Donald Hoffman: Consciousness goes deeper then spacetime | "Wake up to what you really are!"

Coming up on the Nick Stanley show. Perhaps our senses didn't evolve to show us reality as it is. We're all basically, perhaps, just one consciousness looking at itself through different avatars. We have access to that very, very deep realm of consciousness, the infinite, unbounded intelligence that that we are at the deepest level. All of our words, all of our theories are merely pointers. The real thing is the conscious experience. The taste of cinnamon, the experience of awareness without any content. That's the real thing. Spirituality is about waking up to what you really are. It must be the case that you've got to really commit to the illusion to really wake up from the illusion and know that you are not that illusion. Let's take the red pill, stay in Wonderland, and let Dr. Hoffman show us how deep the rabbit hole [Music] goes.

Don H. Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and professor emeritus at UC Irvine. He studies consciousness, visual perception, and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. He is the author of "The Case Against Reality," an excellent book that argues that our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, but instead our interfaces constructed by natural selection. He contends that evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Drawing on 30 years of research in evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, "The Case Against Reality" makes the mind-bending, yet utterly convincing, case that the world that we see is nothing like what we experience through our eyes. His work theorizes that an interconnected consciousness exists beyond space and time and may be the author of everything we define as reality. He has appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, The Tim Ferris Show, The Jordan Peterson podcast, and Deepo Trois podcast, and today he's on the Nick Stanley show. Listener, I'm convinced that Don will one day receive a Nobel Prize for his work. But these concepts are challenging. As Schopenhauer once said, "All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident." I've experienced all three stages in studying Dr. Hoffman's work, and you might too, as you move through this conversation. But if you can keep an open mind, I'm confident that you'll end up in a better place for having interacted with these ideas. So, without further ado, Dr. Hoffman, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Nick. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for that kind introduction.

My pleasure. You started your line of inquiry by trying to locate where consciousness existed in the brain. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Let's start there and how all of this developed.

Yes, many of my colleagues now in the neurosciences are very interested in in consciousness, which when I was a graduate student, uh, in the 1980s, early 1980s, we really weren't allowed to talk about consciousness. It was considered a schmythical kind of idea, and we needed to do serious work. But Francis Crick started saying, you know, we really need to study consciousness. And and he was the winner of the Nobel Prize along with Watson for the work on the structure of DNA. And and so he had quite a bit of sway, right? And his work with Christof Koch really became evident that it was time for us to start looking at this as a good technical problem: how our conscious experiences related to brain activity. And so, so many of my colleagues now are are studying that. And and what they're looking for are neural correlates of consciousness. What parts of the brain seem to be sort of jointly sufficient for generating conscious experiences? And but the assumption, I would say, of most, most of my colleagues, 99% of them, is that physical systems are fundamental. So space and time and physical systems, and inside space and time are fundamental. In the case of brains, it would be neurons. There's various kinds of neural and glial cells that are that are that constitute the brain, and somehow networks of these neurons with the right computational or causal properties, um, somehow give rise to consciousness. And so most of my colleagues who are studying consciousness in neurosciences are taking that that point of view.

What did you discover as you kept looking further into that?

Perhaps our senses didn't evolve to show us reality as it is. If we're not seeing reality as it is, then when we look at brains and neurons, we're not seeing reality as it is. And and so the whole idea that brains and neurons are creating conscious experiences needs to be revisited. Doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, but we need to look at that a little bit more more closely. But some work I was doing in studying visual perception and the rules that visual perception uses, just you, independent of evolution, just looking at perception itself, made me realize, you know, that as many of my colleagues were saying, perception is a process of inference. And inferences require premises. And and if your premises are wild, then your conclusions may not be related to objective reality. And so I needed to really understand what makes me think that the premises that are guiding our perceptual interpretation of the world are are somehow going to give us access to reality. I decided I really needed to know evolutionary game theory. I mean, this is a mathematical question. You got to now jump in. So I got a couple of graduate students who were really quite bright, Justin Mark and Brian Maran, and we jumped in. We got a book on evolutionary game theory, learned the mathematics, started running simulations. What we found was, to to our surprise, that organisms in these simulations that saw reality as it is went extinct when they were competing against organisms that that didn't see any of reality and were just tuned to what evolution calls the fitness payoff functions.

I thought that might have happened because it takes a lot of resources. You know, evolution might be shaping us with tricks and hacks, shortcuts, heuristics. And I thought maybe that was going to be the reason why. But as we looked at the simulations, and this is why you do the science because you get surprised. What I found was, yes, that was part of it. Heuristics and shortcuts and tricks were part of the reason why evolution wasn't shaping us to see the truth. But the real thing was that the fitness payoff functions, these are the things that are actually guiding evolution according to evolutionary game theory. These fitness payoff functions, it's roughly, if you're playing a video game and you get points for, you know, killing certain things or crossing certain boundaries or whatever, and if you get enough points, uh, in a short enough period of time, you might survive and go to the next level of the game. Well, in evolutionary theory, the idea is that, um, you're trying to get these fitness payoff points. And if you get enough of them in a short amount of time, then you don't go to the next level, but you, you have kids that go to the next level. So that's sort of the analogy of what these fitness payout. It's a technical thing, but it's intuitive. And and what I found with with my graduate students, and it was really, I mean, again, hats off to my graduate students, Brian Maran and Justin Mark, who helped me really see this, the fitness payoff functions almost never contain information about reality.

Mhm. Right. They're functions from reality to the payoffs. That's the, the, what we call the domain of the function. The range is some numbers like from zero to 100. Zero means you lose, 100 means you've got the most points you possibly could. So it's, it's, it's a function. And and we realized that if that function doesn't contain any information about the structure of the world, there's no way that it could shape your sensory systems to see the structure of the world. And that's, that was the big discovery. So, yeah, heuristics and shortcuts and doing things, you know, quick and cheap, that's part of it. But the real deep thing that came out of it is that evolution entails that the fitness functions, which are involved in shaping our sensory perceptions, don't have the information needed to shape them to see the truth. And so they couldn't shape us to see the truth. So, so now there's lots of details we can go into if you, if you want, but, but that's the top level.

Well, to summarize at the top level, so you're running these evolutionary simulations, right? And you've got different organisms in the simulations, and some can see reality for what it is, and some are trained just for fitness payoffs, right? And the ones that see reality as it is keep getting killed off because they're not scoring as many points.

That's right.

As the ones that are trained for fitness.

Exactly. Their offspring are advancing to the next level.

That's right. And that leads you to this conclusion that we as humans, everything that exists on planet Earth, would be subject to the same rules and forces of evolution to not be trained to see reality, but to see fitness payoffs instead.

That's exactly right. So this would be a result not just about human perception, but about perception for all species, period. That we. And I should say, my attitude as a scientist in all of this, right? I'm using the theory of evolution by natural selection because it's the single best theory we have right now. There, there's nothing better than Darwin's theory with the new mathematical spin to understand biological evolution. There's just nothing else. So I'm not saying that evolutionary theory is correct or the final answer. It's the best answer we have so far. And so as a scientist, it's my duty to take the best we have so far, not to not to believe it, but to ask, what does it entail about our perceptions? Now, you might say, well, so much the worse for evolutionary theory. And I'm perfectly fine with that as well. But of course, if you say that, then what is your alternative? And right now, there are no alternatives for evolution that come anywhere near the the power of, you know, Darwin's theory for explaining biological evolution.

You've you've come to this insight that perhaps we don't perceive reality as it exists. And what was the next step in your inquiry as to what reality might be?

Well, first, I should say, the next step was to go to my good, uh, friend and longtime collaborator, Chayton Prash, who is a real mathematician, and say, look, we have this game result. Suggest to me there's a theorem here. And so with working with Chayton, but, you know, Chayton was the mathematician, I'm, I'm, I'm not a mathematician. Um, we published a couple of papers where we actually have theorems now. So you, there's one thing to do games, uh, but real scientists won't be completely convinced by games. Theorems. And so we published a couple theorems. But your question is, where do I go from there in terms of how I should think about perceptions when they're not the truth? Or yeah, and how you came to the idea of the desktop interface as a as a metaphor for what we're actually experiencing.

Yes, it's interesting that I had started to come to that conclusion even prior to the evolutionary work. So I have a book called "Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See." And it's that book is not about evolution. I almost never mention evolution in that book. There, I'm just looking straight at how does vision work, and also I talk a little bit about how our, our touch perceptions work. And there, I, I canvassed 30, 35 rules that our field has discovered, uh, about how we construct our visual world. And that was the interesting thing in that, in that book. You know, the title is "Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See," and so it's a, it's a constructive process. Technically, we'll talk, they talk about Bayesian inference and so forth, but when you get down to it, it's, it's really a construction process. And so I knew that we were constructing, and that's, so that was standard in, in my field. I would not, without exceptions, there, of course, every, every idea in science has controversy, but I would say the vast majority of my colleagues took it that perception as Bayesian inference was a, was a pretty solid foundation. And so even in my book, "Visual Intelligence," at the very end, I, I start speculating about, well, this, this could be like a, a VR. And that was part of what was in the back of my mind when I said, well, you know, a few years later, well, let's go check with, you know, evolutionary theory to see, does, would it say it's also a VR?

So then I think the reason I went after this, this headset metaphor, VR metaphor, or desktop metaphor, from from the evolutionary point of view is, how are you going to explain to people in a way that they'd understand? Why would evolution shape you not to see the truth? I mean, clearly, it seems perceptions that show you reality as it is are going to make you more fit. I mean, that's just seems obvious, right? How, how are you going to be more fit? Well, by seeing reality more, more clearly. So how in the world could you explain to people why that might not be the case? And I realized, well, the desktop on your computer is a really good metaphor for that. If you had to actually to write a program or send an email or or, you know, look at a photo, if you had to toggle voltages in your computer to do that, they wouldn't be selling like hotcakes, right? We couldn't do it. But so you have a desktop interface which hides what you're doing. What you're really doing is toggling in a, in a precise sequence, millions of voltages and other stuff inside of some really complicated computer. You don't want to see any of that reality. You just want to press a couple, couple buttons and have your photo pop up and, and do a few things, and, you know, change the brightness and contrast. If you had to toggle millions of voltages, you wouldn't. So I realized that that's a really good metaphor. A desktop is useful because it hides the truth. It, it controls the truth. It lets you control the truth, but it keeps you ignorant of what you're doing and it keeps you ignorant of that truth. And so I realized that makes perfect sense for evolution. The whole point from evolutionary theory is not to see the truth. It's to have kids, right? We're not here to see truth. You're here to have kids. And so what's the quickest way? The, the, the cheapest way, right? Evolution does things on the cheap. Um, making you see all the reality and toggle all the bits. Good luck. You're going to die. So it gives you a headset that lets you play the game of life. So that's, that was sort of the metaphor. If you want to play the game of life, you need a headset that that hides the details of reality and just lets you play the game. It's like a VR headset and a VR game that we're playing.

