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Consciousness vs The Ruliad | Stephen Wolfram Λ Donald Hoffman
June 26, 2024
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Stephen Wolfram, welcome. Hello there. Donald Hoffman, welcome. Thank you. It's my understanding this is the first time you both are meeting.
That's great. Yes. People, people say to me, you know, about things I worked on in physics and so on. Oh, that's related to things that Emmanuel Kant did. And they say might be related to things that Donald Hoffman has done. Well, Emmanuel Kant, I'm too late for, but Donald Hoffman, we get a chance to actually talk about things. That'd be fun. Absolutely. Don, do you see yourself as Kant 2.0?
Well, I'm not nearly as smart as him, so it would be a lesser version, but similar. It's idealism, but with some mathematics behind it. Are you a Leibniz 2.0 as well?
Yeah, much, much less smart than Leibniz, that's for sure. But yeah, it's very, very similar. I like Leibniz's monadology. There's a lot of good ideas in there. And the work I'm doing on conscious agents, in some sense, I can view it as simply a mathematization of Leibniz's ideas. Interesting. I still have to, you know, people have told me for four decades that things I'm doing are sort of Leibniz related. And at various times I have tried to understand Leibniz's monad idea
I've usually failed. Although one thing that helped me a lot recently was realizing, and maybe you can comment on this, that Leibniz didn't imagine that you could have mind made from non-mind. So for him, a monad, if there was ever going to be anything mind-like about it, it had to start by being a mind, so to speak. Right.
Analogy of the mill labnitz mill analogy writes where he says you so he's looking at the hard what we call the hard problem of consciousness from a physicalist point of view. Any gives it just one paragraph in the in the monology that's up that's all he thinks it deserves and he basically says look you know if you're trying to get consciousness out of some kind of physical system it's like going inside of a mill and
going down and seeing all the gears and so forth, you know, whatever it is, the gear is not going to give you an explanation for what is going on in consciousness. And so he, you know, he felt that whatever mechanical physical explanation we give will fail. And he figured one paragraph was enough and he moved right on. Don, what would be your position on that? Well, so physicalists have been trying to give theories of consciousness
Quite strongly now for the last three decades, right? So we have integrated information theory, global workspace theory, orchestrated collapse of quantum states of microtubules and so forth. But I know that the players and their brilliant people and their friends and they know what I'm going to ask them every time I talk with them or get on stage with them is what specific conscious experience can your theory explain? Taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic,
The taste of men. We're interested in scientific theories that explain specific conscious experiences. What experience can you give me? Humans can experience around a trillion different experiences. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. There's a trillion experiences. Which ones have you done? The answer is zero. Right now, we have no example
a physical theory that can explain even one specific conscious experience so for example what i would ask for example of integrated information theory they said there's gonna be some causal structure that's the substrate and if you have the right causal structure then they say you can represent that in a particular with it with a matrix
It seems like we have an easier problem in the last year or two than we've had in the time before that, because now we have LLMs that can talk to us a little bit like we talk to each other.
Yes and you know for humans it's both practically and ethically not possible to kind of take our brains apart and see what's going on inside but for an LLM so far it seems ethically just fine to do that.
You know, so what would you imagine? I mean, you know, you've got your LLM and it's, you know, it's talking to you and it's discussing the kind of tea it likes and all kinds of other things. What would be the kind of thing that you would think you should want to identify that is its internal experience? Uh, nothing. My guess is that they don't have any internal experiences. Uh, and they're what, what, you know, what,
Our LLMs right now are doing or just sophisticated correlations and computations. They're looking for statistics. And how convinced are you that you are more than that? Well, I would say that I have the taste of mint and the smell of garlic and I can hear the middle C on a piano and
Right now, can you convince me that you can hear those things or feel those things? Oh, absolutely not. And you can't convince me either that you have it. So it's a matter of me just believing that you're, you're relatively similar to me in certain ways. So, so I absolutely agree that there's, there's no proof of anybody else. Solipsism is certainly a logical possibility.
Right. But so, but you believe that I might have those internal experiences, but you don't believe that the LLM could have those internal experiences. Well, so it's, it's a little more complicated. So I'll say a little bit more about, so I think that our experience of space and time and physical objects is, um, just a headset. So it's, it's my consciousness is, is created a headset to interact with other consciousnesses.
