:45 maybe that’s why we don’t see aliens everywhere,
00:51:48 is you get smarter and smarter and smarter,
00:51:51 you realize that exploration is,
00:51:55 there’s other fun ways to spend your time than exploring.
00:51:59 You could be sort of living maximally
00:52:03 in some way that’s not exploration.
00:52:05 There’s all kinds of video games you can construct
00:52:10 and put yourself inside of them
00:52:11 that don’t involve you going outside of the game world.
00:52:15 It’s a feeling, from my human perspective,
00:52:18 what seems to be fun is challenging yourself
00:52:21 and overcoming those challenges.
00:52:22 So you can constantly artificially generate challenges
00:52:25 for yourself, like Sisyphus and his boulder,
00:52:28 just, and that’s it.
00:52:30 So the scientific method
00:52:32 that’s always reaching out to the stars,
00:52:34 that’s always trying to figure out
00:52:35 the puzzle on the bottom puzzle,
00:52:37 we’re always trying to get to the bottom turtle.
00:52:40 Maybe if we can build more and more the intuition
00:52:43 that that’s infinite pursuit,
00:52:48 we agree to start deviating from that pursuit
00:52:51 and start enjoying the here and now
00:52:53 versus the looking out into the unknown always.
00:52:56 Maybe that’s looking out into the unknown
00:52:58 as a early activity for a species that’s evolved.
00:53:07 I’m just sort of saying, pushing back,
00:53:09 as you probably got a lot of scientists excited
00:53:12 in terms of job security,
00:53:13 I could envision where it’s not job security,
00:53:17 where scientists become more and more useless.
00:53:22 Maybe they’re like the holders of the ancient wisdom
00:53:25 that allows us to study our own history,
00:53:29 but not much more than that, just to push back.
00:53:34 That’s good pushback.
00:53:36 I’ll put one in there for the scientists again,
00:53:39 but sure, but then I’ll take the other side too.
00:53:41 So when Faraday did all of his experiments
00:53:46 with magnets and electricity and so forth,
00:53:49 he came up with all this wonderful empirical data
00:53:52 and James Clerk Maxwell looked at it
00:53:54 and wrote down a few equations,
00:53:56 which we can now write down in a single equation,
00:53:58 the Maxwell equation if we use geometric algebra,
00:54:00 just one equation.
00:54:03 That opened up unbelievable technologies.
00:54:07 People are zooming and talking to each other
00:54:09 around the world, the whole electronics industry.
00:54:13 There was something that transformed our lives
00:54:17 in a very positive way.
00:54:19 With the theories beyond space time,
00:54:21 here’s one potential, right now,
00:54:25 most of the galaxies that we see, we can see them,
00:54:29 but we know that we could never get to them
00:54:31 no matter how fast we traveled.
00:54:32 They’re going away from us at the speed of light or beyond.
00:54:36 So we can’t ever get to them.
00:54:37 So there’s all this beautiful real estate
00:54:39 that’s just smiling and waving at us
00:54:41 and we can never get to it.
00:54:42 Yeah.
00:54:43 But that’s if we go through space time.
00:54:45 But if we recognize that space time
00:54:47 is just a data structure, it’s not fundamental.
00:54:50 We’re not little things inside space time.
00:54:53 Space time was a little data structure in our perceptions.
00:54:58 It’s just the other way around.
00:54:59 Once we understand that,
00:55:02 and we get equations for the stuff that’s beyond space time,
00:55:07 maybe we won’t have to go through space time.
00:55:08 Maybe we can go around it.
00:55:09 Maybe I can go to Proxima Centauri
00:55:11 and not go through space.
00:55:11 I can just go right there directly.
00:55:14 It’s a data structure.
00:55:15 We can start to play with it.
00:55:17 So I think that for what it’s worth,
00:55:21 my take would be that the endless sequence of theories
00:55:27 that we could contemplate building
00:55:30 will lead to an endless sequence of new remarkable insights
00:55:36 into the potentialities, the possibilities
00:55:39 that would seem miraculous to us.
00:55:41 And that we will be motivated to continue the exploration
00:55:45 partly just for the technological innovations
00:55:49 that come out.
00:55:50 But the other thing that you mentioned though,
00:55:53 what about just being?
00:55:55 What if we decide instead of all this doing and exploring,
00:55:58 what about being?
00:56:00 My guess is that the best scientists will do both
00:56:04 and that the act of being will be a place
00:56:10 where they get many of their ideas
00:56:12 and that they then pull into the conceptual realm.
00:56:16 And I think many of the best scientists,
00:56:18 like Einstein comes to mind, right?
00:56:19 Where these guys say, look,
00:56:21 I didn’t come up with these ideas by a conceptual analysis.
00:56:25 I was thinking in vague images
00:56:28 and it was just something nonconceptual.
00:56:31 And then it took me a long, long time
00:56:33 to pull it out into concepts
00:56:35 and then longer to put it into math.
00:56:38 But the real insights didn’t come from data.
00:56:41 The real insights didn’t come from just slavishly
00:56:44 playing with equations.
00:56:45 They came from a deeper place.
00:56:48 And so there may be this going back and forth
00:56:51 between the complete nonconceptual
00:56:54 where there’s essentially no end to the wisdom
00:56:57 and then conceptual systems
00:56:58 where there’s the girdle limits that we have to that.
00:57:02 And that may be, if consciousness is important
00:57:05 and fundamental, that may be what consciousness,
00:57:07 at least part of what consciousness is about
00:57:09 is this discovering itself, discovering its possibilities,
00:57:13 so to speak, and we can talk about what that might mean,
00:57:17 by going from the nonconceptual to the conceptual
00:57:20 and back and forth.
00:57:23 So you get better and better and better at being.
00:57:26 Right.
00:57:27 Let me ask you just to linger on the evolutionary,
00:57:31 because you mentioned evolutionary game theory
00:57:33 and that’s really where you,
00:57:35 the perspective from which you come
00:57:37 to form the case against reality.
00:57:42 At which point in our evolutionary history
00:57:45 do we start to deviate the most from reality?
00:57:49 Is it way before life even originated on Earth?
00:57:55 Is it in the early development from bacteria and so on?
00:58:02 Or is it when some inklings of what we think of
00:58:05 as intelligence or maybe even complex consciousness
00:58:11 started to emerge?
00:58:12 So where did this deviation,
00:58:15 just like with the interfaces in a computer,
00:58:19 you start with transistors and then you have assembly
00:58:23 and then you have C, C++, then you have Python,
00:58:28 then you have GUIs, all that kind,
00:58:30 you have layers upon layers.
00:58:31 When did we start to deviate?
00:58:33 Well, David Marr, again, my advisor at MIT,
00:58:37 in his book, Vision,
00:58:38 suggested that the more primitive sensory systems
00:58:42 were less realistic, less theoretical,
00:58:45 but that by the time you got to something
00:58:47 as complicated as the humans,
00:58:48 we were actually estimating the true shapes
00:58:51 and distances to objects and so forth.
00:58:53 So his point of view, and I think it was probably,
00:58:57 it’s not an uncommon view among my colleagues
00:59:01 that, yeah, the sensory systems of lower creatures
00:59:06 may just not be complicated enough
00:59:07 to give them much, much truth.
00:59:10 But as you get to 86 million neurons,
00:59:12 you can now compute the truth,
00:59:14 or at least the parts of the truth that we need.
00:59:17 When I look at evolutionary game theory,
00:59:21 one of my graduate students, Justin Mark,
00:59:24 did some simulations using genetic algorithms.
00:59:27 So there he was just exploring,
00:59:30 we start off with random organisms,
00:59:32 random sensory genetics and random actions.
00:59:36 And the first generation was unbelievably,
00:59:38 it was a foraging situation.
00:59:39 They were foraging for resources.
00:59:41 Most of them stayed in one place,
00:59:44 didn’t do anything important.
00:59:47 But we could then just look at how the genes evolved.
00:59:51 And what we found was,
00:59:55 what he found was that basically you never even saw
00:59:59 the truth organisms even come on the stage.
01:00:06 If they came up, they were gone in one generation,
01:00:07 they just weren’t.
01:00:09 So they came and went even just in one generation.
01:00:14 They just are not good enough.
01:00:16 The ones that were just tracking,
01:00:18 their senses just were tracking the fitness payoffs
01:00:20 were far more fit than the truth seekers.
01:00:25 So an answer at one level,
01:00:29 I want to give an answer at a deeper level,
01:00:30 but just with evolutionary game theory,
01:00:32 because my attitude as a scientist is,
01:00:36 I don’t believe any of our theories.
01:00:38 I take them very, very seriously.
01:00:40 I study them, I look at their implications,
01:00:42 but none of them are the gospel.
01:00:43 They’re just the latest ideas that we have.
01:00:46 And so the reason I study evolutionary game theory
01:00:49 is because that’s the best tool we have right now
01:00:52 in this area.
01:00:53 There is nothing else that competes.
01:00:56 And so as a scientist, it’s my responsibility
01:00:58 to take the best tools and see what they mean.
01:01:01 And the same thing the physicists are doing.
01:01:02 They’re taking the best tools
01:01:03 and looking at what they entail.
01:01:06 But I think that science now has enough experience
01:01:10 to realize that we should not believe our theories
01:01:14 in the sense that we’ve now arrived.
01:01:17 In 1890, a lot of physicists thought we’d arrived.
01:01:21 They were discouraging bright young students
01:01:25 from going into physics, because it was all done.
01:01:27 And that’s precisely the wrong attitude forever.
01:01:31 It’s the wrong attitude forever.
01:01:33 The attitude we should have is a century from now,
01:01:37 they’ll be looking at us and laughing
01:01:39 at what we didn’t know.
01:01:40 And we just have to assume that that’s going to be the case.
01:01:43 Just know that everything that we think
01:01:45 is so brilliant right now, our final theory.
01:01:48 A century from now, they’ll look at us
01:01:50 like we look at the physicists of 1890 and go,
01:01:52 how could they have been so dumb?
01:01:54 So I don’t want to make that mistake.
01:01:56 So I’m not doctrinaire about any
01:02:00 of our current scientific theories.
01:02:02 I am doctrinaire about this.
01:02:05 We should use the best tools we have right now.
01:02:08 That’s what we’ve got.
01:02:09 And with humility.
01:02:10 Well, so let me ask you about game theory.
01:02:13 I love game theory, evolutionary game theory.
01:02:18 But I’m always suspicious of it, like economics.
01:02:23 When you construct models,
01:02:25 it’s too easy to construct things that oversimplify
01:02:31 just because we, our human brains,
01:02:34 enjoy the simplification of constructing a few variables
01:02:39 that somehow represent organisms or represent people
01:02:43 and running a simulation that then allows you
01:02:45 to build up intuition and then it feels really good
01:02:48 because you can get some really deep
01:02:50 and surprising intuitions.
01:02:51 But how do you know your models aren’t,
01:02:55 the assumptions underlying your models
01:02:57 aren’t some fundamentally flawed?
01:02:58 And because of that,
01:03:00 your conclusions are fundamentally flawed.
01:03:03 So I guess my question is what are the limits
01:03:06 in your use of game theory, evolution game theory,
01:03:08 your experience with it?
01:03:10 What are the limits of game theory?
01:03:12 So I’ve gotten some pushback from professional colleagues
01:03:15 and friends who have tried to rerun simulations
01:03:19 and try to, the idea that we don’t see the truth
01:03:21 is not comfortable and so many of my colleagues
01:03:24 are very interested in trying to show that we’re wrong.
01:03:26 And so the idea would be to say that somehow
01:03:28 we did something, as you’re suggesting,
01:03:30 maybe something special that wasn’t completely general.
01:03:33 We got some little special part of the whole search space
01:03:36 in evolutionary game theory in which this happens to be true
01:03:39 but more generally organisms would evolve
01:03:42 to see the truth.
01:03:42 So the best pushback we’ve gotten is from a team at Yale.
01:03:48 And they suggested that if you use
01:03:52 thousands of payoff functions,
01:03:53 so we in our simulations, we just use a couple,
01:03:57 one or two, because it was our first simulations, right?
01:04:00 So that would be a limit.
01:04:01 We had one or two payoff functions,
01:04:02 we showed the result of those,
01:04:05 at least for the genetic algorithms.
01:04:07 And they said, if you have 20,000 of them,
01:04:10 then we can find these conditions in which
01:04:14 truth seeing organisms would be the ones
01:04:17 that evolved and survived.
01:04:19 And so we looked at their simulations
01:04:21 and it certainly is the case that you can find
01:04:25 special cases in which truth can evolve.
01:04:27 So when I say it’s probability zero,
01:04:29 it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
01:04:30 It can happen, in fact, it could happen infinitely often.
01:04:32 It’s just probability zero.
01:04:34 So probability zero things can happen infinitely often.
01:04:38 When you say probability is zero, you mean probability
01:04:40 close to zero.
01:04:42 To be very, very precise.
01:04:43 So for example, if I have a unit square on the plane
01:04:48 and I use a measure on a probability measure
01:04:53 in which the area of a region is this probability.
01:04:58 Then if I draw a curve in that unit square,
01:05:02 it has measure precisely zero,
01:05:05 precisely not approximately, precisely zero.
01:05:07 And yet it has infinitely many points.
01:05:10 So there’s an object that for that probability measure
01:05:12 has probability zero, and yet there’s
01:05:14 infinitely many points in it.
01:05:16 So that’s what I mean when I say that things
01:05:19 that are probability zero can happen
01:05:20 infinitely often in principle.
01:05:21 Yeah, but infinity, as far as, and I look outside often,
01:05:26 I walk around and I look at people.
01:05:29 I have never seen infinity in real life.
01:05:32 That’s an interesting issue.
01:05:35 I’ve been looking, I’ve been looking.
01:05:37 I don’t notice it, infinitely small or the infinitely big.
01:05:41 And so the tools of mathematics,
01:05:43 you could sort of apply the same kind of criticism
01:05:45 that it is a very convenient interface into our reality.
01:05:49 That’s a big debate in mathematics,
01:05:50 the intuitionists versus the ones who take,
01:05:52 for example, the real numbers as real.
01:05:55 And that’s a fun discussion.
01:05:57 Nicholas Giesen, a physicist,
01:05:59 has really interesting work recently
01:06:00 on how if you go with intuitionist mathematics,
01:06:04 you could effectively quantize Newton,
01:06:10 and you find that the Newtonian theory
01:06:12 and quantum theory aren’t that different
01:06:14 once you go with it.
01:06:16 It’s funny.
01:06:17 It’s really quite interesting.
01:06:18 So the issue he raises is a very, very deep one,
01:06:21 and one that I think we should take quite seriously,
01:06:23 which is how should we think about the reality
01:06:27 of the contours hierarchy?
01:06:30 Aleph one, aleph two, and all these different infinities
01:06:35 versus just a more algorithmic approach, right?
01:06:41 So where everything’s computable,
01:06:44 in some sense, everything’s finite,
01:06:46 as big as you want, but nevertheless finite.
01:06:50 So yeah, that ultimately boils down to
01:06:52 whether the world is discrete or continuous
01:06:56 in some general sense.
01:06:59 And again, we can’t really know,
01:07:01 but there’s just a mind breaking thought,
01:07:05 just common sense reasoning,
01:07:07 that something can happen,
01:07:09 and as yet, probability of it happening is 0%.
01:07:13 That doesn’t compute for common sense computer.
01:07:18 Right.
01:07:18 This is where you have to be a sharp mathematician
01:07:21 to really, and I’m not.
01:07:23 Sharp is one word.
01:07:24 What I’m saying is common sense computer is,
01:07:27 I mean that in a very kind of,
01:07:33 in a positive sense,
01:07:35 because we’ve been talking about perception systems
01:07:37 and interfaces, if we are to reason about the world,
01:07:42 we have to use the best interfaces we got.
01:07:45 And I’m not exactly sure that game theory
01:07:50 is the best interface we got for this.
01:07:52 Oh, right.
01:07:53 In application of mathematics, tricks and tools
01:07:57 in mathematics, the game theory is the best we got
01:08:00 when we are thinking about the nature of reality
01:08:03 and fitness functions and evolution, period.
01:08:07 Right.
01:08:07 Well, that’s a fair rejoinder,
01:08:10 and I think that that was the tool that we used.
01:08:14 And if someone says, here’s a better mathematical tool
01:08:17 and here’s why, this mathematical tool
01:08:20 better captures the essence of Darwin’s idea,
01:08:23 John Maynard Smith didn’t quite get it
01:08:24 with evolutionary game theory.
01:08:26 There’s this thing.
01:08:27 Now there are tools like evolutionary graph theory,
01:08:30 which generalize evolutionary game theory,
01:08:32 and then there’s quantum game theory.
01:08:35 So you can use quantum tools like entanglement,
01:08:41 for example, as a resource in games
01:08:44 that change the very nature of the solutions,
01:08:48 the optimal solutions of the game theory.
01:08:50 Well, the work from Yale is really interesting.
01:08:54 It’s a really interesting challenge of these ideas
01:08:58 where, okay, if you have a very large number
01:09:00 of fitness functions, or let’s say you have
01:09:04 a nearly infinite number of fitness functions
01:09:07 or a growing number of fitness functions,
01:09:09 what kind of interesting things start to emerging
01:09:13 if you are to be an organism?
01:09:15 If to be an organism that adapts means
01:09:18 having to deal with an ensemble of fitness functions.
01:09:23 Right, and so we’ve actually redone some of our own work
01:09:28 based on theirs, and this is the back and forth
01:09:30 that we expect in science, right?
01:09:32 And what we found was that in their simulations,
01:09:36 they were assuming that you couldn’t carve the world
01:09:39 up into objects, and so we said,
01:09:42 well, let’s relax that assumption.
01:09:43 Allow organisms to create data structures
01:09:45 that we might call objects,
01:09:47 and an object would be you take,
01:09:49 you would do hierarchical clustering
01:09:51 of your fitness payoff functions,
01:09:53 the ones that have similar shapes.
01:09:54 If you have 20,000 of them, maybe these 50
01:09:58 are all very, very similar,
01:09:59 so I can take all the perception, action, fitness stuff
01:10:03 and make that into a data structure,
01:10:05 and we’ll call that a unit or an object.
01:10:08 And as soon as we did that,
01:10:09 then all of their results went away.