Right, right. And I thought it was, was interesting that you said that a lot of quantum mechanics and study into reality was almost like looking more and more at the at the pixels on the desktop, uh, and that studying the pixels is not getting at what's actually inside the computer. If we're still using that metaphor.

One surprising implication of what I've just been saying is that space and time themselves are not fundamental reality. They're just the format of our VR headset.

Mhm. Now, so here's a cognitive scientist now treading on the turf of the physicist, right? Because space and time, that, that's the physicist's turf, quantum theory, and general relativity, and special relativity, and so forth. So, you know, I'm treading outside of my field. This is quite a claim for a cognitive scientist to say space-time can't be fundamental. You mean on evolutionary grounds? And so you, you, I can imagine people saying, well, some cognitive scientists saying, this, he's not even evolutionary biology. He's, he's just a cognitive scientist, and he's using evolutionary biology. So surely the physicists will put him in his place. So I started looking at, at the physics of this, right? And there, it's quite striking that the physicists themselves now, um, I found a paper in 2005, David Gross, Nobel Prize winner for his work on, um, the strong force, yeah, in 2005, which was 100 years after Einstein's publication in 1905 of special relativity. So it was, you know, it was a 100-year anniversary. It was a big deal for the physicists. There, of course, giving praise to Einstein, thank you, and so forth. And and Gross does that in his his paper, and then in good scientific style says, here's the problem: spacetime is doomed. And that's a quote. Spacetime is doomed. It cannot be fundamental. And he argues, so Gross argues that it can't be fundamental because, uh, it, it falls apart at the Planck scale. It has, so when you go to smaller and smaller scales of space, which you can, but by using higher and higher energies, you can, in smaller and smaller wavelengths of light, you can go to smaller scales of space and measure stuff, right? That's what microscopes do. They use smaller and smaller wavelengths of light to resolve finer and finer details. But there's a limit to that, as it turns out. And Einstein's theory, together with a couple of things from quantum theory, E equals H nu, which actually was from Einstein himself, so Einstein himself, his theories were precise enough to tell us where they stop. Spacetime. Einstein's spacetime has no operational meaning at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. It's over, right? And so Gross is saying in 2005, thank you, Einstein, for spacetime, and spacetime is doomed. So I realized, wow, okay, this is, um, along the same lines of of what I'm getting from evolutionary biology, that spacetime is a useful data structure, but from my point of view, a shallow data structure. It falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters, just 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So we have, it's a, it's only a four-dimensional headset. So it's a very, very small number of dimensions. It falls apart very, very quickly. 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So begin to. So that's what you'd expect from a cheap model headset from an evolutionary point of view. That, and that's what we got. A cheap model headset that's hiding reality.

Now, I should say, be very careful here. I won't just say the physicists are saying that that's that spacetime is doomed. It's a certain group of physicists who are the specialists in spa, high energy theoretical physicists. So that's, that's the brand. So David Gross, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and several other, you know, big names in that field. So these are the ones who it's their specialty, right? They're the ones that are telling us that spacetime is doomed. I've, I've actually talked with many quantum theorists at at consciousness conferences. So these are PhDs in quantum theory who are interested in consciousness and giving talks. And I've asked many of them at the end of their talks, so what do you think about, you know, the recent work about spacetime is not fundamental? And they haven't even heard of it. Right, right. So, so, so even physicists don't know about this. And the only reason that, you know, Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, knows about it is because I went looking for it. It's sort of like, okay, if evolution is saying this, I, you know, I better check with the physicists. Are they saying something different? And well, most physicists don't know it. But the physicists, the high energy theoretical physicists are saying spacetime is doomed. Well, that's what evolution says too. So we have two of our, our pillars of modern science, you know, Einstein's theory of spacetime with with quantum theory, and evolution by natural selection, both saying spacetime is not fundamental reality.

Yeah, I think one of the things that's really exciting about your work is this multidisciplinary approach that you had ideas as a neuroscientist, but then brought in the mathematics, yes, and brought in the, was it high energy theoretical physics?

Yeah, high energy theoretical physics.

And really followed the math and the science wherever it led, even though it led to this very surprising and to some people upsetting place. Um, but I do think it takes a lot of academic integrity and bravery to just keep running with it if that's where the math and the science are leading you. Um, and actually, the gentleman who first turned me on to your work, um, wanted to make sure that I said thank you for that, that bravery and, and real just curiosity that was going to go wherever your work led you, um, and not having preconceived notions about where you would end up. So thank you for that.

Well, well, thank you. Yeah, it's, it's my pleasure. And I, I, I should thank the scientific community because the way that it's set up, that this is what tenure is about. Tenure is not, you know, you now you're safe, you don't have to do. You can't. Tenure is there for, now we're saying, okay, we know that you can do research. Now we're saying you can do risky research. Right, right. Before tenure, don't do risky research. Do show us that you can do stuff. After tenure, your imagination can go wild. We know that you can do good research, so go do it. And that, so that's really good about tenure in academics. And also the scientific community, right, right. So 99% of my colleagues disagree with me. Mhm. But they don't avoid me, right? We engage in intellectual discussions. And and they may disagree, but so that's what I love about the scientific community. It, and if, of course, if they come up with some devastating argument against me that I, I find compelling, then I would just abandon what I'm so that's right. So, so it's really just having that's what academic freedom is about, and tenure is about, is to allow people to. And most, you know, most interesting work, of course, goes against the current grain. That's that's why it's interesting. So, yeah, I think it was Max Planck who who said that science progresses one funeral at a time, or something like that.

I like that. Yeah, I think we need more of that positive disagreement in all of society. But, um, we'll come back to that later when we get to the, uh, interconnected consciousness and what that might mean for how we can all interact with each other. So, looking for where consciousness originates, discovering that reality is not what it appears to be, and that space and time itself are doomed, as in they are not the most fundamental level of existence. Is that the right word?

Sure.

What was, what was the next step from that point?

That's right. So the question then is, what's beyond spacetime? Right, right. If spacetime isn't it, if spacetime is just like a VR headset, well, what's outside? And as a scientist, again, there's a couple of things that are guiding me. One is, there is no theory of everything in science. So as science, of course, we want precise theories, but we, there's also a certain humility that's required because a scientific theory is just a set of assumptions, and then the conclusions that you can derive from that set of assumptions. If you grant me these assumptions, then I can explain all this wonderful stuff. Mhm. But you don't explain your assumptions. You assume them, right? And of course, I can give you a deeper theory that might explain those assumptions, but it'll have its own new assumptions. And so this is a never-ending process, and there's infinite job security in science. So this is a great job opportunity, infinite job security, because science will never even approach a theory of everything. So, so my attitude is, what's the next baby step? Right? Spacetime was a really, really good set of assumptions for our scientific endeavors. We thought it was the truth. It's not. It's just a headset. So what's outside? Now, what's interesting, before I talk about what I'm thinking about, yeah, the physicists in just the last 10 years have been doing this as well. They, the, the new generation is going, spacetime is doomed. What's outside spacetime? And they're looking, and they're finding stuff. It's called positive geometries. And there, this month is a kickoff for a big multi-million euro project, international, to start studying these positive geometries. In the last 10 years, so many discoveries have been made of these. They're like, so positive geometries are like these diamonds, these these objects outside of spacetime whose volumes encode really important physical interactions inside spacetime, like the probabilities of particles interacting and scattering, right? So the volumes of these things are are capturing what we call scattering amplitudes, scattering probabilities. And the, the structure, the vertices, the edges, the faces, is capturing properties of spacetime, locality, and unitarity. These are technical properties about spacetime, um, but, but they're doing it in a format entirely outside of spacetime and entirely beyond quantum theory. So these are geometries that don't care a bit about spacetime or quantum theory. Spacetime and quantum theory arise as special projections of these much deeper, but static structures. And so, so to name a few, there's the amplituhedron, the associahedron. And then there's, so these are some of the positive geometries. They're finding. And then they're finding these other objects that are what they call combinatorial objects that describe these geometries, and something called decorated permutations. So permutations are like shuffling cards, and decorated permutations are a slightly fancy twist on that. So these decorated permutations turn out to be able to classify these geometries. And so, so this is all brand new. Again, most physicists don't know about it. It's only the high energy theoretical physicists, and then a rogue cognitive scientist here and there who was looking at this stuff and going, oh, that's pretty interesting. But most people don't know about this. But these, these positive geometries allow you to compute the scattering probabilities, like two gluons hitting each other and four gluons go spraying out. When you do it, when you do that computation using the tools of spacetime, namely quantum field theory, so the standard tools, Feynman diagrams, and so forth. And we're talking about, say, a particle collider.

That's right. And that's right. Like a Large Hadron Collider or something at Fermilab or something like that, right? When you, when you do the computation using quantum field theory inside spacetime, just a single interaction, two gluons in, four gluons out, something like that, hundreds of pages of algebra for one inter. It's just a mess.

Mhm. When you do it with the new positive geometries, three or four terms, you can do it by hand, right? A single page. And so, so the mathematics, all of a sudden becomes simple. Well, simpler, right? Right. Until I can get up to the blackboard and do it from memory, I won't say it's simple. Okay. Um, and then they also discover that there are these symmetries that are true about the scattering processes that you can't see in, in the spacetime description of them. So letting go of spacetime makes the math simpler, dramatically simpler, not just a little, dramatically simpler, and allows you to see new symmetries that are true of the data. So there you have it. Those are, that's the killer app. And these are clues that you're on the right path when it simplifies the mathematics exponentially.

