Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion - How Evolution Hid the Truth | Lex Fridman Podcast #293
- Whatever reality is,
it's not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction. - The following is a
conversation with Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive
sciences at UC Irvine, focusing his research on
evolutionary psychology, visual perception, and consciousness. He's the author of over
120 scientific papers on these topics, and his most recent book, titled "The Case Against Reality, Why Evolution Hid The
Truth From Our Eyes." I think some of the most
interesting ideas in this world, like those of Donald Hoffman's, attempt to shake the foundation of our understanding of reality, and thus, they take a long
time to internalize deeply. So proceed with caution. Questioning the fabric of reality can lead you to either
madness or the truth. And the funny thing is you
won't know which is which. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Donald Hoffman. In your book, "The Case Against Reality, why Evolution Hid the
Truth From Our Eyes," you make the bold claim
that the world we see with our eyes is not real. It's not even an abstraction
of objective reality. It is completely detached
from objective reality. Can you explain this idea? - Right, so this is a theorem from evolution by natural selection. So the technical question
that I and my team asked was, what is the probability
that natural selection would shape sensory systems to see true properties
of objective reality? And to our surprise, we
found that the answer is precisely zero except for one, one kind of structure that we
can go into if you want to. But for any generic structure that you might think the world might have. A total order, a topology metric, the probability is precisely zero that natural selection would
shape any sensory system of any organism to see any
aspect of objective reality. So in that sense, what we're
seeing is what we need to see to stay alive long enough to reproduce. So in other words, we're
seeing what we need to guide adaptive behavior. Full stop. - So the evolutionary process, the process that took us from
the origin of life on Earth to the humans that we are today, that process does not maximize for truth, it maximizes for fitness, as
you say, fitness beats truth. And fitness does not have
to be connected to truth is the claim. And that's where you have an approach towards zero of probability
that we have evolved human cognition, human consciousness, whatever it is, the magic
that makes our mind work, evolved not for its ability
to see the truth of reality, but its ability to survive
in the environment. - That's exactly right. So most of us intuitively
think that surely the way that evolution will
make our senses more fit is to make them tell us more truths, or at least the truths we need to know about objective reality, the truths we need in our niche. That's the standard view,
and it was the view I took. I mean, that's sort of what we're taught or just even assume. It's just sort of like
the intelligent assumption that we would all make, but we don't have to just wave our hands. Evolution of natural selection is a mathematically precise theory. John Maynard Smith in the seventies created evolutionary game theory, and we have evolutionary graph theory, and even genetic algorithms
that we can use to study this. And so we don't have to wave our hands. It's a matter of theorem
and proof and or simulation before you get the therms and proofs. And a couple graduate students of mine, Chester Mark and Brian Marion, did some wonderful
simulations that tipped me off that there was something going on here. And then I went to a mathematician, Chachan Prakash, and Manish Singh, and some other friends
of mine, Chris Fields, but Chachan was the real
mathematician behind all this. And he's proved several theorems that uniformly indicate
that with one exception, which has to do with probability measures. The probability is zero. The reason there's an exception
for probability measures, so-called sigma algebras
or sigmative classes, is that for any scientific theory, there is the assumption
that needs to be made that the whatever structure, the whatever probabilistic
structure the world may have is not unrelated to the
probabilistic structure of our perceptions. If they were completely unrelated, then no science would be possible. And so this is technically, the map from reality to
our senses has to be a, so-called measurable map, has to preserve sigma algebras. But that means it could
be infinite to one, and it could collapse all
sorts of event information. But other than that,
there's no requirement in standard evolutionary theory for fitness payoff functions, for example, to preserve any specific
structures of objective reality. So you can ask the technical question. This is one of the avenues we took. If you look at all the fitness payoffs from whatever world structure
you might want to imagine, so a world with say a total order on it. So it's got end states and
they're totally ordered, and then you can have a set of maps from that world into a set of payoffs, say from zero to a thousand or whatever you want your payoffs to be. And you can just literally
count all the payoff functions and just do the
computations and count them. And then you can ask a precise question, how many of those payoff functions
preserve the total order? If that's what you're, or how
many preserve the topology? And you just count them and divide. So the number that are homomorphisms versus the total number
and then take the limit as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff
values goes very large. And when you do that,
you get zero every time. - Okay, there's a million
things to ask here, but first of all, just in
case people are not familiar with your work, let's sort of linger on the big bold statement here. Which is, the thing we see with our eyes is not some kind of limited
window into reality. It is completely detached from reality, likely completely detached from reality. You're saying a hundred percent likely. Okay, so none of this is real
in the way we think is real, in the way we have this intuition. There's like, this table is
some kind of abstraction, but underneath it all, there's atoms, and there's an entire century of physics that describes the
functioning of those atoms and the quarks that make them up. There's many Nobel prizes
about particles, and fields, and all that kind of stuff
that slowly builds up to something that's perceivable to us, both with our eyes, with our
different senses as this table. Then there's also ideas of chemistry that over layers of abstraction
from DNA, to embryos, to cells that make the human body. So all of that is not real. - It's a real experience, and it's a real adaptive
set of perceptions. So it's an adaptive set of perceptions. Full stop. We want to think. - [Lex] The perceptions are real. - So their perceptions are
real as perceptions, right? They are, we are having our perceptions, but we've assumed that there's
a pretty tight relationship between our perceptions and reality. If I look up and see the moon, then there is something that
exists in space and time that matches what I perceive. And all I'm saying is
that if you take evolution by natural selection seriously, then that is precluded that
our perceptions are there. They're there to guide
adaptive behavior, full stop. They're not there to show you the truth. In fact, the way I think about it is they're there to hide the truth because the truth is too complicated. It's just like if you're
trying to use your laptop to write an email, right? What you're doing is toggling
voltages in the computer, but good luck trying to do it that way. The reason why we have a user interface is because we don't wanna
know that quote unquote truth, the diodes and resistors and all that, that terrible hardware. If you had to know all that truth, your friends wouldn't hear from you. So what evolution gave us was perceptions that guide adaptive behavior, and part of that process, it turns out, means hiding the truth
and giving you eye candy. - So what's the difference
between hiding the truth and forming abstractions, layers upon layers of abstractions over these low level voltages, and transistors, and chips,
and programming languages from assembly to Python that then leads you to be
able to have an interface like Chrome, where you open
up another set of JavaScript and HTML programming languages that lead you to have a
graphical user interface on which you can then send
your friends an email? Is that completely detached
from the zeros and ones that are firing away inside the computer? - It's not, of course. When I talk about the user
interface on your desktop, there's this whole sophisticated
backstory to it, right? The hardware and the software that's allowing that to happen. Evolution doesn't tell
us the backstory, right? So the theory of evolution
is not going to be adequate to tell you what is that backstory? It's gonna say that whatever reality is, and that's the interesting thing. It says whatever reality
is, you don't see it, you see a user interface, but it doesn't tell you
what that user interface is, how it's built. Right, now we can try to look at certain aspects of the interface, but already we're gonna
look at that and go, before I would look at neurons and I was assuming that
I was seeing something that was at least partially true, and now I'm realizing
it could be like looking at the pixels on my desktop,
or icons on my desktop, and good luck going from
that to the data structures, and then the voltages, and
the, I mean, good luck. There's just no way. So what's interesting about this is that our scientific theories are precise enough and rigorous enough to
tell us certain limits, and even limits of the
theories themselves, but they're not going to tell
us what the next move is. And that's where scientific
creativity comes in. So the stuff that I'm
saying here, for example, is not alien to physicists. The physicists are saying
precisely the same thing, that space time is doomed. We've assumed that space
time is fundamental. That we've assumed that
for several centuries, and it's been very useful. So all the things that you're mentioning, the particles and all the
work that's been done, that's all been done in space time. But now physicists are
saying space time is doomed. There's no such thing as
space time fundamentally in the laws of physics. And that comes actually out of gravity together with quantum field theory. It just comes right out of it. It's a theorem of those
two theories put together, but it doesn't tell you what's behind it. So the physicists know
that the best theories, Einstein's gravity and quantum
field theory put together entail that space time
cannot be fundamental and therefore particles in space
time cannot be fundamental. They're just irreducible representations of the symmetries of space time. That's what they are. So space time, so we put the two together. We put together what the
physicists are discovering, and we can talk about how they do that. And then the new discoveries from evolution to natural selection, both of these discoveries are
really in the last 20 years. And what both are saying is
space time has had a good ride, it's been very useful,
reductionism has been useful, but it's over, and it's
time for us to go beyond. - When you say space time
is doomed, is it the space, is it the time, is it the
very hardcoded specification of four dimensions, or are you specifically referring to the kind of perceptual domain that humans operate in,
which is space time? You think there's a 3D, like our world is three dimensional and time progresses forward, therefore three dimensions plus one, 4D. What exactly do you mean by space time? What do you mean by space time is doomed? - Great, great. So this is by the way, not my quote. This is from, for
example, Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton. Ed Witten also there, David
Gross, Nobel Prize winner. So this is not just something
the cognitive scientists, this is what the physicists are saying. - Yeah, the physicists
are space time skeptics. - Yeah, they're saying that, and I can say exactly why
they think it's doomed, but what they're saying is that, because your question was
what aspect of space time? What are we talking about here? It's both space and time. Their union into space
time, as Einstein's theory, that's doomed. And they're basically saying
that even quantum theory, this is with Nima Arkani-Hamed especially, so Hilbert spaces will
not be fundamental either. So the notion of Hilbert space, which is really critical
to quantum field theory, quantum information theory, that's not going to figure in the fundamental new laws of physics. So what they're looking for is some new mathematical structures beyond space time, beyond Einstein's four
dimensional space time, or super symmetric version, geometric algebra signature, 2, 4 kind of, there are different ways
that you can represent it, but they're finding new structures, and by the way, they're succeeding now. They found something
called the Amplituhedron, this is Nima and his colleagues,
the cosmological polytopes. So there are these like polytopes, these polyhedra in multidimensions, generalizations of simplicities,
that are coding for, for example, the scattering
amplitudes of processes in the large Hadron collider
and other colliders. So they're finding that if they let go of space time completely,
they're finding new ways of computing these scattering amplitudes that turn literally billions
of terms into one term. When you do it in space and time, because it's the wrong framework, it's just a user interface, that's now from the
evolutionary point of view, it's just user interface, it's not a deep insight
into the nature of reality. So it's missing, deep symmetry is something
called a dual conformal symmetry, which turns out to be true
of the scattering data, but you can't see it in space time. And it's making the computations
way too complicated, 'cause you're trying to
compute all the loops, and fineman diagrams, and
all the fineman integrals. So see, the fineman approach
to the scattering amplitudes is trying to enforce two critical
properties of space time, locality and unitarity. And so when you enforce
those, you get all these loops and multiple different levels of loops. And for each of those
you have to add new terms to your computation. But when you do it outside of space time, you don't have the notion of unitarity, you don't have the notion of locality. You have something deeper, and it's capturing some symmetries that are actually true of the data. But then when you look at the geometry of the facets of these polytopes, then certain of them will code
for unitarity and locality. So it actually comes out of the structure of these deep polytopes. So what we're finding is
there's this whole new world now beyond space time that is making explicit symmetries that are true of the data that cannot be seen in space time. And that is turning the
computations from billions of terms to one or two or a handful of terms. So we're getting insights into symmetries, and all of a sudden the
math is becoming simple, because we're not doing something silly. We're not adding up all
these loops in space time. We're doing something far deeper. But they don't know what
this world is about all. So they're in an interesting position where we know that space time is doomed, and I should probably
tell you why it's doomed, what they're saying about why it's doomed. But they need a flashlight
to look beyond space time. What flashlight are we gonna use to look into the dark beyond space time? Because Einstein's
theory and quantum theory can't tell us what's beyond them. All they can do is tell us
that when you put us together, space time is doomed at 10
to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Beyond that space time
doesn't even make sense. It's just has no operational definition. So, but it doesn't tell you what's beyond. And so they're just looking
for deep structures, like guessing. It's really fun. So these really brilliant guys, generic. Brilliant men and women
who are doing this work, physicists, are making guesses
about these structures, informed guesses. Because they're trying to ask, well, okay, what deeper structure could give us the stuff that we're seeing in space time, but without certain commitments that we have to make in space time, like locality and unitarity? So they make these brilliant guesses, and of course, most of the
time you're gonna be wrong, but once you get one or
two that start to pay off and then you get some lucky breaks. So they got a lucky break back in 1986. A couple of mathematicians
named Park and Taylor took the scattering
amplitude for two gluons coming in and high energy and four gluons going out at low energy. So that kind of scattering thing. So it's like, apparently for
people who are into this, that's sort of something
that happens so often, you need to be able to find
it and get rid of those, because you already know
about that and you need to, so you needed to compute them. It was billions of terms. And they couldn't do it, even the supercomputers couldn't do that for the many billions or
millions of times per second they needed to do it. So they begged, the experimentalists
begged the theorists, please can you, you gotta. And so Park and Taylor
took the billions of terms, hundreds of pages, and miraculously they turned it into nine. And then a little bit later
they guessed one term expression that turned out to be equivalent. So billions of terms reduced to one term, that so-called famous
Park-Taylor Formula, 1986. And that was like, okay,
where did that come from? This is a pointer into a deep
realm beyond space and time, but no one, I mean,
what can you do with it? And they thought maybe it was a one-off. But then other formulas started coming up. And then eventually Nima
Arkani-Hamed and his team found this thing called the amplituhedron, which really sort of captures a big part of the whole ball of wax. I'm sure they would say, no,
there's plenty more to do. So I won't say they did
it all by any means. They're looking at the
cosmological polytope as well. So what's remarkable to me is that two pillars of modern science, quantum field theory with
gravity on the one hand and evolution by natural
selection on the other, just in the last 20 years
have very clearly said, space time has had a good run. Reductionism has been a
fantastic methodology. So we had a great ontology of space time, a great methodology of reductionism. Now it's time for a new trick, but now you need to go deeper and show, but by the way, this is
doesn't mean we throw away everything we've done. Not by a long shot. Every new idea that we come
up with beyond space time must project precisely into space time, and it better give us back everything that we know
and love in space time, or generalizations, or it's not gonna be taken
seriously and it shouldn't be. So we have a strong constraint on whatever we're going
to do beyond space time. It needs to project into space time. And whatever this deeper theory is, it may not itself have
evolution of natural selection. This may not be part of this deeper realm, but when we take the whatever
that thing is beyond time and project it into space time, it has to look like evolution
by natural selection or it's wrong. So that's a strong
constraint on this work. - So even the evolution
by natural selection and quantum field theory
could be interfaces into something that
doesn't look anything like, like you mentioned, I mean
it's interesting to think that evolution might be
a very crappy interface into something much deeper. - That's right, they're both telling us that the framework that
you've had can only go so far, and it has to stop, and
there's something beyond. And that framework, the very framework that is space and time itself. Now of course evolution
by natural selection is not telling us about like Einstein's relativistic space time. So that was another question
you asked a little bit earlier. It's telling us more about
our perceptual space and time, which we have used as
the basis for creating first the Newtonian space versus time, as a mathematical extension
of our perceptions. And then Einstein then took that and extended it even further. So the relationship between
what evolution is telling us and what the physicists are telling us is that in some sense the
Newton and Einstein space time are formulated as sort
of rigorous extensions of our perceptual space, making it mathematically rigorous and laying out the symmetries
that they find there. So that's sort of the
relationship between them. So it's the perceptual space time that evolution is telling us is just a user interface effectively. And then the physicists are finding that even the mathematical
extension of that into the Einsteinian
formulation has to be, as well, not the final story. There's something deeper. - So let me ask you about
reductionism and interfaces as we march forward from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics. These are all, in your view, interfaces. Are we getting closer
to objective reality? How do we know if these interfaces, in the process of science, the reason we like those interfaces is because they're
predictive of some aspects, strongly predictive about
some aspects of our reality. Is that completely deviating from our understanding of that reality? Or is it helping us get
closer and closer and closer? - Well, of course one critical constraint on all of our theories is that
they are empirically tested and pass the experiments
that we have for them. So no one's arguing against
experiments being important and wanting to test all
of our current theories and any new theories on that. So that's all there. We have good reason to believe that science will never
get a theory of everything. - [Lex] Everything, everything. - Everything, everything, right. A final theory of everything, right? I think that my own
take for what it's worth is that Godel's incompleteness theorem sort of points us in that direction. Even with mathematics,
any finite eczemetization that's sophisticated enough
to be able to do arithmetic, it's easy to show that there'll
be statements that are true, that can't be proven, can't be deduced from within that framework. And if you add the new
statements to your axioms, then there'll be always new
statements that are true but can't be proven
with a new axiom system. And the best scientific theories
in physics, for example, and also now evolution are mathematical. So our theories are gonna be, they're gonna have their own assumptions, and they'll be mathematically precise, and they'll be theories