01:10:11 It turned out they were the special case
01:10:13 and that the organisms that were allowed
01:10:16 to only see, that were shaped to see only fitness payoffs
01:10:21 were the ones that were.
01:10:22 So the idea is that objects then,
01:10:25 what are objects from an evolutionary point of view?
01:10:27 This bottle, we thought that when I saw a bottle,
01:10:30 it was because I was seeing a true object
01:10:31 that existed whether or not it was perceived.
01:10:34 Evolutionary theories suggest a different interpretation.
01:10:37 I’m seeing a data structure that is encoding
01:10:42 a convenient way of looking at various fitness payoffs.
01:10:45 I can use this for drinking.
01:10:48 I could use it as a weapon, not a very good one.
01:10:50 I could be somewhere with head with it.
01:10:52 If my goal is mating, this is pointless.
01:10:56 So I’m seeing for, what I’m coding here
01:10:59 is all sorts of actions and the payoffs that I could get.
01:11:04 When I pick up an apple,
01:11:05 now I’m getting a different set of actions and payoffs.
01:11:08 When I pick up a rock, I’m getting, so for every object,
01:11:11 what I’m getting is a different set of payoff functions
01:11:16 and with various actions.
01:11:18 And so once you allow that,
01:11:20 then what you find is once again that truth goes extinct
01:11:25 and the organisms that just get an interface
01:11:28 are the ones that win.
01:11:29 But the question, just sneaking up on, this is fascinating.
01:11:34 From where do fitness functions originate?
01:11:38 What gives birth to the fitness functions?
01:11:40 So if there’s a giant black box
01:11:43 that just keeps giving you fitness functions,
01:11:45 what are we trying to optimize?
01:11:46 You said that water has different uses than an apple.
01:11:55 So there’s these objects.
01:11:57 What are we trying to optimize?
01:11:58 And why is not reality a really good generator
01:12:02 of fitness functions?
01:12:05 So each theory makes its own assumptions and says,
01:12:07 grant me this, then I’ll explain that.
01:12:09 So evolutionary game theory says,
01:12:11 grant me fitness payoffs, right?
01:12:13 And grant me strategies with payoffs.
01:12:16 And I can write down the matrix
01:12:18 for this strategy interacts with that strategy.
01:12:20 These are the payoffs that come up.
01:12:21 If you grant me that,
01:12:22 then I can start to explain a lot of things.
01:12:24 Now you can ask for a deeper question like,
01:12:26 okay, how does physics evolve biology
01:12:32 and where do these fitness payoffs come from, right?
01:12:36 Now that’s a completely different enterprise.
01:12:41 And of course, evolutionary game theory then
01:12:43 would be not the right tool for that.
01:12:45 It would have to be a deeper tool
01:12:46 that shows where evolutionary game theory comes from.
01:12:50 My own take is that there’s gonna be a problem
01:12:55 in doing that because space time isn’t fundamental.
01:13:01 It’s just a user interface.
01:13:03 And that the distinction that we make
01:13:06 between living and nonliving
01:13:08 is not a fundamental distinction.
01:13:10 It’s an artifact of the limits of our interface, right?
01:13:15 So this is a new wrinkle and this is an important wrinkle.
01:13:19 It’s so nice to take space and time as fundamental
01:13:22 because if something looks like it’s inanimate,
01:13:24 it’s inanimate and we can just say it’s not living.
01:13:27 Now it’s much more complicated.
01:13:30 Certain things are obviously living.
01:13:32 I’m talking with you, I’m obviously interacting
01:13:35 with something that’s alive and conscious.
01:13:38 I think we’ve let go of the word obviously
01:13:40 in this conversation.
01:13:42 I think nothing is obvious.
01:13:43 Nothing’s obvious, that’s right.
01:13:45 But when we get down to like an ant,
01:13:48 it’s obviously living, but I’ll say it appears to be living.
01:13:52 But when we get down to a virus, now people wonder
01:13:55 and when we get down to protons,
01:13:57 people say it’s not living.
01:13:58 And my attitude is look, I have a user interface.
01:14:02 Interface is there to hide certain aspects of reality
01:14:05 and others to, it’s an uneven representation,
01:14:11 put it that way.
01:14:11 Certain things just get completely hidden.
01:14:14 Dark matter and dark energy are most of the energy
01:14:18 and matter that’s out there.
01:14:19 Our interface just plain flat out hides them.
01:14:23 The only way we get some hint is because
01:14:25 gravitational things are going wrong within our,
01:14:28 so most things are outside of our interface.
01:14:31 The distinction between living and nonliving
01:14:35 is not fundamental.
01:14:35 It’s an artifact of our interface.
01:14:37 So if we really, really want to understand
01:14:41 where evolution comes from,
01:14:44 to answer the question, the deep question you asked,
01:14:46 I think the right way we’re gonna have to do that
01:14:48 is to come up with a deeper theory than space time
01:14:52 in which there may not be the notion of time
01:14:54 and show that whatever this dynamics of that deeper theory
01:15:00 is, by the way, I’ll talk about how you could have dynamics
01:15:03 without time, but the dynamics of this deeper theory,
01:15:07 when we project it into, in certain ways,
01:15:11 then we do get space time and we get what appears
01:15:13 to be evolution by natural selection.
01:15:15 So I would love to see evolution by natural selection,
01:15:17 nature, red and tooth and claw, people fighting,
01:15:20 animals fighting for resources and the whole bit,
01:15:22 come out of a deeper theory in which perhaps
01:15:24 it’s all cooperation, there’s no limited resources
01:15:27 and so forth, but as a result of projection,
01:15:30 you get space and time, and as a result of projection,
01:15:33 you get nature, red and tooth and claw,
01:15:35 the appearance of it, but it’s all an artifact
01:15:38 of the interface.
01:15:39 I like this idea that the line between living
01:15:43 and nonliving is very important
01:15:46 because that’s the thing that would emerge
01:15:48 before you have evolution, the idea of death.
01:15:55 So that seems to be an important component
01:15:58 of natural selection, and if that emerged,
01:16:01 because that’s also asking the question,
01:16:05 I guess, that I ask, where do fitness functions come from?
01:16:09 That’s like asking the old meaning of life question, right?
01:16:12 It’s the why, why, why?
01:16:17 And one of the big underlying whys,
01:16:20 okay, you can start with evolution on Earth,
01:16:22 but without living, without life and death,
01:16:26 without the line between the living and the dead,
01:16:28 you don’t have evolution.
01:16:30 So what if underneath it, there’s no such thing
01:16:32 as the living and the dead?
01:16:35 There’s no, like this concept of an organism, period.
01:16:39 There’s a living organism that’s defined
01:16:42 by a volume in space time that somehow interacts,
01:16:48 that over time maintains its integrity somehow.
01:16:52 It has some kind of history, it has a wall of some kind.
01:16:56 The outside world, the environment,
01:16:58 and then inside, there’s an organism.
01:17:00 So you’re defining an organism,
01:17:02 and also you define that organism
01:17:04 by the fact that it can move, and it can become alive,
01:17:10 which you kind of think of as moving,
01:17:12 combined with the fact that it’s keeping itself
01:17:14 separate from the environment,
01:17:15 so you can point out that thing is living,
01:17:17 and then it can also die.
01:17:21 That seems to be all very powerful components of space time
01:17:26 that enable you to have something
01:17:28 like natural selection and evolution.
01:17:31 Well, and there’s a lot of interesting work,
01:17:33 some of it by collaborators of Carl Friston and others,
01:17:36 where they have Bayes net kind of stuff
01:17:40 that they build on the notion of a Markov blanket.
01:17:43 So you have some states within this network
01:17:47 that are inside the blanket, then you have the blanket,
01:17:49 and then the states outside the blanket.
01:17:50 And the states inside this Markov blanket
01:17:52 are conditionally independent of the states
01:17:54 outside the blanket conditioned on the blanket.
01:17:57 And what they’re looking at is that the dynamics inside
01:18:02 of the states inside the Markov blanket
01:18:04 seem to be trying to estimate properties of the outside
01:18:07 and react to them in a way.
01:18:08 So it seems like you’re doing probabilistic inferences
01:18:11 in ways that might be able to keep you alive.
01:18:14 So there’s interesting work going on in that direction.
01:18:17 But what I’m saying is something slightly different,
01:18:21 and that is, like, when I look at you,
01:18:24 all I see is skin, hair, and eyes, right?
01:18:26 That’s all I see.
01:18:27 But I know that there’s a deeper reality.
01:18:31 I believe that there’s a much deeper reality.
01:18:32 There’s the whole world of your experiences,
01:18:34 your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams.
01:18:35 In some sense, the face that I see
01:18:39 is just a symbol that I create, right?
01:18:42 And as soon as I look away, I delete that symbol.
01:18:44 But I don’t delete you.
01:18:46 I don’t delete the conscious experience,
01:18:48 the whole world of your…
01:18:50 So I’m only deleting an interface symbol.
01:18:53 But that interface symbol is a portal, so to speak.
01:19:00 Not a perfect portal, but a genuine portal
01:19:04 into your beliefs, into your conscious experiences.
01:19:07 That’s why we can have a conversation.
01:19:09 Your consciousness is genuinely affecting mine,
01:19:12 and mine is genuinely affecting yours,
01:19:13 through these icons, which I create on the fly.
01:19:17 I mean, I create your face.
01:19:18 When I look, I delete it.
01:19:20 I don’t create you, your consciousness.
01:19:22 That’s there all the time, but I do…
01:19:24 So now, when I look at a cat,
01:19:27 I’m creating something that I still call living,
01:19:29 and I still think is conscious.
01:19:31 When I look at an ant, I create something
01:19:34 that I still would call living, but maybe not conscious.
01:19:38 When I look at something I call a virus,
01:19:40 now I’m not even sure I would call it living.
01:19:42 And when I look at a proton, I would say,
01:19:45 I don’t even think it’s not alive at all.
01:19:48 It could be that I’m nevertheless interacting
01:19:53 with something that’s just as conscious as you.
01:19:55 I’m not saying the proton is conscious.
01:19:57 The face that I’m creating when I look at you,
01:19:59 that face is not conscious.
01:20:00 That face is a data structure in me.
01:20:03 That face is an experience.
01:20:06 It’s not an experiencer.
01:20:08 Similarly, a proton is something that I create
01:20:12 when I look or do a collision
01:20:15 in the Large Hadron Collider or something like that.
01:20:18 But what is behind the entity in space time?
01:20:21 So I’ve got this space time interface,
01:20:23 and I’ve just got this entity that I call a proton.
01:20:25 What is the reality behind it?
01:20:27 Well, the physicists are finding these big, big structures.
01:20:30 The amplitude hadron, the sociahedron,
01:20:33 cause what’s behind those?
01:20:36 Could be consciousness, what I’m playing with.
01:20:38 In which case, when I’m interacting with a proton,
01:20:42 I could be interacting with consciousness.
01:20:43 Again, to be very, very clear,
01:20:45 because it’s easy to misunderstand,
01:20:46 I’m not saying a proton is conscious.
01:20:49 Just like I’m not saying your face is conscious.
01:20:51 Your face is a symbol I create and then delete as I look.
01:20:56 So your face is not conscious,
01:20:57 but I know that that face in my interface,
01:21:00 the Lex Friedman face that I create,
01:21:01 is an interface symbol that’s a genuine portal
01:21:04 into your consciousness.
01:21:06 The portal is less clear for a cat,
01:21:09 even less clear for an ant.
01:21:11 And by the time we get down to a proton,
01:21:13 the portal is not clear at all.
01:21:15 But that doesn’t mean I’m not interacting
01:21:17 with consciousness, it just means my interface gave up.
01:21:20 And there’s some deeper reality that we have to go after.
01:21:23 So your question really forces out a big part
01:21:26 of this whole approach that I’m talking about.
01:21:29 So it’s this portal and consciousness.
01:21:30 I wonder why you can’t,
01:21:33 your portal is not as good to a cat,
01:21:36 to a cat’s consciousness than it is to a human.
01:21:40 Does it have to do with the fact that you’re human
01:21:45 and just similar organisms, organisms of similar complexity
01:21:49 are able to create portals better to each other?
01:21:53 Or is it just as you get more and more complex,
01:21:55 you get better and better portals?
01:21:57 Well, let me answer one aspect of it
01:22:00 that I’m more confident about,
01:22:01 then I’ll speculate on that.
01:22:03 Why is it that the portal is so bad with protons?
01:22:07 Well, and elementary particles more generally.
01:22:09 So quarks, leptons and gluons and so forth.
01:22:12 Well, the reason for that is because those are just
01:22:16 symmetries of space time.
01:22:19 More technically, they’re irreducible representations
01:22:21 of the Poincare group of space time.
01:22:22 So they’re just literally representations
01:22:26 of the data structure of space time that we’re using.
01:22:30 So that’s why they’re not very much insightful.
01:22:33 They’re just almost entirely tied
01:22:35 to the data structure itself.
01:22:37 There’s not much,
01:22:38 they’re telling you only something about the data structure,
01:22:40 not behind the data structure.
01:22:42 It’s only when we get to higher levels
01:22:44 that we’re starting to, in some sense,
01:22:46 build portals to what’s behind space time.
01:22:49 Sure.
01:22:50 Yeah, so there’s more and more complexity built
01:22:55 on top of the interface of space time with the cat.
01:22:59 So you can actually build a portal, right?
01:23:01 Yeah.
01:23:02 Yeah, right.
01:23:06 Yeah, this interface of face and hair and so on, skin.
01:23:14 There’s some syncing going on between humans though,
01:23:18 where we synced, like you’re getting
01:23:21 a pretty good representation of the ideas in my head
01:23:24 and starting to get a foggy view of my memories in my head.
01:23:30 Even though this is the first time we’re talking,
01:23:34 you start to project your own memories.
01:23:36 You start to solve like a giant hierarchy of puzzles
01:23:40 about a human, because we’re all,
01:23:43 there’s a lot of similarities, a lot of it rhymes.
01:23:46 So you start to make a lot of inferences
01:23:48 and you build up this model of a person.
01:23:50 You have a pretty sophisticated model
01:23:52 what’s going on underneath.
01:23:55 Again, I just, I wonder if it’s possible
01:23:59 to construct these models about each other
01:24:00 and nevertheless be very distant from an underlying reality.
01:24:06 There’s a lot of work on this.
01:24:08 So there’s some interesting work called signaling games
01:24:10 where they look at how people can coordinate
01:24:13 and come to communicate.
01:24:17 There’s some interesting work that was done
01:24:19 by some colleagues and friends of mine,
01:24:21 Louis Narens, Natalia Komarova, and Kimberly Jamieson,
01:24:26 where they were looking at evolving color words.
01:24:32 So you have a circle of colors, the color circle,
01:24:36 and they wanted to see if they could get people to cooperate
01:24:39 and how they carved the color circle up into a circle.
01:24:43 Two units of words.
01:24:45 And so they had a game theoretic kind of thing
01:24:49 that they’d had people do.
01:24:50 And what they found was that when they included,
01:24:52 so most people are trichromats,
01:24:54 you have three kinds of cone photoreceptors,
01:24:57 but there are some, a lot of men,
01:24:59 7% of men are dichromats.
01:25:01 They might be missing the red cone photoreceptor.
01:25:04 They found that the dichromats had an outsized influence
01:25:09 on the final ways that the whole space of colors
01:25:12 was carved up and labels attached.
01:25:14 You needed to be able to include the dichromats
01:25:17 in the conversation.
01:25:18 And so they had a bigger influence
01:25:20 on how you made the boundaries of the language.
01:25:23 And I thought that was a really interesting kind of insight
01:25:25 that there’s going to be, again, a game,
01:25:27 perhaps a game where evolutionary or genetic algorithm
01:25:31 kind of thing that goes on in terms of learning
01:25:34 to communicate in ways that are useful.
01:25:37 And so, yeah, you can use game theory to actually explore
01:25:41 that are signaling games.
01:25:42 There’s a lot of brilliant work on that.
01:25:44 I’m not doing it, but there’s work out there.
01:25:47 So if it’s okay, let us tackle once more
01:25:50 and perhaps several more times
01:25:52 after the big topic of consciousness.
01:25:55 Okay, this very beautiful, powerful things
01:25:59 that perhaps is the thing that makes us human, what is it?
01:26:03 What’s the role of consciousness in,
01:26:06 let’s say even just the thing we’ve been talking about,
01:26:08 which is the formation of this interface, any kind of ways
01:26:13 you want to kind of start talking about it.
01:26:18 Well, let me say first what most of my colleagues say.
01:26:22 99% are, again, assuming that space time is fundamental,
01:26:27 particles and space time, matter is fundamental,
01:26:30 and most are reductionist.
01:26:33 And so the standard approach to consciousness
01:26:37 is to figure out what complicated systems of matter
01:26:43 with the right functional properties
01:26:45 could possibly lead to the emergence of consciousness.
01:26:48 That’s the general idea, right?
01:26:51 So maybe you have to have neurons,
01:26:53 maybe only if you have neurons, but that might not be enough.
01:26:58 They have to certain kinds of complexity
01:27:00 in their organization and their dynamics,
01:27:02 certain kind of network abilities, for example.
01:27:05 So there are those who say, for example,
01:27:10 that consciousness arises from orchestrated collapse
01:27:14 of quantum states of microtubules and neurons, certainly.
01:27:18 So this is Hamroff and Penrose, that’s kind of.
01:27:22 So you start with something physical,
01:27:25 a property of quantum states of neurons,
01:27:30 of microtubules and neurons,
01:27:32 and you say that somehow an orchestrated collapse
01:27:34 of those is consciousness or conscious experiences.
01:27:38 Or integrated information theory.
01:27:40 Again, you start with something physical,
01:27:42 and if it has the right kind of functional properties,
01:27:44 it’s something they call phi,
01:27:46 with the right kind of integrated information,
01:27:48 then you have consciousness.
01:27:50 Or you can be a panpsychist, Philip Goff, for example,
01:27:54 where you might say, well,
01:27:57 in addition to the particles and space and time,
01:28:01 those particles are not just matter,
01:28:03 they also could have, say, a unit of consciousness.
01:28:06 And so, but once again, you’re taking space and time
01:28:09 and particles as fundamental,
01:28:11 and you’re adding a new property to them,
01:28:14 say, consciousness, and then you have to talk about how
01:28:16 when a proton and an electron get together
01:28:21 to form hydrogen, then how those consciousnesses
01:28:24 merge to or interact to create the consciousness
01:28:27 of hydrogen and so forth.