And so when I look at you on the screen, for example, all I see is pixels and the pixels on the screen, I wouldn't want to say are conscious, but through the pixels, I'm getting a portal into, I think your consciousness. I can guess what you're thinking about and guess what your, what your beliefs might be right now and so forth, but you know, probabilistically and not, not all the completely accurately.
But I wouldn't want to say that pixels are conscious. They're just part of my headset that's given me access to the consciousness. So I want to say that consciousness is fundamental. It's the fundamental existence. And what we call space-time is a fairly trivial headset that some consciousnesses use, but probably most don't. Probably there's a variety of much more interesting headsets out there than just a four-dimensional one.
If you see a frog, are you interacting with consciousness inside the frog or not?
not inside the frog but i meant it's sort of like the frog is like the pixels on my screen that's uh giving me access to certain aspects of consciousness so but the but the frog internally has a feeling of i don't know what it might have a feeling of a mosquito or something like that a feeling of of uh it it has a an inner experience all right yes yes we understand steven so let's say there's a frog feeling sub one and then a frog feeling sub two
Well, well, yeah, I would say that there is a conscious experience that I'm interacting with a conscious experience or a series of experiences behind the frog. And in the case of the LLM, there is going to be beyond the headset, conscious experiences, but it's not going to be what we typically think of as somehow a physical machine gave rise to consciousness.
It's rather that even the very components of the computer that are running the LLM are like pixels on my headset and behind that is consciousness.
Absolutely. So it's like the LLM is the digest of eight billion souls and that's the way you see it? That's right. So it's really a bunch of conscious agents outside of space-time and we are opening different portals into consciousness beyond our headset.
So we humans are sort of the ultimate seat of those elements of consciousness in your view. Is that right? Not at all. We're probably among the less sophisticated ones. So what's an example of a more sophisticated one? Well, our headset has only got four dimensions. Why not have consciousnesses that are using headsets with a billion dimensions?
But I mean, but then I'm a little surprised, you know, in we, I mean, so do you view our sort of, if you imagine, first of all, do you believe there are laws of physics, for example, or do you believe that there are, in other words, are there things that are laws on top of which our brains and the electrochemistry of them and so on operate?
What do you think that it's sort of that is there some substrate underneath or are you somehow imagining that your scientific theory is built I mean okay for example we could imagine that you never had a theory of physics all you had in physics was a collection of experimental results.
And you would have a bunch of you know you could even imagine sort of axioms about how i've seen that this thing correlates with that thing and we would have this kind of uh sort of um observational version of physics that never had anything sort of underneath. I'm just curious how do you imagine kind of the the nature of kind of what's happening in brains relating to sort of the substrate or the potentially laws of physics. Right so
So my view is very, very similar to what some high energy theoretical physicists are doing right now, which they're looking for for new principles and structures beyond space time. So this is Neemar Kani Hamed and a bunch of other people. There's the European Research Council just announced the universe plus project and put putting 10 million euros into what are called positive geometries beyond space time and beyond quantum theory. So,
They just had their first workshop in February where they brought together about a hundred PhDs in mathematics and theoretical physics. What they've discovered are these new structures beyond space-time called positive geometries, amplituhedron, the sociohedron, cosmological polytopes, that their volumes encode scattering amplitudes.
Yeah, I used to do particle physics when I was a kid. I know these things are these things are a bit more recent than that. But I mean, I think the thing to understand about sort of particle physics and where it's gone is I think what you're describing is kind of the limit of what one can view as the S matrix approach to particle physics. I mean, you know, the one view of what happens when sort of particles interact is you see all the details of what's happening and the mechanism of the interaction.
Another approach that heisenberg introduced was just this we don't know what's happening inside we're just going to say what are the things that are coming in what are the initial states what are the final states and we're just going to define this thing we call it the s matrix that sort of describes the transformation from initial states to final states without having to address this question about sort of the mechanism of what's happening inside
you know it's a thing that i learned recently is a piece of uh history of science trivia but it's interesting to me at least is about how heisenberg ended up coming up with the s matrix okay so the the um
You know, one of the things that's relevant to, you know, my efforts to understand fundamental physics is the question of, you know, what's discrete, what's continuous, you know, back in antiquity, you know, people are arguing about everything, you know, is matter can dispute or continuous and so on that finally got resolved at the end of the 19th century, basically. And yes, you know, matter is discrete, it's made of molecules. We can see Brownian motion, all those kinds of things. And then very soon after, you know, light is consistent with being thought of as being discrete.