perhaps of everything except those assumptions. Because the assumptions are, we say, please grant me these assumptions. If you grant me these assumptions, then I can explain this other stuff. So you have the assumptions
that are like miracles as far as the theory is concerned. They're not explained,
they're the starting points for explanation. And then you have the
mathematical structure of the theory itself, which
will have the Godel limits. And so my take is that
reality, whatever it is, is always going to transcend
any conceptual theory that we can come up with. - There's always gonna be
mystery at the edges, right? Contradictions and all that kind of stuff. - [Donald] And truths. - So there's this idea that is brought up in the financial space of
settlement of transactions. It's often talked about in
cryptocurrency especially. So you could do money, cash
is not connected to anything. It used to be connected to
gold, to physical reality. But then you can use money to
exchange value, to transact. So when it was on the gold standard, the money would represent some
stable component of reality. Isn't it more effective to
avoid things like hyperinflation if we generalize that idea? Isn't it better to connect your, whatever we humans are doing
in the social interaction space with each other, isn't it better from an evolutionary perspective to connect it to some degree to reality? So that the transactions are settled with something that's universal as opposed to us constantly operating in something that's a complete illusion. Isn't it easy to hyperinflate that, like where you really
deviate very, very far away from the underlying reality? Or do you never get in trouble for this? Can you just completely
drift far, far away from the underlying reality
and never get in trouble? - That's a great question. On the financial side,
there's two levels at least that we could take your question. One is strictly like
evolutionary psychology of financial systems. And that's pretty interesting. And there, the decentralized
idea that defy kind of idea in cryptocurrencies may make good sense from just an evolutionary
psychology point of view. Having human nature being what it is, putting a lot of faith in
a few central controllers depends a lot on the veracity of those and trustworthiness of those
few central controllers. And we have ample evidence time and again that that's often betrayed. So it makes good evolutionary
sense, I would say, to have a decentralized, I mean, democracy is a step in
that direction, right? We don't have a monarch
now telling us what to do. We decentralize things, right? Because if the monarch, if
you have Marcus Aurelius as you're emperor, you're great. If you have Nero, it's not so great. And so we don't want that. So democracy is a step in that direction. But I think the defy thing
is an even bigger step and is is going to even
make the democratization even greater. So that's one level. - Also the fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is also a consequence of evolution. That's also a feature I think, right? You can argue from the long
span of living organisms, it's nice for power to corrupt. So mad men and women throughout history might be useful to teach us a lesson. - We could learn from
our negative example. - [Lex] Exactly. - So power does corrupt, and I think that you can
think about that again from an evolutionary point of view, but I think that your
question was a little deeper. That was, does the
evolutionary interface idea sort of unhinge science from
some kind of important test for the theories, right? Doesn't mean that anything
goes in scientific theory, but there's no, if we don't see the truth, is there no way to tether
our theories and test them? And I think there's no problem there. We can only test things in
terms of what we can measure with our senses in space and time. So we are going to have to
continue to do experiments, but we're gonna understand
a little bit differently what those experiments are. We had thought that when we see a pointer on some machine in an experiment that the machine exists,
the pointer exists, and the values exist even
when no one is looking at them and that they're an objective truth. And our best theorists are telling us no. Pointers are just pointers, and that's what you have to rely on for making your judgements. But that even the pointers themselves are not the objective reality. And I think Godel is telling us not that anything goes, but you know, as you develop new axiom systems, you'll find out what goes
within that axiom system and what testable
predictions you can make. So I don't think we're untethered. We continue to do experiments, but I think we won't have that we want is a conceptual understanding that gives us a theory of everything that's final and complete. I think that this is,
to put it another way, this is job security for scientists. Our job, will never be done, is job security for neuroscience. Because before we thought that
when we looked in the brain, we saw neurons and neural networks and axion potentials and
synapses and so forth, and that was it. That that was the reality. Now we have to reverse engineer that. We have to say what is beyond space time? What is going on? What is a dynamical
system beyond space time, that when we project it
into Einstein space time, gives us things that look like neurons, and neural networks, and synapses. So we have to reverse engineer it. So there's gonna be lots
more work for neuroscience. It's gonna be far more
complicated, and difficult, and challenging. But that's wonderful. That's what we need to do. We thought neurons exist
when they aren't perceived, and they don't. In the same way that if I show you, when I say they don't exist, I should be very, very concrete. If I draw on a piece of
paper a little sketch of something that is
called the Necker cube, it's just a little line drawing of a cube. It's on a flat piece of paper. If I execute it well and I show it to you, you'll see a 3D cube. And you'll see it flip, sometimes you'll see one face in front, sometimes you'll see
the other face in front. But if I ask you which face is in front when you don't look? The answer is, well
neither face is in front, 'cause there's no cube, there's
just a flat piece of paper. So when you look at the piece of paper, you perceptually create the cube, and when you look at it,
then you fix one face to be in front and one face to the other. So that's what I mean when
I say it doesn't exist. Space time itself is like the cube. It's a data structure that
your sensory systems construct, whatever your sensory systems mean now. Because we now have to
even take that for granted. But there are perceptions
that you construct on the fly, and they're data structures
in the computer science sense, and you garbage collect them
when you don't need them. So you create them and
garbage collect them. - But is it possible that it's mapped well in some concrete, predictable
way to objective reality? The sheet of paper, the
two dimensional space, or we can talk about space time, maps in some way that we
maybe don't yet understand, but will one day understand
what that mapping is. But it maps reliably, it
is tethered in that way. - Well, yes, and so the new theories that the physicists are
finding beyond space time have that kind of tethering. So they show precisely how you
start with an amplituhedron and how you project this
high dimensional structure into the four dimensions of space time. So there's a precise procedure
that relates the two. And they're doing the same thing with the cosmological polytopes. So they're the ones that are making the most
concrete and fun advances going beyond space time. And there they're tethering it, right? They say this is precisely
the mathematical projection from this deeper
structure into space time. One thing I'll say about,
as a non physicist, what I find interesting
is that they're finding just geometry, but there's
no notion of dynamics. Right now they're just
finding these static geometric structures, which is impressive. I'm not putting them down. What they're doing is
unbelievably complicated, and brilliant, and adventurous. It's all those things. - And beautiful. - [Donald] And beautiful, yeah, right. - From a human aesthetic perspective, 'cause geometry is beautiful. - Absolutely. And they're finding symmetries
that are true of the data that can't be seen in space time. But I'm looking for a
theory beyond space time that's a dynamical theory. I would love to find, and we can talk about that at some point, a theory of consciousness in which the dynamics
of consciousness itself will give rise to the geometry that the physicists are
finding beyond space time. If we can do that, then we'd
have a completely different way of looking at how
consciousness is related to what we call the brain
or the physical world more generally. Right now, all of my brilliant colleagues, well 99% of them are trying to, they're assuming space
time is fundamental. They're assuming that
particles are fundamental, quarks, gluons, leptons and so forth. Elements, atoms and so
forth are fundamental. And that therefore neurons and brains are part of objective reality. And that somehow when you get matter that's complicated enough, it will somehow generate
conscious experiences by its functional properties. Or if you're panpsychist,
maybe in addition to the physical properties of particles, you add a consciousness property as well. And then you combine these
physical and conscious properties to get more complicated ones, but they're all doing
it within space time. All of the work that's
being done on consciousness and its relationship to the brain has all assumed something
that our best theories are telling us is doomed, space time. - Why does that particular
assumption bother you the most? So you bring up space time,
I mean that's just one useful interface we've
used for a long time. Surely there's other interfaces. Is space time just the one of the big ones to build up people's
intuition about the fact that they just do assume
a lot of things strongly? Or is it in fact the fundamental flaw in the way we see the world? - Well, everything else
that we think we know are things in space time. - [Lex] Sure. - And so, when you say
space time is doomed, this is a shot to the heart
of the whole framework, the whole conceptual framework
that we've had in science. Not to the scientific method, but to the fundamental ontology and also the fundamental methodology. The ontology of space
time and its contents and the methodology of reductionism, which is that as we go to
smaller scales in space time, we will find more and
more fundamental laws. And that's been very useful for the space and time for centuries, reductionism for centuries. But now we realize that that's over. Reductionism is in fact
dead, as is space time. - What exactly is reductionism? What is the process of reductionism that is different than
some of the physicists that you mentioned that
are trying to think, trying to let go of the
assumption of space time? Like beyond, isn't that
still trying to come up with a simple model that
explains this whole thing? Isn't it still reducing? - It's a wonderful question
because it really helps to clarify two different notions, which is scientific
explanation on the one hand and a particular kind of
scientific explanation on the other, which is the reductionist. So the reductionist explanation is saying, I will start with things that
are smaller in space time and therefore more fundamental, and where the laws are more fundamental. So we go to just smaller
and smaller scales. Whereas in science, more
generally we just say, like when Einstein did the
special theory of relativity, he's saying, let me have
a couple postulates. I will assume that the
speed of light is universal for all observers in uniform motion. And that the laws of physics for uniform motion are relative. That's not reductionist. That those are saying,
grant me these assumptions, I can build this entire concept
of space time out of it. It's not a reductionist thing. You're not going to smaller
and smaller scales of space. You're coming up with these
deep, deep principles. Same thing with this
theory of gravity, right? It's the falling elevator idea, right? So this is not a
reductionist kind of thing. It's something different. - Simplification is a bigger
thing than just reductionism. - Yeah, reductionism has
been a particularly useful kind of scientific explanation, for example, in thermodynamics, right? Where the notion that we have of heat, some macroscopic thing
like temperature and heat, it turns out that Neil
Boltzmann and others discover, well hey, if we go to
smaller and smaller scales, we find these things
called molecules or atoms. And if we think of them
as bouncing around, having some kind of energy,
then what we call heat really can be reduced to to that. And so that's a particularly
useful kind of reduction is a useful kind of scientific explanation that works within a range
of scales within space time. But we know now precisely
where that has to stop, at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. And I would be impressed if it was 10 to the minus
33 trillion centimeters. I'm not terribly impressed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. - I don't even know how to comprehend either of those numbers, frankly. Just a small aside, because I am a computer science person, I also find cellular automata beautiful. And so you have somebody
like Stephen Wolfram, who recently has been
very excitedly exploring a proposal for a data structure
that could be the numbers that would make you a little
bit happier in terms of scale. Because they're very,
very, very, very tiny. Do you like this space of
exploration of really thinking, letting go of space time,
letting go of everything and trying to think what
kind of data structures could be underneath this whole mess? - That's right, so if
they're thinking about these as outside of space time, then
that's what we have to do. That's what our best
theories are telling us. You now have to think
outside of space time. Now, of course I should back up and say, we know that Einstein
surpassed Newton, right? But that doesn't mean
that there's not good work to do in Newton. There's all sorts of Newtonian physics that takes us to the moon and so forth. And there's lots of good
problems that we want to solve with Newtonian physics. The same thing will be true of space time. It's not like we're gonna
stop using space time. We'll continue to do all
sorts of good work there. But for those scientists
who are really looking to go deeper, to actually find the next, just like what Einstein did to Newton, what are we gonna do to Einstein? How do we get beyond
Einstein and quantum theory to something deeper? Then we have to actually let go. And if we're gonna do like
this automata kind of approach, it is critical that it's
not automata in space time. It's automata prior to space time from which we're going to
show how space time emerges. If you're doing within space time, well that might be a fun model, but it's not the radical
new step that we need. - Yeah, so the space
time emerges from that, whatever system. Like you're saying it's
a dynamical system. Do we even have an understanding
what dynamical means when we go beyond? When you start to think about dynamics, it could mean a lot of things. Even causality could mean a lot of things if we realize that everything's
an interface, right? Like how much do we really know is an interesting question,
because you brought up neurons. I gotta ask you on another,
again, another tangent. There's a paper I remember
a while ago looking at, could a neuroscientist
understand a microprocessor? And I just enjoyed that thought experiment that they provided,
which is they basically, it's a couple of neuroscientists, Eric Jonas and Conrad Cording, who used the tools of neuroscience to analyze a microprocessor. So a computer, computer chip. - Now if we lesion it here,
what happens, and so forth. And if you go and lesion into computer, it's very, very clear that
lesion experiments on computers are not gonna give you a lot
of insight into how it works. - And also the measurement devices, and the kind of, just
using the basic approaches of neuroscience, collecting
the data, trying to intuit about the underlying function of it. And that helps you understand that our scientific exploration of concepts, depending on the field, are maybe in the very, very early stages. I wouldn't say it leads us astray, perhaps it does sometimes, but it's not anywhere close
to some fundamental mechanism that actually makes a thing work. I don't know if you can
sort of comment on that in terms of using
neuroscience to understand the human mind and neurons. Are we really far away potentially from understanding in
the way we understand the transistors enough to
be able to build a computer? So one thing about understanding is you can understand for fun, the other one is to understand so you could build things. And that's when you
really have to understand. - Exactly. In fact, what got me into the field at MIT was work by David Maher
on this very topic. So David Maher was professor at MIT, but he'd done his PhD in neuroscience, studying just the
architectures of the brain. But he realized that his work, it was on the cerebellum. He realized that his work,
as rigorous as it was, left him unsatisfied,
because he didn't know what the cerebellum was for and why it had that architecture. And so he went to MIT and
he was in the AI lab there, and he said he had this
three level approach that really grabbed my attention. So when I was an undergrad at UCLA, I read one of his papers
in a class and said, who is this guy? Because he said, you have to
have a computational theory. What is being computed and why? An algorithm, well how
is it being computed? What are the precise algorithms? And then the hardware, how does it get instantiated
in the hardware? And so to really to do
neuroscience, he argued, we needed to have understanding
at all those levels. And that really got me,
I loved the neuroscience, but I realized this guy was
saying, if you can't build it, you don't understand it effectively. And so that's why I went to MIT, and I had the pleasure
of working with David until he died just a
year and a half later. So there's been that idea
that with neuroscience, we have to have in some
sense a top-down model of what's being computed and why that we would then go after. And the same thing with the
trying to reverse engineer a computing system like your laptop. We really need to understand what the user interface
is about, and why we have, what are keys on the
keyboard for and so forth. You need to know why to really
understand all the circuitry and what it's for. Now we don't, evolution
and natural selection does not tell us the deeper
question that we're asking, the answer to the deeper question, which is why? What's this deeper reality,
and what's it up to, and why? All it tells us is that
whatever reality is, it's not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction. - So just to linger on this
fascinating bold question that shakes you out of your dream state, does this fiction still help
you in building intuitions as literary fiction does about reality? The reason we read literary
fiction is it helps us build intuitions and understanding
and in indirect ways, sneak up to the difficult
questions of human nature. Great fiction. Same with this observed reality. Does this interface that we get, this fictional interface
help us build intuition about deeper truths of
how this whole mess works? - Well, I think that each
theory that we propose will give its own answer
to that question, right? So when the physicists are
proposing these structures, like the amplituhedron,
and cosmological polytope, associohedron, and so
forth beyond space time, we can then ask your question
for those specific structures and say, how much
information, for example, does evolution by natural selection and the the kinds of sensory
systems that we have right now give us about this deeper reality? And why did we evolve this way? We can try to answer that
question from within the deeper. So there's not gonna be a general answer. I think we're going to, what
we'll have to do is posit these new deeper theories, and then try to answer your question within the framework of
those deeper theories, knowing full well that there'll
be an even deeper theory. - So is this paralyzing, though? Because how do we know
we're not completely adrift, out to sea, lost forever? That our theories are completely lost. So if we can never truly,
deeply introspect to the bottom, if it's always just turtles
on top of turtles infinitely, isn't that paralyzing
for the scientific mind? - Well it's interesting that you say introspect to the bottom
because there is that, there is one, I mean, again,
this is in the same spirit of what I said before, which is it depends on what answer you give to
what's beyond space time, what answer we would
give to your question. So, but one answer that
is interesting to explore is something that spiritual
traditions have said for thousands of years,
but haven't said precisely. So we can't take it seriously in science until it's made precise, but we might be able to make it precise. And that is that they've also said something like space and
time aren't fundamental. They're maya, they're illusion. But if you look inside, if you introspect and let go of all of your
particular perceptions, you will come to something
that's beyond conceptual thought. And that is, they claim, being in contact with the deep ground of
being that transcends any particular conceptual understanding. If that is correct, now I'm not saying it's correct, but, and I'm not saying it's not correct, I'm just saying if that's correct, then it would be the
case that as scientists, because we also are in touch
with this ground of being, we would then not be able to conceptually understand
ourselves all the way. But we could know ourselves
just by being ourselves. And so there would be a sense in which there is a fundamental grounding
to the whole enterprise, because we're not separate
from the enterprise. This is the opposite of
impersonal third person science. This would make science be personal, personal all the way down,
but nevertheless scientific because the scientific
method would still be what we would use all the way down for the conceptual understanding. - Unfortunately, you still don't know if you went all the way down. It's possible that this kind
of, whatever consciousness is, and we'll talk about it, is
getting the cliche statement of be yourself. It is somehow digging
at a deeper of reality. But you still don't know