That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So, so, so that's why all of a sudden there's a big launch this month, you know, as we speak, this month, February of 2024, a multidisciplinary, multinational, um, push to go, what's going on with these positive geometries? What they're like obelisks, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, remember the little scene where all the apes are gathered around this obelisk that suddenly appeared, and they're, they're hooting and hollering and pounding on it and screaming? They, they know it's, it's really important. It, it's very meaningful, but they don't know what it means. And, and we're sort of like that right now. There's these obelisks beyond spacetime, these positive geometries, and they're saying, we can do powerful things, we make the math simpler, we show new symmetries, but there's no dynamics. They're just these jewels sitting out there. So, so we're in this very interesting position in in science where in just the last 10 years, the, the, the new generation of physicists have discovered these things, and they don't know what they mean. They know what they can do, they know that there's a lot more of them to discover and a lot deeper understanding of them to be had. And I presume that they're thinking about, okay, and what dynamical systems might give rise to these things? Because typically physics is about dynamics and not just static geometric objects.

Yes. Okay. So you've got this set of indications that you're, you're moving in the right direction. And then when is the leap to this idea of this interconnected consciousness?

So that's the leap. So I'm interested in consciousness, as are many of my colleagues. And we've, as a group, have assumed that consciousness is a latecomer, that space and time are fundamental, that the Big Bang was just a physical thing, and there was no life perhaps for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years, and finally life evolved here, and perhaps other places, but no, but no consciousness. And then eventually life got complicated enough that consciousness. That's the standard story, right? Spacetime is doomed. So is that story? That that can't be the story of consciousness, right? So, so, so what that means is that the theories that 99% of my colleagues are doing, which are assuming that physical systems give rise to consciousness, cannot be right. By the way, these, these are my colleagues are brilliant. So they haven't made much progress on this because the assumptions are false. So I'm hoping, you know, as soon as they can get the right assumptions, they they'll take off on this because they're, they're brilliant. But what's stopping them from from getting any progress in consciousness is the assumption that consciousness is a latecomer and it comes from complicated causal interactions or whatever of of physical systems. So it's that in that context that I'm thinking about. So how do I think about consciousness? One approach is to say it's an illusion. Right? Some of my colleagues, Dan Dennett, um, Michael Graziano, and others, will will say consciousness, there's no such thing. There's only the illusion of consciousness. Most of my colleagues think consciousness is, is a, is a real thing. So I, I take consciousness to be a real thing. So how am I going to, as a scientist, understand consciousness if it cannot possibly arise from spacetime, because spacetime's not fundamental? Spacetime is just a headset. So for better or for worse, we have to go big or go home. Let's reverse the whole thing. Instead of spacetime being fundamental and consciousness as a latecomer, let's switch. Let's make consciousness fundamental and spacetime the latecomer, just one of the headsets. MH. Not, not the most interesting, perhaps one of the cheaper headsets that consciousness can use to explore its own capacities.

So, what is consciousness? Right? Well, mystical traditions and spiritual traditions have talked about it for thousands of years, but there's no scientific theories, right? But we can learn from, you know, Buddhism, Hinduism, mystical Christianity, mystical Judaism, mystical Islam, Sufism, and so forth. There's, there's a mystical tradition that goes back thousands of years in in all of these traditions. So, so even if they have no science and no math, they, they have insights. And they have the idea that there is some consciousness, maybe multiple consciousnesses, maybe there's some unified deep one consciousness, you could call God. So there's, there's all these intuitions. And of course, as a scientist, I'll, I'll listen to them, but they're not rigorous. They're not, they're mathematical. So I listen with respect, but the same respect that I give scientific theories, right? I don't believe them, right, right. I, I study them, I understand them, I don't believe my own theories. Theories are our tools. They're not the truth. They're wonderful tools that we create, period. They're not the truth. And the same thing is true of, and, and I would say the spiritual traditions also say that, you know, they'll say that you, this, the words are just pointers. The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. The Tao Te Ching says, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao." And, and if you understand, understand that, then you can go ahead and read the rest of it and, and, and profit. So, so that's my attitude about, you know, the spiritual traditions. I can get insights from them, but ultimately, as a scientist, I've got to then step back and say, how do I turn those spiritual ideas into a mathematically rigorous and testable theory? And so I decided with Jon Prash and, and also Bruce Bennett years ago, we were looking at this, to have a network of a social network. Think of, think of it like the Twitter verse, or what we call X now, but Twitter verse. Use Twitter verse. Yeah, where you have a bunch of interacting users, some tweeting, some following, and certain things trend and, and so forth. That's sort of what I'm thinking about. A big social network of what I'll call conscious agents. But they're not agents inside spacetime. They're just, they, they are the foundational reality. They, they are, they are the starting point. And so agents can have conscious experiences, and they can affect the conscious experiences of other agents. And so we wrote down what's called a Markovian dynamics. And the reason for that is it's, in some sense, the simplest mathematical framework that's completely general. Someone who knows Markovian stuff might say, well, it's not completely general because it, it only allows finite states. And, and that's technically true. But it turns out that you can use as arbitrarily large finite states as you want. So, so do you need a trillion states? Do you need a trillion to the trillionth power states? You can do it with Markov. So as big as you want, you can have with Markovian dynamical systems. The only thing you can't have is is pure infinity. Okay, so fair, fair enough, fair enough. So, so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's not, it's not doesn't go to infinity, but it's, it's a good starting point. And I never thought it was going to be the final work. Words. So let's, let's go with this. And so we're, we're now modeling these network of conscious agents. And so now the quick, here's the, here's the idea, the big idea. The physicists have come from inside spacetime and taken a step out. They found these positive geometries, right? But no dynamics. We're starting outside spacetime with these dynamics of conscious agents. And I want to get back into spacetime because I want to test my theory, right? Where am I going to get experiments that test my theory? Only inside spacetime, like at the Large Hadron Collider or psychophysical experiments in in psychology labs. Well, the physicists have already done half the work. They, they've said, if you can get to these positive geometries outside of spacetime, we'll take you all the way in and we'll give you the scattering amplitudes for particles. So, so if I, all I, I don't have to go all the way into spacetime myself. I can just connect with the positive geometries and, and the, the combinatorial objects that classify them, like the decorated permutations. So that's what we're doing. We, we have published a couple of papers, um, one called "Objects of Consciousness," and if you just Google my, you know, Hoffman "Objects of Consciousness," the paper is free, you can get it online. And also "Fusions of Consciousness." And again, paper is free, you can get it online and read it for yourself. And in the fusions, so in the "Objects of Consciousness" paper, we introduced this dynamical system, this network, the Twitter verse, of of consciousness, let's put it that way. And in our "Fusions" paper, which we published last year, we, we prove that you can map from our dynamics of conscious agents onto one of the combinatorial objects that the physicists have found, namely the decorated permutations. So we show how to do that. So we have one connection. We've also shown how to go from specific Markovian kernels to the wave function for free particles in spacetime. So, so the quantum wave functions for free particles. So we can go from, so you can see what we're up to. What we're trying to do is to show that we, that behind the positive geometries that the physicists are finding, there is a rich social network of conscious agents, and the positive geometries are simply a projection. So they're a, a dumbed-down story of this deeper network of of conscious agents. The, if you think about the Twitter verse, it's complicated, right? There's millions of users and billions of tweets. It's too much for, you can't read all the tweets and you can't interact with it. It's, it's overwhelming. So you need some kind of ways to, so you need to look at at some interfaces to dumb things down. So see, like, see what's trending, what, what's trending in California versus Australia, or something like that. So that's what spacetime is. Spacetime is simply a simplification, a headset that certain conscious agents use to grok this infinite network, as far as I can tell, it's probably an infinite network of of interacting conscious agents. Um, and so how are you going to deal with that? Well, headsets and spacetime is just one of the possible headsets. And, and to connect with some of the positive geometries, one of the, the most interesting ones right now is something called the amplituhedron, that was discovered by Nima Arkani-Hamed and Yau Trinka and published in 2014, so just 10 years ago, right? And that positive geometry has several parameters. You know, it's a function of four things: N, K, M, and Z. But the M is the integer M is interesting here. All of them are interesting, but, but for my current purpose, the integer M is basically telling you the number of dimensions in your space, in your headset. So for, for this, for example, to, when M is four, then you get our current physics, right, out of it. But as they, but the mathematics says, but this positive geometry, M could be six, it could be eight, it could be whatever you, it's a variable. And four is one of the smaller numbers, right? So, so, so this really fits in line with what I was saying earlier, that, you know, spacetime is one of the cheaper headsets. And now the physicists, in finding these positive geometries, are finding that, yeah, this, this parameter M is saying, yeah, there's lots of different, infinitely many possible headsets, and M equals four is one of the more trivial ones.

What's exciting about this is you're dabbling in spiritual traditions, but then trying to come up with a theorem that has predictive power all the way back from this something that's more fundamental than spacetime. The theorem is predictive power reflects all the way back into spacetime, right? And so it's taking ideas that exist in various spiritual traditions, but using the process of scientific inquiry to see if they really shake out and have scientific value. As an academic, is that frightening, or is that exciting? Is it both, to get into things that usually science does not touch? What are your, what are your personal thoughts on, on now where this work has taken you?