At the time hundred and something years ago most of the office for the tests were convinced that space was also discrete but.
They kept on trying to make that work from a mathematical point of view and particularly make it compatible with relativity and they kept on failing and Heisenberg, as I recently learned, was kind of in the middle of that whole effort when he said, I just can't make this work. And he said, forget it all. I'm not going to try and describe the mechanism. I'm not going to describe what's happening in space. I'm just going to set up the S matrix and say, you know, this is given this initial configuration. What, you know, how will that translate to final configurations?
So I think, you know, it is certainly possible to, you know, in terms of what we experience in the world, there's no question that you can describe our experience of the world, just in terms of kind of the initial states, the final states, you can describe just, you know, as I was mentioning, sort of an axiomatic physics, where all you describe is what relates to what, and you don't really talk about what the underlying substrate, the mechanism of physics is.
i think that's a a and it's interesting you know in our models of physics at some level that's what's happening at some level what really matters are things like causal graphs let's say how you know one event relates to another event the question of what is the you know how are those events kind of uh what's you know when we start setting up things like space and time space and time are very different in our kinds of models
But when we when we sort of say, this is a lump of space, it's that's something which is something we can do as a convenience for understanding what's going on. But ultimately, in terms of our experience, what matters is this causal graph of relationships between events. So I think I mean, in that, you know, so I'm, I'm, I'm certainly on board with the idea that what matters to us is
Just this cause of events now whether that means and for example that the very construction of space for instance is something that i view as being kind of a coincidental feature of our scale in the universe. That is no the fact that we say there's a state of space at a particular moment in time yes you know i look around this room it's you know i can see maybe ten meters away.
I you know lights gets to me in a microsecond from ten meters away but it takes me milliseconds to process what i saw and so i kind of integrated this whole you know i've aggregated all those photons that are coming in and i can reasonably say there's a state of space that i can talk about and then that might change over time whereas if i was for example i don't know if i thought a million times faster than i do then
You know i wouldn't probably integrate space and i wouldn't talk about space and if somebody told me oh by the way there's this way of thinking about the physical world that involves the idea of space i'd say well that's kind of interesting but it's not necessarily something that is relevant to my particular way of observing the world so i i mean i. I think that's a i don't disagree that the the construction of space is a feature of certain details of us.
Being the way that we are, so to speak. I agree and that seems to be what the this universe plus the positive geometry approach to physics is after as well. One of their banners is they say space time is doomed. It cannot be fundamental because it ceases to have operational meaning beyond the Planck scale. So they're actually looking for new foundations for physics entirely outside of space time and remarkably entirely beyond quantum theory. So these new structures, for example, have no Hilbert spaces.
And they're saying there are no Hilbert spaces here. There is no unitarity and so forth. This is beyond quantum theory, but they want to get space time and quantum theory emerging together from
Yeah, I'm not sure that's the best way to do it. I think one of the things, you know, I have to say, I did physics when I was much younger and then I haven't, didn't do physics for a long time and then kind of got back into doing it when I realized that a bunch of things that I'd figured out for other reasons were sort of converging on giving us a view of how physics might work.
And it's been super exciting to me to actually you know i think i think we got it and i think we know how it works and i think nema and folks like that i know know something about what we've done but i think that the paradigm is is it's interesting because the paradigm is a bit different from traditional mathematical physics. But there are very beautiful connections to lots of work that's been done in traditional mathematical physics sorry just a moment the paradigm of space time is doomed or the paradigm of the amplitude he drawn.
No, no, the paradigm of what people call Wolfram physics project. I mean, it's something where sort of the foundational machine code is very computational. What that turns into at the level of things that we can do experiments on and so on is sort of looks much more like traditional mathematical physics. And what's really cool is that a bunch of limits of our model clearly are kind of
map into things that have been studied in traditional mathematical physics and that's that's kind of what you would hope would be the case because you know what we're trying to do is is deal with something that is sort of a lower level machine code of the structure of the universe the structure of reality basically um than than the things you know i i'd always thought of what i was doing is kind of going underneath space and time
Something which is sort of more fundamental than space and time i think it is not helped the progress of a lot of kind of physics that people have sort of had this idea that space and time of the same kind of thing which is kind of i think.