when you get to the bottom. You know, a lot of people,
they'll take psychedelic drugs and they'll say, well that
takes my mind to certain places where it feels like that is revealing some deeper truth of reality. But you still, it could be
interfaces on top of interfaces. In your view of this,
you really don't know. I mean it's Godel's incompleteness is that you really don't know. - My own view on it, for what it's worth, 'cause I don't know the right
answer, but my own view on it right now is that it's never ending. I think that there will
never, that this is great, as I said before, great
job security for science, and that if this is true, and if consciousness is somehow important or fundamental in the universe, this may be an important fundamental fact about consciousness itself that it's a never ending
exploration that's going on in some sense. - Well that's interesting. Lemme push back on the job security. So maybe as we understand
this kind of idea deeper and deeper, we
understand that the pursuit is not a fruitful one,
that maybe we need to, maybe that's why we don't
see aliens everywhere. As you get smarter and
smarter and smarter, you realize that like exploration is, there's other fun ways to
spend your time than exploring. You could be sort of living
maximally in some way that's not exploration. I could, there's all kinds of
video games you can construct and put yourself inside of them that don't involve you going
outside of the game world. It's feeling, for my human perspective, what seems to be fun
is challenging yourself and overcoming those challenges, so you can constantly
artificially generate challenges for yourself like
Sisyphus and his Boulder. And that's it. So the scientific method
that's always reaching out to the stars, that's
always trying to figure out the puzzle upon a puzzle, always trying to get to the bottom turtle. Maybe if we can build more and more the intuition that that's
an infinite pursuit, we agree to start deviating
from that pursuit, start enjoying the here and now versus the looking out
into the unknown always. Maybe looking out into the
unknown is a early activity for a species that's evolved. I'm just sort of saying, pushing back as you probably got a
lot of scientists excited in terms of job security. I could envision where
it's not job security, where scientists become
more and more useless. Maybe they're like the
holders of the ancient wisdom that allows us to study our own history, but not much more than that. Just to pushback. - Well, that's good pushback. I'll put one in there
for the scientists again. But sure, but then I'll
take the other side too. So when Faraday did
all of his experiments, with magnets and electricity and so forth, he came up with all this
wonderful empirical data and James Clark Maxwell looked at it and wrote down a few equations, which we can now write
down in a single equation. The Maxwell equation, if we
used geometrical algebra, just one equation. That opened up unbelievable technologies where people are resuming
and talking to each other around the world, the
whole electronics industry. There was something that
transformed our lives in a very positive way. With the theories beyond space
time, here's one potential. Right now, most of the
galaxies that we see, we can see them, but we know
that we could never get to them no matter how fast we traveled. They're going away from us at
the speed of light or beyond. So we can't ever get to them. So there's all this beautiful real estate that's just smiling and waving at us, and we can never get to it. But that's if we go through space time. But if we recognize that space time is just a data structure,
it's not fundamental, we're not little things inside space time, space time is a little data
structure in our perceptions. It's just the other way around. Once we understand that
and we get equations for the stuff that's beyond space time, maybe we won't have to
go through space time. Maybe we can go around it. Maybe I can go to Proxima
Centauri and not go through space. I can just go right there directly. If it's a data structure we
can start to play with it. So I think that, for what it's worth, my take would be that the
endless sequence of theories that we could contemplate building will lead to an endless sequence
of new remarkable insights into the potentialities, the possibilities that would seem miraculous to us. And that we will be motivated to continue the exploration partly just for the technological
innovations that come out. But the other thing that
you mentioned though, what about just being? What if we decide instead of
all this doing and exploring, what about being? My guess is that the best
scientists will do both, and that the act of being will be a place where they get many of their ideas, that they then pull into
the conceptual realm. And I think many of the best scientists, Einstein comes to mind, right? Where these guys say, look, I didn't come up with these
ideas by a conceptual analysis. I was thinking in vague images and it was just something non-conceptual. And then it took me a long, long time to pull it out into concepts and then longer to put it into math. But the real insights didn't come from just slavishly
playing with equations. They came from a deeper place. And so there may be this
going back and forth between the complete non-conceptual, where there's essentially
no end to the wisdom, and then conceptual systems where there's the Godel
limits that we have to that. And that maybe if
consciousness is important and fundamental, that
maybe what consciousness, at least part of what
consciousness is about, is this discovering itself, discovering its
possibilities, so to speak. And we can talk about what that might mean by going from the
non-conceptual to the conceptual and back and forth. - [Lex] To get better and
better and better at being. - Right. - Let me ask you just, just
to linger on the evolutionary, because you mentioned
evolutionary game theory and that's really the perspective from which you come to form
the case against reality. At which point in our evolutionary history did we start to deviate
the most from reality? Is it way before life
even originated on earth? Is it in the early development
from bacteria and so on? Or is it when some inklings of what we think of as intelligence or maybe even complex
consciousness started to emerge? So where did this deviation, just like with the
interfaces on in a computer, you know, you start with transistors, and then you have assembly, and then you have C, C++,
then you have Python, then you have GUIs and all that kind, you have layers upon layers. When did we start to deviate? - Well, David Maher,
again, my advisor at MIT, in his book "Vision" suggested that the more primitive sensory
systems were less realistic, less vertical. But that by the time you got to something as complicated as the humans, we were actually estimating
the true shapes and distances to objects and so forth. So his point of view, and
I think it was probably, it is not an uncommon
view among my colleagues that, yeah, the sensory
systems of lower creatures may just not be complicated
enough to give them much truth. But as you get to 86 billion neurons, you can now compute the truth or at least the parts of
the truth that we need. When I look at evolutionary game theory, one of my graduate students, Justin Mark, did some simulations
using genetic algorithms. So there he was just exploring, we start off with random organisms, random sensory genetics
and random actions. And first generation was unbelievably, it was a foraging situation. There were foraging for resources, and most of them stayed in one place, didn't do anything important. But we could then just look
at how the genes evolved, and what we found was, what he found, was that basically you never even saw the truth organisms
even come on the stage. If they came, they were
gone in one generation. They just weren't. So they came and gone. They came and went, even
just in one generation, they just are not good enough. The ones that were just
tracking their senses, just were tracking the fitness payoffs, were far more fit than the truth seekers. So an answer at one level, I'm gonna give an answer
at a deeper level, but just with evolutionary game theory. Because my attitude as a scientist is, I don't believe any of our theories. I take them very, very seriously. I study them, I look
at their implications, but none of them are the gospel. They're just the latest
ideas that we have. And so the reason I study
evolutionary game theory is because that's the best tool we have right now in this area. There is nothing else that competes. And so as a scientist,
it's my responsibility to take the best tools
and see what they mean. And the same thing the
physicists are doing, they're taking the best tools and looking at what they entail. But I think that science
now has enough experience to realize that we should
not believe our theories in the sense that we've now arrived. In 1890, it was a lot of
physicists thought we'd arrived, they were discouraging
bright young students from going into physics,
because it was all done. And that's precisely the wrong attitude. Forever, this is the
wrong attitude forever. The attitude we should have
is, a century from now, they'll be looking at us and laughing at what we didn't know. And we just have to assume that
that's going to be the case. Just know that everything that we think is so brilliant right now, our
final theory of everything, a century from now, they'll look at us like we
look at the physicists of 1890 and go, how could they have been so dumb? So I don't wanna make that mistake. So I'm not doctrinaire about any of our current
scientific theories. I'm doctrinaire about this, we should use the best
tools we have right now. That's what we've got. - And with humility. Well, so let me ask you about game theory. I love game theory,
evolutionary game theory, but I'm always suspicious
of it, like economics. When you construct models, it's
too easy to construct things that oversimplify just because we, our human brains enjoy the simplification of constructing a few variables that somehow represent
organisms or represent people. And running a simulation
that then allows you to build up intuition. And then it feels really good because you just can get some really deep and surprising intuitions. But how do you know the
assumptions underlying your models aren't fundamentally flawed? And because of that, your conclusions are fundamentally flawed. So I guess, yes, my question is, what are the limits in
your use of game theory, evolutionary game theory,
your experience with it, what are the limits of game theory? - So I've gotten some pushback
from professional colleagues and friends who have
tried to rerun simulations and try to, I mean, the idea
that we don't see the truth is not comfortable. And so many of my colleagues
are very interested in trying to show that we're wrong. And so the idea would be to say that somehow we did something, as you're suggesting,
maybe something special that wasn't completely general. We've got some little special
part of the whole search space and evolutionary game theory in which this happens to be true. But more generally, organisms
would evolve to see the truth. So the best pushback we've
gotten is from a team at Yale. And they suggested that if you use thousands of payoff functions, so we, in our simulations, we just use a couple, one or two. Because it was our first
simulations, right? So that would be a limit. We had one or two payoff functions. We showed the result in those, at least for the genetic algorithms. And they said, if you have 20,000 of them, then we can find these conditions in which truth seeing organisms would
be the ones that evolved and survived. And so we looked at their simulations, and it certainly is the case
that you can find special cases in which truth can evolve. So when I say it's probability zero, it doesn't mean it can't happen. It can happen, in fact, it
could happen infinitely often, it's just probability of zero. So probability of zero things
can happen infinitely often. - When you say probability of zero, you mean probability close to zero? - To be very precise. So for example, if I have
a unit square on the plane, and I use a probability measure in which the area of a
region is this probability, then if I draw a curve
in that unit square, it has a measure precisely zero. Precisely, not approximately,
precisely zero. And yet it has infinitely many points. So there's an object that,
for that probability measure, has probability zero, and yet there's infinitely
many points in it. So that's what I mean
when I say that the things that are probability zero
can happen infinitely often in principle. - Yeah, but infinity, as far as I, and I look outside often, I walk around, and I look at people, I haven't ever seen infinity in real life. - That's an interesting issue. - I've been looking, I've been looking. I don't notice it infinitely
small or the infinitely big. And so the tools of mathematics, you could sort of apply
the same kind of criticism, that it is a very convenient
interface into our reality. - Well, that's a big
debate in mathematics. The intuitionist versus the
ones who take, for example, the real numbers as real. And that's a fun discussion. Nicholas Giesen, a physicist,
had really interesting work recently on how if you go
with Intuitionist mathematics, you could effectively quantize Newton. And you find that Newtonian
theory and quantum theory aren't that different once you go with it. - [Lex] That's funny. - It's really quite interesting. So the issue you raised
is a very, very deep one, and one that I think we
should take quite seriously, which is how should we think about the reality of Contra's
hierarchy, Aliff one, Aliff two, and all these different infinities versus just a more
algorithmic approach, right? So where everything's
computable in some sense, everything's finite. As big as you want, but
nevertheless finite. - So yeah, that ultimately boils down to whether the world is
discreet or continuous in some general sense. And again, we can't really know, but there's just mind breaking thought, just common sense reasoning
that something can happen and yet probability of it happening is 0%. That doesn't compute for
a common sense computer. - Right, this is where you have
to be a sharp mathematician to really, and I'm not. - Sharp is one word. What I'm saying is
common sense computer is, I mean that in a very,
kinda in a positive sense, because we've been talking
about perception systems and interfaces. If we are to reason about the world, we have to use the best interfaces we got. And I'm not exactly sure that game theory is the best interface we got for this. - [Donald] Oh, right. - And application of
mathematics tricks and tools in mathematics to game
theory is the best we got when we are thinking about
the nature of reality, and fitness functions,
and evolution, period. - Well that's a fair rejoinder. And I think that that was
the tool that we used. And if someone says, here's
a better mathematical tool and here's why, this
mathematical tool better captures the essence of Darwin's idea. John Maynard Smith didn't quite get it with evolutionary game theory. There's this better, this thing. Now there are tools like
evolutionary graph theory, which generalized
evolutionary game theory, and then there's quantum game theory. So you can use quantum tools,
like entanglement for example, as a resource in games
that change the very nature of the solutions, the optimal
solutions of the game theory. - Well the work from Yale
is really interesting. It's a really interesting
challenge of kind of these ideas where, okay, if you
have a very large number of fitness functions,
or let's say you have a nearly infinite number
of fitness functions, or a growing number of fitness functions, what kind of interesting
things start emerging? If you are to be an organism,
if to be an organism that adapts means having to deal with an ensemble of fitness functions. - Right, and so we've actually redone some of our own work based on theirs, and this is the back and forth that we expect in science, right? And what we found was
that in their simulations, they were assuming that you
couldn't carve the world up into objects. And so we said, well, let's
relax that assumption. Allow organisms to create data structures that we might call objects. And an object would be, you would do hierarchical clustering of your fitness payoff functions. The ones that have similar shapes, if you have 20,000 of them, maybe these 50 are all very, very similar. So I can take all the
perception, action, fitness stuff and make that into a data structure, and we'll call that a unit or an object. And as soon as we did that, then all of their results went away. It turned out they were the special case and that the organisms that
were allowed to only see, that were shaped to see
only fitness payoffs were the ones that were. So the idea is that objects then, what are objects from an
evolutionary point of view? This bottle, we thought
that when I saw a bottle, it was because I was seeing
a true object that existed whether or not it was perceived. Evolutionary theories suggest
a different interpretation. I'm seeing a data
structure that is encoding a convenient way of looking
at various fitness payoffs. I can use this for drinking, I could use it as a weapon,
not a very good one. I could beat someone
over the head with it. If my goal is mating, this is pointless. So I'm seeing, what I'm coding
here is all sorts of actions and the payoffs that I could get. When I pick up an apple,
now I'm getting a different set of actions and payoffs. When I pick up a rock I'm getting, so for every object, what I'm getting is a different set of payoff
functions with various actions. And so once you allow that,
then what you find is, once again, that truth goes extinct. And the organisms that
just get an interface are the ones that win. - But the question just sneaking up on, this is fascinating, from where do fitness functions originate? What gives birth to the fitness functions? So if there's a giant black box that just keeps giving
you fitness functions, what are we trying to optimize? You said that water has
different uses than an apple. So there's these objects. What are we trying to optimize and why is not reality
a really good generator of fitness functions? - So each theory makes its own assumptions and says, grant me this,
then I'll explain that. So evolutionary game theory says, grant me fitness payoffs, and grant me strategies with payoffs, and I can write down a matrix where this strategy
interacts with that strategy, these are the payoffs that come up. If you grant me that, then
I can start to explain a lot of things. Now you can ask for a
deeper question like, okay, how does physics evolve biology? And where do these
fitness payoffs come from? That's a completely different enterprise. And of course evolutionary
game theory then would be not be the right tool for that. It would have to be a deeper tool that shows where evolutionary
game theory comes from. My own take is that
there's gonna be a problem in doing that because space
time isn't fundamental, it's just a user interface. And that the distinction that we make between living and non-living is not a fundamental distinction. It's an artifact of the
limits of our interface. So this is a new wrinkle, and
this is an important wrinkle. It's so nice to take space
and time as fundamental because if something
looks like it's inanimate, it's it's inanimate, and we
can just say it's not living. Now it's much more complicated. Certain things are obviously living. I'm talking with you,
I'm obviously interacting with some something that's
alive and conscious. - I think we've let go
of the word "obviously" in this conversation. I think nothing is obvious. - Nothing's obvious, that's right. But when we get down to like
an ant, it's obviously living, but I'll say it appears to be living. But when we get down to a
virus, now people wonder. And when we get down to protons, people say it's not living. And my attitude is, look,
I have a user interface. Interface is there to hide
certain aspects of reality and others to, it's an
uneven representation, put it that way. Certain things just get completely hidden. Dark matter and dark energy
are most of the energy and matter that's out there. Our interface just plain
flat out hides them. The only way we get some hint is because gravitational
things are going wrong within our. So most things are
outside of our interface. The distinction between
living and non-living is not fundamental. It's an artifact of our interface. So if we really, really want to understand where evolution comes from, to answer the question, the
deep question you asked, I think the right way
we're gonna have to do that is to come up with a deeper
theory than space time in which there may not
be the notion of time. And show that whatever the dynamics of that deeper theory is, and by the way, I'll talk about
how you could have dynamics without time, but the dynamics
of this deeper theory, when we project it in certain ways, then we do get space time, and we get what appears to be evolution by natural selection. So I would love to see
evolution by natural selection, nature red in tooth and claw, people fighting, animals
fighting for resources and the whole bit, come
out of a deeper theory in which perhaps it's all cooperation. There's no limited resources and so forth. But as a result of projection,
you get space and time, and as a result of projection, you get nature red in tooth
and claw, the appearance of it. But it's all an artifact of the interface. - I like this idea that the line between living and
non-living is very important. Because that's a thing that would emerge before you have evolution,
the idea of death. So that seems to be an important component of natural selection. And if that emerged, because that's also asking the question, I guess, that I ask, where do
fitness functions come from? That's like asking the old
meaning of life question, right? It's what's the why? And one of the big underlying whys, okay, you can start with evolution on earth, but without living,
without life and death, without the line between
the living and the dead, you don't have evolution. So what if underneath it, there's no such thing as
the living and the dead. Like this concept of an organism, period. There's a living organism that's defined by a volume in space time
that somehow interacts, that over time maintains
its integrity, somehow, has some kind of history,