Well, yeah, it's interesting that when science starts talking about consciousness, we're necessarily now on the turf that that many spiritual traditions have been talking about for thousands of years. And they have a big history of meditation and, and, and very kinds of aesthetic practices and so forth to study consciousness. And, and of course, as scientists, we would be wise to listen to what they have to say about it. They, they, they're there before us. Um, and we would also be wise to apply the same grain of salt that we apply to ourselves, right, in in everything. And, and of course, the, the good thinkers in those mystical traditions have themselves said that what we're saying is just a pointer, it's not the truth. So don't take anything that we're saying here literally. So hats off to them for for recognizing that. And, and the same thing is true for scientific theories, as I said, they're never a theory of everything. They're, they're just our tools, right? And so, so my attitude is, no problem here. I'm, I'm happy to get my ideas wherever I might, even in a glass of beer, whatever, where, whatever it might be, wherever you can get your ideas, get them, right? Have fun with them. At some point, you got to get serious, write them down in mathematics, and then the real testing begins. And then you find, you will, you will find the limits of your theory. There is no theory of everything. That means every theory has its limits. The only question is, is your theory precise enough, and are you clever enough to use your theory to find out what those limits are? So, so we, so every theory has a shelf life, right? There's never going to be a theory of everything. So, so if you're a young person wanting to go into science, don't worry, it's not all been done. Almost none of it's been done. There's everything is open for you. And what I'm doing now, um, if it holds it up, holds up at all, will eventually be replaced. And I hope in my lifetime to, to see it be replaced. That's the same attitude that the good spiritual traditions have when they say that these are pointers, don't take them seriously, don't fight over these pointers. Mhm. Mhm. Right. Don't fight over the theories. Find their limits. And the nice thing about the scientific pointers is the, those pointers themselves tell you where they stop. The spiritual pointers do not. Well, I use the word love or God, or so forth, or consciousness. Those pointers are not precise enough to tell you their limits. But Einstein, when he wrote down his idea about spacetime, right? His big idea, that was, if I'm standing on a, a weighing scale in an elevator, and someone cuts the cord of the elevator, and all of a sudden I'm in free fall, how much would I weigh? I would weigh zero. All of a sudden, I would weigh zero on the scale, right? That was his big idea for for general relativity. It took him many years to turn it into mathematics. And was Einstein right? But he turned it into mathematics. And then the mathematics, together with his E equals H nu equation, basically then told us the limit of his idea. Einstein, your your idea is great, and it stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. It has no operational meaning beyond that. That's perfect. That's how science works. No theory is the theory of everything. And so, so the science, so the science and spirituality, they interact. The spiritual traditions have said, our pointers have their limits, but, but the pointers themselves don't tell you their limits. In science, our pointers tell you their limits. And so, and, and, and so this leads to an interesting thing that happens in science, and this is very, very important, because here's an objection that people will have to what I've been saying. Yeah, I, I get this actually from bright scientific colleagues and, and, and philosophers. Hoffman, you're using the theory of evolution by natural selection to prove that we don't see reality as it is. But the theory of evolution by natural selection is a mathematical, you know, the mathematics is is codifying Darwin's ideas about physical objects like organisms inside space and time competing for physical, you know, resources like food ands. So you're using the mathematics of evolution to shoot yourself in the foot, logically, right? Because you start off with a theory that assumes space and time and physical objects that they're real, and a mathematics that's that's built on that theory, and then you conclude that space and time isn't, and physical objects are not the fundamental reality. So clearly, you, you've shot yourself in the foot logically. And, and the way they'll say it is this: either your mathematics, evolutionary game theory, faithfully, you know, represents Darwin's ideas, or it does not. If it doesn't, then of course, you couldn't use it to disprove Darwin's assumption of physical objects in space and time. And if it did faithfully represent Darwin's ideas, it couldn't possibly contradict his assumptions either way, you're you're messed up. Either way, you can't win. So that's the argument that that's actually not just an informal argument, it's been published in in premier scientific, um, philosophical journals.

The reply is very, very simple. That completely misunderstands how science, science works. Every scientific theory that's mathematically stated will have a limit. The only question is, is the theory precise enough to show you the limits? And what you do is, is you take that mathematical theory and you then, like Einstein's theory of spacetime, you find its limits. Spacetime is great until you get to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, then it's over. Well, Darwin's theory is great, but, but when you look at it mathematically, it entails that that resources and, and organisms cannot be fundamentally objects in spacetime. That can't be the final reality. That's just an implication of the mathematics of evolutionary game theory. The way science works is that our scientific theories have their limits. Everyone will have its limits. A good scientific theory will be precise enough that you can compute what its limits are. You can, the theory will tell you what its limits are. It can't tell you what's next. What's the deeper theory? I can't tell you that. But when you get a new deeper theory.

You're going to want to project it back to the old theories that we know and love and test them back there. So our theories of SpaceTime can't tell us what's beyond SpaceTime. Einstein's theory can't tell us what's beyond SpaceTime, nor, nor can Quantum Field Theory. It can't tell us what's beyond space time.

But the new positive geometries that they're finding outside of space time have to project back into SpaceTime and give us testable predictions that we can test inside SpaceTime. So, so Einstein's theories, our SpaceTime theories, can't tell us what is next. But they can say, "No, if you come up with something that you think might be next and you project it back into SpaceTime and it contradicts what we have inside Space time, then you're probably wrong."

So, so that's the way science, science works. We're pulling ourselves up by the bootstrap. We use, in, in my case, I use the theory of evolution by natural selection, the mathematical model of it, evolutionary game theory, to find limits of the concepts of that theory of evolution. Now, what's beyond evolution? But selection? Well, I'm proposing the theory of conscious agents. I have to now project that theory of conscious agents back into SpaceTime and I better get evolution by natural selection and also Einstein's theory of gravity and, and Quantum Field Theory as, as special projections of this more deeper theory, or I'm wrong. Or I need to show why I'm having a, my new theory projects into a correction of those theories. But in either case, those theories, um, are going to play a role of thumbs up or thumbs down on the deeper theory. So it's, so that's the way science works. We pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and we use the math of our own theories to prove the limits of our own theories without self-contradiction. That's just the way it works.

You mentioned Einstein. Let's say, for the moment, that the series of conscious agents or this interconnected consciousness, let's take that as an assumption here, that the, the science has led us there. And you mentioned with Einstein that he first glimpsed some of his insights, like the, "How much would he weigh in a falling elevator?" as an image, and then later the math came later, the ultimate theories came. I'm interested in that because Rick Rubin, who's done a lot of work on creativity, talks about a very similar process. Mike Czech sent me High, who wrote *Flow*, uh, who I worked for for a number of years, he did a lot of work into creativity. And both scientists, authors, painters, sculptors, a lot of them talked about a process of tapping into something bigger than themselves. It wasn't so much that ideas were coming from them, but through them, and trying to furiously get it down before the faucet turned off. Yes. Is it possible that in those moments of great insight, uh, and, and Csikszentmihalyi defined all of that, whether it was good science or good artwork, as creativity? Is it possible that we are tapping into that interconnected consciousness in those moments when these insights pour through us?

Yes. Now, there are two levels of answer, I think, that I would want to talk about. First is, in, in the field of cognitive science, we, we do talk about, you know, creativity. And, and there is sort of like a right hemisphere versus left hemisphere kind of attitude toward things. So sometimes you're more left hemisphere and, and you're doing more rational, step-by-step, procedural kind of things. And then the right hemisphere might be a little bit more, you know, broad spectrum, thinking out of the box kind of thing, more visual perhaps. So, so there's that. There's then there's books like, you know, Danny Kahneman's *Thinking, Fast and Slow*, which goes at the different ways that that that cognition happens. And, and, and there's a lot of work on insight where, you know, you might be working on a problem for a long time, and then you sleep on it and wake up in the middle of the night with it. So there's things are, you know, unconscious might be working on. So there, there's that one level of, of description, which I think is very, very interesting.

But you're asking at a deeper level. So you're asking, so I just wanted to point to that literature to not ignore that literature. I think it's good, and I think there's a lot of good research there. But this idea that consciousness is fundamental, um, does lead to a different framework for thinking about that. The, the, the framework I just talked about is, is more a brain-based framework. A consciousness arises from the brain activity and so forth. Now, I'm saying the brain is just a user interface symbol to something far deeper. So that gets to your version of the question. Is there, does creativity come from some deeper aspect of this conscious network beyond SpaceTime that only looks like a brain through a simple projection? And I, I think, of course, the answer has to be yes from, from the point of view of this deeper framework.

But, but that gets it an interesting technical question. And that is, um, many spiritual traditions talk about the one, or something like the one, a God, or the one, or Brahman, or, or the, the ultimate. Somehow there might be multiple consciousnesses. Like in Christianity, there are angels and so forth, right? But then ultimately, then there's a Trinity. But then there is, in some sense, the one, the one God. And you get that kind of idea that there could be a diversity, but also a unity, um, in this consciousness. So there's a technical question for me then, right? I'm writing down all these individual conscious agents. What about this unity versus diversity kind of aspect? It turns out the mathematics guides us, right? The mathematical model of conscious agents actually gives us ways to combine agents. So when you take two agents, you can, in some cases, combine them. We have, um, they're described by Markovian kernels. We've discovered an order relationship on Markovian kernels. It's, it's called the trace order. And we haven't published it yet. This is brand new stuff. But so this is what, what I'm talking about is is not even, not even published yet.

The set of all possible conscious agents has an order on it, and that order tells you how they combine and which ones are are compatible and which ones are incompatible. So there is, in some sense, one big social consciousness with all these individual parts, dissociations, so to speak. But it's not trivial. And it's so non-trivial that we're, we have to do theorem and proof, theorem and proof to understand what's going on here. So what, what's exciting to me about this is that there's been this informal, purely verbal description of there's some kind of unity, but some kind of diversity in consciousness. We now have, and I'm not saying again, this is the final word, but it is a completely rigorous word. It's a partial order. And I'll just state one, one Markovian kernel is less than another if it's a trace chain of the other. I just gave the entire definition. Out of that comes out a non-Boolean logic. A completely non-Boolean logic. It's locally Boolean. So the answer is, there may be some deep, deep unified consciousness that that sums, sums up all this. But it's not going to be any simple conception that we have of it. It is going to be wrong. And, and even, even I haven't been able to, I define this logic. I actually wrote down the basic definition. But it's mathematicians now who are actually exploring. I'm not smart enough to explore the mathematics, and we don't understand it yet. So, so this is, it's really complicated. But ultimately, you might say, could the one? Could I, as a scientist, and I'm here, I am just a particular little conscious agent, you know, Don Hoffman, but I'm not divorced from the one. And maybe, in some sense, I am unified with the one. I, I think so. And I want to study this, this trace logic. And we're writing a paper now called "Traces of Consciousness." That's the paper we're writing. It'll probably be a year before it's out. So.