01:28:30 There’s attention schema theory,
01:28:31 which again, this is how neural network processes
01:28:35 representing to the network itself,
01:28:38 its attentional processes, that could be consciousness.
01:28:42 There’s global workspace theory,
01:28:45 and neuronal global workspace theory.
01:28:48 So there’s many, many theories of this type.
01:28:50 What’s common to all of them is they assume
01:28:53 that space time is fundamental.
01:28:56 They assume that physical processes
01:28:57 and space time is fundamental.
01:28:59 Panpsychism adds consciousness as an additional thing,
01:29:02 it’s almost dualist in that regard.
01:29:05 And my attitude is our best science is telling us
01:29:11 that space time is not fundamental.
01:29:13 So why is that important here?
01:29:17 Well, for centuries, deep thinkers thought of earth, air,
01:29:23 fire, and water as the fundamental elements.
01:29:26 It was a reductionist kind of idea.
01:29:28 Nothing was more elemental than those,
01:29:30 and you could sort of build everything up from those.
01:29:33 When we got the periodic table of elements,
01:29:37 we realized that, of course,
01:29:40 we want to study earth, air, fire, and water.
01:29:42 There’s combustion science for fire.
01:29:44 There’s sciences for all these other things,
01:29:49 water and so forth.
01:29:50 So we’re gonna do science with these things,
01:29:51 but fundamental, no, no.
01:29:54 If you’re looking for something fundamental,
01:29:56 those are the wrong building blocks.
01:29:58 Earth has many, many different kinds of elements
01:30:02 that project into the one thing that we call earth.
01:30:04 If you don’t understand that there’s silicon,
01:30:06 that there’s iron,
01:30:07 that there’s all these different kinds of things
01:30:09 that project into what we call earth,
01:30:11 you’re hopelessly lost.
01:30:14 You’re not fundamental, you’re not gonna get there.
01:30:17 And then after the periodic table,
01:30:19 then we came up with quarks, leptons, and gluons,
01:30:22 the particles of the standard model of physics.
01:30:26 And so we actually now know
01:30:29 that if you really want to get fundamental,
01:30:33 the periodic table isn’t it.
01:30:34 It’s good for chemistry,
01:30:35 and it’s just wonderful for chemistry,
01:30:37 but if you’re trying to go deep fundamental,
01:30:39 what is the fundamental science?
01:30:41 That’s not it.
01:30:42 You’re gonna have to go to quarks, leptons,
01:30:44 and gluons and so forth.
01:30:46 Well, now we’ve discovered space time itself is doomed.
01:30:51 Quarks, leptons, and gluons
01:30:53 are just irreducible representations
01:30:54 of the symmetries of space time.
01:30:57 So the whole framework
01:31:00 on which consciousness research is being based right now
01:31:03 is doomed.
01:31:05 And for me, these are my friends and colleagues
01:31:09 that are doing this, they’re brilliant.
01:31:11 They’re absolutely, they’re brilliant.
01:31:13 I, my feeling is I’m so sad
01:31:19 that they’re stuck with this old framework
01:31:21 because if they weren’t stuck with earth, air, fire,
01:31:25 and water, you could actually make progress.
01:31:27 So it doesn’t matter how smart you are.
01:31:28 If you start with earth, air, fire, and water,
01:31:30 you’re not gonna get anywhere, right?
01:31:32 Can I actually just,
01:31:33 because the word doomed is so interesting,
01:31:36 let me give you some options, multiple choice quiz.
01:31:40 Is space time, we could say is reality
01:31:43 the way we perceive it doomed,
01:31:46 wrong or fake?
01:31:54 Because doomed just means it could still be right
01:31:59 and we’re now ready to go deeper.
01:32:02 It would be that.
01:32:03 So it’s not wrong, it’s not a complete deviation
01:32:08 from a journey toward the truth.
01:32:10 Right, it’s like earth, air, fire, and water is not wrong.
01:32:13 There is earth, air, fire, and water.
01:32:15 That’s a useful framework, but it’s not fundamental.
01:32:19 Right, well, there’s also wrong,
01:32:20 which is they used to believe, as I recently learned,
01:32:24 that George Washington was the president,
01:32:27 the first president of the United States,
01:32:28 was bled to death for something
01:32:31 that could have been easily treated
01:32:34 because it was believed that you can get,
01:32:36 actually, I need to look into this further,
01:32:38 but I guess you get toxins out or demons out.
01:32:40 I don’t know what you’re getting out
01:32:41 with the bleeding of a person.
01:32:43 So that ended up being wrong,
01:32:47 but widely believed as a medical tool.
01:32:50 So it’s also possible that our assumption of space time
01:32:55 is not just doomed, but is wrong.
01:32:58 Well, if we believe that it’s fundamental, that’s wrong.
01:33:02 But if we believe it’s a useful tool, that’s right.
01:33:05 But bleeding somebody to death
01:33:08 was believed to be a useful tool.
01:33:10 And that was wrong.
01:33:11 It wasn’t just not fundamental.
01:33:13 It was very, I’m sure there’s cases
01:33:17 in which bleeding somebody would work,
01:33:19 but it would be a very tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of cases.
01:33:23 So it could be that it’s wrong,
01:33:25 like it’s a side road that’s ultimately leading
01:33:29 to a dead end as opposed to a truck stop or something
01:33:32 that you can get off of.
01:33:34 My feeling is not the dead end kind of thing.
01:33:37 I think that what the physicists are finding
01:33:39 is that there are these structures beyond space time,
01:33:41 but they project back into space time.
01:33:44 And so space time, when they say space time is doomed,
01:33:48 they’re explicit.
01:33:49 They’re saying it’s doomed in the sense
01:33:50 that we thought it was fundamental.
01:33:51 It’s not fundamental.
01:33:53 It’s a useful, absolutely useful and brilliant data structure,
01:33:57 but there are deeper data structures
01:33:59 like cosmological polytope and space time is not fundamental.
01:34:03 What is doomed in the sense that it’s wrong
01:34:07 is reductionism.
01:34:10 Which is saying space time is fundamental, essentially.
01:34:14 Right, right.
01:34:14 The idea that somehow being smaller in space and time
01:34:20 or space time is a fundamental nature of reality,
01:34:23 that’s just wrong.
01:34:26 It turned out to be a useful heuristic
01:34:28 for thermodynamics and so forth.
01:34:29 And in several other places,
01:34:31 reductionism has been very useful,
01:34:33 but that’s in some sense an artifact
01:34:36 of how we use our interface.
01:34:39 Yeah, so you’re saying size doesn’t matter.
01:34:41 Okay, this is very important for me to write down.
01:34:44 Ultimately. Ultimately, right.
01:34:46 It’s useful for theories like thermodynamics
01:34:49 and also for understanding brain networks
01:34:51 in terms of individual neurons and neurons
01:34:54 in terms of chemical systems inside cells.
01:34:58 That’s all very, very useful,
01:35:00 but the idea that we’re getting
01:35:02 to the more fundamental nature of reality, no.
01:35:05 When you get all the way down in that direction,
01:35:08 you get down to the quarks and gluons,
01:35:09 what you realize is what you’ve gotten down to
01:35:11 is not fundamental reality,
01:35:13 just the irreducible representations of a data structure.
01:35:16 That’s all you’ve gotten down to.
01:35:17 So you’re always stuck inside the data structure.
01:35:21 So you seem to be getting closer and closer.
01:35:23 I went from neural networks to neurons,
01:35:25 neurons to chemistry, chemistry to particles,
01:35:27 particles to quarks and gluons.
01:35:29 I’m getting closer and closer to the real.
01:35:31 No, I’m getting closer and closer to the actual structure
01:35:34 of the data structure of space and time,
01:35:36 the irreducible representations.
01:35:38 That’s what you’re getting closer to,
01:35:39 not to a deeper understanding of what’s beyond space time.
01:35:43 We’ll also refer, we’ll return again
01:35:46 to this question of dynamics
01:35:48 because you keep saying that space time is doomed,
01:35:51 but mostly focusing on the space part of that.
01:35:54 It’s very interesting to see why time gets the bad cred too
01:35:59 because how do you have dynamics without time
01:36:01 is the thing I’d love to talk to you a little bit about.
01:36:02 But let us return your brilliant whirlwind overview
01:36:09 of the different theories of consciousness
01:36:11 that are out there.
01:36:14 What is consciousness if outside of space time?
01:36:18 If we think that we want to have a model of consciousness,
01:36:20 we as scientists then have to say,
01:36:23 what do we want to write down?
01:36:25 What kind of mathematical modeling
01:36:26 are we gonna write down, right?
01:36:28 And if you think about it, there’s lots of things
01:36:30 that you might want to write down about consciousness.
01:36:32 For all the complicated subject.
01:36:35 So most of my colleagues are saying,
01:36:36 let’s start with matter or neurons
01:36:38 and see what properties of matter
01:36:40 could create consciousness.
01:36:42 But I’m saying that that whole thing is out.
01:36:45 Space time is doomed, that whole thing is out.
01:36:47 We need to look at consciousness qua consciousness.
01:36:51 In other words, not as something that arises
01:36:53 in space and time, but perhaps as something
01:36:55 that creates space and time as a data structure.
01:36:58 So what do we want?
01:36:59 And here again, there’s no hard and fast rule,
01:37:02 but what you as a scientist have to do
01:37:03 is to pick what you think are the minimal assumptions
01:37:09 that are gonna allow you to boot up a comprehensive theory.
01:37:13 That is the trick.
01:37:16 So what do I want?
01:37:17 So what I chose to do was to have three things.
01:37:23 I said that there are conscious experiences.
01:37:26 Feeling of headache, the smell of garlic,
01:37:28 experiencing the color red.
01:37:32 There are, those are conscious,
01:37:33 so that’s the primitive of the theory.
01:37:34 And the reason I want few primitives, why?
01:37:36 Because those are the miracles of the theory, right?
01:37:38 The primitives, the assumptions of the theory
01:37:40 are the things you’re not going to explain.
01:37:42 Those are the things you assume.
01:37:43 And those experiences, you particularly mean
01:37:46 there’s a subjectiveness to them.
01:37:49 That’s the thing when people refer
01:37:51 to the hard problem of consciousness,
01:37:54 is it feels like something to look at the color red, okay.
01:37:58 Exactly right, it feels like something to have a headache
01:38:00 or to feel upset to your stomach.
01:38:02 It feels like something.
01:38:04 And so I’m going to grant that in this theory,
01:38:09 there are experiences and they’re fundamental in some sense.
01:38:12 So conscious experience.
01:38:13 So they’re not derived from physics.
01:38:15 They’re not functional properties of particles.
01:38:18 They are sui generis, they exist.
01:38:21 Just like we assume space time exists.
01:38:23 I’m now saying space time is just a data structure.
01:38:26 It doesn’t exist independent of conscious experiences.
01:38:29 Sorry to interrupt once again,
01:38:30 but should we be focusing in your thinking on humans alone?
01:38:35 Or is there something about in relation
01:38:40 to other kinds of organisms that have
01:38:42 a sufficiently high level of complexity?
01:38:44 Or even, or is there some kind of generalization
01:38:50 of the panpsychist idea that all consciousness permeates,
01:38:54 all matter?
01:38:55 Outside of the usual definition
01:38:58 of what matter is inside space time.
01:39:01 So it’s beyond human consciousness.
01:39:04 Human consciousness, from my point of view,
01:39:06 would be one of a countless variety of consciousnesses.
01:39:10 And even within human consciousness,
01:39:12 there’s countless variety of consciousnesses within us.
01:39:15 I mean, you have your left and right hemisphere.
01:39:18 And apparently if you split the corpus callosum,
01:39:20 the personality of the left hemisphere
01:39:22 and the religious beliefs of the left hemisphere
01:39:24 can be very different from the right hemisphere.
01:39:26 And their conscious experiences can be disjoint.
01:39:30 One could have one conscious experience.
01:39:32 They can play 20 questions.
01:39:33 The left hemisphere can have an idea in its mind
01:39:35 and the right hemisphere has to guess.
01:39:37 And it might not get it.
01:39:38 So even within you,
01:39:40 there is more than just one consciousness.
01:39:43 It’s lots of consciousnesses.
01:39:45 So the general theory of consciousness that I’m after
01:39:48 is not just human consciousness.
01:39:50 It’s going to be just consciousness.
01:39:51 And I presume human consciousness is a tiny drop
01:39:56 in the bucket of the infinite variety of consciousnesses.
01:39:59 That said, I should clarify that the black hole
01:40:02 of consciousness is the home cat.
01:40:07 I’m pretty sure cats lack, is the embodiment of evil
01:40:11 and lack all capacity for consciousness or compassion.
01:40:16 So I just want to lay that on the table.
01:40:17 That’s the theory I’m working on.
01:40:17 I don’t have any good evidence, but it’s just an intuition.
01:40:20 It’s just a shout out.
01:40:23 Sorry to distract.
01:40:24 So that’s the first assumption.
01:40:25 The first assumption, that’s right.
01:40:27 The second assumption is that
01:40:29 these experiences have consequences.
01:40:31 So I’m going to say that conscious experiences
01:40:35 can trigger other conscious experiences somehow.
01:40:38 So really in some sense, there’s two basic assumptions.
01:40:43 There’s some kind of causality.
01:40:46 Is there a chain of causality?
01:40:47 Does this relate to dynamics?
01:40:50 I’ll say there’s a probabilistic relationship.
01:40:55 So I’m trying to be as nonspecific to begin with
01:40:58 and see where it leads me.
01:41:01 So what I can write down are probability spaces.
01:41:04 So a probability space, which contains
01:41:06 the conscious experiences that this consciousness can have.
01:41:09 So I call this a conscious agent, this technical thing.
01:41:16 Annika Harris and I’ve talked about this
01:41:19 and she rightly cautions me that people will think
01:41:22 that I’m bringing in a notion of a self or agency
01:41:25 and so forth when I say conscious agent.
01:41:27 So I just want to say that I use the term conscious agent
01:41:30 merely as a technical term.
01:41:32 There is no notion of self in my fundamental definition
01:41:35 of a conscious agent.
01:41:36 There are only experiences and probabilistic relationships
01:41:41 of how they trigger other experiences.
01:41:43 So the agent is the generator of the conscious experience?
01:41:46 The agent is a mathematical structure
01:41:49 that includes a probability measure,
01:41:51 the probability space of a possible conscious experiences
01:41:56 and a Markovian kernel, which describes how
01:42:00 if this agent has certain conscious experiences,
01:42:02 how that will affect the experiences
01:42:04 of other conscious agents, including itself.
01:42:07 But you don’t think of that as a self?
01:42:09 No, there is no notion of a self here.
01:42:13 There’s no notion of really of an agent.
01:42:17 But is there a locality?
01:42:20 Is there an organism?
01:42:21 There’s no space.
01:42:22 There’s no.
01:42:22 So this is, these are conscious units, conscious entities.
01:42:28 But they’re distinct in some way
01:42:30 because they have to interact.
01:42:32 Well, so here’s the interesting thing.
01:42:33 When we write down the mathematics,
01:42:36 when you have two of these conscious agents interacting,
01:42:39 the pair satisfy a definition of a conscious agent.
01:42:43 So they are a single conscious agent.
01:42:46 So there is one conscious agent.
01:42:48 But it has a nice analytic decomposition
01:42:52 into as many conscious agents as you wish.
01:42:53 So that’s a nice interface.
01:42:55 It’s a very useful scientific interface.
01:42:58 It’s a scale free or if you like a fractal like approach
01:43:03 to it in which we can use the same unit of analysis
01:43:06 at all scales in studying consciousness.
01:43:09 But if I want to talk about,
01:43:12 so there’s no notion of learning, memory, problem solving,
01:43:17 intelligence, self, agency.
01:43:20 So none of that is fundamental.
01:43:24 So, and the reason I did that was
01:43:26 because I want to assume as little as possible.
01:43:29 Everything I assume is a miracle in the theory.
01:43:32 It’s not something you explain, it’s something you assume.
01:43:34 So I have to build networks of conscious agents.
01:43:38 If I want to have a notion of a self,
01:43:40 I have to build a self.
01:43:41 I have to build learning, memory, problem solving,
01:43:43 intelligence and planning, all these different things.
01:43:46 I have to build networks of conscious agents to do that.
01:43:49 It’s a trivial theorem that networks of conscious agents
01:43:52 are computationally universal, that’s trivial.
01:43:54 So anything that we can do with neural networks
01:43:56 or automata, you can do with networks of conscious agents.
01:44:00 That’s trivial.
01:44:01 But you can also do more.
01:44:04 The events in the probability space need not be computable.
01:44:08 So the Markovian dynamics is not restricted
01:44:11 to computable functions
01:44:14 because the very events themselves need not be computable.
01:44:17 So this can capture any computable theory.
01:44:20 Anything we can do with neural networks,
01:44:22 we can do with conscious agent networks.
01:44:24 But it leaves open the door for the possibility
01:44:27 of noncomputable interactions between conscious agents.
01:44:31 So if we want a theory of memory, we have to build it.
01:44:37 And there’s lots of different ways you could build.
01:44:39 We’ve actually got a paper,
01:44:40 Chris Fields took the lead on this.
01:44:41 And we have a paper called Conscious Agent Networks
01:44:44 where Chris takes the lead and shows how to use
01:44:47 these networks of conscious agents to build memory
01:44:49 and to build primitive kinds of learning.
01:44:53 But can you provide some intuition
01:44:56 of what conscious networks,
01:44:58 networks of conscious agents helps you?
01:45:04 First of all, what that looks like.
01:45:07 And I don’t just mean mathematically.
01:45:08 Of course, maybe that might help build up intuition.
01:45:11 But how that helps us potentially solve
01:45:14 the hard problem of consciousness.
01:45:17 Or is that baked in, that that exists?
01:45:21 Can you solve the hard problem of consciousness,
01:45:27 why it tastes delicious when you eat a delicious ice cream
01:45:31 with networks of conscious agents?
01:45:33 Or is that taken as an assumption?
01:45:36 So the standard way the hard problem is thought of
01:45:40 is we’re assuming space and time and particles
01:45:44 or neurons, for example.