it has a wall of some kind. The outside world, the environment, and then inside there's an organism. So you're defining an organism, and also you're defining that organism by the fact that it can move and it can become alive,
which you kind of think of as moving combined with the
fact that it's keeping itself separate from the environment. So you can point out that thing is living and then it can also die. That seems to be all very
powerful components of space time that enable you to have
something like natural selection and evolution. - Well, and there's a
lot of interesting work, some of it by collaborators
of Carl Friston and others where they have Baysnet kind
of stuff that they build on. And the notion of a Markov blanket. So you have some states
within this network that are inside the blanket,
then you have the blanket, and then the states outside the blanket. And the states inside this Markov blanket are conditionally
independent of the states outside the blanket,
conditioned on the blanket. And what they're looking
at is that the dynamics inside of the states,
inside the Markov blanket, seem to be trying to estimate
properties of the outside and react to them in a way. So it seems like you're doing
probabilistic inferences in ways that might be
able to keep you alive. So there's interesting work
going on in that direction. But what I'm saying is
something slightly different. And that is like, when I look at you, all I see is skin, hair, and eyes, right? That's all I see. But I know that there's a deeper reality. I believe that there's
a much deeper reality. There's the whole world of your
experiences, your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams. In some sense the face that I see is just a symbol that I create, right? And as soon as I look
away, I delete that symbol, but I don't delete you, I don't delete the conscious experience, the whole world of yours, so I'm only deleting an interface symbol, but that interface symbol
is a portal, so to speak. Not a perfect portal, but a genuine portal into your beliefs, into your conscious experiences. That's why we can have a conversation. We genuinely, your consciousness
is genuinely affecting mine and mine is genuinely affecting
yours through these icons which I create on the fly. I mean I create your face
when I look, I delete it. I don't create you, your consciousness, that's there all the time. But I do. So now, when I look at a cat, I'm creating something
that I still call living and I still think is conscious. When I look at an ant, I create something that I still would call living,
but maybe not conscious. When I look at something I call a virus, now I'm not even sure
I would call it living. And when I look at a proton, I would say I don't even think, it's not alive at all. It could be that I'm
nevertheless interacting with something that's
just as conscious as you. I'm not saying the proton is conscious. The face that I'm creating
when I look at you, that face is not conscious. That face is a data structure in me. That face, it's an experience. It's not an experiencer. Similar, the proton is something
that I create when I look or do a collision in the
Large Hadron Collider or something like that. But what is behind the
entity in space time? So I've got this space time interface, and I just got this entity
that I call a proton. What is the reality behind it? Well, the physicists are finding
these big, big structures, amplituhedron, associohedron. What's behind those
could be consciousness, what I'm playing with. In which case, when I'm
interacting with a proton, I'm could be interacting
with consciousness. Again, to be very, very clear, 'cause it's easy to misunderstand, I'm not saying a proton is conscious, just like I'm not saying
your face is conscious. Your face is a symbol I create
and then delete as I look. And so your face is not conscious, but I know that that face in my interface, the Lex Fridman face that I
create is an interface symbol that's a genuine portal
into your consciousness. The portal is less clear for a cat, even less clear for an ant. And by the time we get down to a proton, the portal is not clear at all. But that doesn't mean I'm not interacting with consciousness, it just
means my interface gave up and there's some deeper reality that we have to go after. So your question really
forces out a big part of this whole approach
that I'm talking about. - So it's this portal to
conscious, I wonder why you can't, your portal is not as good to a cat, to a cat's consciousness
than it is to a human. Does it have to do with
the fact that you're human and just similar organisms, organisms of similar complexity
are able to create portals better to each other? Or is it just as you get
more and more complex, you get better and better portals? - Well, let me answer one aspect of it that I'm more confident about,
then I'll speculate on that. Why is it that the portal
is so bad with protons, and elementary particles more generally? So quarks, leptons, and
gluons and so forth. Well, the reason for that is because those are just symmetries of space time, more technically the
irreducible representations of the point gray group of space time. So they're just literally representations of the data structure of
space time that we're using. So that's why they're
not very much insightful. They're just almost entirely tied to the data structure itself. There's not much, they're telling you only something
about the data structure, not behind the data structure. It's only when we get to higher levels that we're starting to, in some sense build portals to what's behind space time. - Sure, yeah. So there's more and more complexity built on top of the interface
of space time with the cat. - [Donald] So you can actually
build a portal, right? - Yeah, right. This interface of face
and hair and so on, skin, there is some syncing going
on between humans though, where we sync, like you're getting a pretty good representation
of the ideas in my head, and starting to get a foggy view of my memories in my head. Even though this is the
first time we're talking, you start to project your own memories. You start to solve like a
giant hierarchy of puzzles about a human, 'cause we're all, there's
a lot of similarities. A lot of it rhymes. So you start to make a lot of inferences and you build up this model of a person. You have a pretty sophisticated model of what's going on underneath. Again, I just, I wonder if it's possible to construct these models about each other and nevertheless be very distant
from an underlying reality. - Yes, there's a lot of work on this. So there's some interesting
work called signaling games where they look at how
people can coordinate and come to communicate. There's some interesting
work that was done by some colleagues and friends of mine, Louis Narins, Natalia
Camarova, and Kimberly Jameson, where they were looking
at evolving color words. So you have a circle of
colors, so the color circle. And they wanted to see if they
could get people to cooperate in how they carved the color
circle up into units of words. And so they had a game
theoretic kind of thing that they'd had people do. And what they found was
that when they included, so most people are trichromats, you have three kinds
of cone photoreceptors, but there are some, a lot of men, 7% of men have are dichromats. They might be missing the
red cone photoreceptor. They found that the dichromats
had an outsized influence on the final ways that
the whole space of colors was carved up and labels attached. You needed to be able to include the Dichromats in the conversation, and so they had a bigger
influence on how you made the boundaries of the language. And I thought that was a really
interesting kind of insight that there's going to be, again, a game, perhaps a game, or evolutionary,
or genetic algorithm kind of thing that goes on in terms of learning to communicate
in ways that are useful. And so, yeah, you can use game theory to actually explore
that, or signaling games. There's a lot of brilliant work on that. I'm not doing it, but
there's work out there. - So if it's okay, let
us tackle once more, and perhaps several more times after, the big topic of consciousness. This very beautiful, powerful thing that perhaps is the thing
that makes us human. What is it? What's the role of consciousness in, let's say even just the thing
we've been talking about, which is the formation of this interface? Any kind of ways you want to kind of start talking about it? - Well, let me say first what
most of my colleagues say. 99% are, again, assuming that
space time is fundamental, particles in space time,
matter is fundamental, and most are reductionist. And so the standard
approach to consciousness is to figure out what
complicated systems of matter with the right functional
properties could possibly lead to the emergence of consciousness. That's the general idea, right? So maybe you have to have neurons, maybe only if you have neurons, but that might not be enough. They have to certain kinds of complexity in their organization and their dynamics. Certain kind of network
abilities, for example. So there are those who say for example that consciousness arises
from orchestrated collapse of quantum states, of
microtubules in neurons. So this is Hamrov and
Penrose have this kind of. So it's, you start with
something physical, a physical property of
quantum states of neurons, of microtubules and neurons. And you say that somehow an
orchestrated collapse of those is consciousness or conscious experiences. Or integrated information theory. Again, you start with something physical, and if it has the right kind
of functional properties with something they call phi, with the right kind of
integrated information, then you have consciousness. Or you can be a panpsychist,
Philip Goff for example, where you might say, well, in addition to the
particles in space and time, those particles are not just matter. They also could have say
a unit of consciousness. And so, but once again,
you're taking space and time and particles as fundamental, and you're adding a new property to them, see consciousness. And then you have to talk about how, where a proton and electron
get together to form hydrogen, then how those consciousnesses
merge or interact to create the consciousness
of hydrogen so forth. There's a tension schema
theory, which again, this is how neural network processes representing to the network itself its intentional processes. That could be consciousness. There's global workspace theory, and neuronal global workspace theory. So there's many, many
theories of this type. What's common to all
of them is they assume that space time is fundamental. They assume that physical processes in space time is fundamental. Panpsychism adds consciousness
as an additional thing, it's almost dualist in that regard. And my attitude is our
best science is telling us that space time is not fundamental. So why is that important here? Well, for centuries deep thinkers thought of earth, air, fire, and water as the fundamental elements. It was a reductionist kind of idea. Nothing was more elemental than those. And you could sort of build
everything up from those. When we got the periodic
table of elements, we realized that, of course
we want to study earth, air, fire, and water. There's combustion science for fire. There's sciences for
all these other things, water and so forth. So we're gonna do
science for these things. But fundamental, no, no, if you're looking for
something fundamental, those are the wrong building blocks. Earth has many, many
different kinds of elements that project into the one
thing that we call earth. If you don't understand
that there's silicon, that there's iron, that
there's all these different kinds of things that project
into what we call earth, you're hopelessly lost, you're not fundamental,
you're not gonna get there. And then after the periodic table, then we came up with
quarks, leptons, and gluons, the particles of the
standard model of physics. And so we actually now know that if you really want
to get fundamental, the periodic table isn't
it, it's good for chemistry, and it's just wonderful for chemistry. But if you're trying
to go deep fundamental, what is the fundamental science? That's not it. You're gonna have to go to
quarks, leptons, and gluons and so forth. Well now we've discovered
space time itself is doomed. Quarks, leptons, and gluons are just irreducible representations of the symmetries of space time. So the whole framework on
which consciousness research is being based right now is doomed. And for me, these are my
friends and colleagues that are doing this, they're brilliant. They're brilliant. My feeling is, I'm so
sad that they're stuck with this old framework, because if they weren't
stuck like with earth, air, fire, and water, you could
actually make progress. So it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you start with earth,
air, fire, and water, you're not gonna get anywhere, right? - Can I actually, just 'cause the word
"doomed" is so interesting. Lemme give you some options. Multiple choice quiz. Is space time, we could say is reality, the way we perceive it,
doomed, wrong, or fake? Because doomed just means
it could still be right and we're now ready to go deeper. - [Donald] It would be that. - So it's not wrong, it's not a complete
deviation from a journey toward the truth. - Right, it's like earth, air,
fire, and water is not wrong. There is earth, air, fire, and water. That's a useful framework,
but it's not fundamental. - Well, there's also wrong,
which is they used to believe, as I recently learned, that George Washington, the first president of the
United States, was bled to death for something that could
have been easily treated because it was believed that you can get, actually I need to look into this further, but I guess you get
toxins out or demons out. I don't know what you're getting out with the bleeding of a person. But, so that ended up being wrong, but widely believed as a medical tool. So it's also possible that
our assumption of space time is not just doomed, but it's wrong. - Well, if we believe that
it's fundamental, that's wrong. But if we believe it's a
useful tool, that's right. - But bleeding somebody to death was believed to be a useful tool. - [Donald] That was wrong. - It wasn't just not fundamental, it was very, I'm sure there's cases in which bleeding somebody would work, but it would be a very tiny,
tiny, tiny percentage of cases. So it could be that it's wrong, like it's a side road that's ultimately leading to a dead end, as opposed to a truck stop or something that you can get off of. - My feeling is not the
dead end kind of thing. I think that what the
physicists are finding is that there are these
structures beyond space time, but they project back into space time. And so space time, when they say space time is
doomed, they're explicit. They're saying it's doomed in the sense that we
thought it was fundamental. It's not fundamental. It's a useful, absolutely useful and brilliant data structure. But there are deeper data structures, like cosmological polytopes, and space time is not fundamental. What is doomed, in the
sense that it's wrong, is reductionism, - Which is saying space time
is fundamental, essentially. - Right, the idea that
that somehow being smaller in space and time, or space time, is a fundamental nature of reality. That's just wrong. It turned out to be a useful heuristic for thermodynamics and so forth and several other places. Reductionism has been very useful, but that's, in some sense, an artifact of how we use our interface. - Yeah, so you're saying
size doesn't matter. Okay, this is very important
for me to write down. Ultimately. - Ultimately, I mean it's useful for theories like thermodynamics and also for understanding brain networks in terms of individual neurons, and neurons in terms of
chemical systems inside cells. That's all very, very useful. But the idea that we're
getting to the more fundamental nature of reality, no. When you get all the way
down in that direction, you get down to the quarks and gluons, and what you realize is
what you've gotten down to is not fundamental reality, just the irreducible
representations of a data structure. That's all you've gotten down to. So you're always stuck
inside the data structure. So you seem to be getting
closer and closer. I mean, I went from neural
networks to neurons, neurons to chemistry,
chemistry to particles, particles to quarks and gluons. I'm getting closer and
closer to the reality. No, I'm getting closer and
closer to the actual structure of the data structure of space and time, the irreducible representations. That's what you're getting closer to, not to a deeper understanding
of what's beyond space time. - We'll return again to
this question of dynamics, because you keep saying
that space time is doomed, but mostly focusing on
the space part of that, it's very interesting to see
why time gets the bad cred too. Because how do you have
dynamics without time is the thing I'd love to talk
to you a little bit about. But let us return your
brilliant whirlwind overview of the different theories of consciousness that are out there. What is consciousness if
outside of space time? - If we think that we want to
have a model of consciousness, we as scientists then have to say, what do we want to write down? What kind of mathematical
model are we gonna write down? And if you think about
it, there's lots of things that you might wanna write
down about consciousness. Fairly complicated subject. So most of my colleagues are saying, let's start with matter or neurons and see what properties of matter could create consciousness. But I'm saying that
that whole thing is out, space time is doomed,
that whole thing is out. We need to look at
consciousness qua consciousness. In other words, not as
something that arises in space and time, but
perhaps it's something that creates space and
time as a data structure. So what do we want? And here again, there's
no hard and fast rule, but what you as a scientist
have to do is to pick what you think are the minimal assumptions that are gonna allow you to
boot up a comprehensive theory. That is the trick. So what do I want? So what what I chose to do
was to have three things. I said that there are
conscious experiences, feeling of headache, the smell of garlic, experiencing the color red. Those are conscious. So that's a primitive of the theory. And the reason I want few primitives, why? Because those are the
miracles of the theory, right? The primitives, the
assumptions of the theory are the things you're
not going to explain. Those are the things you assume. - And those experiences
you particularly mean there's a subjectiveness to them. - [Donald] That's right. - It's the thing when people refer to the hard problem of consciousness is it feels like something
to look at the color red. - Exactly right. It feels like something to have a headache or to feel upset to your stomach, it feels like something. So I'm going to grant that in this theory, there are experiences and they're
fundamental in some sense. So conscious experience. So they're not derived from physics, they're not functional
properties of particles. They are sui generis. They exist. Just like we assume space time exists, I'm now saying space time
is just a data structure. It doesn't exist independent. Conscious experiences exist. - Sorry to interrupt once again, but should we be focusing in
your thinking on humans alone? Or is there something about, in relation to other kinds of organisms that have a sufficiently
high level of complexity? Or is there some kind of generalization of the panpsychist idea that consciousness permeates all matter outside of the usual
definition of what matter is inside space time? - So it's beyond human consciousness. Human consciousness from
my point of view would be one of a countless
variety of consciousness. And even within human consciousness, there's countless variety
of consciousness within us. I mean, you have your
left and right hemisphere, and apparently if you
split the corpus collosum, the personality of the left hemisphere, and the religious beliefs
of the left hemisphere, can be very different
from the right hemisphere. And their conscious
experiences can be disjointed. One could have one conscious experience. They can play 20 questions. The left hemisphere can
have an idea in its mind, and the right hemisphere has to guess, and it might not get it. So even within you it's more
than just one consciousness. It's lots of consciousnesses. So the general theory of consciousness that I'm after is not
just human consciousness. It's going to be just consciousness, and I presume human
consciousness is a tiny drop in the bucket of the infinite
variety of consciousness. - That said, I should clarify that the black hole of
consciousness is the home cat. I'm pretty sure cats lack
the embodiment of evil and lack all capacity for
consciousness or compassion. So I just wanna lay that on the table, but that's a theory I'm working. I don't have any good evidence. - The black cat. - That's just a shout out
to, sorry to distract. So that's the first assumption. - The first assumption. The second assumption is
that these experiences have consequences. So I'm going to say that
conscious experiences can trigger other conscious
experiences somehow. So really in some sense
there's two basic assumptions. - So there's some kind of causality, there is a chain of causality. Does this relate to dynamics? - I'll say there's a
probabilistic relationship. And then, so I'm trying
to be as non-specific to begin with and see where it leads me. So what I can write down
are probability spaces, so probability space, which contains the conscious experiences that this consciousness can have. So I call this a conscious
agent, this technical thing. Annaka Harris and I've talked about this, and she rightly cautions
me that people will think that I'm bringing in a
notion of a self or agency and so forth when I say conscious agent. So I just wanna say that I
use the term conscious agent merely as a technical term. There is no notion of self
in my fundamental definition of a conscious agent. There are only experiences and
probabilistic relationships of how they trigger other experiences. - So the agent is the generator
of the conscious experience? - The agent is a mathematical structure that includes a probability
measure, a probability space of possible conscious experiences, and a markovian kernel,
which describes how, if this agent has certain
conscious experiences, how that will affect the experiences of other conscious
agents, including itself. - [Lex] But you don't
think of that as a self. - No, there is no notion of a self here. There's no notion of really of an agent. - But is there a locality? Is there an organism?