And in that paper, we're going to go through this trace logic and go at this question. Long answer to your question. Bottom line: yes, I think that as, as an individual consciousness, I'm probably not separate from the one. And that I can tap into an infinite intelligence if I open myself up to it. And that's what many spiritual traditions have also been saying. Is that through the practice of meditation and so forth, you let go of your ego, you let go of, uh, attachment to this, this body, and, and me being better than you, being me being different from you, you know, competing with you. All of that, all that stuff that that is part of the sort of evolutionary, you know, competition realm. And you get to this deeper realm in which that's all just a game, right? It's just a headset, a projection of a much deeper unity that we're all, we're all basically perhaps just one consciousness looking at itself through different avatars, right? And in science, and in, in everyday life, we have access to that very, very deep realm of consciousness, the infinite, unbounded intelligence, that, that we are at the deepest level. And the only barrier is opening ourselves up to it, um, which is a pretty big barrier.

It is, it is. What role has meditation played for you in thinking through all of this? If that's, if thinking is the right word, um, but in, in the process of discovery and insight, how has meditation played a role? I do meditate. And I've meditated for about 22 years. That wasn't for any deep spiritual reasons. I just needed to sleep and I didn't want to take pills. And so I said, "Okay, maybe meditation is a way to relax myself." And, but then I realized as I started to do it, you know, it, it has a life its own. It, it starts to, you begin to realize this is pretty important. Uh, and then it starts transforming you as you really start to, to let go of of your fears and anxieties, or, or at least face them. Um, and then slowly have your, your personality transformed by it. It's, it, it, it, it's so it's played a, a big role. It's helped me to take consciousness quite seriously. Because when you spend time in meditation, you're, you're letting go of sort of attachment to the, the physical realm, the realm of form, so to speak. And you're, you're in the realm of conscious experiences. And so I think that that's helped. And there are times when I, you know, I'm working on a technical problem, I will just ask the one for help. And sometimes yes, and sometimes no, right? But sometimes I get help almost immediately. I'm, I'm stuck on a problem, I'm walking, I just ask for help, and three minutes later, I've got the answer. And then other times it's, "No, you, I can't give it to you because you simply don't have the, the mathematical background to even understand the answer, right?" So there are cases in which you can ask for, for help. But, but since I don't know the math, I, I can't get the help. I couldn't understand it if it was given to me, right? So, so there's going to be, but then I might, the help might get my, get is, "Okay, well, you need to learn this." And, yeah.

I mean, one of the things that really clicked for me with your work was, if you meditate for long enough, um, on a regular basis, at some point you have an experience where you realize you are not your thoughts. Yes. Because most of us walk around thinking that our, we are our thoughts, and that they belong to us. But with meditation, at some point, there's a break from that where you see this thought machine firing off ideas, and yet it does not feel like that is what is at the most fundamental level. That's right. That's right. And the only way I've ever known how to describe it is consciousness is all that's there at the, in those deep levels of meditation. And I'm certainly no master meditator. And I think other people are able to stay in that space for a lot longer. But even glimpsing it, yes. When I was reading and listening to some of your, your latest work on this internet-connected consciousness, it really reminded me of those experiences. And so I wanted to ask about the meditation. I, I agree that meditation does lead you to realize at some point that thoughts are just thoughts. And we tend to identify with the thoughts, "That's me," and, and believe our thoughts. And at some point, you get to step back and say, "I can just look at those thoughts, and I can realize that many of them are are dumb, and they're painful, and they're stupid." And, and, and the emotions that come with them are, are just emotions. And I don't have to believe the emotions either. I, I can just watch the emotion. Um, some of the emotions are very, very deep. And so I have to watch them and, and, and, you know, spend time with them before they dissolve. But, but, but I agree. And, what's below all those thoughts and feelings is just a field of awareness, pure awareness without any particular content. And that has a mathematical concomitant in our, in our theory. There are the contents of the conscious exper, conscious experiences of the agents. But the, the fundamental structure itself is a measurable space. And that, that measurable space really is our mathematical structure is pointing to this awareness without content. So, so we, and by the way, I didn't intend it that way, right? I, when I was writing down the mathematics with, with, of course, my colleagues Chayton and, and Bruce, and so forth, we're forced to write down these measurable structures. You can't write down probabilities unless you write down these measures. And, and it was only years later that I was looking at that and going, "So what does that measurable structure correspond to when there's no contents?" And I realized, "Oh, that must correspond to awareness without contents." So, so, so were, so the mathematics forced us to write it down. And, and I was, you know, so slow that it took me more than a decade working on the theory before I realized the implications that pure awareness is the infinite intelligence. And, and our scientific theories and our thoughts and so forth are the dumbed-down projection of it. Right? So science can never be a theory of everything. The everything is that awareness. And of course, I'm only pointing to it, right? By saying that, I'm not defining it. I'm just pointing to it. And that's an important point.

Let me just say what I mean by that. If I talk about cinnamon, say, you know, if you've never had cinnamon, and I want to describe it to you and say, "Well, it's, it's slightly sharp, but, um, it's not really sweet." It's not. I'm going to have a hard time. What's the best way to? I give you a piece of cinnamon, say, "Taste it for yourself." And you taste it and go, "Oh, we call that cinnamon." And so now I can use the word. Now, did I explain anything to you? No. I let you taste it for yourself. And, and, and that's how you got it. And it's the same thing with this awareness. Awareness, no description is it. Descriptions don't come anywhere near the reality. Descriptions are just, if you want to know cinnamon, you got to taste it for yourself. I can talk. The same thing is true about consciousness and conscious awareness. I can talk until I'm blue. This is what we call in cognitive science, ostensive definition, you know, defining by ostensive definition. When you teach a child the names of objects, like, you know, Chris is, is now 18 months old, and it's time to teach Chris, um, the name of a rabbit. So there's a rabbit on, on the floor and on a blanket. And Mom or Dad points and says, "Rabbit." And Chris, and at the right age, Chris gets it, like, once or twice, and that's it. Chris knows. Now, did you explain what a rabbit is? No. You just pointed and said, "Rabbit." Now, what you didn't do is point and say, um, "quadruped," right? Or "mammal," or "thing." Or you didn't say, "white." You know, it's not. Or, or you didn't talk about the fur. If you think about what, what is, how does Chris get this when you just point and say, "Rabbit"? It could be the ear. It could be the fur, the furriness, the color. It could be the tail and the in the front left leg. M. It could be the, the left ear and the rug. There, there are an infinite number of hypotheses that Chris could entertain. You just pointed. And in, there's some kind of agreement, unspoken agreement. If, you know, actually sounds funny, if, if Mom pointed and said, you know, "quadruped," that actually sounds funny. It's like, are you trying to mess up your kid? Are you trying to screw them up? We just know that that's not so. All of our words, all of our theories are merely pointers. The real thing is the conscious experience. The taste of cinnamon, the experience of, of the rabbit, or the experience of awareness without any content. That's the real thing. Any scientific theory, any verbal description is, of course, important. We need them. But they're trivial compared to the reality. And they, they, they, in no way, right? The, the word cinnamon, in no way grabs on to any structure about it. It's just some sounds we make, noises. And, and that noise. So, so think of words as just noises that we make. They're no, there's no explanation whatsoever. The real thing is the conscious experience. So this turns the whole physicalist paradigm around. Instead of, you know, SpaceTime being the fundamental reality, the little objects we see, fundamental. No, no. The things we say about them, the experiences we have, and the things we say about them are are trivial compared to the deep awareness. Yes. Yes.

If there is this inter fundamental interconnected Consciousness, then what is death? That's a big one. Uh, if you're a physicalist and take SpaceTime as fundamental, it's, it's very, very clear. Death is the end of the brain, and the brain is the source of your consciousness. And so that's it, right? So there's, there's no question about that. If consciousness is fundamental and SpaceTime is just a headset, then death has to be something like just taking off this particular headset. The, the consciousness is not dependent on the headset. The headset is dependent on the consciousness. So, so to be very, very clear, my, I don't have any neurons right now. If you looked inside my skull, you would find neurons because you, you would be creating them as you looked. You, you create everything that you perceive, just like in a VR headset, right? If you're playing Grand Theft Auto, and I look over and I see a red Ferrari racing me, well, when I look over there, I render it. I render the red Ferrari. But as soon as I look away, it, it ceases to exist. There's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer that's playing the game. And just to clarify that point for, uh, viewers, so just like the headset, when I turn, when I turn to the side to see the car, the headset renders the Ferrari. If I turn away, it doesn't want to waste the energy rendering the Ferrari anymore. That's right. And your contention is that our brains and visual system are doing the same thing? And so that's why you're saying there are no actual neurons, but if I looked, you would see neurons? This, this headset would be rendering those neurons as a way to interact with this reality? Absolutely. That's right. So, so, so I'm, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, and I love cognitive neuroscience, and I love the study of the brain. But I think it's, it's much more complicated than we thought. We, we thought it's really complicated. There's 86 billion neurons in the brain and roughly that number of glial cells, and there's thousands of different types of these of these cells. It's really, really complicated. Well, it is complicated, but it's trivial compared that's just a projection of a much deeper reality. That's just a headset projection of something. So we need more money for neuroscience, not less, because it's much, much more complicated. 86 billion neurons is trivial, is trivial compared to what we're going to have to deal with. We have to reverse engineer the brain to find out what's beyond it. So, so the brain doesn't exist and it doesn't create my conscious experiences. Um, it doesn't exist when it's not perceived. So that it can't be, then I mean, the logic that if there's no brain, there's no consciousness, that doesn't work because right now I don't have a brain and I still have consciousness. So, so here I already have proof that I don't need a brain to, to be conscious. And so when my, when it appears that my brain is completely destroyed, there's no reason to believe that my consciousness will, will be destroyed. Now, that's an intellectual argument. How do I feel about it? I don't believe it emotionally, right? If you put a gun to my head, I'd be scared, right? So, so it's, it's really quite interesting to me to be in this, this state where intellectually, clear as day, and my emotions have a long way to go to, to come. Now, meditation does have the ability to, and I can feel it integrating that, so that this is no longer just, it's less and less just an intellectual thing, it's more and more becoming a lived thing. But, but, but it's very, very interesting that in some sense, this consciousness, when it projects itself into a headset, decides to go all in. Mhm. To completely lose itself. To, in some sense, fall asleep. Some spiritual traditions will talk about, we're, we're almost asleep, and spirituality is about waking up to what you really are. And I, I think there's something to that. And, but it's almost moments of waking up and then falling back asleep. That, that's right. And then you do see a few people where it looks like they woke up and, and stay awake, right? You know, like someone like an Eckhart Tolle or something, right? There, or maybe a Jesus, or a Buddha, or, or Muhammad, or, or something like that, right? Yeah. These figures that that perhaps were, were, um, awake all the time.