01:45:47 These are just physical things that have no consciousness.
01:45:50 And we have to explain how the conscious experience
01:45:51 of the taste of chocolate could emerge from those.
01:45:54 So the typical hard problem of consciousness
01:45:57 is that problem, right?
01:45:58 How do you boot up the taste of chocolate,
01:46:02 the experience of the taste of chocolate from neurons, say,
01:46:06 or the right kind of artificial intelligence circuitry?
01:46:10 How do you boot that up?
01:46:11 That’s typically what the hard problem of consciousness
01:46:14 means to researchers.
01:46:15 Notice that I’m changing the problem.
01:46:18 I’m not trying to boot up conscious experiences
01:46:21 from the dynamics of neurons or silicon
01:46:23 or something like that.
01:46:25 I’m saying that that’s the wrong problem.
01:46:27 My hard problem would go in the other direction.
01:46:29 If I start with conscious experiences,
01:46:33 how do I build up space and time?
01:46:35 How do I build up what I call the physical world?
01:46:37 How do I build up what we call brains?
01:46:40 Because I’m saying consciousness
01:46:43 is not something that brains do.
01:46:45 Brains are something that consciousness makes up.
01:46:49 It’s among the experience,
01:46:50 it’s an ephemeral experience in consciousness.
01:46:54 I look inside, so to be very, very clear,
01:46:57 right now, I have no neurons.
01:46:59 If you looked, you would see neurons.
01:47:03 That’s a data structure that you would create on the fly,
01:47:05 and it’s a very useful one.
01:47:06 As soon as you look away,
01:47:08 you garbage collect that data structure,
01:47:10 just like that Necker cube that I was talking about
01:47:11 on the piece of paper.
01:47:12 When you look, you see a 3D cube you created on the fly.
01:47:17 As soon as you look away, that’s gone.
01:47:19 When you say you, you mean a human being scientist.
01:47:22 Right now, that’s right.
01:47:24 More generally, it’ll be conscious agents,
01:47:26 because as you pointed out,
01:47:28 am I asking for a theory of consciousness
01:47:30 only about humans?
01:47:31 No, it’s consciousness,
01:47:33 which human consciousness is just a tiny sliver.
01:47:38 But you are saying that there is,
01:47:40 that’s a useful data structure.
01:47:41 How many other data structures are there?
01:47:43 That’s why I said you human.
01:47:45 If there’s another Earth,
01:47:47 if there’s another alien civilization
01:47:49 and doing these kinds of investigations,
01:47:51 would they come up with similar data structures?
01:47:54 Probably not.
01:47:55 What is the space of data structures,
01:47:56 I guess is what I’m asking.
01:48:00 My guess is that if consciousness is fundamental,
01:48:04 consciousness is all there is,
01:48:07 then the only thing that mathematical structure
01:48:10 can be about is possibilities of consciousness.
01:48:15 And that suggests to me
01:48:17 that there could be an infinite variety of consciousnesses,
01:48:21 and a vanishingly small fraction of them
01:48:25 use space time data structures
01:48:27 and the kinds of structures that we use.
01:48:29 There’s an infinite variety of data structures.
01:48:32 Now, this is very similar
01:48:33 to something that Max Tegmark has said,
01:48:35 but I want to distinguish it.
01:48:36 He has this level four multiverse idea.
01:48:40 He thinks that mathematics is fundamental.
01:48:43 And so that’s the fundamental reality.
01:48:45 And since there’s an infinite variety of,
01:48:47 endless variety of mathematical structures,
01:48:49 there’s an infinite variety of multiverses in his view.
01:48:52 I’m saying something similar in spirit,
01:48:55 but importantly different.
01:48:56 There’s an infinite variety
01:48:57 of mathematical structures, absolutely.
01:49:00 But mathematics isn’t the fundamental reality
01:49:03 in this framework.
01:49:04 Consciousness is,
01:49:06 and mathematics is to consciousness
01:49:09 like bones are to an organism.
01:49:12 You need the bones.
01:49:12 So mathematics is not divorced from consciousness,
01:49:16 but it’s not the entirety of consciousness by any means.
01:49:20 And so there’s an infinite variety of consciousnesses
01:49:24 and signaling games that consciousnesses could interact via.
01:49:30 And therefore worlds, your common worlds,
01:49:32 data structures that they can use to communicate.
01:49:37 So space and time is just one of an infinite variety.
01:49:40 And so I think that what we’ll find is that
01:49:43 as we go outside of our little space time bubble,
01:49:48 we will encounter utterly alien forms
01:49:51 of conscious experience that we may not be able
01:49:54 to really comprehend in the following sense.
01:49:59 If I ask you to imagine a color
01:50:03 that you’ve never seen before,
01:50:04 does anything happen?
01:50:06 Nothing happens.
01:50:09 Nothing happens.
01:50:11 And that’s just one color.
01:50:12 I’m asking for just a color.
01:50:14 We actually know, by the way,
01:50:16 that apparently there are women called tetraphams
01:50:21 who have four color receptors, not just three.
01:50:25 And Kimberly Jameson and others who’ve studied these women
01:50:28 have good evidence that they apparently have
01:50:31 a new dimension of color experience
01:50:34 that the rest of us don’t have.
01:50:35 So these women are apparently living in a world of color
01:50:40 that you and I can’t even concretely imagine.
01:50:42 No man can imagine them.
01:50:43 Yeah.
01:50:44 And yet they’re real color experiences.
01:50:46 And so in that sense, I’m saying,
01:50:48 now take that little baby step,
01:50:50 oh, there are women who have color experiences
01:50:52 that I could never have.
01:50:53 Well, that’s shocking.
01:50:55 Now take that infinite.
01:50:57 There are consciousnesses where every aspect
01:51:00 of their experiences is like that new color.
01:51:03 It’s something utterly alien to you.
01:51:05 You have nothing like that.
01:51:07 And yet these are all possible varieties
01:51:10 of conscious experience.
01:51:11 And when you say there’s a lot of consciousnesses,
01:51:13 as a singular consciousness,
01:51:16 basically the set of possible experiences you can have
01:51:19 in that subjective way,
01:51:22 as opposed to the underlying mechanism.
01:51:25 Because you say that, you know,
01:51:28 having a extra color receptor,
01:51:32 ability to have new experiences
01:51:34 that somehow a different consciousness,
01:51:36 is there a way to see that as all the same consciousness,
01:51:39 the subjectivity itself?
01:51:41 Right.
01:51:42 Because when we have two of these conscious agents
01:51:45 interacting, the mathematics,
01:51:46 they actually satisfy the definition of a conscious agent.
01:51:49 So in fact, they are a single conscious agent.
01:51:52 So in fact, one way to think about what I’m saying,
01:51:55 I’m postulating with my colleagues,
01:51:57 Chaiton and Chris and others,
01:51:58 Robert Pretner and so forth.
01:52:01 There is one big conscious agent, infinitely complicated.
01:52:05 But fortunately, we can, for analytic purposes,
01:52:08 break it down all the way to,
01:52:10 in some sense, the simplest conscious agent,
01:52:11 which has one conscious experience, one.
01:52:15 This one agent can experience red 35, and that’s it.
01:52:18 That’s what it experiences.
01:52:20 You can get all the way down to that.
01:52:22 So you think it’s possible that consciousness,
01:52:27 whatever that is,
01:52:30 is much more, is fundamental,
01:52:34 or at least much more in the direction of the fundamental
01:52:37 than is space time as we perceive it?
01:52:40 That’s the proposal.
01:52:42 And therefore, what I have to do,
01:52:45 in terms of the hard problem of consciousness,
01:52:47 is to show how dynamical systems of conscious agents
01:52:51 could lead to what we call space and time
01:52:54 and neurons and brain activity.
01:52:56 In other words, we have to show how you get space time
01:53:00 and physical objects entirely from a theory
01:53:05 of conscious agents outside of space time,
01:53:07 with the dynamics outside of space time.
01:53:10 So that’s, and I can tell you how we plan to do that,
01:53:13 but that’s the idea.
01:53:15 Okay, the magic of it, that chocolate is delicious.
01:53:19 So there’s a mathematical kind of thing
01:53:22 that we could say here, how it can emerge
01:53:24 within this system of networks of conscious agents,
01:53:27 but is there going to be at the end of the proof
01:53:34 why chocolate is so delicious?
01:53:36 Or no?
01:53:38 I guess I’m going to ask different kinds of dumb questions
01:53:41 to try to sneak up.
01:53:43 Oh, well, that’s the right question, and when I say
01:53:45 that I took conscious experiences as fundamental,
01:53:48 what that means is, in the current version of my theory,
01:53:51 I’m not explaining conscious experiences
01:53:54 where they came from.
01:53:55 That’s the miracle, that’s one of the miracles.
01:53:58 So I have two miracles in my theory.
01:53:59 There are conscious experiences, like the taste of chocolate,
01:54:02 and that there’s a probabilistic relationship.
01:54:06 When certain conscious experiences occur,
01:54:08 others are more likely to occur.
01:54:10 Those are the two miracles that are possible.
01:54:12 Is it possible to get beyond that
01:54:17 and somehow start to chip away
01:54:19 at the miracleness of that miracle,
01:54:22 that chocolate is delicious?
01:54:24 I hope so.
01:54:25 I’ve got my hands full with what I’m doing right now,
01:54:27 but I can just say at top level how I would think about that.
01:54:32 That would get at this
01:54:38 consciousness without form.
01:54:40 This is really tough, because it’s consciousness without form
01:54:46 versus the various forms that consciousness takes
01:54:50 for the experiences that it has.
01:54:53 Right, right.
01:54:55 So when I write down a probability space
01:55:01 for these conscious experiences, I say,
01:55:03 here’s a probability space
01:55:04 for the possible conscious experiences, right?
01:55:07 It’s just like when I write down a probability space
01:55:08 for an experiment.
01:55:09 Like I’m gonna flip a coin twice, right?
01:55:12 And I want to look at the probabilities of various outcomes.
01:55:15 So I have to write down a probability space.
01:55:16 There could be heads, heads, heads, tails,
01:55:18 tails, heads, tails, tails.
01:55:20 So any class of probability you’re told,
01:55:24 write down your probability space.
01:55:25 If you don’t write down your probability space,
01:55:26 you can’t get started.
01:55:28 So here’s my probability space for consciousness.
01:55:30 How do I want to interpret that structure?
01:55:33 The structure is just sitting there.
01:55:34 There’s gonna be a dynamics that happens on it, right?
01:55:37 Experiences appear and then they disappear,
01:55:39 just like heads appears and disappears.
01:55:42 So one way to think about that fundamental
01:55:46 probability space is that corresponds
01:55:49 to consciousness without any content.
01:55:53 The infinite consciousness that transcends
01:55:57 any particular content.
01:55:58 Well, do you think of that as a mechanism,
01:56:00 as a thing, like the rules that govern the dynamics
01:56:05 of the thing outside of space time?
01:56:08 Isn’t that, if you think consciousness is fundamental,
01:56:10 isn’t that essentially getting like,
01:56:12 it is solving the hard problem,
01:56:14 which is like from where does this thing pop up,
01:56:21 which is the mechanism of the thing popping up,
01:56:24 whatever the consciousness is,
01:56:25 the different kinds and so on, that mechanism.
01:56:29 And also, the question I want to ask is how tricky
01:56:34 do you think it is to solve that problem?
01:56:38 You’ve solved a lot of difficult problems
01:56:40 throughout the history of humanity.
01:56:42 There’s probably more problems to solve left
01:56:47 than we’ve solved by like an infinity.
01:56:52 But along that long journey of intelligent species,
01:56:58 when will we solve this consciousness one?
01:57:01 Which is one way to measure the difficulty of the problem.
01:57:04 So I’ll give two answers.
01:57:05 There’s one problem I think we can solve,
01:57:08 but we haven’t solved yet.
01:57:09 And that is the reverse
01:57:11 of what my colleagues call the hard problem.
01:57:14 The problem of how do you start with conscious experiences
01:57:17 in the way that I’ve just described them and the dynamics
01:57:19 and build up space and time and brains,
01:57:22 that I think is a tough technical problem,
01:57:25 but it’s in principle solvable.
01:57:26 So I think we can solve that.
01:57:27 So we would solve the hard problem,
01:57:29 not by showing how brains create consciousness,
01:57:31 but how networks of conscious agents
01:57:33 create what we call the symbols that we call brains.
01:57:38 So that I think.
01:57:40 But does that allow you to, so that’s interesting.
01:57:42 That’s an interesting idea.
01:57:43 Consciousness creates the brain,
01:57:44 not the brain creates consciousness.
01:57:46 But does that allow you to build the thing?
01:57:49 My guess is that it will enable unbelievable technologies.
01:57:53 Once, and I’ll tell you why.
01:57:55 I think it plugs into the work
01:57:57 that the physicists are doing.
01:57:58 So this theory of consciousness will be even deeper
01:58:01 than the structures that the physicists are finding,
01:58:03 like the amplituhedron.
01:58:06 But the other answer to your question is less positive.
01:58:10 As I said earlier, I think that there is no such thing
01:58:13 as a theory of everything.
01:58:15 So that I think that the theory that my team is working on,
01:58:21 this conscious agent theory, is just a 1.0 theory.
01:58:26 We’re using probability spaces and Markovian curls.
01:58:29 I can easily see people now saying,
01:58:31 well, we can do better if we go to category theory.
01:58:35 And we can get a deeper, perhaps more interesting.
01:58:38 And then someone will say,
01:58:39 well, now I’ll go to topoi theory.
01:58:42 So I imagine that there’ll be conscious agents,
01:58:45 five, 10, 3 trillion, 0.0, but I think it will never end.
01:58:51 I think ultimately this question
01:58:54 that we sort of put our fingers on of,
01:58:56 how does the formless give birth to form,
01:59:03 to the wonderful taste of chocolate?
01:59:06 I think that we will always go deeper and deeper,
01:59:10 but we will never solve that.
01:59:12 That in some sense, that will be a primitive.
01:59:15 I hope I’m wrong.
01:59:16 Maybe it’s just the limits of my current imagination.
01:59:23 So I’ll just say my imagination right now
01:59:26 doesn’t peer that deep.
01:59:30 By the way, I’m saying this,
01:59:31 I don’t want to discourage some brilliant 20 year old
01:59:35 who then later on proves me dead wrong.
01:59:37 I hope to be proven dead wrong.
01:59:39 Just like you said, essentially from now,
01:59:41 everything we’re saying now, everything you’re saying,
01:59:43 all your theories will be laughing stock.
01:59:45 They will respect the puzzle solving abilities
01:59:51 and how much we were able to do with so little.
01:59:54 But outside of that, you will all be just,
01:59:58 the silliness will be entertainment for a teenager.
02:00:01 Especially the silliness when we thought
02:00:03 that we were so smart and we knew it all.
02:00:06 So it would be interesting to explore your ideas
02:00:08 by contrasting, you mentioned Annika, Annika Harris,
02:00:12 you mentioned Philip Goff.
02:00:15 So outside of, if you’re not allowed to say
02:00:19 the fundamental disagreement is the fact
02:00:21 that space time is fundamental.
02:00:24 What are interesting distinctions
02:00:26 between ideas of consciousness
02:00:28 between you and Annika, for example?
02:00:30 You guys have, you’ve been on a podcast together,
02:00:33 I’m sure in private you guys
02:00:36 have some incredible conversations.
02:00:38 So where are some interesting sticking points,
02:00:41 some interesting disagreements,
02:00:44 let’s say with Annika first.
02:00:45 Maybe there’ll be a few other people.
02:00:47 Well, Annika and I just had a conversation this morning
02:00:49 where we were talking about our ideas
02:00:51 and what we discovered really in our conversation
02:00:53 was that we’re pretty much on the same page.
02:00:57 It was really just about consciousness.
02:01:00 Our ideas about consciousness
02:01:02 are pretty much on the same page.
02:01:04 She rightly has cautioned me to,
02:01:07 when I talk about conscious agents,
02:01:10 to point out that the notion of agency
02:01:12 is not fundamental in my theory.
02:01:15 The notion of self is not fundamental
02:01:17 and that’s absolutely true.
02:01:18 I can use this network of conscious agents,
02:01:22 I now use as a technical term,
02:01:25 conscious agent is a technical term
02:01:26 for that probability space with the Markovian dynamics.
02:01:29 I can use that to build models of a self
02:01:31 and to build models of agency,
02:01:33 but they’re not fundamental.
02:01:35 So she has really been very helpful
02:01:40 in helping me to be a little bit clear about these ideas
02:01:43 and not say things that are misleading.
02:01:45 This is the interesting thing about language, actually,
02:01:50 is that language, quite obviously,
02:01:52 is an interface to truth.
02:01:56 It’s so fascinating that individual words
02:02:01 can have so much ambiguity
02:02:05 and the specific choices of a word
02:02:10 within a particular sentence,
02:02:12 within the context of a sentence,
02:02:13 can have such a difference in meaning.
02:02:17 It’s quite fascinating,
02:02:18 especially when you’re talking about topics
02:02:20 like consciousness, because it’s a very loaded term.
02:02:23 It means a lot of things to a lot of people
02:02:26 and the entire concept is shrouded in mystery.
02:02:29 So a combination of the fact that it’s a loaded term
02:02:32 and that there’s a lot of mystery,
02:02:34 people can just interpret it in all kinds of ways.
02:02:36 And so you have to be both precise
02:02:39 and help them avoid getting stuck
02:02:43 on some kind of side road of miscommunication,
02:02:48 lost in translation because you used the wrong word.
02:02:50 That’s interesting.
02:02:51 I mean, because for a lot of people,
02:02:54 consciousness is ultimately connected to a self.
02:03:01 I mean, that’s our experience of consciousness
02:03:04 is very, it’s connected to this ego.
02:03:08 I mean, I just, I mean, what else could it possibly be?
02:03:12 I can’t even, how do you begin to comprehend,
02:03:15 to visualize, to conceptualize a consciousness
02:03:19 that’s not connected to like this particular organism?
02:03:23 I have a way of thinking about this whole problem now
02:03:26 that comes out of this framework that’s different.
02:03:30 So we can imagine a dynamics of consciousness,
02:03:35 not in space and time, just abstractly.
02:03:37 It could be cooperative for all we know.
02:03:40 It could be very friendly, I don’t know.