- [Donald] There's no space. So these are conscious
units, conscious entities. - [Lex] But they're distinct in some way, 'cause they have to interact? - Well, so here's the interesting thing. When we write down the mathematics, when you have two of these
conscious agents interacting, the pair satisfy a definition
of a conscious agent. So they are a single conscious agent. So there is one conscious agent. But it it has a nice
analytic decomposition into as many conscious agents as you wish. - So that's a nice interface. - It it's a very useful
scientific interface. It's a scale free, or if you like, a fractal-like approach to it in which we can use the
same unit of analysis at all scales in studying consciousness. But if I want to talk about, so there's no notion of learning, memory, problem solving,
intelligence, self, agency. So none of that is fundamental. And the reason I did that
was because I want to assume as little as possible. Everything I assume is
a miracle in the theory. It's not something you explain,
it's something you assume. So I have to build networks
of conscious agents. If I wanna have a notion of a
self, I have to build a self. I have to build learning,
memory, problem solving, intelligence and planning,
all these different things. I have to build networks of
conscious agents to do that. It's a trivial theorem that
networks of conscious agents are computationally
universal, that's trivial. So anything that we can
do with neural networks or automata you can do with
networks of conscious agents, that's trivial. But you can also do more, the events in the probability
space need not be computable. So the Markovian dynamics
is not restricted to computable functions, because the very events
themselves need not be computable. So this can capture any computable theory, anything we can do with neural networks, we can do with conscious agent networks. But it leaves open the
door for the possibility of non-computable interactions
between conscious agents. So we have to, if we
want a theory of memory, we have to build it. And there's lots of different
ways you could build. We've actually got a paper, Chris Fields took the lead on this, and we have a paper called
"Conscious Agent Networks" where Chris takes the lead and shows how to use these
networks of conscious agents to build memory and to build
primitive kinds of learning. - But can you provide some intuition of what conscious networks,
networks of conscious agents helps you, first of all,
what that looks like. And I don't just mean mathematically, of course maybe that might
help build up intuition, but how that helps us potentially solve the hard problem of consciousness? Or is that baked in that that exists? Can you solve the hard
problem of consciousness, why it tastes delicious when
you eat a delicious ice cream, with networks of conscious agents? Or is that taken as an assumption? - So the standard way the
hard problem is thought of is we're assuming space
and time and particles, or neurons for example, these are just physical things
that have no consciousness. And we have to explain how
the conscious experience of the taste of chocolate
could emerge from those. So that's the typical hard
problem of consciousness is that problem, right? How do you boot up the taste of chocolate, the experience or the taste of
chocolate from neurons, say, or the right kind of artificial
intelligence circuitry? How do you boot that up? That's typically what the
hard problem of consciousness means to researchers. Notice that I'm changing the problem. I'm not trying to boot
up conscious experiences from the dynamics of neurons or silicon or something like that. I'm saying that that's the wrong problem. My hard problem would go
in the other direction. If I start with conscious experiences, how do I build up space and time? How do I build up what I
call the physical world? How do I build up what we call brains? Because I'm saying
consciousness is not something that brains do. Brains are something that
consciousness makes up. It is among the experience, it's an ephemeral
experience in consciousness. I look inside, so to be
very, very clear right now, I have no neurons. If you looked, you would see neurons. That's a data structure that
you would create on the fly. And it's a very useful one. As soon as you look away, you garbage collect that data structure. Just like that Necker cube
that I was talking about on the piece of paper, when you look, you see a 3D
cube, you create it on the fly. As soon as you look away, that's gone. - [Lex] When you say you, you
mean a human being scientist. - Right now, that's right. More generally it'll be conscious agents, because as you pointed out, am I asking for a theory of
conscience only about humans? No, it's consciousness, which human consciousness
is just a tiny sliver. - So, but you are saying that there is, that's a useful data structure. How many other data structures are there? That's why I said you, human. If there's another earth, if there's another alien civilization doing these kinds of investigations, would they come up with
similar data structures? - [Donald] Probably not. - What is the space of data structures, I guess is what I'm asking. - My guess is that if
consciousness is fundamental, if consciousness is all there is, then the only thing that
mathematical structure can be about is possibilities
of consciousness. And that suggests to
me that there could be an infinite variety of consciousnesses and a vanishingly small fraction of them use space time data structures and the kinds of structures that we use. There's an infinite
variety of data structures. Now this is very similar to something that Max Tegmark has said,
but I wanna distinguish it. He has his level four multiverse idea. He thinks that mathematics is fundamental. And so that's the fundamental reality, and since there's an infinite variety, endless variety of
mathematical structures, there's an infinite variety
of multiverses in his view. I'm saying something similar in spirit, but importantly different. There's an infinite variety
of mathematical structures. Absolutely. But mathematics isn't
the fundamental reality in this framework, consciousness is. And mathematics is to consciousness like bones are to an
organism, you need the bones. So mathematics is not
divorced from consciousness, but it's not the entirety of
consciousness by any means. And so there's an infinite
variety of consciousnesses and signaling games that
consciousnesses could interact via and therefore worlds, common worlds, data structures that they
can use to communicate. So space and time is just
one of an infinite variety. And so I think that
what we'll find is that as we go outside of our
little space time bubble, we will encounter utterly alien forms of conscious experience that we may not be able
to really comprehend in the following sense. If I ask you to imagine a color that you've never seen
before, does anything happen? Nothing happens, right? - [Lex] Yeah, no. - Nothing happens. And that's just one color, I'm asking for just one color. We actually know, by the way, that there apparently there
are women called Tetrafems who have four color
receptors, not just three. And Kimberly Jameson and
others who studied these women have good evidence that
they apparently have a new dimension of color experience that the rest of us don't have. So these women are apparently
living in a world of color that you and I can't
even concretely imagine. No man can imagine them. And yet they're real color experiences. And so in that sense, I'm saying, now take that little baby step. Oh, there are women who
have color experiences that I could never have. Whoa, that's shocking. Now take that infinite, there are consciousness where every aspect of their experiences
is like that new color. It's something utterly alien to you. You have nothing like that. And yet these are all possible varieties of conscious experience. - When you say there's
a lot of consciousness, is a singular consciousness
basically the set of possible experiences you can
have in that subjective way? As opposed to the underlying mechanism. Because you say that having
a extra color receptor, ability to have new experiences, that's somehow a different consciousness. Is there a way to see that as
all the same consciousness, the subjectivity itself? - Right, because when we have two of these conscious agents
interacting, mathematics, they actually satisfy the
definition of a conscious agent. So in fact, they are a
single conscious agent. So in fact, one way to
think about what I'm saying, I'm postulating with my colleagues, Jayton and Chris and others,
Robert Brentner and so forth. There is one big conscious
agent, infinitely complicated. But fortunately we can,
for analytic purposes, break it down all the
way to, in some sense, the simplest conscious agent, which has one conscious experience, one. This one agent can experience red 35. That's it. That's what it experiences. You can get all the way down to that. - So you think it's
possible that consciousness, whatever that is, is fundamental, or at least much more in the
direction of the fundamental than is space time as we perceive it. - That's the proposal. And therefore what I have to do in terms of the hard
problem of consciousness is to show how dynamical
systems of conscious agents could lead to what we call
space, and time, and neurons, and brain activity. In other words, we have to
show how you get space time and physical objects
entirely from a theory of conscious agents outside of space time with the dynamics outside of space time. And I can tell you how we plan to do that. But that's the idea. - The magic of it, that
chocolate is delicious. So there's a mathematical kind of thing that we could say here, how it
can emerge within the system of networks of conscience agents. But is there going to be,
at the end of the proof, why chocolate is so delicious? Or no, I guess I'm going to ask different kinds of dumb
questions to try to sneak up. - Sure, oh, well that's
the right question. And when I say that I
took conscious experiences as fundamental, what that means is, in the current version of my theory, I'm not explaining conscious experiences where they came from. That's the miracle. That's one of the miracles. So I have two miracles in my theory. There are conscious experiences, like the taste of chocolate, and that there's a
probabilistic relationship. When certain conscious experiences occur, others are more likely to occur. Those are the two miracles that. - It's possible to get beyond that and somehow start to chip
away at the miracle-ness of that miracle that
chocolate is still delicious. - I hope so. I've got my hands full with
what I'm doing right now. But I can just say a top level how I would think about that. That would get at this, consciousness without form. This is gonna be really,
this is really tough, because it's consciousness without form versus the various forms
that consciousness takes for the experiences that it has. - [Lex] Right, right. - So when I write down a probability space for these conscious experiences, I say, here's a probability space for the possible conscious
experiences, right? It's just like when I write
down a probability space for an experiment, like I'm
gonna flip a coin twice, right? And I want to look at the
probability of various outcomes. So I have to write down
a probability space. There could be heads heads, heads tails, tails heads, tails tails. So before, as any class in
probability you're told, write down your probability space. If you don't write down
your probability space, you can't get started. So here's my probability
space for consciousness. How do I wanna interpret that structure? The structure is just sitting there, there's gonna be a dynamics
that happens on it. Experiences appear and then disappear, just like heads appears and disappears. So one way to think about that
fundamental probability space is that corresponds to
consciousness without any content. The infinite consciousness that transcends any particular content. - Well, do you think of that
as a mechanism, as a thing? Like the rules that govern
the dynamics of the thing outside of space time, isn't that, if you think conscious is fundamental, isn't that essentially getting like, it is solving the hard
problem, which is like from where does this thing pop up, which is the mechanism
of the thing popping up. Whatever the consciousness is, the different kinds and
so on, that mechanism. And also, the question I wanna ask is how tricky do you think
it is to solve that problem? You solved a lot of difficult problems throughout the history of humanity. There's probably more
problems to solve left than we've solved by like an infinity. But along that long journey
of intelligent species, when will we solve this consciousness? Which is one way to measure
the difficulty of the problem. - So I'll give two answers. There's one problem I think we can solve but we haven't solved yet. And that is the reverse
of what my colleagues call the hard problem. The problem of how do you start
with conscious experiences, in the way that I've just
described them and the dynamics, and build up space and time and brains? That I think is a tough technical problem, but it's in principle solvable. So I think we can solve that. So we would solve the hard problem, not by showing how brains
create consciousness, but how networks of conscious agents create what we call the
symbols that we call brains. So that, I think. - But does that allow you
to, so that's interesting. That's an interesting idea. Consciousness creates the brain, not the brain creates consciousness, but does that allow
you to build the thing? - My guess is that it will
enable unbelievable technologies, and I'll tell you why. I think it plugs into the work that the physicists are doing. So this theory of consciousness
will be even deeper than the structures that
the physicists are finding, like the amplituhedron. But the other answer to your
question is less positive. As I said earlier, I think
that there is no such thing as a theory of everything. So that I think that the theory
that my team is working on, this conscious agent theory
is just a 1.0 theory. We're using probability
spaces and markovian kernels. I can easily see people now saying, well, we can do better if we
go to category theory, and we can get a deeper,
perhaps more interesting. And then someone will say, well now I'll go to topoid theory, and so I imagine that
there'll be conscious agents, 5, 10, 3 trillion point 0, but I think it will never end. I think ultimately this question that we sort of put our fingers on of, how does the formless give birth to form? To the taste, the wonderful
taste of chocolate? I think that we will always
go deeper and deeper, but we will never solve that. That in some sense, that
will be a primitive. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe it's just the limits
of my current imagination. So I'll just say, my imagination right now doesn't peer that deep. So I don't, by the way I'm saying this, I don't want to discourage
some brilliant 20-year-old who then later on proves me dead wrong. I hope to be proven dead wrong. - Well, just like you
said, a century from now, everything we're saying now,
everything you're saying, all your theories will be laughing stock. They will respect the
puzzle solving abilities and how much we're able
to do with so little. But outside of that it will all be just, the silliness will be
entertainment for a teenager. - Especially the silliness when we thought that we were
so smart and we knew it all. - So it would be interesting
to explore your ideas by contrasting, you
mentioned Annaka Harris, you mentioned Philip Goff. So outside of, if you're
not allowed to say the fundamental disagreement is the fact that space
time is fundamental, what are interesting distinctions between ideas of consciousness, between you and Annaka for example? You guys have been on a podcast together. I'm sure in private you guys have some incredible conversations. So where are some
interesting sticking points, some interesting disagreements, let's say, with with Annaka first? Maybe there'll be a few other people. - Well, Annaka and I just had
a conversation this morning where we were talking about our ideas, and what we discovered
really in our conversation was that we're pretty
much on the same page. It was really just terminology
about consciousness. Yeah, our ideas about consciousness are pretty much on the same page. She rightly has cautioned me to, when I talk about conscious agents, to point out that the notion of agency is not fundamental in my theory, the notion of self is not fundamental. And that's absolutely true. I can use this network
of conscious agents, and I now use as a technical term. Conscious agents is a technical term for that probability space
with the Markovian dynamics. I can use that to build models of a self and to build models of agency. But they're not fundamental. So she has really been very helpful in helping me to be a little
bit clear about these ideas and not say things that are misleading. - The word, I mean, this
is the interesting thing about language actually, is that language, quite obviously, is an interface to truth. It's so fascinating that individual words can have so much ambiguity, and that the specific choices of a word within a particular sentence, within the context of a sentence, can have such a difference in meaning. It's quite fascinating, especially when you're talking about topics like consciousness, because it's a very loaded term. It means a lot of things
to a lot of people. And the entire concept
is shrouded a mystery. So combination of the fact
that it's a loaded term and that there's a lot of mystery, people can just interpret
it in all kinds of ways. And so you have to be both precise and help them avoid getting stuck on some kind of side
road of miscommunication, lost in translation because
you used the wrong word. That's interesting. I mean, because for a lot of people, consciousness is ultimately
connected to self. I mean, our experience
of consciousness is very, it's connected to this ego. I mean, I just, I mean, what
else could it possibly be? How do you begin to
comprehend, to visualize, to conceptualize a consciousness that's not connected to like
this particular organism? - Well, I have a way of thinking about this whole problem now that comes outta this
framework that's different. So we can imagine a
dynamics of consciousness, not in space and time, just abstractly. It could be cooperative for all we know. It could be very friendly, I don't know. And you can set up a
dynamics, a Markovian dynamics that is so-called stationary, and that's a technical term, which means that the entropy
effectively is not increasing. There is some entropy, but it's constant. So there's no increasing entropy. And in that sense, the
dynamics is timeless. There is no entropic time. But it's a trivial theorem. Three line proof that if you have a stationary Markovian dynamics, any projection that you
make of that dynamics, by conditional probability. And if you want, I can state even more mathematically precisely for some readers or listeners. But if any projection you take
by conditional probability, the induced image of that markov chain will have increasing entropy. You'll have entropic time. So I'll be very, very precise. I have a markov chain X1, X2, through XN, where N goes to infinity. The entropy H, capital H, of XN is equal to the entropy
H of XN-1 for all N. So the entropy is the same, but it's a theorem that H
of XN, say given X sub one, is greater than or equal
to H of XN-1 given X1. - [Lex] Sure, where does
the greater come from? - Because, well the theorem,
the three line proof, H of XN given X1 is greater than or equal to H of XN given X1 and X2. Because conditioning reduces. But then H of XN minus one given X1, X2 is equal to H of XN-1 given X2, by the markov property. And then because it's stationary, it's equal to H of X. I have to write it down. - [Lex] Yeah, sure, sure. - I have to write it, anyway,