To go a little bit deeper on that, on that topic, um, on the, I believe on Lex's show, you mentioned you had a, a brush with death a few years ago. Can you, if you're comfortable with it, can you tell us about that and how that further informed your thinking on all of this? Yeah, um, apparently was a, a consequence of of COVID. It, um, it inflamed my heart and gave me arrhythmia that they couldn't stop for 36 hours. And at the end of 36 hours, no sleep, heart racing, 190 beats per minute. I, I fig, well, they can't do it if they've been at it for 36 hours, they can't do it, do it. And my heart's not going to be able to do this much longer. So I, I texted my wife goodbye. And that was exceedingly painful. And, um, and, and quite scary, quite painful. And, and my heart is still, um, questionable, right? I've had a surgery since then, but the damage is pretty severe. And, uh, um, it, it still goes into a rhythm. And, and every time it does, there is the potential that this is it. It's, it's, it's, wow. It's, it's, it's so it really, I have a short teller, um, and it does focus the attention. When you, when death is not an abstract idea, it is something I face every day. The potential, the real potential, every day. Um, not to overblow it. I mean, I don't spend my time worrying about it. But when my heart goes into arrhythmia, then the potential is right there. I have some, you know, pills to take and, and so forth for that. Um, but when it takes several hours for the pills to work, then there you are, face to face. So, so I then see, um, what do I emotionally believe as opposed to what do I intellectually believe? Right? The intellectual stuff is pretty clear. It's really quite striking how the emotions, um, are largely auto. The fear is, is there. I would say it's less than it was. I think that there is a, the meditation has been slowly affecting my emotional system. Um, there are some, like Eckhart Tolle, who apparently, like it happened overnight. Apparently he was a mess one day and completely out of it the next. And, you know, um, I might wish for that, although I guess apparently the, the stress that he was under was so extreme, so maybe I wouldn't want to go through through that kind of extreme stress where you, it's so nasty that you pop out, you pop awake permanently, right? Right. That maybe I couldn't handle that. Um, so I, I'm apparently one of those that's awake, asleep, awake, asleep, mostly asleep, but, but, but waking up a little bit more. I, I spend time every day in meditation, um, and, and coming to terms with, with death. I mean, it's, it's obvious that we're all going to, we're all going to face it. MH. And taking that seriously means that almost everything that we're spending our, our time on has to be reevaluated. And our mo, especially our motivations for you. Am I trying to become rich because I think that's going to make me deeply, ultimately, permanently happy? No, it's just more to walk away from in a few years when you die. You're, it's not going to stop you from dying. Um, you're going to walk away from all reputation. You're going to walk away from that. You're going to walk away from it all. Ultimately, I think the analogy that that comes to me is that that's perhaps most helpful. If you're in a video game, it's a first-person player video game. So you have an avatar, and you maybe you're shooting up and so forth, and, and things are, people are trying, other avatars are trying to attack your avatar. There are two ways you can play the game. One is, I'm, I'm just sitting in my chair having a good time, and there's my avatar. And, and if, if they shoot it up, hey, you know, no big deal. The other thing is you get lost in the game. And sometimes the games are so immersive that you, like, you forget that it's a game. And you're, and now something happens to your avatar is happening to you. And so that's, so I, I'm identified with my avatar. I, I, I've still, I'm, I'm immersed in the game. M. And I'm slowly waking up and saying, "Oh, you know, I have the mathematics that says that, you know, I have no neurons when they're not perceived. And this, my hands don't even exist when they're not perceived." Um, so it's just an avatar. And it doesn't matter. Um, so I intellectually understand that, um, but I'm still immersed in the game emotionally. Sure. So I'm trying to, to wake up in some sense from from that immersion. And so why would the infinite unbounded consciousness do that to itself? Why would it allow that? It's painful. It, it's quite painful. Ultimately, it's an illusion. And we can laugh at the pain, but, but when you're in it, you're not laughing. It's just painful, right? And the answer is, I don't know. But, but there's one idea, and that is, how can the infinite formless awareness know itself? Maybe it's about knowing itself. And there's a theorem. So here's the mathematics that that no system can ever completely understand itself. Can never build a model of itself. If you have a computer, for example, and you want the computer to build a model of itself, well, it's going to have to have a program in it that sort of is talking about its structure. Well, as soon as you have the program inside the computer, now it's different. It's, it's more complicated. So now to model itself, you need to model it with that model. M. Well, you can see it's an infinite regress, right? So you get an infinite regress here. So, so there could be a theorem here that that the one can never ever completely know itself. And there's, in some sense, this interesting case in which the one must necessarily always be exploring itself. It can never. And how do, how do you explore yourself? Well, you can know yourself perhaps by saying, "Well, let me put on, look at myself through this perspective, through, so I put on a particular headset. So I'll put on this little four-dimensional SpaceTime headset. I'll look at myself through that headset, and I'll let myself go completely into it. I'll get completely lost in it, identify with that, and think that that's me. Really spend 70, 80, 90 years in it, and then slowly wake up, and I'll know that whatever I am, it wasn't just that." So I know what I am by knowing what I'm not. But to really do it, you got to have sort of skin in the game, right? Really, really. It's, it's not just, "I'm not that." No, no, no. You need to really think you're that. Really take it seriously. And then wake up and realize, "I really am not that." But I really know what that is, and I know that whatever I am is deeper than that. M. No description of the one will ever be anything but absolutely trivial. But by looking at an infinite number of descriptions, the one can know more deeply its transcendent nature. It's almost like the taste of cinnamon. So that Oneness could not know itself, but by by splitting into billions, if not trillions, of different manifestations, that is the only way to actually experience itself. Just like you can't think through the taste of cinnamon or what the color blue is. You have to see it, taste it to have those, to know. I think that's a very good point. I think that is a very, very good point. So, yeah, so you have to really just experience it for yourself. And then you can know deeply that you're that, that's an aspect of you, but you transcend that aspect. By the way, the, that also leads to something that the spiritual traditions talk about, which is, you know, like Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Well, that makes sense because your neighbor is yourself, just under a different avatar. You and your neighbor are that one consciousness, just looking at itself. And, and under the illusion that you're someone I need to compete against, right? You're my enemy, or you're my friend. But I'm only, you're my friend because I can get something from you, that kind of thing. And eventually, that kind of sleeping, you wake up to realize, "No, no, love your neighbor as yourself because that is myself. That really is me." I, and the way I treat that person or that animal is the way I'm treating myself. Like right now, two avatars that are connected to that interconnected consciousness. Yes. Would you, would you say the same consciousness looking back at itself? That's right. Through different, through different frames, basically, through different avatars. So it's ultimately the one consciousness, but, but adopting different perspectives on itself. I'm looking at it through through a Hoffman avatar. You're looking at it through a Nick avatar, and so forth, right? Which is a very different way to approach the world than saying, playing the games of wealth accumulation, right? Right. And again, this goes back to the, you know, the VR games analogy again. If you're, if you're in there and you're trying to beat everybody and get more territory and whatever it might be, if you know it's a game, then you're just doing it for fun. And, and you're really not being hostile toward the other people. It's, it's all in good humor and good laugh, and we'll, you'll take off our headsets and have a beer afterwards. But if you get immersed in the game, then you take it seriously, like, "Oh no, they really are my enemies. I really do need to compete for that. And I, I really do need to impress." And so forth. So it's, it's, it's really identifying with the avatar. So in spirituality, in some sense, is understanding this is just a game. It's just a headset. Take it off.

I'm reminded of this story my father told me. He was at a, many years ago, at a business team-building conference. They, they said, "We're going to play a game. Split into four or five different teams." And they said, "The object of the game is to maximize resources." And it was pretty loose other than that. And then they let everybody go plan their strategy. And they came back and wheeling and dealing with each other. And my father was really excited because they tricked some of the other groups into alliances and then won the game. Really? That's cool. Very cool. And afterwards, the gentleman running the game said, "Now, I know you're all patting yourselves on the back for winning. We never said you had to defeat the other teams. And if you actually wanted to maximize resources, all the teams would have just worked together and built actual alliances. And then everyone in the game wins." Very clever. Very clever. Very much ties into, I think, what you're getting at with, with a different framework for what it means to exist. And the different games we can play or frameworks we can use to look at everyone else. Yes. We can really transcend that competition that's instilled in us through these evolutionary forces with a little bit of waking up. I, I agree. And, and this is very interesting politically. Because communism has a really nice philosophy, right? It, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." And it, it sounds great. But the 20th century showed catastrophic failure, right? Capitalism, it's, it's nature read in truth. And, uh, me versus you. Um, we need a legal system to make sure that everybody plays by the rules. We need a constitution. We need courts. And, and it works much, much better than communism. But if human nature were different, if we actually took what Jesus said seriously, "Love your neighbor as yourself," because your neighbor is yourself, then communism would work. It actually would work. And we would actually be better off than capitalism. So today, I'm glad I'm in a capitalist society because it's, communism doesn't work. But if we become a spiritual people that actually wake up, then I think we will just naturally. We won't need the capitalist structure. We would then move to communism. Um, not going to happen anytime soon. So I'm not, I'm not, for the record, I'm not advocating communism. Right? I am advocating waking up. Mhm. First. Yeah. And then, and then let's see, let's see what happens from there. But I think only, only good things would happen from there. That's right.