02:03:43 And you can set up a dynamics, a Markovian dynamics
02:03:46 that is so called stationary.
02:03:48 And that’s a technical term,
02:03:50 which means that the entropy effectively is not increasing.
02:03:53 There is some entropy, but it’s constant.
02:03:55 So there’s no increasing entropy.
02:03:56 And in that sense, the dynamics is timeless.
02:04:01 There is no entropic time, but it’s a trivial theorem,
02:04:05 three line proof that if you have a stationary
02:04:10 Markovian dynamics, any projection that you make
02:04:13 of that dynamics by conditional probability.
02:04:16 And if you want, I can state a little bit more,
02:04:17 even more mathematically precisely
02:04:19 for some readers or listeners.
02:04:21 But if any projection you take by conditional probability,
02:04:25 the induced image of that Markov chain
02:04:28 will have increasing entropy.
02:04:32 You will have entropic time.
02:04:34 So I’ll be very, very precise.
02:04:36 I have a Markov chain X1, X2 through Xn
02:04:40 where Xn, n goes to infinity, right?
02:04:43 The entropy H, capital H of Xn is equal to the entropy H
02:04:49 of Xn minus one for all n.
02:04:52 So the entropy is the same.
02:04:55 But it’s a theorem that H of Xn,
02:05:00 say given X sub one is greater than or equal to
02:05:06 H of Xn minus one given X1.
02:05:10 Sure, where does the greater come from?
02:05:13 Because with the theorem, the three line proof,
02:05:17 H of Xn given X1 is greater than or equal to H of Xn
02:05:23 given X1 and X2 because conditioning reduces.
02:05:27 But then H of Xn minus one given X1, X2
02:05:35 is equal to H of Xn given X2,
02:05:39 Xn minus one given X2 by the Markov property.
02:05:44 And then because it’s stationary, it’s equal to H of X.
02:05:51 I have to write it down.
02:05:53 Anyway, there’s a three line proof.
02:05:56 Sure, but the assumption of stationarity,
02:06:02 we’re using a lot of terms that people won’t understand,
02:06:04 doesn’t matter.
02:06:07 So there’s some kind of, some Markovian dynamics
02:06:10 is basically trying to model some kind of system
02:06:13 with some probabilities and there’s agents
02:06:15 and they interact in some kind of way
02:06:17 and you can say something about that system
02:06:19 as it evolves stationarity.
02:06:22 So a stationary system is one that has certain properties
02:06:28 in terms of entropy, very well.
02:06:30 But we don’t know if it’s stationary or not.
02:06:33 We don’t know what the properties.
02:06:35 Right.
02:06:36 So you have to kind of take assumptions
02:06:38 and see, okay, well, what does the system behave like
02:06:42 under these different properties?
02:06:43 The more constraints, the more assumptions you take,
02:06:46 the more interesting, powerful things you can say,
02:06:49 but sometimes they’re limiting.
02:06:52 That said, we’re talking about consciousness here.
02:06:54 Right.
02:06:55 How does that, you said cooperative, okay, competitive.
02:07:02 It just, I like chocolate.
02:07:04 I’m sitting here, I have a brain, I’m wearing a suit.
02:07:08 It sure as hell feels like I’m myself.
02:07:11 Right.
02:07:12 Now, what, am I tuning in?
02:07:14 Am I plugging into something?
02:07:16 Am I a projection, a simple, trivial projection
02:07:20 into space time from some much larger organism
02:07:23 that I can’t possibly comprehend?
02:07:25 How the hell, you’re saying some,
02:07:28 you’re building up mathematical intuitions, fine, great.
02:07:31 But I’m just, I’m having an existential crisis here
02:07:35 and I’m gonna die soon.
02:07:36 Well, I’ll die pretty quickly.
02:07:37 So I wanna figure out why chocolate’s so delicious.
02:07:43 So help me out here.
02:07:44 So let’s just keep sneaking up to this.
02:07:47 Right, so the whole technical thing was to say this.
02:07:52 Even if the dynamics of consciousness is stationary
02:07:56 so that there is no entropic time,
02:07:58 any projection of it, any view of it
02:08:03 will have the artifact of entropic time.
02:08:08 That’s a limited resource.
02:08:10 Limited resources, so that the fundamental dynamics
02:08:14 may have no limits, limited resources whatsoever.
02:08:17 Any projection will have certainly time
02:08:19 as a limited resource
02:08:21 and probably lots of other limited resources.
02:08:24 Hence, we could get competition and evolution
02:08:28 and nature, red and tooth and claw
02:08:30 as an artifact of a deeper system
02:08:32 in which those aren’t fundamental.
02:08:34 And in fact, I take it as something
02:08:37 that this theory must do at some point
02:08:41 is to show how networks of conscious agents,
02:08:42 even if they’re not resource limited,
02:08:45 give rise to evolution by natural selection
02:08:47 via a projection.
02:08:49 Yeah, but you’re saying,
02:08:51 I’m trying to understand how the limited resources
02:08:53 that give rise to,
02:08:55 so first the thing gives rise to time,
02:08:57 that gives rise to limited resource,
02:08:59 that gives rise to evolution by natural selection,
02:09:03 how that has to do with the fact that chocolate’s delicious?
02:09:05 Well, it’s not gonna do that directly.
02:09:08 It’s gonna get to this notion of self.
02:09:10 Oh, it’s gonna give you?
02:09:12 The notion of self.
02:09:12 Oh, the evolution gives you the notion of self.
02:09:14 And also of a self separate from other selves.
02:09:18 So the idea would be that.
02:09:20 It’s competition, it has life and death,
02:09:22 all those kinds of things.
02:09:23 That’s right.
02:09:24 So it won’t, I don’t think,
02:09:26 as I said, I don’t think that I can tell you
02:09:28 how the formless gives rise
02:09:30 to the experience of chocolate.
02:09:32 Right now, my current theory says
02:09:33 that’s one of the miracles I’m assuming.
02:09:35 Yeah.
02:09:36 So my theory can’t do it.
02:09:38 And the reason my theory can’t do it
02:09:39 is because Hoffman’s brain can’t do it right now.
02:09:41 But the notion of self, yes.
02:09:45 The notion of self can be an artifact
02:09:49 of the projection of it.
02:09:51 So there’s one conscious agent.
02:09:55 Because anytime conscious agents interact,
02:09:56 they form a new conscious agent.
02:09:57 So there’s one conscious agent.
02:10:00 Any projection of that one conscious agent
02:10:02 gives rise to time,
02:10:05 even if there wasn’t any time in that one conscious agent.
02:10:07 And it gives rise, I want to,
02:10:10 now I haven’t proven this.
02:10:10 So this is, so now this is me guessing
02:10:13 where the theory is going to go.
02:10:14 I haven’t done this.
02:10:15 There’s no paper on this yet.
02:10:16 So now I’m speculating.
02:10:18 My guess is I’ll be able to show,
02:10:20 or my brighter colleagues working with me
02:10:22 will be able to show
02:10:23 that we will get evolution of a natural selection,
02:10:26 the notion of individual selves,
02:10:28 individual physical objects and so forth
02:10:29 coming out as a projection of this thing.
02:10:31 And that the self, this then will be really interesting
02:10:35 in terms of how it starts to interact
02:10:37 with certain spiritual traditions, right?
02:10:40 Where they will say that there is a notion of self
02:10:44 that needs to be let go,
02:10:45 which is this finite self
02:10:46 that’s competing with other selves
02:10:48 to get more money and prestige and so forth.
02:10:52 That self in some sense has to die.
02:10:54 But there’s a deeper self,
02:10:56 which is the timeless being
02:11:01 that precludes, not precludes,
02:11:04 but precedes any particular conscious experiences,
02:11:08 the ground of all experience.
02:11:10 That there’s that notion of a deep capital self.
02:11:13 But our little capital, lowercase s selves
02:11:17 could be artifacts of projection.
02:11:20 And it may be that what consciousness is doing
02:11:25 in this framework is, right?
02:11:26 It’s projected itself down into a self
02:11:30 that calls itself dawn
02:11:31 and a self that calls itself lax.
02:11:33 And through conversations like this,
02:11:36 it’s trying to find out about itself
02:11:37 and eventually transcend the limits
02:11:41 of the dawn and lax little icons that it’s using
02:11:45 and that little projection of itself.
02:11:49 Through this conversation,
02:11:50 somehow it’s learning about itself.
02:11:53 So that thing dressed me up today
02:11:57 in order to understand itself.
02:11:59 And in some sense, you and I are not separate
02:12:02 from that thing and we’re not separate from each other.
02:12:03 Yeah, well, I have to question the fashion choices
02:12:06 on my end then.
02:12:08 All right, so you mentioned you agree
02:12:10 in terms of consciousness on a lot of things with Anika.
02:12:15 Is there somebody, friend or friendly foe
02:12:20 that you disagree with in some nuanced, interesting way
02:12:25 or some major way about consciousness,
02:12:28 about these topics of reality that you return to?
02:12:34 Often, it’s like Christopher Hitchens
02:12:38 with Rabbi David Wolpe have had interesting conversations
02:12:43 through years that added to the complexity
02:12:46 and the beauty of their friendship.
02:12:47 Is there somebody like that that over the years
02:12:51 has been a source of disagreement with you
02:12:54 that’s strengthened your ideas?
02:12:56 Hmm, my ideas have been really shaped by several things.
02:13:02 One is the physicalist framework
02:13:06 that my scientific colleagues, almost to a person,
02:13:10 have adopted and that I adopted too.
02:13:12 And the reason I walked away from it was
02:13:15 because it became clear that we couldn’t start
02:13:20 with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness.
02:13:22 Can you define physicalist in contrast to reductionist?
02:13:28 So a physicalist, I would say as someone
02:13:33 who takes space time and the objects within space time
02:13:35 as ontologically fundamental.
02:13:38 Right, and then reductionist is saying
02:13:42 the smaller, the more fundamental.
02:13:43 That’s a methodological thing.
02:13:45 That’s saying within space time,
02:13:47 as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space,
02:13:50 you get deeper and deeper laws, more and more fundamental
02:13:53 laws and the reduction of temperature
02:13:57 to particle movement was an example of that.
02:14:01 But I think that the reason that worked
02:14:03 was almost an artifact of the nature of our interface.
02:14:07 That was for a long time and your colleagues,
02:14:10 including yourself, were physicalists
02:14:12 and now you broke away.
02:14:13 Broke away because I think you can’t start
02:14:15 with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness.
02:14:18 And so even with Roger Penrose
02:14:21 where there’s like a gray area.
02:14:23 Right, and here’s the challenge I would put
02:14:26 to all of my friends and colleagues
02:14:30 who give one specific conscious experience
02:14:36 that you can boot up, right?
02:14:37 So if you think that it’s integrated information
02:14:40 and I’ve asked this of Giulio Tononi a couple times
02:14:44 back in the 90s and then just a couple years ago.
02:14:46 I asked Giulio, okay, so great, integrated information.
02:14:49 So we’re all interested in explaining
02:14:51 some specific conscious experiences.
02:14:53 So what is, you know, pick one, the taste of chocolate.
02:14:56 What is the integrated information precise structure
02:15:00 that we need for chocolate and why does that structure
02:15:03 have to be for chocolate and why is it
02:15:07 that it could not possibly be vanilla?
02:15:09 Is there any, I asked him, is there any one specific
02:15:11 conscious experience that you can account for?
02:15:13 Because notice, they’ve set themselves the task
02:15:18 of booting up conscious experiences from physical systems.
02:15:21 That’s the task they’ve set themselves.
02:15:22 But that doesn’t mean they’re,
02:15:25 I understand your intuition,
02:15:26 but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong
02:15:28 just because they can’t find a way to boot it up yet.
02:15:31 That’s right.
02:15:32 No, that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.
02:15:33 It just means that they haven’t done it.
02:15:37 I think it’s principled.
02:15:38 The reason is principled,
02:15:40 but I’m happy that they’re exploring it.
02:15:43 But the fact is, the remarkable fact is
02:15:45 there’s not one theory.
02:15:46 So integrated information theory,
02:15:49 orchestrated collapse of microtubules,
02:15:52 global workspace theory.
02:15:54 These are all theories of consciousness.
02:15:56 These are all theories of consciousness.
02:15:57 There’s not a single theory that can give you
02:16:01 a specific conscious experience that they say,
02:16:03 here is the physical dynamics or the physical structure
02:16:06 that must be the taste of chocolate
02:16:08 or whatever one they want.
02:16:09 So you’re saying it’s impossible.
02:16:11 They’re saying it’s just hard.
02:16:13 Yeah.
02:16:14 My attitude is, okay, no one said
02:16:18 you had to start with neurons or physical systems
02:16:20 and boot up consciousness.
02:16:21 You guys are just taking that.
02:16:22 You chose that problem.
02:16:23 So since you chose that problem,
02:16:26 how much progress have you made?
02:16:27 Well, when you’ve not been able to come up
02:16:30 with a single specific conscious experience
02:16:32 and you’ve had these brilliant people
02:16:34 working on it for decades now,
02:16:36 that’s not really good progress.
02:16:38 Let me ask you to play devil’s advocate.
02:16:41 Can you try to steel man, steel man meaning
02:16:46 argue the best possible case for reality?
02:16:49 The opposite of your book title.
02:16:51 So, or maybe just stick into consciousness.
02:16:54 Can you take the physicalist view?
02:16:56 Can you steel man the physicalist view
02:16:58 for a brief moment playing devil’s advocate too?
02:17:01 Or steel man the person you used to be?
02:17:05 Right, right. She’s a physicalist.
02:17:07 What’s a good, like saying that you might be wrong
02:17:10 right now, what would be a convincing argument for that?
02:17:17 Well, I think the argument I would give
02:17:21 that I believed was, look,
02:17:23 when you have very simple physical systems,
02:17:25 like a piece of dirt,
02:17:28 there’s not much evidence of life or consciousness.
02:17:30 It’s only when you get really complicated physical systems
02:17:32 like that have brains and really,
02:17:35 the more complicated the brains,
02:17:36 the more it looks like there’s consciousness
02:17:39 and the more complicated that consciousness is.
02:17:41 Surely that means that simple physical systems
02:17:45 don’t create much consciousness or if maybe not any,
02:17:49 or maybe panpsychists,
02:17:50 they create the most elementary kinds
02:17:52 of simple conscious experiences,
02:17:54 but you need more complicated physical systems to boot up,
02:17:59 to create more complicated consciousnesses.
02:18:02 I think that’s the intuition
02:18:03 that drives most of my colleagues.
02:18:04 And you’re saying that this concept of complexity
02:18:09 is ill defined when you ground it to space time.
02:18:13 Oh, I think it’s well defined
02:18:15 within the framework of space time, right?
02:18:17 No, it’s ill defined relative to what you need
02:18:21 to actually understand consciousness
02:18:23 because you’re grounding complexity in just in space time.
02:18:26 Oh, got you, right, right.
02:18:27 Yeah, what I’m saying is if it were true
02:18:33 that space time was fundamental,
02:18:37 then I would have to agree
02:18:38 that if there is such a thing as consciousness,
02:18:40 given the data that we’ve got,
02:18:41 that complex brains have consciousness and dirt doesn’t,
02:18:45 that somehow it’s the complexity of the dynamics
02:18:48 or organization, the function of the physical system
02:18:52 that somehow is creating the consciousness.
02:18:55 So under those assumptions, yes,
02:18:58 but when the physicists themselves are telling us
02:19:00 that space time is not fundamental, then I can understand.
02:19:03 See, then the whole picture starts to come into focus.
02:19:07 Why, my colleagues are brilliant, right?
02:19:10 These are really smart people.
02:19:12 I mean, Francis Crick worked on this
02:19:14 for the last 20 years of his life.
02:19:16 These are not stupid people.
02:19:17 These are brilliant, brilliant people.
02:19:19 The fact that we’ve come up
02:19:20 with not a single specific conscious experience
02:19:22 that we can explain and no hope.
02:19:25 There’s no one that says, oh, I’m really close.
02:19:27 I’ll have it for you in a year.
02:19:29 No, there’s just like, there’s this fundamental gap.
02:19:33 So much so that Steve Pinker in one of his writings says,
02:19:36 look, he likes the global workspace theory,
02:19:39 but he says the last dollop of the theory
02:19:41 in which there’s something it’s like to,
02:19:44 he says, we may have to just stipulate that as a brute fact.
02:19:50 Pinker is brilliant, right?
02:19:52 He understands the state of play
02:19:54 on this problem of the hard problem of consciousness,
02:19:57 starting with physicalist assumptions
02:20:00 and then trying to put up consciousness.
02:20:02 So you’ve set yourself the problem.
02:20:04 I’m starting with physical stuff
02:20:05 that’s not conscious.
02:20:07 I’m trying to get the taste of chocolate out
02:20:11 as maybe some kind of function of the dynamics of that.
02:20:14 We’ve not been able to do that.
02:20:16 And so Pinker is saying, we may have to punt.
02:20:18 We may have to just stipulate that last bit.
02:20:21 He calls it the last dollop.
02:20:23 And just stipulate it as a bare fact of nature
02:20:27 that there is something it’s like.
02:20:28 Well, from my point of view as the physical,
02:20:30 the whole point, the whole promise of the physicalist
02:20:33 was we wouldn’t have to stipulate.
02:20:34 I was gonna start with the physical stuff
02:20:36 and explain where the consciousness came from.
02:20:38 If I’m going to stipulate consciousness,
02:20:40 why don’t I just stipulate consciousness
02:20:42 and not stipulate all the physical stuff too?
02:20:45 So I’m stipulating less.
02:20:46 I’m saying, okay, I agree.
02:20:47 Which is the panpsychist perspective.
02:20:49 Well, it’s actually what I call
02:20:51 the conscious realist perspective.
02:20:52 Consciousness.
02:20:53 Panpsychists are effectively dualists, right?
02:20:55 They’re saying there’s physical stuff
02:20:57 that really is fundamental and then consciousness stuff.
02:21:00 So I would go with Pinker and say, look,
02:21:01 let’s just stipulate the consciousness stuff,
02:21:04 but I’m not gonna stipulate the physical stuff.
02:21:05 I’m gonna actually now show how to boot up
02:21:08 the physical stuff from just the consciousness stuff.
02:21:11 So I’ll stipulate less.