there's a three line proof. - But the assumption of stationarity, we're using a lot of terms
that people won't understand. Doesn't matter. So there's some kind of,
so Markovian dynamics is basically trying to
model some kind of system with some probabilities,
and there's agents, and they interact in some kind of way, and you can say something
about that system as it evolves. So stationary system is one
that has certain properties in terms of entropy. Very well, but we don't know if
it's stationary or not. We don't know what the properties, so you have to kind of take assumptions and see, okay, well what
does the systems behave like under these different properties? The more constraints, the
more assumptions you take, the more predictive, the more interesting, powerful things you can say. But sometimes they're limiting. That said, we're talking
about consciousness here. How does that, you said
cooperative, okay, competitive. I like chocolate. I'm sitting here, I have a
brain, I'm wearing a suit. It sure as hell feels like I'm myself. What, am I tuning in? Am I plugging into something? Am I a projection, a simple trivial
projection into space time from some much larger organism that I can't possibly comprehend? How the hell? You're saying, you're building
up mathematical intuitions. Fine, great. But I'm just, I'm having
an existential crisis here, and I'm gonna die soon. We'll all die pretty quickly. So I wanna figure out why
chocolate's so delicious. So help me out here. So let's just keep sneaking up to this. - Right, so the whole technical thing was to say this, even if the
dynamics of consciousness is stationary, so that
there is no entropic time. Any projection of it, any view of it will have the artifact of entropic time. That's a limited resource. Limited resources, so that
the fundamental dynamics may have no limits, limited
resources whatsoever. Any projection will have certainly time as a limited resource, and probably lots of
other limited resources. Hence, we could get
competition, and evolution, and nature red in tooth and claw as an artifact of a deeper system in which those aren't fundamental. And in fact, I take it as
something that this theory must do at some point, is to show how
networks of conscious agents, even if they're not resource limited, give rise to evolution
by natural selection via a projection. - Yeah, but you're saying,
I'm trying to understand how the limited resources
that give rise to, so first the thing gives rise to time, that gives rise to the limited resource, that gives rise to evolution
by natural selection. How that has to do with the fact that chocolate is delicious. - Well, it is not gonna do that directly. It's gonna get to this notion of self. - Oh, it's gonna give you. - [Donald] The notion of self. - Oh, the evolution gives
you the notion of self. - And also of a self
separate from other selves. So the idea would be. - Has a competition, has life and death and all those kinds of things - That's right. So it won't, I don't think, as I said, I don't think that I can tell you how the formless gives rise to
the experience of chocolate. Right now my current theory says that's one of the miracles I'm assuming. So my theory can't do it. And the reason my theory can't do it is because Hoffman's brain
can't do it right now. But the notion of self, yes. The notion of self can be an
artifact of the projection. So there's one conscious agent. Because anytime conscious agents interact, they form a new conscious agent. So there's one conscious agent. Any projection of that one conscious agent gives rise to time, even
if there wasn't any time in that one conscious agent. And it gives rise, I want to,
now, I haven't proven this, so now this is me guessing
where the theory's gonna go. I haven't done this, there's
no paper on this yet. So now I'm speculating. My guess is I'll be able to show, or my brighter colleagues working with me will be able to show, that we will get evolution
of a natural selection, the notion of individual selves, individual physical objects and so forth, coming out as a projection of this thing. And that the self, this then
will be really interesting in terms of how it starts to interact with certain spiritual traditions, right? Where they will say that
there is a notion of self that needs to be let go,
which is this finite self that's competing with other
selves to get more money and prestige and so forth. That self in some sense has to die. But there's a deeper self,
which is the timeless being that precedes, not precludes, but precedes any particular conscious experiences. The ground of all experience. That there's that notion
of a deep capital self. But our little Lowercase S selves could be artifacts of projection. And it may be that what
consciousness is doing in this framework is it's
projected itself down into a self that calls itself Don and a self that calls itself Lex. And through conversations like this, it's trying to find out about itself, and eventually transcend the
limits of the Don and Lex little icons that it's using. And that little projection of itself, through this conversation, is somehow, it's learning about itself. - So that thing dressed me up today in order to understand itself. - And in some sense, you
and I are not separate from that thing, and we're
not separate from each other. - Yeah, well, I have to
question the fashion choices on my end then. All right, so you mentioned you agree in terms of consciousness, on
a lot of things with Annaka. Is there somebody, friend or friendly foe, that you disagree with in
some nuanced, interesting way, or some major way about consciousness, about these topics of reality
that you return to often? It's like Christopher Hitchens with the Rabbi David Wallby have had interesting
conversations through years that added to the complexity and the beauty of their friendship. Is there somebody like that, that over the years has been a source of disagreement with you that strengthened your ideas? - Hmm, my ideas have been
really shaped by several things. One is the physicalist framework that my scientific colleagues, almost to a person have
adopted, and that I adopted too. The reason I walked away from
it was because it became clear that we couldn't start with
unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness. - Can you define physicalist in contrast to reductionist. - So a physicalist, I would say, is someone who takes space time and the objects within space time as ontologically fundamental. - Right, and then reductionist
is saying the smaller, the more fundamental. - That's a methodological thing. That's saying within space time, as you go to smaller and
smaller scales in space, you get deeper and deeper laws, more and more fundamental laws. And the reduction of
temperature to particle movement was an example of that. But I think that that
the reason that worked was almost an artifact of
the nature of our interface. - That was for a long time, your colleagues including
yourself, were physicalist, and now you broke away. - Broke away because I
think you can't start with unconscious ingredients
and boot up consciousness. - So even with Roger Penrose, where there's like a gray area. - Right, and here's the
challenge I would put to all of my friends
and colleagues who are, give one specific conscious experience that you can boot up, right? So if you think that it's
integrated information, and I've asked this of
Giulio Tononi a couple times, back in the nineties, and
then just a couple years ago. Asked Giulio, okay, so great
integrated information. So we're all interested in explaining some specific conscious experiences. So pick one, the taste of chocolate. What is the integrated
information, precise structure that we need for chocolate? And why does that structure
have to be for chocolate? And why is it that it could
not possibly be vanilla? Is there any, I asked them, is there any one specific
conscious experience that you can account for? Because notice they've
set themselves the task of booting up conscious
experiences from physical systems. That's the task they've set themselves. - But that doesn't mean they're, I understand your intuition, but that doesn't mean they're wrong just because they can't find
a way to boot it up yet. - That's right. No, that doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just just means that
they haven't done it. I think it's principled. The reason is principled, but I'm happy that they're exploring it. But the fact is, the remarkable fact is there's not one theory. So integrated information theory, orchestrated collapse of microtubules, global workspace theory. - These are all theories of consciousness. - [Lex] These are all
theories of consciousness. There's not a single theory that can give you a specific
conscious experience that they say, here is
the physical dynamics or the physical structure. That must be the taste of chocolate or whatever one they want. - So you're saying it's impossible. They're saying it is just hard. - Yeah, I mean my attitude is, okay, no one said you had to start with neurons or physical systems and
boot up consciousness. - [Lex] You guys are just taking that. - You chose that problem. So since you chose that problem, how much progress have you made? Well, when you've not been able to come up with a single specific
conscious experience, and you've had these
brilliant people working on it for decades now, that's
not really good progress. - Let me ask you to play devil's advocate, can you try to steel
man, steel man meaning argue the best possible case for reality, the opposite of your book title? Or maybe just sticking to consciousness, can you take the physicalist view? Can you steel man the physicalist view for a brief moment
playing devil's advocate, or steel man the person you used to be? So a physicalist. What's a good, like saying that you might be wrong right now, what would be a convincing
argument for that? - Well, I think the argument I would give and that I believed was, look, when you have very simple physical systems like a piece of dirt,
there's not much evidence of life or consciousness. It's only when you get really
complicated physical systems like that have brains. And really, the more
complicated the brains, the more it looks like
there's consciousness and the more complicated
that consciousness is. Surely that means that
simple physical systems don't create much consciousness,
or if maybe not any. Or maybe if panpsychists, they create the most elementary kinds of simple conscious experiences, but you need more
complicated physical systems to boot up to create more
complicated consciousnesses. I think that's the intuition that drives most of my colleagues. - And you're saying that
this concept of complexity is ill-defined when you
ground it to space time? - Oh, well, I think it's well defined within the framework of space time, right? - No, it's ill defined
relative to what you need to actually understand consciousness, because you're grounding
complexity just in space time. - Oh, got you. Right, right. Yeah, what what I'm saying is, if it were true that space
time was fundamental, then I would have to agree that if there is such a
thing as consciousness, given the data that we've got that complex brains have consciousness and dirt doesn't, that
somehow it's the complexity of the dynamics or organization, the function of the physical system that somehow is creating
the consciousness. So under those assumptions, yes, but when the physicists
themselves are telling us that space time is not
fundamental, then I can understand, see then the whole picture
starts to come into focus. My colleagues are brilliant, right? These are really smart people. I mean, Francis Crick worked on this for the last 20 years of his life. I mean, these are not stupid people. These are brilliant, brilliant people. The fact that we've come up with not a single specific
conscious experience that we can explain, and no hope. There's no one that says, I'm close, I'll have it for you in a year. No, there's just like
this fundamental gap. So much so that Steve Pinker
in one of his writings says, look, he likes the
global workspace theory, but he says the last dollop of the theory in which there's something it's like, we may have to just stipulate
that as a brute fact. And Pinker is brilliant, right? He understands the state
of play on this problem, the hard problem of consciousness, starting with physicalist assumptions and then trying to boot up consciousness. You've set yourself the problem. I'm starting with physical
stuff that's not conscious. I'm trying to get the
taste of chocolate out as maybe some kind of function
of the dynamics of that. We've not been able to do that. And so Pinker is saying
we may have to punt, we may have to just
stipulate that last bit, he calls it the last dollop, and just stipulate it
as a bare fact of nature that there is something that's like, well, from my point of view is the physical, the whole point, the whole
promise of the physicalist was we wouldn't have to stipulate. I was gonna start with the physical stuff and explain where the
consciousness came from. If I'm gonna stipulate consciousness, why don't I just stipulate consciousness and not stipulate all
the physical stuff too? So I'm stipulating less. I'm saying, okay, I agree. - [Lex] Which is the panpsychist
perspective, I suppose. - Well, it's actually what I call the conscious realist perspective. - [Lex] Conscious realist. - Panpsychists are
effectively dualists, right? They're saying there's physical stuff that really is fundamental
and then consciousness stuff. So I would go with Pinker and say, look, let's just stipulate
the consciousness stuff, but I'm not gonna stipulate
the physical stuff. I'm gonna actually now show how to boot up the physical stuff from just
the consciousness stuff. So I'll stipulate less. - Is it possible? So if you stipulate less, is it possible for our limited brains
to visualize reality as we delve deeper and deeper and deeper? Is it possible to visualize
somehow, with the tools of math, with the tools of computers,
with the tools of our mind? Are we hopelessly lost? You said there's ways to intuit what's true using
mathematics and probability and sort of Markovian dynamics,
all that kind of stuff. But that's not visualizing, that's kind of building intuition. But is it possible to visualize
in the way we visualize so nicely in space time,
in four dimensions, in three dimensions, sorry. Well, two. We really are looking through
a two dimensional screen until it's what we intuit to
be a three dimensional world. And also inferring dynamic
stuff, making it 4D. Anyway, is it possible to
visualize some pretty pictures that give us a deeper sense
of the truth of reality? - I think that we will
incrementally be able to do that. I think that, for example,
the picture that we have of electrons and photons
interacting and scattering wasn't, it may have not been possible until Faraday did all of his experiments, and then Maxwell wrote down his equations, and we were then sort of
forced by his equations to think in a new way. And then when Plunk in 1900, desperate to try to solve the problem of black body radiation, what they call the
ultraviolet catastrophe, where Newton was predicting
infinite energies where there weren't infinite energies in black body radiation. And he, in desperation,
proposed packets of energy. Then once you've done that, and then you have a Einstein
come along five years later and show how that explains
the photo electric effect. And then, eventually in
1926 you get quantum theory, and then you get this whole
new way of thinking that was, from the Newtonian point of view, completely contradictory and
counterintuitive certainly. And maybe if Dyson is
right, not contradictory, maybe if you use intuitionist math, they're not contradictory, but still certainly you wouldn't have gone there. And so here's a case where the experiments and then a desperate mathematical move, sort of we use those as a
flashlight into the deep fog. And so that science may be the
flashlight into the deep fog. - I wonder if it's still
possible to visualize, like we talk about consciousness from a self perspective experience, hold that idea in our mind, the way you can experience
things directly. We've evolved to experience
things in this 3D world, and that's a very rich experience. When you're thinking mathematically, you still in the end of the
day have to project it down to a low dimensional
space to make conclusions. Your conclusions will
be a number, or a line, or a plot, or a visual. So I wonder like how we can really touch some deep truth in a subjective way, like experience it, really
feel the beauty of it in the way that humans feel beauty. Are we screwed? - I don't think we're screwed. I think that we get little hints of it, from psychedelic drugs and so forth. We get hints that there
are certain interventions that we can take on our interface. I apply this chemical, which is just some element of
my interface to this other, to a brain by ingesting it. And all of a sudden I seem
like I've opened new portals into conscious experiences. Well, that's very, very suggestive. That's like the black body
radiation doing something that we didn't expect, right? It doesn't go to infinity when we thought it was
gonna go to infinity and we're forced to propose these quanta. So once we have a theory
of conscious agents, and its projection into
space time, I should say, I should sketch what I
think that projection is. But then I think we can then start to ask specific questions. When you're taking DMT,
or you're taking LSD, or something like that, now
that we have this deep model, we've reverse engineered space and time and physical particles,
we've pulled them back to this theory of conscious agents. Now we can ask ourselves,
in this idealized future, what are we doing to conscious agents when we apply 5-MeO-DMT,
what are we doing? Are we opening a new portal? So when I say that, I mean, I have a portal into consciousness that I call my body of Lex
Fridman that I'm creating. And it's a genuine portal, not perfect, but it's a genuine portal. I'm definitely communicating
with your consciousness. And we know that we have one technology for building new portals. We know one technology,
and that is having kids. Having kids is how we build
new portals into consciousness. It takes a long time. - Can you elaborate that? Oh, oh, oh, you mean like. - Your son and your daughter didn't exist. That was a portal. You're having contact with consciousness that you never would have had before, but now you've got a son or a daughter. You went through this physical process, they were born, there was all that. - Is that portal yours? So when you have kids, are
you creating new portals that are completely
distinct from the portals that you've created with
other consciousness? Like can you elaborate on that? To which degree are the
consciousness of your kids a part of you? - Well, so every person that
I see, that symbol that I see, the body that I see,
is a portal potentially for me to interact with a consciousness. - [Lex] Yeah. - And each consciousness
has unique character. We call it a personality and so forth. So with each new kid that's born, we come in contact with a personality that we've never seen before, and a version of consciousness that we've never seen
before at a deeper level. The theory says there's one agent. So this is a different
projection of that one agent. But, so that's what I mean by a portal is, within my own interface,
my own projection, can I see other projections
of that one consciousness. So can I get portals in that sense? And I think we will get a theory of that, that we will get a theory of portals, and then we can ask how the
psychedelics are acting. Are they actually creating