I did want to ask, how do you think your current lines of inquiry jive with Carl Jung's idea of a collective unconscious? At, at a very high level, yes. I mean, I'm sure there are details of his theory that, that, you know, are specific to some certain models of the brain and so forth that he might have. But I think the, the, just at a high level, I would say yes. And it might be complicated. So it, it may not go back just to the, the one. It may go back to this, the, the commonality of the kinds of avatars that we, that we have in this particular simulation. So there are some similarities between our avatars. And that, and then there's some, some, some history that we have together. Mhm. And that sort of shapes the perspective that the one has on itself. So that could be, you know, at a top-level kind of connection between the collective unconscious and, and Jung's ideas. Um, very, very loosely.

Now, what about Robert Sapolsky's latest work on that we basically do not operate with free will? So he is against free will, right? At this point, right now, at this point, he is. And I have really struggled with work, but I always really liked his thinking, his ideas. And I just wanted to know your, where do you weigh in on free will? As scientists have a mathematical theory that involves probabilities, right? So whenever talking about something where there's probabilities, there are typically two deep ways of interpreting those probabilities. One is random chance, right? So you might say that, you know, when there's this probability that a uranium atom will fission in a certain amount of time, a certain half-life, mhm, well, you can think of that probability as just some kind of objective chance. And that, but it's certainly a place where where explanation stops. If, if your theory can only give you a probability and can't say anything more, then that's where explanation stops. But another way to, so, so probabilities, when you see probability in the theory, that's a pointer that says, um, "Here is where ignorance begins." Uh-huh. What's the nature of that ignorance? Well, we, in one case, we might call the ignorance objective chance, if we're a physicalist, for example. If you, if you're taking consciousness as fundamental and you're thinking about agents, now conscious agents, and you have a notion of agency, then you might say, well, if, if there are fundamental probabilities in my theory, then it doesn't make sense to talk about that as just objective chance. It's, it seems like there's something else that that we might want to talk about with with agents. And there, there's then the notion, then, of free will. Now, neuroscientists, many of my colleagues will will say, "We have clear evidence against free will." I, you know, I can put a person in an experiment and ask them to, you know, to decide at a certain random time when they're going to push a certain button. And I can predict several seconds before they go to push the button from their brain activity, and then motor cortex or something like that, or prefrontal cortex, what that one, that they're going to, and which button they might want to push or something like that. So, so I can actually tell them before they know what they're going to do. So clearly, it's all, um, forced by the, the neural activity. There's no free will there. And there are many theorists who would say that my attitude is that neurons don't exist when they're not perceived. So we have to think about those experiments a little more, more deeply. You might say, "Okay, well, if you're going to think more deeply, you still have to reverse engineer that to something outside of space." So it's not neurons, but it's something deeper outside of space time. And still using that, I could predict before that person what, what they were going to do. So where is their free will? The, the, the fact we have to face is, I'm here. I just now chose to put my hand and take a drink. That's, that's just a fact of what happened. Now, was that just random chance? Was that free will? And what do, what do we even mean by free will? Does it, is it perfectly free? And you can see I'm on the fence. What I can say is that this new order that we've discovered, the trace order on the, on these Markovian kernels, gives me a way of taking different conscious agents, looking at a, a one big conscious agent as as a combination of a bunch of little agents. Mhm. I can think about them as making free will choices. And the mathematics allows me, in a completely coherent fashion, and I just discovered this this week. So this is just yesterday or the day before I discovered in the math. It allows me in a completely coherent way to assign free will choices, probabilistic free will choices, to all the agents and their combination. And each agent will have, if, if the choice is going from red to green or something, you seeing red and then going looking at green, MH, the probabilities for each agent of doing that will be different. And yet they all cohere into one big agent which has its own probabilities, its own free will. So, so I have, I have for the first time a mathematical model in which I can have a bunch of. And then, so this is only two days old, right? Yeah. I don't, haven't even told Chayton. I don't think I've told Chayton about this. So, so this is the first person, you're the first person I've told this. Well, that's pretty exciting. So the mathematics, and Chayton will maybe come back and slap me on the wrist with a mathematical ruler. We'll see. But it looks, looks to me like the mathematics are saying that there's a completely consistent mathematical way of of assigning probabilities of of free choices for the same action to the big agent and to all the little agents, to tons of count little agents. And each would have their own free will choice with different probabilities, literally different probabilities, but they all cohere into one formal partial order that, that, that's consistent. As of the last two days, I now see no formal obstruction to having a really interesting notion of free will in which I could talk about a big agent would say a billion by a billion states. MH. And then look at, there's probably the number of sub-agents inside that are more than the number of particles in the known universe. So the, so there's the sub-agents are, and all those sub-agents could have different probabilities for the same choice, but they all cohere. They all combine into one consistent agent. So it's possible to have an A, a theory of free choice and, and still have a combination of of agents, and all their choices remain the same, and yet the choice of the one agent is different. And it's all mathematically consistent. Another way then to step back on this is to say, well, you know, free will is just a name, just like cinnamon is just a name. There's something going on there, and that's very, very deep. Maybe what's going on is going to be much, much deeper than anything that we've thought about philosophically. That's what, that's what happens when we have mathematical science, right? It may be that this, this partial order that I'm talking about will change the game in how we think about the whole free will question. It may change the very rules of, of how we're going to play that game. So, and that's the way science works, right? So we talked about SpaceTime in a certain way prior to Einstein. Einstein wrote down some mathematics that changed the game on how we even talk about space and time. Completely changed the game. We can, we should have our debates about free will or not. But I think that what we'll have to wait is the arguments that we've given against free will were based on one kind of science. We've now transcended that science. Neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived. So the neural arguments against it aren't as compelling as they were. Right? Now we're getting these new mathematical structures that may, if, if Chayton tells me I'm not completely off, may be showing there's this new consistent way that we've never even seen before of thinking about free will choices that look very, very different and all integrating in in a coherent manner that may completely change the whole intellectual scape. So, so I would say at the current state, we may be using very, very primitive tools when we ask this question. And we, as we begin, as we continue to explore the concepts and the mathematics, we find, may find much deeper, deeper frameworks, um, for it.

One of the things I find really refreshing about the way you approach questions, uh, is that you'll look at it through different lenses. And, and you keep coming back to mathematics. And one of the questions I had when I was, when I was reading *The Case Against Reality*, "Evolution selecting for fitness payoffs and not reality seeing payoffs," is selecting for the ability to understand mathematics, a fitness payoff. So I should now step back a little bit about evolution. Okay. As, as you know, I've made a big case against reality based on evolution, right? I think evolution is not deeply true, right? I think it's a headset story of something that's far deeper. And so when I look at the conscious agent dynamics outside of SpaceTime, it's, it's possible for me to write down a dynamical system of conscious agents in which there is no arrow of time. M. The entropy of the dynamical system is constant. It doesn't grow. Entropy does not grow. The entropy, the sort of the randomness, in some sense, of, of the, of the dynamics. But the entropy of the system does not grow as the system proceeds. And that means there's not an arrow of time. There's no entropic arrow of time, like in the second law of Thermodynamics, right? The second law of Thermodynamics says entropy is always increasing, and time and, and the second law of Thermodynamics are deeply entwined. M. Well, but it's a theorem. So if I, I take my dynamics of conscious agents, I can write down the system in which the entropy is not increasing. But it's a theorem. If I take a projection of that dynamical system where I'm losing some information, then I will, I will have a new dynamical system, and it will be not as complicated as my original, and it will have

An arrow of time? So, so the arrow of time, the increasing entropy, is not an insight into the deeper dynamics. Mhm. It's 100% an artifact of the loss of information from going from this deep fundamental level to a, a less fundamental level, right? Our space-time level. Yes, our space-time level. Okay.

So, so there's this deeper dynamics of conscious agents outside space-time. I'm now projecting it through a headset into space-time, looking at it. I'm going to get an arrow of time as an artifact, not as an insight into the deeper reality. It, it's not an insight. It's wrong. There is no arrow of time in the deeper reality. You're seeing an arrow. There is no arrow. So it's not an insight. It's wrong.

Now, what is the fundamental limited resource in evolution? It's time. If I don't breathe in time, I die. If I don't get food in time, I die. If I don't mate in time, I don't reproduce. Time is the fundamental limited resource. Mhm. All of evolution, but natural selection, I think all of it is an artifact of the projection. None of evolution by natural selection is an insight into the deeper nature of reality beyond space-time. That again is showing you what I think about how science works. I used the theory of evolution inside space-time to find its limits, to actually say this can't be the final space and time themselves object. It can't be the final reality. And that's, that's the glory of evolutionary theory. The glory is it tells you its limits. I only hold inside space-time. I don't hold outside space-time.

Well, yes, and we can actually show that outside of space-time, we can come up with a dynamical system in which there is no limited resource. Perhaps there's no competition. So all the stuff of evolution isn't even there. But when you look at this realm beyond space-time through a headset, it looks like evolution by natural selection. That's the artifact of the projection. So that's my attitude about, about evolution. It's my attitude about all scientific theories. They're tools. They're not the truth. MH. And if you don't want to look dumb a century from now, don't talk about a theory of everything. Don't think that you are anywhere near. You're going to look unbelievably dumb in just a century because the next generation will be happy to show you wrong. Right. And, and they'll be able to, assuming we don't blow ourselves up. But, and the question, why would we evolve to get math? That's what set me off. This, why would we evolve to? So, so you can now see that I don't take the evolutionary explanations too deeply. MH. Right. So I think that the whole story of evolution is an artifact. So, so I'm not surprised if, if evolutionary explanations aren't going to always work. Okay.