02:21:12 Is it possible, so if you stipulate less,
02:21:15 is it possible for our limited brains to visualize reality
02:21:22 as we delve deeper and deeper and deeper?
02:21:25 Is it possible to visualize somehow?
02:21:27 With the tools of math, with the tools of computers,
02:21:31 with the tools of our mind, are we hopelessly lost?
02:21:34 You said there’s ways to intuit what’s true
02:21:40 using mathematics and probability
02:21:44 and sort of a Markovian dynamics, all that kind of stuff,
02:21:50 but that’s not visualizing.
02:21:51 That’s a kind of building intuition.
02:21:55 But is it possible to visualize
02:21:57 in the way we visualize so nicely in space time
02:22:00 in four dimensions, in three dimensions, sorry.
02:22:04 Well, we really are looking through a two dimensional screen
02:22:07 until it’s what we intuit to be a three dimensional world
02:22:12 and also inferring dynamic stuff, making it 4D.
02:22:17 Anyway, is it possible to visualize some pretty pictures
02:22:20 that give us a deeper sense of the truth of reality?
02:22:25 I think that we will incrementally be able to do that.
02:22:29 I think that, for example, the picture that we have
02:22:33 of electrons and photons interacting and scattering,
02:22:41 it may have not been possible
02:22:43 until Faraday did all of his experiments
02:22:45 and then Maxwell wrote down his equations.
02:22:47 And we were then sort of forced by his equations
02:22:50 to think in a new way.
02:22:52 And then when Planck in 1900,
02:22:56 desperate to try to solve the problem
02:23:00 of black body radiation,
02:23:02 what they call the ultraviolet catastrophe
02:23:03 where Newton was predicting infinite energies
02:23:08 where there weren’t infinite energies
02:23:09 in black body radiation.
02:23:11 And he in desperation proposed packets of energy.
02:23:20 Then once you’ve done that,
02:23:23 and then you have an Einstein come along five years later
02:23:25 and show how that explains the photoelectric effect.
02:23:29 And then eventually in 1926, you get quantum theory.
02:23:33 And then you get this whole new way of thinking
02:23:35 that was, from the Newtonian point of view,
02:23:38 completely contradictory and counterintuitive, certainly.
02:23:45 And maybe if Giesen is right, not contradictory.
02:23:47 Maybe if you use intuitionist math, they’re not contradictory,
02:23:50 but still, certainly you wouldn’t have gone there.
02:23:54 And so here’s a case where the experiments
02:23:57 and then a desperate mathematical move,
02:24:01 sort of we use those as a flashlight into the deep fog.
02:24:07 And so that science may be the flashlight into the deep fog.
02:24:13 I wonder if it’s still possible to visualize
02:24:16 in the, like we talk about consciousness
02:24:20 from a self perspective experience it.
02:24:22 Hold that idea in our mind,
02:24:25 the way you can experience things directly.
02:24:27 We’ve evolved to experience things in this 3D world.
02:24:33 And that’s a very rich experience.
02:24:35 When you’re thinking mathematically,
02:24:41 you still in the end of the day have to project it down
02:24:44 to a low dimensional space to make conclusions.
02:24:49 Your conclusions will be a number or a line
02:24:53 or a plot or a visual.
02:24:56 So I wonder like how we can really touch some deep truth
02:25:00 in a subjective way, like experience it,
02:25:03 really feel the beauty of it, you know,
02:25:05 in the way that humans feel beauty.
02:25:08 Right, are we screwed?
02:25:10 I don’t think we’re screwed.
02:25:11 I think that we get little hints of it
02:25:14 from psychedelic drugs and so forth.
02:25:17 We get hints that there are certain interventions
02:25:19 that we can take on our interface.
02:25:21 I apply this chemical,
02:25:22 which is just some element of my interface
02:25:25 to this other, to a brain I ingested.
02:25:29 And all of a sudden I seem like I’ve opened new portals
02:25:33 into conscious experiences.
02:25:36 Well, that’s very, very suggestive.
02:25:38 That’s like the black body radiation doing something
02:25:41 that we didn’t expect, right?
02:25:42 It doesn’t go to infinity
02:25:44 when we thought it was gonna go to infinity
02:25:45 and we’re forced to propose these quanta.
02:25:49 So once we have a theory of conscious agents
02:25:53 and this projection to space,
02:25:55 I should say, I should sketch what I think
02:25:57 that projection is.
02:25:59 But then I think we can then start
02:26:01 to ask specific questions.
02:26:03 When you’re taking DMT or you’re taking LSD
02:26:08 or something like that,
02:26:10 now that we have this deep model
02:26:12 that we’ve reverse engineered space and time
02:26:14 and physical particles,
02:26:16 we’ve pulled them back to this theory of conscious agents.
02:26:18 Now we can ask ourselves in this idealized future,
02:26:23 what are we doing to conscious agents
02:26:25 when we apply five MEO DMT?
02:26:28 What are we doing?
02:26:29 Are we opening a new portal, right?
02:26:32 So when I say that, I mean,
02:26:33 I have a portal into consciousness
02:26:35 that I call my body of Lex Friedman that I’m creating.
02:26:39 And it’s a genuine portal, not perfect,
02:26:41 but it’s a genuine portal.
02:26:43 I’m definitely communicating with your consciousness.
02:26:45 And we know that we have one technology
02:26:49 for building new portals.
02:26:51 We know one technology and that is having kids.
02:26:54 Having kids is how we build new portals into consciousness.
02:26:59 It takes a long time.
02:27:00 Can you elaborate that?
02:27:01 Oh, oh, oh, you mean like?
02:27:04 Your son and your daughter didn’t exist.
02:27:07 That was a portal.
02:27:08 You’re having contact with consciousness
02:27:10 that you never would have had before,
02:27:12 but now you’ve got a son or a daughter.
02:27:14 You went through this physical process,
02:27:16 they were born, then there was all the training.
02:27:19 But is that portal yours?
02:27:22 So when you have kids, are you creating new portals
02:27:25 that are completely distinct from the portals
02:27:27 that you’ve created with other consciousness?
02:27:29 Like can you elaborate on that?
02:27:31 To which degree are the consciousness of your kids
02:27:35 a part of you?
02:27:37 Well, so every person that I see,
02:27:39 that symbol that I see, the body that I see,
02:27:43 is a portal potentially for me to interact
02:27:46 with a consciousness.
02:27:50 And each consciousness has a unique character.
02:27:53 We call it a personality and so forth.
02:27:56 So with each new kid that’s born,
02:27:59 we come in contact with a personality
02:28:01 that we’ve never seen before.
02:28:03 And a version of consciousness
02:28:05 that we’ve never seen before.
02:28:06 At a deeper level, as I said,
02:28:08 the theory says there’s one agent.
02:28:10 So this is a different projection of that one agent.
02:28:15 But so that’s what I mean by a portal
02:28:17 is within my own interface, my own projection,
02:28:22 can I see other projections of that one consciousness?
02:28:29 So can I get portals in that sense?
02:28:31 And I think we will get a theory of that,
02:28:36 that we will get a theory of portals
02:28:38 and then we can ask how the psychedelics are acting.
02:28:41 Are they actually creating new portals or not?
02:28:44 If they’re not, we should nevertheless then understand
02:28:47 how we could create a new portal, right?
02:28:50 Maybe we have to just study what happens
02:28:51 when we have kids.
02:28:53 We know that that technology creates new portals.
02:28:57 So we have to reverse engineer that and then say,
02:28:59 okay, could we somehow create new portals de novo?
02:29:04 With something like brain computer interfaces, for example.
02:29:09 Yeah, well, maybe just a chemical or something.
02:29:10 It’s probably more complicated than a chemical.
02:29:12 That’s why I think that the psychedelics may,
02:29:15 because they might be affecting this portal
02:29:17 in certain ways that it turns it around and opens up.
02:29:20 In other words, maybe once we understand
02:29:22 what this thing is a portal, your body is a portal,
02:29:25 and understand all of those complexities,
02:29:26 maybe we’ll realize that that portal can be shifted
02:29:29 to different parts of the deeper consciousness
02:29:32 and can be used to create new portals.
02:29:34 And give new windows on it.
02:29:36 And so in that way, maybe yes,
02:29:38 psychedelics could open up new portals
02:29:41 in the sense that they’re taking something
02:29:42 that’s already a complex portal
02:29:43 and just tweaking it a bit.
02:29:45 Well, but creating is a very powerful difference
02:29:48 between morphing.
02:29:50 Right, right, tweaking versus creating, I agree.
02:29:53 But maybe it gives you intuition
02:29:55 to at least the full space of the kinds of things
02:29:58 that this particular system is capable of.
02:30:01 I mean, the idea of the consciousness creates brains.
02:30:05 I mean, that breaks my brain because,
02:30:08 I guess I’m still a physicalist in that sense
02:30:12 because it’s just much easier to intuit the world.
02:30:19 It’s practical to think there’s a neural network
02:30:22 and what are the different ways
02:30:25 fascinating capabilities can emerge
02:30:30 from this neural network.
02:30:33 I agree, it’s easier.
02:30:34 And so you start to,
02:30:36 and then present to yourself the problem of,
02:30:38 okay, well, how does consciousness arise?
02:30:40 How does intelligence arise?
02:30:42 How does emotion arise?
02:30:46 How does memory arise?
02:30:49 How do we filter within the system
02:30:52 all the incoming sensory information
02:30:54 we’re able to allocate attention
02:30:57 in different interesting ways?
02:30:58 How do all those mechanisms arise?
02:31:02 To say that there’s other fundamental things
02:31:04 we don’t understand outside of space time
02:31:06 that are actually core to how this whole thing works
02:31:10 is a bit paralyzing because it’s like,
02:31:14 oh, we’re not 10% done, we’re like 0.001% done.
02:31:20 It’s the immediate feeling.
02:31:23 Certainly understand that.
02:31:24 My attitude about it is,
02:31:26 if you look at the young physicists
02:31:29 who are searching for these structures beyond space time,
02:31:32 like amplitude and so forth,
02:31:36 they’re having a ball.
02:31:38 Space time, that’s what the old folks did.
02:31:41 That’s what the older generation did.
02:31:44 We’re doing something that really is fun and new
02:31:48 and they’re having a blast
02:31:51 and they’re finding all these new structures.
02:31:53 So I think that we’re going to
02:31:59 succeed in getting a new deeper theory.
02:32:03 I can just say what I’m hoping with the theory
02:32:05 that I’m working on, I’m hoping to show
02:32:07 that I could have this timeless dynamics of consciousness,
02:32:11 no entropic time.
02:32:12 I take a projection and I show how this timeless dynamics
02:32:16 looks like the Big Bang
02:32:19 and the entire evolution of space time.
02:32:21 In other words, I see how my whole space time interface.
02:32:25 So not just the projection
02:32:28 doesn’t just look like space time,
02:32:29 you can explain the whole from the origin of the universe.
02:32:34 That’s what we have to do
02:32:35 and that’s what the physicists understand.
02:32:37 When they go beyond space time to the amplitude heat
02:32:39 and the cosmological polytope,
02:32:41 they ultimately know that they have to get back
02:32:43 the Big Bang story and the whole evolution,
02:32:46 that whole story where there were no living things.
02:32:49 There was just a point and then the explosion
02:32:53 and then just particles at high energy
02:32:55 and then eventually the cooling down
02:32:57 and the differentiation and finally matter condenses
02:33:01 and then life and then consciousness.
02:33:03 That whole story has to come out of something
02:33:05 that’s deeper and without time.
02:33:07 And that’s what we’re up to.
02:33:12 So the whole story that we’ve been telling ourselves
02:33:14 about Big Bang and how brains evolved in consciousness
02:33:17 will come out of a much deeper theory.
02:33:18 And yeah, for someone like me, it’s a lot.
02:33:24 But for the younger generation, this is like, oh wow,
02:33:29 all the low cherries aren’t picked.
02:33:30 This is really good stuff.
02:33:31 This is really new fundamental stuff that we can do.
02:33:35 So I can’t wait to read the papers of the younger generation
02:33:40 and I wanna see them.
02:33:41 Kids these days with their non space time assumptions.
02:33:48 It’s just interesting looking at the philosophical tradition
02:33:51 of this difficult ideas you struggle with.
02:33:53 If you look like somebody like Emmanuel Kant,
02:33:57 what are some interesting agreements and disagreements
02:34:00 you have with a guy about the nature of reality?
02:34:04 So there’s a lot in agreement, right?
02:34:06 So Kant was an idealist, transcendental idealist
02:34:10 and he basically had the idea
02:34:15 that we don’t see nature as it is.
02:34:19 We impose a structure on nature.
02:34:26 And so in some sense, I’m saying something similar.
02:34:29 I’m saying that, by the way,
02:34:30 I don’t call myself an idealist.
02:34:31 I call myself a conscious realist
02:34:33 because idealism has a long history.
02:34:35 A lot of different ideas come under idealism
02:34:38 and there’s a lot of debates and so forth.
02:34:40 It tends to be identified with, in many cases,
02:34:44 anti science and anti realism.
02:34:46 And I don’t want either connection with my ideas
02:34:49 and so I just called mine conscious realism
02:34:51 with an emphasis on realism and not anti realism.
02:34:56 But one place where I would, of course,
02:34:58 disagree with Kant was that he thought
02:35:00 that Euclidean space time was a priori, right?
02:35:05 We just know that that’s false.
02:35:07 So he went too far on that.
02:35:11 But in general, the idea that we don’t start with space time,
02:35:16 that space and time is in some sense
02:35:17 the forms of our perceptions.
02:35:19 Yes, absolutely.
02:35:21 And I would say that there’s a lot in common
02:35:25 with Berkeley in that regard.
02:35:28 There’s a lot of ingenious arguments in Berkeley.
02:35:31 Leibniz in his monodology understood very clearly
02:35:36 that the hard problem was not solvable.
02:35:38 He posed the hard problem and basically dismissed it.
02:35:41 He just said, you can’t do this.
02:35:43 And so if he came here and saw where we are,
02:35:47 he said, look, guys, I told you this 300 years ago.
02:35:50 And he had his monodology.
02:35:51 He was trying to do something like,
02:35:53 it’s different from what I’m doing,
02:35:56 but he had these things that were not in space and time,
02:35:59 these monads.
02:36:00 He was trying to build something.
02:36:03 I’m trying to build a theory of conscious agents.
02:36:05 My guess is that if he came here,
02:36:08 I could just, if he saw what I was doing,
02:36:10 he would say, he would understand it
02:36:13 and immediately take off with it
02:36:15 and go places that I couldn’t.
02:36:17 He would have no problem with this.
02:36:19 Right, there would be overlap of the spirit
02:36:22 of the ideas would be totally overlapping.
02:36:25 But his genius would then just run with it
02:36:26 far faster than I could.
02:36:28 I love the humility here.
02:36:29 So let me ask you about sort of practical implications
02:36:32 of your ideas to our world, our complicated world.
02:36:36 When you look at the big questions of humanity,
02:36:38 of hate, war, what else is there?
02:36:46 Evil, maybe there’s the positive aspects of that,
02:36:51 of meaning, of love.
02:36:54 What is the fact that reality is an illusion perceived?
02:36:59 What is the conscious realism when applied to daily life?
02:37:07 What kind of impact does it have?
02:37:09 A lot, and it’s sort of scary.
02:37:15 We all know that life is ephemeral
02:37:18 and spiritual traditions have said wake up to the fact
02:37:21 that anything that you do here is going to disappear.
02:37:24 But it’s even more ephemeral than perhaps we’ve thought.
02:37:27 I see this bottle because I create it right now.
02:37:30 As soon as I look away,
02:37:33 that data structure has been garbage collected.
02:37:36 That bottle, I have to recreate it every time I look.
02:37:38 So I spend all my money and I buy this fancy car.
02:37:42 That car, I have to keep recreating it
02:37:44 every time I look at it.
02:37:45 It’s that ephemeral.
02:37:46 So all the things that we invest ourselves in,
02:37:50 we fight over, we kill each other over,
02:37:52 we have wars over, these are all,
02:37:55 it’s like people in a virtual reality simulation, right?
02:37:59 And there’s this Porsche and we all see the Porsche.
02:38:03 Well, that Porsche exists when I look at it.
02:38:07 I turn my headset and I look at it.
02:38:09 And then if Joe turns his headset the right way,
02:38:12 he’ll see his Porsche.
02:38:13 It’s not even the same Porsche that I see.
02:38:15 He’s creating his own Porsche.
02:38:17 So these things are exceedingly ephemeral.
02:38:20 And now just imagine saying that that’s my Porsche.
02:38:25 Well, you can agree to say that it’s your Porsche,
02:38:29 but really the Porsche only exists as long as you look.
02:38:32 So this all of a sudden,
02:38:34 what the spiritual traditions have been saying
02:38:36 for a long, long time,
02:38:38 this gets cashed out in mathematically precise science.
02:38:41 It’s saying ephemeral, yes.
02:38:43 In fact, it lasts for a few milliseconds,
02:38:45 a few hundred milliseconds while you look at it.
02:38:47 And then it’s gone.
02:38:48 So the whole idea, why are we fighting?
02:38:53 Why do we hate?
02:38:57 We fight over possessions
02:39:01 because we think that we’re small little objects
02:39:05 inside this preexisting space time.
02:39:07 We assume that that mansion and that car
02:39:11 exists independent of us.
02:39:12 And that somehow we, these little things
02:39:16 can have our sense of self and importance
02:39:19 enhanced by having that special car
02:39:21 or that special house or that special person.
02:39:23 When in fact, it’s just the opposite.
02:39:26 You create that mansion every time you look.
02:39:29 That’s, you’re something far deeper than that mansion.
02:39:32 You’re the entity which can create that mansion on the fly.
02:39:37 And there’s nothing to the mansion
02:39:39 except what you create in this moment.
02:39:41 So all of a sudden, when you take this point of view,
02:39:46 it has all sorts of implications
02:39:49 for how we interact with each other,
02:39:51 how we treat each other.
02:39:57 And again, a lot of things
02:39:58 that spiritual traditions have said, it’s a mixed bag.
02:40:02 Spiritual traditions are a mixed bag.
02:40:03 So let me just be right up front about that.
02:40:05 I’m not promoting any particular,
02:40:06 but they do have some insights.
02:40:08 Yeah, they have wisdom.
02:40:09 They have certain wisdom.