new portals or not? If they're not, we should
nevertheless then understand how we could create a new portal. Maybe we have to just study what happens when we have kids. We know that that technology
creates new portals. So we have to reverse engineer that and then say, okay, could we somehow create new portals de novo with that? - With something like
brain computer interfaces, for example. - Yeah, maybe just a chemical
or something like that more complicated than a chemical. That's why I think that the psychedelics, the psychedelics may,
because they might be affecting this portal in certain ways that it turns it around and opens up. In other words, maybe once we understand this thing is a portal,
your body as a portal, and understand all of its complexities, maybe we'll realize that
that portal can be shifted to different parts of
the deeper consciousness and give new windows on it. And so in that way, maybe yes, psychedelics could open up new portals in the sense that they're taking something that's already a complex portal
and just tweaking it a bit. - Well, but creating is a
very powerful difference between morphing. - [Donald] Tweaking versus
the creating, I agree. - But maybe it gives you intuition to at least the full space
of the kinds of things that this particular system is capable of. I mean, the idea, your idea that the consciousness creates brains. I mean, that breaks my brain, because I guess I'm still a
physicalist in that sense, because it is just much
easier to intuit the world. It's very practical to think, all right, there's a neural network, and what are the different ways, fascinating capabilities can emerge from this neural network? - [Donald] I agree, it's easier. - And so you start to present
to yourself the problem of, okay, well how does consciousness arise? How does intelligence arise? How does emotion arise? How does memory arise, how do we filter within this system all the incoming sensory information we're able to allocate attention in different interesting ways? How do all those mechanisms arise? To say that there's
other fundamental things we don't understand outside of space time that are actually core to
how this whole thing works is a bit paralyzing. Because it's like, oh, we're not 10% done. We're like 0.001% done. Is the immediate feeling. - I certainly understand that. My attitude about it is, if you
look at the young physicists who are searching for these
structures beyond space time, like amplituhedron and so forth, they're having a ball. Space time, that's what the old folks did. That's what the older generation did. We're doing something that
really is fun and new, and they're having a blast, and they're finding all
these new structures. So I think that we're going to succeed in getting a new deeper theory. I can just say what I'm hoping with the theory that I'm working on. I'm hoping to show that I could have this timeless dynamics of consciousness. No entropic time. I take a projection and I show how this timeless dynamics
looks like the big bang and the entire evolution of space time. In other words, I see how my
whole space time interface. - So not just, the projections doesn't just look like space time. You can explain with it the whole from the origin of the universe. - That's what we have to do. And that's what the physicists understand. When they go beyond space
time to the amplituhedron and the cosmological polytope, they ultimately know that
they have to get back the big bang story and
the whole evolution, that whole story where
there were no living things, there was just a point. And then the explosion, and then just particles at high energy, and then eventually the cooling down and the differentiation, and
finally matter condenses, and then life, and then consciousness. That whole story has to
come out of something that's deeper and without time. And that's what we're up to. We want to get that. So the whole story that
we've been telling ourselves about big bang and how brains
evolve into consciousness will come out of a much deeper theory. And for someone like me, it's a lot. I mean, but for the younger generation, this is like, oh wow, all the
low cherries aren't picked. This is really good stuff. This is really new fundamental
stuff that we can do. So I can't wait to read the papers of the younger generation,
and I wanna see them. - Kids these days with their
non-space time assumptions. It's just interesting looking
at the philosophical tradition of this difficult ideas you struggle with. If you look like somebody
like Emmanuel Kant, what are some interesting
agreements and disagreements you have with the guy about
the nature of reality? - So there's a lot in agreement, right? So Kant was an idealist,
transcendental idealist, and he basically had the
idea that we don't see nature as it is. We impose a structure on nature. And so in some sense, I'm
saying something similar. I'm saying that, by the way, I don't call myself an idealist. I call myself a conscious realist, because idealism has a long history. A lot of different ideas
come under idealism, and there's a lot of debates and so forth. It tends to be identified with, in many cases, anti-science
and anti-realism And I don't want either
connection with my ideas. And so I just called
mine conscious realism, with an emphasis on realism,
and not anti-realism. But one place where I would
of course disagree with Kant was that he thought that
Euclidean space time was a priori. We just know that that's false. So he went too far on that. But in general, the
idea that we don't start with space time, that space
and time is in some sense the forms of our perceptions. Yes, absolutely. And I would say that
there's a lot in common with Barkley in that regard. There's a lot of ingenious
arguments in Barkley. Leibniz, in his monodology, understood very clearly
that the hard problem was not solvable. He posed a hard problem
and basically dismissed it and just said, you can't do this. And so if he came here
and saw where we are, he'd say, look guys, I told
you this 300 years ago, and he had his monodology. He was trying to do something like this, it's different from what I'm doing. But he had these things that
were not in space and time, these monads. He was trying to build something. I'm trying to build a
theory of conscious agents. My guess is that if he
came here, I could just, if he saw what I was doing, he would say, he would understand it and
immediately take off with it and go places that I couldn't. He would have no problems. - So there would be, right,
there would be overlap of the spirit of the ideas, would be totally overlapping. - But his genius would
then just run with it far faster than I could. - I love the humility here. So let me ask you about sort
of practical implications of your ideas to our world,
our complicated world. When you look at the big
questions of humanity, of hate, war, what else is there, evil? Maybe there's the
positive aspects of that, of meaning, of love. What is the fact that reality
is an illusion perceived? What is the conscious realism? When applied to daily life, what kind of impact does it have? - A lot, and it's sort of scary. We all know that life is ephemeral, and spiritual traditions have said, wake up to the fact that
anything that you do here is gonna disappear. But it's even more ephemeral
than perhaps we have thought. I see this bottle because
I create it right now. As soon as I look away, that data structure has
been garbage collected. That bottle, I have to
recreate it every time I look. So I spend all my money and
I buy this fancy car that, that car, I have to keep recreating it every time I look at
it, it's that ephemeral. So all the things that
we invest ourselves in, we fight over, and we
kill each other over, and we have wars over. These are all, it's just like people in a virtual reality simulation, and there's this Porsche, and we all see the Porsche. Well, that Porsche
exists when I look at it, I turn my headset and I look at it, and then if Joe turns his
headset in the right way, he'll see his Porsche. But it's not even the
same Porsche that I see. He's creating his own Porsche. So these things are exceedingly ephemeral. And now just imagine saying
that that's my Porsche. Well, you can agree to say
that it's your Porsche, but really the Porsche only
exists as long as you look. So this, all of a sudden, what the spiritual
traditions have been saying for a long, long time,
this gets cashed out in mathematically precise science. It's saying ephemeral, yes, in fact, it lasts for a few milliseconds, a few hundred milliseconds
while you look at it, and then it's gone. So the whole idea, why are
we fighting, why do we hate? We fight over possessions because we think that we're small little objects inside this preexisting space time. We assume that that mansion and that car exists independent of us and that somehow these little things can
have our sense of self and importance enhanced by
having that special car, or that special house,
or that special person, when in fact it's just the opposite. You create that mansion
every time you look. You're something far
deeper than that mansion. You're the entity which can
create that mansion on the fly. And there's nothing there. There's nothing to the mansion except what you create in this moment. So all of a sudden, when
you take this point of view, it has all sorts of implications for how we interact with each other, how we treat each other. And again, a lot of things that spiritual traditions
have said, it's a mixed bag. Spiritual traditions are a mixed bag. So lemme just be right
up front about that. I'm not promoting any particular, but they do have some insights. - They have wisdom. - They have certain wisdom. I can point to nonsense. I won't go into it, but I can also point to lots of nonsense. So the issue is to then to
look for the key insights. And I think they have a lot of insights about the ephemeral nature
of objects in space and time and not being attached to
them, including our own bodies, and reversing that I'm
not this little thing, a little consciousness
trapped in the body, and the consciousness itself
is only a product of the body. So when the body dies, the
consciousness disappears. It turns completely around. The consciousness is fundamental. The body, my hand exists right now because I'm looking at it. My hand is gone. I have no hand, I have no
brain, I have no heart. If you looked, you'll see a heart. Whatever I am is this
really complicated thing in consciousness. That's what I am. All the stuff that I thought I was is something that I create
on the fly and delete. So this is completely
a radical restructuring of how we think about
possessions, about identity, about survival of death and so forth. This is completely transformative. But the nice thing is
that this whole approach of conscious agents, unlike
the spiritual traditions, which has said in some
cases similar things, they said it imprecisely. This is mathematics. We can actually now begin to say precisely here's the mathematical
model of consciousness, conscious agents. Here's how it maps onto space time, which I should sketch really briefly. And here's why things are ephemeral, and here's why you shouldn't be worried about the ephemeral nature of things, because you're not a little tiny entity inside space and time, quite the opposite. You're the author of space and time. - The I, and the am, and the I am is all kind of emergent
through this whole process of evolution and so on. That's just surface waves, and there's a much deeper ocean that we're trying to figure out here. So you said of the stuff
you're thinking about maps to space time, how
does it map to space time? - Right, so just a very, very high level, I'll keep it brief. The structures that the
physicists are finding, like the amplituhedron, it turns out they're
just static structure. They're polytopes. But they, remarkably, most
of the information in them is contained in permutation matrices. So it's a matrix like an NxN matrix that just has zeros and ones. That contains almost
all of the information. And they have these
plotted graphs and so forth that they use to boot up the scattering. You can compute those
scattering amplitudes almost entirely from these
permutation matrices. So that's just now from my point of view, I have this conscious agent dynamics. It turns out that the stationary
that I was talking about, where the entropy is increasing, all the stationary
dynamics are sketched out by permutation matrices. So there's a so-called Burkhoff polytope. All the vertices of this polytope, all the points are permutation matrices. All the internal points
are markovian kernels that have the uniform measure
as a stationary measure. - I need to intuit a little better what the heck you're talking about. So basically there's some
complicated thing going on with the network of conscious agents. And that's mappable to this. - [Donald] That's right. - You're saying a two dimensional matrix that scattering has to do with
what, with the perception? Like that's like photon stuff or? I mean, I don't know if it's useful to sort of dig into detail. - I'll do just the high level thing. So the high level is, the long-term behavior of
the conscious agent dynamics. So that's a projection. Just looking at the long-term behavior I'm hoping will give rise
to the amplituhedron. The amplituhedron then
gives rise to space time. And so then I can just use their link to go all the way from consciousness, through its asymptotics, through the amplituhedron,
into space time, and get the map all the
way into our interface. - And that's why you mentioned
the permutation matrix, because it gives you a nice
thing to try to generate. - That's right. It's the connection
with the amplituhedron. The permutation matrices are the core of the amplituhedron. And it turns out they're the core of the asymptotic description
of the conscious agents. - So not to sort of bring
up the idea of a creator, but first of all, I like video games. And you mentioned this
kind of simulation idea. First of all, do you think
of, as an interesting idea, this thought experiment that
we live in a simulation? And in general, do you think
we live in a simulation? - So Nick Bostrom's idea
about the simulation is typically couched in
a physicalist framework. - [Lex] Yes. - So there's the bottom level. There's some programmer
in a physical space time, and they have a computer
that they've programmed brilliantly and cleverly where they've created conscious entities. So you have the hard problem
of consciousness, right? The standard hard problem. How could a computer simulation
create a consciousness? Which isn't explained by
that simulation theory. But then the idea is that the next level, the entities that are created in the first level simulation, then can write their own simulations, and you get this nesting. So the idea that this
is a simulation is fine, but the idea that it starts
with a physicalist base, I think isn't fine. - There's different properties here. The partial rendering. And to me that's the interesting idea is not whether the entirety
of the universe is simulated, but how efficiently can
you create interfaces that are convincing to all other entities that can appreciate such interfaces? How little does it take? Because you said like partial rendering, or like temporal, ephemeral
rendering of stuff. Only render the tree falling in the forest when there's somebody there to see it. It's interesting to think, how can you do that super efficiently without having to render everything? And that to me is one
perspective on the simulation, just like it is with video games, right? Where a video game doesn't have to render every single thing. It's just the thing that
the observer is looking at. - Right, there is actually,
that's a very nice question. And there's whole groups of researchers that are actually studying,
in virtual reality, what is the sort of minimal
requirements on the system? How does it have to operate to give you an immersion experience, to give you the feeling
that you have a body, to get you to take it real? And there's actually a
lot of really good work on that right now. And it turns out it
doesn't take that much. You do need to get the
perception action loop tight, and you have to give them the perceptions that they're expecting
if you want them to. But if you can lead them along, if you give them
perceptions that are close to what they're expecting, you can then maybe move
their reality around a bit. - Yeah, it's a tricky engineering problem, especially when you
try to create a product that's costs little, but it feels like an engineering problem, not a deeply scientific problem. Meaning, obviously it's
a scientific problem, but as a scientific problem,
it's not that difficult to trick us descendants of apes. - But here's a case
for just us in our own, if this is a virtual reality that we're experiencing right now. So here's something you
can try for yourself. If you just close your eyes and look at your
experience in front of you, to be aware of your
experience in front of you, what you experience is just
like a modeled dark gray. There's some dynamics to
it, but it's just dark gray. But now I ask you, instead of
having your attention forward, put your attention backward. What is it like behind
you with your eyes closed? And there it's like nothing. It's really. So what is going on here? What am I experiencing back there? - I don't know if it's nothing. It's like, I guess it's the absence of, it's not even like darkness or something. - It's not even darkness. There's no qualia to it. And yet there is a sense of being, and that's the interesting thing. There's a sense of being back. So I close my eyes, I
put my attention forward. I have the quality of a gray model thing, but when I put my attention backward, there's no quality at all. But there is a sense of being. - I personally, now you haven't been to that side of the room. I have been to that side of the room. So for me, memories, I start playing the engine of memory
replay, which is like, I take myself back in time and think about that place where I was hanging out in that part. That's what I see when I'm behind. So that's an interesting
quirk of human humans too. We're collecting these experiences and we can replay them in interesting ways whenever we feel like it. And it's almost like being
there, but not really, but almost. - That's right. And yet we can go our
entire lives on this. You're talking about the
minimal thing for VR. We can go our entire lives and not realize that all of my life, it's been like nothing behind me. We're not even aware
that all of our lives, if you just pay attention, close your, pay attention
to what's behind me, we're like, oh, holy smoke. It's totally scary. I mean, it's like nothing. There's no quality there at all. How did I not notice that my entire life? We're so immersed in the simulation, we buy it so much. - Yeah, I mean you could see
this with children, right? With persistence you could
do the peekaboo game, you can hide from them and appear, and they're fully tricked. And in the same way we're fully tricked. There's nothing behind us,
and we assume there is. And that's really interesting. These theories are pretty heavy. You as a human being,
as a mortal human being, how has these theories
been to you personally? Like, are there good days and bad days, when you wake up and look in the mirror and the fact that you can't
see anything behind you, the fact that it's rendered? Like is there interesting quirks, you know Nietzsche with his, if you gaze long into the
abyss, the abyss gazes into you. How has this theories, these
ideas changed you as a person? - It's been very, very difficult. The stuff is not just