But, but now let me just play the game within the story of evolution. So I'm, I'm going to put aside what I just said. I'm going to now just assume evolutionary. How, how would I try to answer your question within that framework? And by the way, this is what we should always be doing in science. We just say, here's the framework now, which I'm, I'm going to try to answer. It's not the truth. It's not the final word. But this is the scientific framework that I'm using. Right. In, within science, scientific framework, evolution, what you could say is this: knowing the difference between having two bites of a hamburger versus one bite of hamburger could be useful to you. Knowing that two bites is better than one, one bite. MH is is good for fitness. Right. So there could be selection pressures for some elementary capacity with with numbers. And there's some evidence that that many creatures have some elementary capacity for, you know, not noticing the difference between one, two, and and many, or something like that. And so you could similarly give stories for various kinds of mathematical, um, like like notions like distance. Right. A predator that's twice as far away from me, maybe half or or less as dangerous as one that's twice as close to me. So, so you can start to get notions of of, um, mathematical notions like metrics or distances and so forth. So you can put together a story where there could be selection pressures and evolution for elementary capacities. And then you could then have that there could be some mutations where, see, most of us have trouble even balancing our checkbooks. Say, H. But every once in a while, you get the right mutations and you get a, a Von Neumann who who can do unbelievable math in his head. Right. So most of us are not Von Neumanns. But if you have a billion people on the planet, you're, you're bound to get perhaps a Von Neumann. Right. And so, and then the Von Neumann then can teach the rest of us schmucks, you know, a few things. And we can then, if we study really, really hard, we can do maybe 2% of what Von, what Von Neumann could do, you know. So that's, that's how I could, you could give an evolutionary story about how mathematics. A lot of the mathematical advances, I mean, there were of course the Greeks were doing lots of interesting stuff in mathematics, you know, before Christ. But the, you know, a lot of the deep advances have happened just on the last, you know, 600 years. U. And, and we see it building on itself that, um, most of us would have spent our lives, you know, a thousand years ago, not, not knowing anything. Probably Von Neumann wouldn't have, not, not known too much mathematics. But we build. We stand on the, you know, the the giant. Right. Right.

I understand that Newton said that as a sort of a hit on Hook, who was a small guy. Oh, a competitor. Okay. And so he, he, it was sort of put, it was sort of a little punch in the stomach to Hook to to say that, oh, that's interesting. If I, if I've seen further than other people, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants, not of midgets. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. But, but anyway, so, so without that negative connotation, standing on the shoulders of giants in mathematics, maybe most of us have to really struggle. We, we have to go to school to to write. Right. Again, our ancestors 20,000 years ago, maybe I don't know when writing happened, but say 30,000 years ago, we didn't have writing. Say, M. They've probably had. I, we actually know that our brains have gotten smaller. Our brains are getting smaller. Right. The, the brain volume has has dropped dramatically in the last 10, 15,000 years. So Homo sapiens is losing brain volume. I'm not sure that that means that we're losing IQ, but I wouldn't think that this means that we're gaining IQ. It, it's not clear that our ancestors 30,000 years ago that maybe couldn't write, read, or write, or couldn't do mathematics, or are dumber than us. I think the reason we can do it is that that we've just had enough, enough outliers, enough Von Neumanns along the line who then stuff that we then have to go to school, elementary school, and junior high, and painfully learn this stuff. And we'd rather be out there just doing, you know, fun stuff. Yeah. We have to learn all this stuff, and it's very, very painful for us.

In your opinion, I guess, why is math so insightful that it's what can help prove what exists at the most fundamental level? I think what makes math really insightful, as as we see it in the sciences, right? Where we really see its power, Einstein's predictions, black holes, and so forth. It's, it's just stunning what it can do. What's going on with mathematics? The reason why it's so powerful is not that it is the truth. I, I think that the relationship of mathematics to reality, the, you know, the full conscious reality, is like the bones to the living organism. You need the bones, but they're not the whole living organism. And so I think that mathematics is an aspect, an important aspect of of consciousness. Gödel has these these famous incompleteness results. Basically, if you give me any set of axioms, mathematical axioms, there'll be a set of things that I can prove. If you give me a consistent set of axioms, I can prove a bunch of theorems, and perhaps an infinite number of theorems. But there will be always statements that are true, but can't be proven. They are true, but they're not. So mathematics will always be incomplete, necessarily, or inconsistent. But assuming it's consistent, it's, it's incomplete. You can always add. If I, if you give me a statement that's true, but not provable within my current axioms, I can then say, well, I'll make that a new axiom. That's fine. Then Gödel will give you a new statement. This goes on. So, so mathematics is open-ended. At least mathematics that we can do as humans can never be complete. It suggests again an infinite realm. It suggests to me that the notion of truth, mathematical truth, transcends the notion of mathematical proof. So that's powerful. So I mean, so there's an infinity. There's an infinity to mathematics. That's, that's Godlike. But I think it's, it's Godlike, but, but it's only one aspect. Again, consciousness transcends it. But almost like another pointer. It's, it's, it's, it's going to be, it's another pointer. Math in mathematics, and it's precise. So it's a point, a pointer system that allows you to see the limits of your pointers. So it's powerful in in that respect. It's perhaps the most precise and self-referential set of pointers that we can have. Like language, natural language, English, Spanish, French, whatever it might be, is is wonderful. It's a wonderful tool, but it has definite limits to its precision. As we see in in even the spiritual traditions where the the founders of the tradition have said, these are just pointers. Don't take them seriously. In a century or two later, we find the followers fighting each other to the death over, you said it wrong. No, you, you don't believe in that. And killing each other and so forth. So, so natural language pointers have their limits. MH. Mathematics also has its limits. But the pointers are far more precise in telling you their limits. It's almost easier to agree on the limits of the mathematics. With language, it becomes much more subjective on what those limits are. And, and to your point, to the to the point of people fighting each other to the death over over it. That's right.

And Dylan, I've got a 11-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter. Congratulations. Thank you. They asked me what I was doing today, and I told them over the last couple of days that I'd be talking to you. And they said, oh, what's, what about? And so I was trying to explain these ideas to them. If you were going to bring your theory of reality and consciousness and present it to an 11-year-old, how would you do that in your words? That's a great question. Video games are going to be a big help here, right? Especially immersive games in VR games where they actually can get immersed and multiplayer games. So to to use the metaphor of a multiplayer game, that this is that we're really in a multiplayer game. I have grandkids, um, who are a grandson who's 13 and a granddaughter who's 10 or 11, so about the same age as your, your kids. And yeah, and they'll, they'll of course play with people they don't even know. They'll play these these games where there's maybe somebody from another state or even another country that they're, they're playing Minecraft with or whatever they might be. And, and, and they, they just see their avatars and, and they play. So that I would probably use that as the metaphor to say, this is just a headset. It's just a like a video game. And there's a deeper reality. But what's weird about this deeper reality is that, um, it may be that all of us are just really one player playing all the different roles of that of that game. Well, that's what's different about it. So in the multiplayer games that you play, you think of there's a person that's separate from you in China that's playing, and someone from Arizona that's playing. I'm in California. And, and so these are separate people. So if you, you just have to let go of that idea of separate people and, and realize ultimately that there's this, there's one player playing all of this. That's great. Which would then raise some questions. Why in the world is he doing it? Yeah, that's a good starter of the conversation.

I wanted to close out with this quote actually from a comedian. Uh, it was, uh, Bill Hicks. And he said, wouldn't this be a nice news story today? A young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to, to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. That there is no such thing as death. Life is only a dream. And we are the imagination of ourselves. Now, here's Tom with the [Laughter] weather. I like that last bit. Now here's Tom with the weather. Is that's great. Yeah. I thought that made the quote because that's almost the experience I keep having with these ideas. I just come back to, now here's Tom with the weather. I get sucked back into everyday life. Me too. It's very, very interesting. Even though I've been working on this for for decades, when I, when I'm not in my thinking cap mode, I am a physicalist like everybody else. And I'm in the game, and I'm, I'm playing the game. And I feel competitive and, and, and the whole bit. And I think what I'm doing is really important. And, and, you know, I need to, you know, all the stuff. Yeah. It's, it's, it's all there. And but then when I step back, I, I then I smile at it and laugh at it. And but then I get lost in it again. And, and I guess what's really interesting that about that is the one consciousness really does go in with both feet. It jumps in with both feet and lets itself get completely lost in the game, loses itself completely. It must be the case that you've got to recommit to the illusion to really wake up from the illusion and know that you are not that illusion. It must be that you've got to rub your nose in the illusion until you really, really get it that you're not that. It must be because I, I have to, I have to rub my nose in it every day. Yeah. As do we all. That do we all. That's right. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for coming in. It is an honor and a privilege to sit down and talk to you. I am such a huge fan of what you've done and I'm excited to see what you do next. Thank you, Nick. It was really, really a lot of fun. Great questions. I appreciate it. Oh, and what, and if anyone wants to follow your work, what's the best place to keep up with what you've got going on? Well, I have a, a Twitter, so Donald D. Hoffman, um, all one word, H O F F, Donald D. Hoffman. Okay. Twitter. I, I tweet, you know, links to papers that I think are interesting or papers that I've done, videos I think are interesting. And I've, you know, for people who are interested, I've got, um, a paper, Objects of Consciousness. Just Google that name and it'll come up as free. Uh, Fusions of Consciousness. That's a paper. Uh, and then my book, The Case Against Reality. And also Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. For those who are interested in just visual science or photography, that the Visual Intelligence book, um, has a lot of really interesting. It's used by photographic classes and so forth. So, and I highly recommend The Case Against Reality. I'm going to read the visual, uh, principles, Visual Intelligence book next. Um, and then Traces of Consciousness, that paper will be coming next. Yeah, hopefully this year. Okay. Yeah. I, I would guess by summer I should have it submitted. Um, yeah. Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. And just have an excellent day. And I, I hope we get to talk again sometime in the future. We're close. So, yes. Okay. All right. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Nick. Wow. Well, my mind is blown in the best possible way. And I hope yours is too. If you're watching this on YouTube, please like and subscribe. Emphasis on the subscribe. If you're listening to this on your favorite podcast platform, please make sure to review us on Apple Podcasts. Rate us five stars on any other podcast platform. And follow us on Instagram @NickStanley, N I C K S A N D L E A. Okay, everybody, until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. And be [Music] curious.