02:40:10 They have, I can point to nonsense.
02:40:12 I won’t go into it,
02:40:13 but I can also point to lots of nonsense.
02:40:14 So the issue is to then to look for the key insights.
02:40:19 And I think they have a lot of insights
02:40:21 about the ephemeral nature of objects in space and time
02:40:25 and not being attached to them, including our own bodies.
02:40:28 And reversing that I’m not this little thing,
02:40:31 a little consciousness trapped in the body.
02:40:33 And the consciousness itself is only a product of the body.
02:40:36 So when the body dies, the consciousness disappears.
02:40:38 It turns completely around.
02:40:40 The consciousness is fundamental.
02:40:42 The body, my hand exists right now
02:40:46 because I’m looking at it.
02:40:47 My hand is gone.
02:40:49 I have no hand.
02:40:50 I have no brain.
02:40:52 I have no heart.
02:40:53 If you looked, you’ll see a heart.
02:40:55 Whatever I am is this really complicated thing
02:41:00 in consciousness.
02:41:01 That’s what I am.
02:41:03 All the stuff that I thought I was
02:41:05 is something that I create on the fly and delete.
02:41:07 So this is completely radical restructuring
02:41:11 of how we think about possessions, about identity,
02:41:16 about survival of death and so forth.
02:41:20 This is completely transformative.
02:41:22 But the nice thing is that this whole approach
02:41:24 of conscious agents, unlike the spiritual traditions,
02:41:27 which have said in some cases similar things,
02:41:30 they’ve said it imprecisely.
02:41:33 This is mathematics.
02:41:34 We can actually now begin to state precisely,
02:41:38 here’s the mathematical model of consciousness,
02:41:40 conscious agents, here’s how it maps onto space time,
02:41:42 which I should sketch really briefly.
02:41:44 And here’s why things are ephemeral
02:41:50 and here’s why you shouldn’t be worried
02:41:52 about the ephemeral nature of things
02:41:54 because you’re not a little tiny entity
02:41:57 inside space and time, quite the opposite.
02:41:59 You’re the author of space and time.
02:42:02 The I and the am and the I am
02:42:04 is all kind of emerging through this whole process
02:42:07 of evolution and so on that’s just surface waves
02:42:12 and there’s a much deeper ocean
02:42:13 that we’re trying to figure out here.
02:42:15 So how does, you said some of the stuff
02:42:18 you’re thinking about maps to space time,
02:42:19 how does it map to space time?
02:42:21 So just a very, very high level and I’ll keep it brief.
02:42:25 The structures that the physicists are finding,
02:42:28 like the amplituhedron, it turns out
02:42:31 they’re just static structure, they’re polytopes.
02:42:34 But they, remarkably, most of the information in them
02:42:37 is contained in permutation matrices.
02:42:40 So it’s a matrix, like an end by end matrix
02:42:45 that just has zeros and ones.
02:42:49 That contains almost all of the information
02:42:51 and you can, they have these plebic graphs
02:42:54 and so forth that they use to boot up the scattering.
02:42:56 You can compute those scattering amplitudes
02:42:59 almost entirely from these permutation matrices.
02:43:03 So that’s just, now from my point of view,
02:43:07 I have this conscious agent dynamics.
02:43:09 It turns out that the stationary dynamics
02:43:12 that I was talking about,
02:43:13 where the entropy isn’t increasing,
02:43:15 all the stationary dynamics are sketched out
02:43:19 by permutation matrices.
02:43:24 So there’s so called Burkhoff polytope.
02:43:27 All the vertices of this polytope,
02:43:29 all the points are permutation matrices.
02:43:33 All the internal points are Markovian kernels
02:43:37 that have the uniform measure as a stationary measure.
02:43:42 Now I need to intuit a little better
02:43:44 what the heck you’re talking about.
02:43:46 So basically, there’s some complicated thing
02:43:50 going on with the network of conscious agents
02:43:54 and that’s mappable to this,
02:43:56 you’re saying a two dimensional matrix
02:43:58 that scattering has to do with what?
02:44:02 With our perception, like that’s like photon stuff?
02:44:05 I mean, I don’t know if it’s useful
02:44:06 to sort of dig into detail.
02:44:09 I’ll do just the high level thing.
02:44:11 Yes.
02:44:11 So the high level is the long term behavior
02:44:15 of the conscious agent dynamics.
02:44:17 So that’s the projection of just looking
02:44:18 at the long term behavior.
02:44:20 I’m hoping we’ll give rise to the amplituhedron.
02:44:23 The amplituhedron then gives rise to space time.
02:44:27 So then I can just use their link
02:44:29 to go all the way from consciousness
02:44:31 through its asymptotics to,
02:44:33 through the amplituhedron into space time
02:44:35 and get the map all the way into our interface.
02:44:37 And that’s why you mentioned the permutation matrix
02:44:39 because it gives you a nice thing to try to generate.
02:44:42 That’s right, it’s the connection with the amplituhedron.
02:44:44 The permutation matrices are the core of the amplituhedron
02:44:47 and it turns out they’re the core
02:44:49 of the asymptotic description of the conscious agents.
02:44:52 So not to sort of bring up the idea of a creator,
02:44:54 but I like, first of all, I like video games
02:44:57 and you mentioned this kind of simulation idea.
02:45:01 First of all, do you think of it as an interesting idea,
02:45:03 this thought experiment that will live in a simulation?
02:45:06 And in general, do you think we’ll live in a simulation?
02:45:10 So the Nick Bostrom’s idea about the simulation
02:45:14 is typically couched in a physicalist framework.
02:45:17 Yes.
02:45:18 So there is the bottom level,
02:45:21 there’s some programmer in a physical space time
02:45:24 and they have a computer that they’ve programmed
02:45:25 really cleverly where they’ve created conscious entities.
02:45:30 So you have the hard problem of consciousness, right?
02:45:32 The standard hard problem.
02:45:33 How could a computer simulation create a conscious,
02:45:36 which isn’t explained by that simulation theory.
02:45:39 But then the idea is that the next level,
02:45:41 the entities that are created in the first level simulation
02:45:46 then can write their own simulations
02:45:48 and you get this nesting.
02:45:50 So the idea that this is a simulation is fine,
02:45:55 but the idea that it starts with a physicalist base,
02:45:58 I think, isn’t fine.
02:46:00 Well, there’s different properties here.
02:46:01 The partial rendering, and to me that’s the interesting idea
02:46:07 is not whether the entirety of the universe is simulated,
02:46:11 but how efficiently can you create interfaces
02:46:17 that are convincing to all other entities
02:46:21 that can appreciate such interfaces?
02:46:24 How little does it take?
02:46:25 Because you said like partial rendering
02:46:27 or like temporal, ephemeral rendering of stuff.
02:46:31 Only render the tree falling in the forest
02:46:33 when there’s somebody there to see it.
02:46:36 It’s interesting to think,
02:46:38 how can you do that super efficiently
02:46:39 without having to render everything?
02:46:41 And that to me is one perspective on the simulation,
02:46:44 just like it is with video games,
02:46:46 where a video game doesn’t have to render
02:46:48 every single thing.
02:46:49 It’s just the thing that the observer is looking at.
02:46:52 Right, there is actually, that’s a very nice question.
02:46:55 And there’s whole groups of researchers
02:46:58 that are actually studying in virtual reality,
02:47:00 what is the sort of minimal requirements on the system?
02:47:06 How does it have to operate
02:47:07 to give you an immersion experience,
02:47:09 to give you the feeling that you have a body,
02:47:12 to get you to take it real?
02:47:14 And there’s actually a lot of really good work
02:47:15 on that right now.
02:47:16 And it turns out it doesn’t take that much.
02:47:18 You do need to get the perception action loop tight
02:47:21 and you have to give them the perceptions
02:47:25 that they’re expecting if you want them to.
02:47:26 But if you can lead them along,
02:47:30 if you give them perceptions
02:47:31 that are close to what they’re expecting,
02:47:32 you can then maybe move their reality around a bit.
02:47:35 Yeah, it’s a tricky engineering problem,
02:47:36 especially when you’re trying to create a product
02:47:39 that costs little, but that’s,
02:47:41 it feels like an engineering problem,
02:47:43 not a deeply scientific problem.
02:47:46 Or meaning, obviously it’s a scientific problem,
02:47:47 but as a scientific problem,
02:47:49 it’s not that difficult to trick us descendants of apes.
02:47:53 But here’s a case for just us, you know, our own,
02:47:56 if this is a virtual reality
02:47:57 that we’re experiencing right now.
02:47:58 So here’s something you can try for yourself.
02:48:01 If you just close your eyes
02:48:04 and look at your experience in front of you,
02:48:08 be aware of your experience in front of you,
02:48:09 what you experience is just like a modeled dark gray,
02:48:14 where there’s all sort of, there’s some dynamics to it,
02:48:15 but it’s just dark gray.
02:48:17 But now I ask you, instead of having your attention forward,
02:48:22 put your attention backward.
02:48:24 What is it like behind you with your eyes closed?
02:48:29 And there, it’s like nothing.
02:48:34 It’s real.
02:48:35 So what is going on here?
02:48:37 What am I experiencing back there?
02:48:44 Right?
02:48:44 Well, it’s, I don’t know if it’s nothing.
02:48:47 It’s like, I guess it’s the absence of,
02:48:49 it’s not even like darkness or something.
02:48:51 It’s not even darkness.
02:48:53 There’s no qualia to it.
02:48:58 And yet there is a sense of being.
02:49:01 And that’s the interesting thing.
02:49:02 There’s a sense of being back.
02:49:03 So I close my, when I put my attention forward,
02:49:06 I have the qualia of a gray model thing.
02:49:08 But when I put my attention backward,
02:49:10 there’s no qualia at all, but there is a sense of being.
02:49:13 Yeah.
02:49:14 I personally, now you haven’t been to that side of the room.
02:49:18 I have been to that side of the room.
02:49:20 So for me, memories, I start playing the engine
02:49:25 of memory replay, which is like,
02:49:29 I take myself back in time and think about that place
02:49:32 where I was hanging out in that part.
02:49:34 That’s where I see what I’m behind.
02:49:35 So that’s an interesting quirk of humans too,
02:49:38 we’re able to, we’re collecting these experiences
02:49:41 and we can replay them in interesting ways
02:49:43 whenever we feel like it.
02:49:44 And it’s almost like being there,
02:49:46 but not really, but almost.
02:49:49 That’s right.
02:49:50 And yet we can go our entire lives in this.
02:49:53 You’re talking about the minimal thing for VR.
02:49:54 We can go our entire lives and not realize
02:49:56 that all of my life, it’s been like nothing behind me.
02:50:01 Yeah, right.
02:50:03 We’re not even aware that all of our lives,
02:50:06 if you just pay attention to us behind me,
02:50:10 we’re like, oh, holy smoke, it’s totally scary.
02:50:13 I mean, it’s like nothing.
02:50:14 There’s no qualia there at all.
02:50:16 How did I not notice that my entire life?
02:50:18 We’re so immersed in the simulation, we buy it so much.
02:50:21 Yeah, I mean, you could see this with children, right?
02:50:24 Though with persistence, you could do the peekaboo game.
02:50:28 You can hide from them and appear and they’re fully tricked.
02:50:32 And in the same way, we’re fully tricked.
02:50:34 There’s nothing behind us and we assume there is.
02:50:37 And that’s really interesting.
02:50:39 These theories are pretty heavy.
02:50:42 You as a human being, as a mortal human being,
02:50:46 how has these theories been to you personally?
02:50:49 Like, are there good days and bad days
02:50:51 when you wake up and look in the mirror
02:50:54 and the fact that you can’t see anything behind you?
02:50:57 The fact that it’s rendered,
02:50:58 like, is there interesting quirks?
02:51:02 Nietzsche with his, if you gaze long into the abyss,
02:51:05 the abyss gazes into you.
02:51:08 How has these theories, these ideas,
02:51:10 changed you as a person?
02:51:13 It’s been very, very difficult.
02:51:15 And this stuff is not just abstract theory building
02:51:19 because it’s about us.
02:51:21 Sometimes I realize that there’s this big division in me.
02:51:24 My mind is doing all this science
02:51:26 and coming up with these conclusions
02:51:28 and the rest of me is not integrating.
02:51:30 I’m just like, I don’t believe it.
02:51:31 I just don’t believe this.
02:51:32 I mean, it seems, so as I start to take it seriously,
02:51:35 I get scared myself.
02:51:37 It’s like, but it’s very much,
02:51:41 then I read these spiritual traditions
02:51:43 and realize they’re saying very, very similar things.
02:51:45 Like, there’s a lot of convergence.
02:51:48 So for me, I have,
02:51:52 the first time I thought it might be possible
02:51:55 that we’re not seeing the truth was in 1986.
02:51:59 It was from some mathematics we were doing.
02:52:02 And when that hit me, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
02:52:05 I had to sit down.
02:52:06 It was, it really, it was scary.
02:52:11 It was really a shock to the system.
02:52:14 And then to realize that everything
02:52:16 that has been important to me,
02:52:18 like, you know, getting a house,
02:52:22 getting a car, getting a reputation and so forth.
02:52:26 Well, that car is just like the car I see
02:52:28 in the virtual reality.
02:52:29 It’s just there when you perceive it and it’s not there.
02:52:32 So the whole question of, you know,
02:52:35 what am I doing and why?
02:52:36 What’s worthwhile doing in life?
02:52:39 Clearly, getting a big house and getting a big car.
02:52:46 I mean, we all knew that we were gonna die.
02:52:48 So we tend not to know that.
02:52:50 We tend to hide it, especially when we’re young.
02:52:52 Before age 30, we don’t believe we’re gonna die.
02:52:54 But we factually maybe know that you kind of
02:52:58 are supposed to, yeah.
02:52:59 But they’ll figure something out and we’ll be the generation
02:53:02 that is the first one that doesn’t have to die.
02:53:04 That’s the kind of thing.
02:53:05 But when you really face the fact that you’re going to die,
02:53:11 and then when I start to look at it from this point of view
02:53:13 that, well, this thing was an interface to begin with.
02:53:16 So what I’m really, is what I’m really gonna be doing,
02:53:20 just taking off a headset.
02:53:21 So I’ve been playing in a virtual reality game all day
02:53:24 and I got lost in the game and I was fighting over a Porsche.
02:53:27 And I shot some guys up and I punctured their tires
02:53:31 and I got the Porsche.
02:53:33 Now I take the headset off and what was that for?
02:53:35 Nothing, it was just, it was a data structure
02:53:37 and the data structure is gone.
02:53:39 So all of the wars, the fighting and the reputations
02:53:42 and all this stuff, it’s just a headset.
02:53:49 So my theory says that intellectually,
02:53:52 my mind, my emotions rebel all over the place.
02:53:57 It’s like I, you know, and so I have to meditate.
02:54:02 I meditate a lot.
02:54:03 What percent of the day would you say you spend
02:54:06 as a physicalist sort of living life,
02:54:11 pretending your car matters, your reputation matters?
02:54:16 Like how much, what’s that Tom Waits song,
02:54:19 I like my town with a little drop of poison.
02:54:22 How much poison do you allow yourself to have?
02:54:25 I think my default mode is physicalist.
02:54:27 I think that that’s just the default.
02:54:30 When I’m not being conscious, consciously attentive.
02:54:37 Then intellectually consciously attentive,
02:54:39 because if you’re just, you’re still,
02:54:40 if you’re tasting coffee and not thinking
02:54:43 or drinking or just taking in the sunset,
02:54:45 you’re not being intellectual,
02:54:47 but you’re still experiencing it.
02:54:49 So it’s when you turn on the introspective machine,
02:54:53 that’s when you can start.
02:54:54 And turn off the thinker,
02:54:56 when I actually just start looking without thinking.
02:55:00 So that’s when I feel like I,
02:55:03 all of a sudden I’m starting to see through.
02:55:06 Sort of like, okay, part of the addiction to the interface
02:55:13 is all the stories I’m telling about it.
02:55:14 It’s really important for me to get that,
02:55:15 really important to do that.
02:55:18 So I’m telling all these stories and so I’m all wrapped up.
02:55:21 Almost all of the mind stuff that’s going on in my head
02:55:24 is about attachment to the interface.
02:55:28 And so what I found is that the,
02:55:34 essentially the only way to really detach
02:55:37 from the interface is to literally let go
02:55:42 of thoughts altogether.
02:55:44 And then all of a sudden, even my identity,
02:55:49 my whole history, my name, my education,
02:55:52 all this stuff is almost irrelevant
02:55:54 because it’s just now here is the present moment.
02:56:00 And this is the reality right now.
02:56:03 And all of that other stuff is an interface story.
02:56:07 But this conscious experience right now,
02:56:09 this is the only reality as far as I can tell.
02:56:14 The rest of it’s a story.
02:56:17 But that is, again, not my default.
02:56:20 That is, I have to make a really conscious choice
02:56:25 to say, okay, I know intellectually
02:56:28 this is all an interface.
02:56:30 I’m gonna take the headset off and so forth.
02:56:33 And then immediately sink back into the game
02:56:36 and just be out there playing the game and get lost in it.
02:56:39 So I’m always lost in the game
02:56:41 unless I literally consciously choose to stop thinking.
02:56:46 Isn’t it terrifying to acknowledge
02:56:50 that, to look beyond the game?
02:56:56 Isn’t it?
02:56:57 It scares the hell out of me.
02:56:59 It really is scary because I’m so attached.
02:57:03 I’m attached to this body.
02:57:04 I’m attached to the interface.
02:57:05 Are you ever worried about breaking your brain a bit?
02:57:09 Meaning like, it’s, I mean, some of these ideas,
02:57:14 some of these ideas, when you think about reality,
02:57:17 even with like Einstein, just realizing,
02:57:21 you said interface, just realizing that light,
02:57:26 that there’s a speed of light
02:57:28 and you can’t go faster than the speed of light
02:57:29 and what kind of things black holes can do with light,
02:57:34 even that can mess with your head.
02:57:37 Yes.
02:57:38 But that’s still space time.
02:57:41 That’s a big mess, but it’s still just space time.
02:57:42 It’s still a property of our interface.
02:57:44 That’s right.
02:57:45 But it’s still like, even Einstein realized
02:57:49 that this particular thing,
02:57:51 some of the stories we tell ourselves
02:57:53 is constructing interfaces
02:57:56 that are oversimplifying the way things work
02:58:00 because it’s nice.