abstract theory building, because it's about us. Sometimes I've realized that there's this big division of me. My mind is doing all this science and coming up with these conclusions, and the rest of me is not integrating. It's just like, I don't believe it. I just don't believe this. So as I start to take it seriously, I get scared myself. It's like, but it's very much, then I read these spiritual traditions and realize they're saying
very, very similar things. There is a lot of conversion. So for me, the first time I thought it might be possible that
we're not seeing the truth was in 1986. It was from some
mathematics we were doing. And when that hit me, it
hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to sit down. It was scary. It was really a shock to the system. And then to realize that everything that has been important to
me, like getting a house, getting a car, getting a
reputation and so forth. Well that car is just like the car I see in the virtual reality. It's there when you perceive
it and it's not there. So the whole question of
what am I doing and why, what's worthwhile doing in life? Clearly getting a big house
and getting a big car. I mean, we all knew
that we were gonna die. So we tend not to know that. We tend to hide it,
especially when we're young. Before age 30, we don't
believe we're gonna die. - We factually maybe know that you kind of are supposed to, yeah. - But they'll figure something out and we'll be the generation
that is the first one that doesn't have to die. That's the kind of thing. But when you really face the fact that you're going to die, and then when I start to look at it from this point of view that, well, this thing was an interface to begin with. So is what I'm really gonna be doing just taking off a headset. So I've been playing in a
virtual reality game all day, and I got lost in the game, and I was fighting over a Porsche. And I shot some guys up and
I punctured their tires, but I got the Porsche. Now I take the headset
off, and what was that for? Nothing. It was just a data structure
and the data structure is gone. So all of the wars, the
fighting and the reputations and all this stuff, it is just a headset. And so my theory says that intellectually, my mind, my emotions
rebel all over the place. And so I have to mention,
I meditate a lot. - What percent of the day would you say you spend as a physicalist
sort of living life, pretending your car matters,
your reputation matter? Like how much, what's that Tom Waits song? I like my town with a
little drop of poison. How much poison do you
allow yourself to have? - I think my default mode is physicalist. I think that that's just the default. When I'm not being conscious, consciously attentive. - Intellectually consciously attentive. Because if you're just, you're still, if you're tasting coffee and
not thinking, or drinking, or just taking in the sunset,
you're not being intellectual. But you're still experiencing it. So it's when you turn on
the introspective machine, that's when you can start. - And turn off the thinker. When I actually just start
looking without thinking. So that's when I feel like all of a sudden I'm starting to see through, it's sort of like, okay,
part of part of the addiction to the interface is all the
stories I'm telling about it. It's really important for me to get that, really important to do that. So I'm telling all these stories, and so I'm all wrapped up,
almost all of the mind stuff that's going on in my
head is about attachment to the interface. And so what I've found is that, essentially the only way to
really detach from the interface is to literally let go
of thoughts altogether. And then all of a
sudden, even my identity, my whole history, my name, my education and all this stuff is almost irrelevant because it's just now,
here is the present moment. And this is the reality right now. And all of that other stuff
is an interface story. But this conscious experience right now, this is the only reality
as far as I can tell. The rest of it's a story. But that is, again, not my default, that is I have to make a
really conscious choice to say, okay, I know intellectually this is all an interface. I'm gonna take the
headset off and so forth. And then immediately
sink back into the game and just be out there playing the game and get lost in it. So I'm always lost in the game unless I literally consciously
choose to stop thinking. - Isn't it terrifying to acknowledge that, to look beyond the game? - Scares the hell outta me. It really is scary. Because I'm so attached,
I'm attached to this body, I'm attached to the interface. - Are you ever worried about
breaking your brain a bit? Meaning like it's, I mean, some of these ideas
when you think about reality, even with like Einstein, just
realizing you said interface, just realizing that light,
that there's a speed of light, and you can't go faster
than the speed of light, and like what kind of things black holes can do with light. Even that can mess with your head. - [Donald] Yes. - But that's still space time. - That's a big mess, but
it's still just space time. It's still a property of our interface. That's right. - Even Einstein realized
that this particular thing, some of the stories you tell ourselves is constructing interfaces that are oversimplifying
the way things work. Because it's nice. The stories are nice. Stories are nice. That's why, I mean, just like
video games, they're nice. - Right, but Einstein
was a realist, right? He was a famous realist, in the sense that he was very explicit, in a 1935 paper with Petuskin
Rosen, the EPR paper, right? They said, if without in
any way disturbing a system, I can predict with probability one the outcome of a measurement, then there exists in reality
that element, that value. And we now know from quantum
theory that that's false. That Einstein's idea of local realism is strictly speaking false. And so we can predict, in quantum theory, you can set up, and there's a paper by Chris Fuchs, quantum bayesianism,
where he scouts this out. It was done by other people, but he gives a good presentation of this, where they have a sequence of something like nine
different quantum measurements that you can make. And you can predict with probability one what a particular outcome will be, but you can actually
prove that it's impossible that the value existed before
you made the measurement. So you know with probability
one what you're gonna get, but you also know with certainty that that value was not there until you made the measurement. So we know from quantum theory that the act of observation
is an act of fact creation. And that is built into what I'm saying with this theory of consciousness. If consciousness is fundamental, space time itself is an
act of fact creation. It's an interface that we create, consciousness creates,
plus all the objects in it. So local realism is not true. Quantum theory has established that. Also non-con contextual
realism is not true. And that fits in perfectly with this idea that consciousness is fundamental. These things exist as data
structures when we create them. As Chris Fuchs says,
the act of observation is an act of fact creation. But I must say, on a personal level, I'm having to spend, I
spend a couple hours a day just sitting in meditation on this and facing the rebellion in
me that goes to the core. It feels like it goes
to the core of my being. Rebellion against these ideas. So here it is very, very
interesting for me to look at this because, so here I'm a
scientist and I'm a person. The science is really clear. Local realism is false. Non-contextual realism is false. Space time is doomed. It's very, very clear. It couldn't be clearer. And my emotions rebel left and right. When I sit there and say,
okay, I am not something in space and time, then
something inside of me says, you're crazy. Of course you are. And I'm completely attached to it. I'm completely attached to all this stuff. I'm attached to my body,
I'm attached to the headset, I'm attached to my car,
attached to people. I'm attached to all of it. And yet I know as an absolute fact, I'm gonna walk away from all of it. I'm gonna die. In fact, I almost died last year. Covid almost killed me. I sent a goodbye text to my
wife, so I thought I was. - [Lex] You really did? - I sent her a goodbye. I was in the emergency room, and it had attacked my heart, and it had been at 190 beats
per minute for 36 hours. I couldn't last much longer, I knew it. They couldn't stop it. - [Lex] So that was it. - So that was it. So I texted her goodbye
from the emergency room. - [Lex] I love you, goodbye kind of thing? - Yeah, right. Yeah, that was it. - [Lex] Were you afraid? - Yeah, it scares the hell of you, right? But there was, you're
just feeling so bad anyway that sort of, you're scared,
but you're just feeling so bad that in some sense you just
want it to stop anyway. So I've been there and
faced it just a year ago. - How did that change you, by the way, having this intellectual
reality that's so challenging that you meditate on, that
it is just an interface, and one of the hardest
things to come to terms with is that that means that it's gonna end. How did that change you
having come so close to the reality of it? It's not just an intellectual reality. It's a reality of death. - It's forced, I've
meditated for 20 years now, and I would say averaging
three or four hours a day. But it's put a new urgency, but urgency is not the right word. It's riveted my attention,
I'll put it that way. It's really riveted my attention. And I've really paid, I've spent a lot more time looking at what spiritual traditions say. I don't, by the way, again, take it all with a grain of salt. But on the other hand, I think it's stupid for me to ignore it. So I try to listen to the best ideas and to sort out nonsense from. And it's just we all have to
do it for ourselves, right? It's not easy. So what makes sense, and I have the advantage of some science, so I can look at what science
says and try to compare with spiritual tradition. I try to sort it out for myself. But then I also look and realize that there's
another aspect to me, which is this whole emotional aspect. I seem to be wired up, as evolutionary psychology
says I'm wired up, right? All these defensive mechanisms, I'm inclined to lie if I need to. I'm inclined to be angry, to protect myself, to have
an ingroup and an outgroup, to try to make my reputation
as big as possible to try to demean the outgroup. There's all these things that evolutionary psychology is spot on. It is really brilliant
about the human condition. And yet I think evolution, as
I said, evolutionary theory is a projection of a deeper theory where there may be no competition. So I'm in this very interesting position where I feel like, okay,
according to my own theory, I'm consciousness. And maybe this is what it means for consciousness to wake up. It's not easy. It's almost like I have, I feel like I have real skin in the game. It really is scary. I really was scared
when I was about to die. It really was hard to
say goodbye to my wife. It really pained. And to then look at that,
and then look at the fact that I'm gonna walk away from this anyway, and it's just an interface. How do I, so it's trying to
put all this stuff together and really grock it, so to speak. Not just intellectually, but grock it at an emotional level. - Yeah, what are you afraid of, you silly evolved organism
that's gotten way too attached to the interface? What are you really afraid of? - [Donald] That's right. - Is there a. - Very personal, you know,
it's very, very personal. - I mean, speaking of that text, what do you think is
this whole love thing? What's the role of love
in our human condition, this interface thing we have? Is this somehow interweaved, interconnected with consciousness, this attachment we have to other humans and this deep, there's some quality to it that seems very interesting, peculiar. - Well, there are two levels
I would think about that. There's love in the sexual sense, and then there's love in a deeper sense. And in the sexual sense, we can give an evolutionary
account of that and so forth. And I think that's pretty clear to people in this deeper sense, right? So of course I married, I love
my wife in a sexual sense. But there's a deeper sense as well. When I was saying goodbye to her, there was a much deeper love that was really at play there. That's one place where I think that the mixed bag from
spiritual traditions has something right. When they say love your
neighbor as yourself, that in some sense love is fundamental. I think that they're onto something, something very, very deep and profound. And every once in a while I can get a personal glimpse of that. Especially when I'm in
the space with no thought. When I can really let go of thoughts, I get little glimpses of a love in the sense that I'm not separate. It's a love in the sense that
I'm not different from that. If you and I are separate,
then I can fight you. But if you and I are the
same, there's a union there. - The togetherness of it. Who's God? All those gods, the stories that have been told
throughout history, you said, through the spiritual traditions. What do you think that is? Is that us trying to find
that common thing at the core? - Well in many traditions, not all, the one I was raised in, so my dad was a Protestant minister, we tend to think of God as a being. But I think that that's not right. I think the closest way to
think about God is being period, not a being, but being, the very ground of being itself is God. I think that's the deep,
and from my point of view, that's the ground of consciousness. So the ground of conscious
being is what we might call God. But the word God has
always been, for example, you don't believe the same God is my God, so I'm gonna fight you. We will have wars over, because the being, the specific being that you call God is different from the
being that I call God, and so we fight. Whereas if it's not a
being, but just being, and you and I share being, then you and I are not separate and there's no reason to fight. We're both part of that one being, and loving you is loving myself. Because we're all part of that one being. The spiritual traditions
that point to that I think are pointing in a
very interesting direction. And that does seem to
match with the mathematics of the conscious agent stuff that I've been working on as well. It really fits with that. Although that wasn't my goal. - Is there, you mentioned that the young physicist
that you talked to, or whose work you follow,
have quite a lot of fun breaking with the traditions of the past, the assumptions of the past. What advice would you
give to young people today in high school and college? Not just physicists, but in general, how to have a career they can be proud of, how they can have a life
they can be proud of, how to make their way in
the world from the lessons, from the wins and the
losses in your own life. What little insights could you pull out? - I would say the universe
is a lot more interesting than you might expect. And you are a lot more
special and interesting than you might expect. You might think that you're just a little, tiny, irrelevant 100
pound, 200 pound person in a vast billions of
light years across space. And that's not the case. You are in some sense the being that's creating that space all the time, every time you look. So waking up to who you really are outside of space and time, as the author of space and time, as the author of everything that you see. - The author of space and
time that's beautiful, sorry. - You're the author of space and time, and I'm the author of space and time, and space and time is just
one little data structure. Many other consciousnesses are creating other data structures, they're authors of various other things. So realizing, and then realizing that, I had this feeling growing
up, going to college, reading all these textbooks,
oh man, it's all been done. If I'd just been there 50 years ago I could have discovered this stuff, but it's all in the textbooks now. Well, believe me, the
textbooks are gonna look silly in 50 years, and it's your
chance to write the new textbook. So, of course study the current textbooks, you have to understand them. There's no way to progress until you understand what's been done. But then the only limit is
your imagination, frankly. That's the only limit. - The greatest books,
the greatest textbooks ever written on Earth
are yet to be written. - [Donald] Exactly. - What do you think is the
meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life
from your limited interface? Can you figure it all out? Like why, so you said the
universe is kind of trying to figure itself out through us. Why? - Yeah, that's the closest I've come. So I'll give you, so I
will say that I don't know, but here's my guess. - Good first sentence. That's a good starting point. - And maybe that's
gonna be a profound part of the final answer is to
start with the, I don't know. It is quite possible that
that's really important to start with the I don't know. My guess is that if
consciousness is fundamental, and if Godel's incompleteness
the holds here, and there's infinite variety of structures for consciousness to some sense explore, that maybe that's what it's about. This is something that
Annaka and I talked about a little bit, and she doesn't like this way of talking about it. And so I'm gonna have to
talk with her some more about this way of talking. But right now I'll just put it this way and I'll have to talk with her more and see if I can say it more clearly. But the way I'm talking
about it now is that there's a sense in which there's being, and then there's experiences, or forums that come out of being. That's one deep, deep mystery. And the question that you
asked, what is it all about? Somehow it's related to that. Why does being, why doesn't it
just stay without any forms? Why do we have experiences? Why not just have, when you close your eyes and pay attention to what's behind you, there's
nothing, but there's being. Why don't we just stop there? Why didn't we just stop there? Why did we create all tables and chairs, and the sun, and moon, and people, all this really complicated stuff? Why? And all I can guess right now, and I'll probably kick
myself in a couple years and say, that was dumb, but
all I can guess right now is that somehow consciousness
wakes up to itself by knowing what it's not. So here I am, I'm not this body. And I sort of saw that,
it was sort of in my face when I sent a text goodbye. But then as soon as I'm
better sort of like, okay, I sort of don't wanna go there, right? So I am my body, I go back
to the standard thinking, I am my body, and then
I want to get that car. Even though I was just
about to die a year ago, so that comes rushing back. So consciousness immerses itself fully into a particular headset, gets lost in it, and then slowly wakes up. - Just so it can escape, and that is the waking up. But it needs to have negative. - [Donald] It needs to know what it's not. To know what you are, you have to say, oh, I'm not that, I'm not
that, that wasn't important, that wasn't important. - That's really powerful. Don, let me just say that, because I've been a
long term fan of yours, and we're supposed to have a conversation during this very difficult
moment in your life. Let me just say you're
a truly special person, and I, for one, I know there's
a lot of others that agree. I'm glad that you're still
here with us on this earth, if for a short time. So whatever the universe,
whatever plan it has for you that brought you close to death, to maybe enlighten you some kind of way, I think it has an
interesting plan for you. You're one of the truly special humans, and it's a huge honor that you would sit and talk with me today. Thank you so much. - Thank you very much, Lex,
I really appreciate that. Thank you. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Donald Hoffman. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein, relevant to the ideas
discussed in this conversation. "Time and space are
modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.