02:58:01 The stories are nice.
02:58:03 Stories are nice.
02:58:04 I mean, just like video games, they’re nice.
02:58:07 Right, but Einstein was a realist, right?
02:58:10 He was a famous realist in the sense
02:58:12 that he was very explicit in a 1935 paper
02:58:15 with Podolsky and Rosen, the EPR paper, right?
02:58:19 They said, if without in any way disturbing a system,
02:58:26 I can predict with probability one,
02:58:28 the outcome of a measurement,
02:58:30 then there exists in reality that element, right?
02:58:36 That value that, and we now know from quantum theory
02:58:39 that that’s false.
02:58:41 Einstein’s idea of local realism is strictly speaking false.
02:58:46 Yeah.
02:58:47 And so we can predict, we can set up,
02:58:50 in quantum theory, you can set up,
02:58:52 and there’s a paper by Chris Fuchs, quantum Bayesianism,
02:58:55 where he scouts this out.
02:58:58 It was done by other people,
02:58:58 but he gives a good presentation of this,
02:59:00 where they have a sequence of something
02:59:02 like nine different quantum measurements that you can make.
02:59:05 And you can predict with probability one
02:59:08 what a particular outcome will be,
02:59:10 but you can actually prove that it’s impossible
02:59:14 that the value existed before you made the measurement.
02:59:18 So you know with probability one what you’re gonna get,
02:59:20 but you also know with certainty
02:59:22 that that value was not there
02:59:23 until you made the measurement.
02:59:25 So we know from quantum theory
02:59:27 that the act of observation is an act of fact creation.
02:59:32 And that is built into what I’m saying
02:59:35 with this theory of consciousness.
02:59:36 If consciousness is fundamental,
02:59:38 space time itself is an act of fact creation.
02:59:42 It’s an interface that we create, consciousness creates,
02:59:44 plus all the objects in it.
02:59:46 So local realism is not true.
02:59:50 Quantum theory has established that.
02:59:51 Also noncontextual realism is not true.
02:59:54 And that fits in perfectly with this idea
02:59:57 that consciousness is fundamental.
02:59:59 These things are, these exist as data structures
03:00:01 when we create them.
03:00:03 As Chris Fuchs says, the act of observation
03:00:06 is an act of fact creation.
03:00:08 But I must say on a personal level,
03:00:12 I’m having to spend,
03:00:16 I spend a couple hours a day
03:00:19 just sitting in meditation on this
03:00:22 and facing the rebellion in me
03:00:27 that goes to the core,
03:00:28 it feels like it goes to the core of my being,
03:00:30 rebellion against these ideas.
03:00:31 So here it’s very, very interesting
03:00:33 for me to look at this because,
03:00:34 so here I’m a scientist and I’m a person.
03:00:37 The science is really clear.
03:00:39 Local realism is false.
03:00:40 Noncontextual realism is false.
03:00:42 Space time is doomed.
03:00:43 It’s very, very clear.
03:00:44 It couldn’t be clearer.
03:00:47 And my emotions rebel left and right.
03:00:50 When I sit there and say, okay,
03:00:52 I am not something in space and time.
03:00:55 Something inside of me says, you’re crazy.
03:00:57 Of course you are.
03:00:58 And I’m completely attached to it.
03:01:00 I’m completely attached to all this stuff.
03:01:02 I’m attached to my body.
03:01:02 I’m attached to the headset.
03:01:04 I’m attached to my car.
03:01:06 I’m attached to people.
03:01:07 I’m attached to all of it.
03:01:09 And yet I know as an absolute fact,
03:01:12 I’m gonna walk away from all of it.
03:01:14 I’m gonna die.
03:01:19 In fact, I almost died last year.
03:01:21 COVID almost killed me.
03:01:24 I sent a goodbye text to my wife.
03:01:26 So I thought I was done.
03:01:28 You really did.
03:01:29 I sent her a goodbye.
03:01:30 I was in the emergency room and it had attacked my heart
03:01:35 and it had been at 190 beats per minute for 36 hours.
03:01:40 I couldn’t last much longer.
03:01:41 I knew I couldn’t, they couldn’t stop it.
03:01:43 So that was it.
03:01:46 So that was it.
03:01:47 So I texted her goodbye from the emergency room.
03:01:50 I love you, goodbye kind of thing.
03:01:52 Yeah, right.
03:01:53 Yeah, that was it.
03:01:54 So, so.
03:01:55 Were you afraid?
03:01:57 God, it scares the hell out of you, right?
03:01:59 But there was, you’re just feeling so bad anyway
03:02:02 that sort of you’re scared, but you’re just feeling so bad
03:02:06 that in some sense you just want it to stop anyway.
03:02:10 So I’ve been there and faced it just a year ago.
03:02:16 How did that change you, by the way?
03:02:18 Having this intellectual reality that’s so challenging
03:02:22 that you meditate on, it’s just an interface.
03:02:25 And one of the hardest things to come to terms with
03:02:28 is that that means that it’s gonna end.
03:02:35 How did that change you having come so close
03:02:37 to the reality of it?
03:02:38 It’s not just an intellectual reality,
03:02:39 it’s a reality of death.
03:02:43 It’s forced, I’ve meditated for 20 years now.
03:02:47 And I would say averaging three or four hours a day.
03:02:52 But it’s put a new urgency,
03:02:57 but urgency is not the right word
03:02:59 because it’s riveted my attention, I’ll put it that way.
03:03:05 It’s really riveted my attention and I’ve really paid,
03:03:10 I spent a lot more time looking up
03:03:12 what spiritual traditions say.
03:03:15 I don’t, by the way, again, not taking it with the,
03:03:19 take it all with a grain of salt.
03:03:21 But on the other hand, I think it’s stupid for me
03:03:23 to ignore it.
03:03:24 So I try to listen to the best ideas
03:03:28 and to sort out nonsense from,
03:03:32 and we all have to do it for ourselves, right?
03:03:34 It’s not easy.
03:03:35 So what makes sense?
03:03:37 And I have the advantage of some science
03:03:39 so I can look at what science says
03:03:40 and try to compare with spiritual tradition.
03:03:43 I try to sort it out for myself.
03:03:46 But then I also look and realize
03:03:48 that there’s another aspect to me,
03:03:49 which is this whole emotional aspect.
03:03:51 The, I seem to be wired up
03:03:56 as evolutionary psychology says I’m wired up, right?
03:04:00 All these defensive mechanisms, you know,
03:04:03 I’m inclined to lie if I need to.
03:04:06 I’m inclined to be angry, to protect myself,
03:04:10 to have an in group and an out group,
03:04:12 to try to make my reputation as big as possible,
03:04:16 to try to demean the out group.
03:04:18 There’s all these things
03:04:19 that evolutionary psychology is spot on.
03:04:22 It’s really bright about the human condition.
03:04:25 And yet I think evolution, as I said, evolutionary theory
03:04:29 is a projection of a deeper theory
03:04:31 where there may be no competition.
03:04:33 So how, so I’m in this very interesting position
03:04:37 where I feel like, okay,
03:04:40 according to my own theory, I’m consciousness.
03:04:42 And maybe this is what it means
03:04:43 for consciousness to wake up.
03:04:46 It’s not easy.
03:04:48 It’s almost like I have,
03:04:52 I feel like I have real skin in the game.
03:04:54 It really is scary.
03:04:55 I really was scared when I was about to die.
03:04:58 It really was hard to say goodbye to my wife.
03:05:02 It really, it really pained.
03:05:04 And to then look at that and then look at the fact
03:05:09 that I’m gonna walk away from this anyway
03:05:11 and it’s just an interface.
03:05:12 How do I, so it’s trying to put all this stuff together
03:05:16 and really grok it, so to speak,
03:05:19 not just intellectually, but grok it at an emotional level.
03:05:22 Yeah, what are you afraid of,
03:05:23 you silly evolved organism
03:05:26 that’s gotten way too attached to the interface?
03:05:30 What are you really afraid of?
03:05:32 That’s right.
03:05:33 Is there a…
03:05:34 Very personal, you know, it’s very, very personal.
03:05:36 Yeah.
03:05:37 Yeah.
03:05:38 I mean, speaking of the text,
03:05:40 what do you think is this whole love thing?
03:05:43 What’s the role of love in our human condition?
03:05:49 This interface thing we have,
03:05:51 is this somehow interweaved,
03:05:53 interconnected with consciousness?
03:05:54 This attachment we have to other humans
03:05:56 and this deep, like some quality to it
03:06:02 that seems very interesting, peculiar.
03:06:07 Well, there are two levels I would think about that.
03:06:11 There’s love in the sexual sense
03:06:12 and there’s love in a deeper sense.
03:06:15 And in the sexual sense,
03:06:16 we can give an evolutionary account of that and so forth.
03:06:20 And I think that’s pretty clear to people.
03:06:24 In this deeper sense, right?
03:06:27 So of course, I love my wife in a sexual sense,
03:06:32 but there is a deeper sense as well.
03:06:34 When I was saying goodbye to her,
03:06:35 there was a much deeper love that was really at play there.
03:06:38 That’s one place where I think
03:06:40 that the mixed bag from spiritual traditions
03:06:43 has something right.
03:06:44 When they say, love your neighbor as yourself,
03:06:46 that in some sense, love is fundamental.
03:06:49 I think that they’re onto something,
03:06:51 something very, very deep and profound.
03:06:54 And every once in a while,
03:06:57 I can get a personal glimpse of that,
03:06:58 especially when I’m in the space with no thought.
03:07:03 When I can really let go of thoughts,
03:07:06 I get little glimpses of a love
03:07:10 in the sense that I’m not separate.
03:07:11 It’s a love in the sense that I’m not different from that.
03:07:18 If you and I are separate, then I can fight you.
03:07:21 But if you and I are the same, if there’s a union there.
03:07:25 The togetherness of it, yeah.
03:07:26 What, who’s God?
03:07:29 All those gods, the stories that have been told
03:07:32 throughout history, you said through the spiritual traditions.
03:07:36 What do you think that is?
03:07:37 Is that us trying to find that common thing at the core?
03:07:44 Well, in many traditions, not all.
03:07:50 The one I was raised in, so my dad was a Protestant minister.
03:07:54 We tend to think of God as a being.
03:08:00 But I think that that’s not right.
03:08:02 I think the closest way to think about God is being, period.
03:08:06 Not a being, but being, the very ground of being itself is God.
03:08:12 I think that’s the deep, and from my point of view,
03:08:16 that’s the ground of consciousness.
03:08:17 So the ground of conscious being is what we might call God.
03:08:22 But the word God has always been,
03:08:25 for example, you don’t believe the same God as my God,
03:08:27 so I’m gonna fight you, or we’ll have wars over,
03:08:30 because the being, the specific being that you call God
03:08:34 is different from the being that I call God,
03:08:35 and so we fight.
03:08:36 Whereas if it’s not a being, but just being,
03:08:40 and you and I share a being,
03:08:42 then you and I are not separate,
03:08:45 and there’s no reason to fight.
03:08:46 We’re both part of that one being,
03:08:48 and loving you is loving myself,
03:08:51 because we’re all part of that one being.
03:08:54 The spiritual traditions that point to that,
03:08:57 I think are pointing in a very interesting direction,
03:09:01 and that does seem to match with the mathematics
03:09:04 of the conscious agent stuff
03:09:05 that I’ve been working on as well,
03:09:07 that it really fits with that, although that wasn’t my goal.
03:09:11 Is there, you mentioned,
03:09:15 you mentioned that the young physicists that you talk to,
03:09:19 or whose work you follow, have quite a lot of fun
03:09:23 breaking with the traditions of the past,
03:09:26 the assumptions of the past.
03:09:28 What advice would you give to young people today,
03:09:31 in high school, in college, not just physicists,
03:09:34 but in general, how to have a career they can be proud of,
03:09:38 how they can have a life they can be proud of,
03:09:41 how to make their way in the world,
03:09:43 from the lessons, from the wins and the losses
03:09:45 in your own life, what little insights could you pull out?
03:09:50 I would say the universe is a lot more interesting
03:09:53 than you might expect, and you are a lot more special
03:09:58 and interesting than you might expect.
03:09:59 You might think that you’re just a little, tiny,
03:10:03 irrelevant, 100 pound, 200 pound person
03:10:09 in a vast billions of light years across space,
03:10:14 and that’s not the case.
03:10:15 You are, in some sense, the being that’s creating
03:10:18 that space all the time, every time you look.
03:10:21 So, waking up to who you really are,
03:10:25 outside of space and time,
03:10:27 as the author of space and time,
03:10:29 as the author of everything that you see.
03:10:32 The author of space and time, sorry.
03:10:36 You’re the author of space and time,
03:10:38 and I’m the author of space and time,
03:10:40 and space and time is just one little data structure.
03:10:42 Many other consciousnesses are creating
03:10:44 other data structures, they’re authors
03:10:46 of various other things.
03:10:48 So, realizing, and then realizing that,
03:10:52 I had this feeling growing up, going to college,
03:10:54 reading all these textbooks, oh man, it’s all been done.
03:10:59 If I’d just been there 50 years ago,
03:11:00 I could have discovered this stuff,
03:11:01 but it’s all in the textbooks now.
03:11:03 Well, believe me, the textbooks are gonna look silly
03:11:07 in 50 years, and it’s your chance
03:11:10 to write the new textbook.
03:11:11 So, of course, study the current textbooks.
03:11:14 You have to understand them.
03:11:15 There’s no way to progress until you understand
03:11:19 what’s been done, but then,
03:11:23 the only limit is your imagination, frankly.
03:11:26 That’s the only limit.
03:11:26 The greatest books, the greatest textbooks
03:11:29 ever written on Earth are yet to be written.
03:11:31 Exactly.
03:11:35 What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
03:11:36 What’s the meaning of life from your limited interface?
03:11:40 Can you figure it all out, like why?
03:11:43 So, you said the universe is kind of trying to figure
03:11:46 itself out through us.
03:11:49 Why?
03:11:50 Why?
03:11:54 Yeah, that’s the closest I’ve come.
03:11:55 So, I’ll give you, so I will say that I don’t know,
03:12:00 but here’s my guess, right?
03:12:02 That’s a good first sentence.
03:12:03 That’s a good starting point.
03:12:05 And maybe that’s gonna be a profound part
03:12:08 of the final answer is to start with the I don’t know.
03:12:10 It’s quite possible that that’s really important
03:12:13 to start with the I don’t know.
03:12:15 My guess is that if consciousness is fundamental
03:12:18 and if Gödel’s incompleteness theorem holds here,
03:12:22 and there’s infinite variety of structures
03:12:27 for consciousness to some sense explore,
03:12:34 that maybe that’s what it’s about.
03:12:37 This is something that Annika and I talked about a little bit
03:12:39 and she doesn’t like this way of talking about it.
03:12:40 And so I’m gonna have to talk with her some more
03:12:42 about this way of talking.
03:12:43 But right now I’ll just put it this way
03:12:45 and I’ll have to talk with her more
03:12:46 and see if I can say it more clearly.
03:12:48 But the way I’m talking about it now is that
03:12:55 there’s a sense in which there’s being
03:13:01 and then there’s the experiences or forms
03:13:03 that come out of being.
03:13:05 That’s one deep, deep mystery.
03:13:09 And the question that you asked, what is it all about?
03:13:13 Somehow it’s related to that.
03:13:15 Why does being, why doesn’t it just stay without any forms?
03:13:19 Why do we have experiences?
03:13:22 Why not just have, when you close your eyes
03:13:26 and pay attention to what’s behind you, there’s nothing.
03:13:30 But there’s being.
03:13:30 So why don’t we just stop there?
03:13:35 Why didn’t we just stop there?
03:13:37 Why did we create all tables and chairs
03:13:39 and the sun and moon and people?
03:13:41 All this really complicated stuff, why?
03:13:44 And all I can guess right now,
03:13:49 and I’ll probably kick myself in a couple of years
03:13:51 and say that was dumb, but all I can guess right now
03:13:53 is that somehow consciousness wakes up to itself
03:13:57 by knowing what it’s not.
03:13:59 So here I am, I’m not this body.
03:14:02 And I sort of saw that, it was sort of in my face
03:14:05 when I sent a text goodbye.
03:14:08 But then as soon as I’m better, it’s sort of like,
03:14:10 okay, I sort of don’t wanna go there, right?
03:14:13 I, okay, so I just, so I am my body.
03:14:17 I go back to the standard thing, I am my body
03:14:19 and then I want to get that car.
03:14:21 And even though I was just about to die a year ago,
03:14:24 so that comes rushing back.
03:14:26 So consciousness immerses itself fully
03:14:31 into a particular headset.
03:14:36 Gets lost in it and then slowly wakes up.
03:14:39 Just so it can escape and that is the waking up,
03:14:41 but it needs to have a negative.
03:14:43 It needs to know what it’s not.
03:14:44 It needs to know what you are.
03:14:47 You have to say, oh, I’m not that, I’m not that.
03:14:49 That wasn’t important, that wasn’t important.
03:14:52 That’s really powerful.
03:14:53 Don, let me just say that because I’ve been
03:14:57 a long term fan of yours and we’re supposed
03:15:01 to have a conversation during this very difficult moment
03:15:03 in your life, let me just say you’re a truly special person
03:15:06 and I for one, I know there’s a lot of others that agree.
03:15:10 I’m glad that you’re still here with us on this earth
03:15:13 if for a short time.
03:15:17 So whatever, whatever the universe,
03:15:21 whatever plan it has for you that brought you close
03:15:25 to death to maybe enlighten you some kind of way,
03:15:30 I think it has an interesting plan for you.
03:15:34 You’re one of the truly special humans
03:15:35 and it’s a huge honor that you would sit
03:15:37 and talk with me today.
03:15:38 Thank you so much.
03:15:39 Thank you very much, Lex.
03:15:40 I really appreciate that, thank you.
03:15:42 Thanks for listening to this conversation
03:15:44 with Donald Hoffman.
03:15:45 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
03:15:48 in the description and now, let me leave you
03:15:50 with some words from Albert Einstein,
03:15:53 relevant to the ideas discussed in this conversation.
03:15:56 Time and space are modes by which we think
03:16:01 and not conditions in which we live.
03:16:03 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.