You know in terms of doing the ideas that is a doomed idea that was that was the thing that you know i'm starting didn't have that idea that idea came in when minkowski said it's really cool that there's this quadratic form that we can write with space pieces in a time piece and they all sort of put together and that's how kind of this concept of space time was was born.
And i think it's sort of a mistake because i think that you know time as i see it is this kind of progressive application of computational rules and space is this thing that you can
you can reasonably construct as a way to describe what's in the universe. It's kind of the structure, there's sort of a data structure of the universe that you can slice into pieces of space. You could slice it into quite different things as well. And, you know, I think it's a feature of observers like us, I think, that we believe in space. I mean, it's the same thing that
The fact that we believe in fluids, as opposed to just saying they're all a bunch of molecules bouncing around. That's a feature of observers like us, and not necessarily a feature of all observers. I mean, I do think, by the way, in terms of dimension, you mentioned, you know, is three plus one dimensions kind of the fundamental thing? I'm sure the answer is no. And, you know, my guess is that there is some
Totally obvious feature of the nature of the observations that we make. That leads us to believe that the universe is three plus one dimensional i mean and you know.
In terms of sort of the computational kind of representation of the universe, it really doesn't make much difference that it's three plus one dimensional. We could as well be, you know, exploring it on some one dimensional space filling curve or some such other thing. It's, you know, I think that's a, I'd love to know what feature of us makes us believe that it's three plus one dimensional. Right. Right. So you have the, you're really at right, which is all, all the possible different computational rules and
And our projection of that really add into a three plus one dimensional space time is just one of an infinite number of different projections you could take, right? Yes. Yes, indeed. I think the thing that has been very exciting to me and was not something I saw coming at all was the way in which one can, given the idea of the really add the way in which one can derive the known laws of physics.
And that's something that you know if you'd asked me five years ago even would that be a way to derive general relativity derived quantum mechanics. I would have said well there might be an underlying theory from which those emerge.
But I don't think that there would be any way to that would make those theories necessary. Those are theories which just happen to be the way they are because the universe happens to be the way it is. If you'd asked me about second world thermodynamics, for example, I would have said, as people have said for a hundred and something years, that yeah, it's probably derivable in some way, but we don't quite know how to do it. But the thing that's been super surprising to me is that
General to the quantum mechanics and it turns out the second law all seem to be derivable. What's the assumption that you need to drive them well the really add doesn't really have assumptions the really add is just this abstract thing that you set up the assumptions have to do with what kind of observers we are.
And, you know, it seems like there are two critical assumptions, although I'm guessing that there are actually more assumptions that I haven't correctly identified yet. But the two that have identified is, you know, we're computationally bounded. We don't get to trace every detail. We only get to notice certain aggregate things, and we believe we're persistent in time.
We believe that, which is something I'd be really interested to talk about is kind of the, you know, to me, it seems like a crucial feature of observers like us is that we have this persistent thread of experience. We don't, and we have, we have a single persistent thread of experience. We, you know, we, it's not the case that we kind of are
You know, have our multiple thoughts kind of branching out in all possible ways, nor is it the case that we are sort of here just for a moment and then it's a different us at the next moment. We kind of have this perception at least that we have a sort of consistent thread of experience. And anyway, the, I mean, from point of view of physics, the big surprise to me is those two assumptions seem to be sufficient to allow us to derive the laws of physics that we have.
Now clearly if those assumptions were changed, if we were observers different from the way we are, we would get different physics. We might not be able to communicate with those other observers who have such very different qualities, but those other observers, were we to be able to get inside them, their view of the physical world would be different. So there's an infinite number of different views of the world that could be in general relativity is just one of the infinite varieties of them, right?
For observers like us. Well, for observers like us, general relativity is inevitable. But not for observers, just for observers like us. Yeah, for observers like us. But there are conceivably other observers that don't observe general relativity. Well, the problem with that, and the reason this is tricky is, you know, I view, for example, you know, the weather as having a mind of its own. But the weather
one might think and this is a question of what its internal quotes conscious experiences might have an experience of the world that might not have general relativity as one of the things that it experiences the problem is that as we were talking about before you imagine that i'm enough like you that you can kind of get some idea of sort of what's going on inside but
In the case of the weather, I don't think it's enough like us that we can have a good projection of what its internal view of things is. So while it may be, while we could abstractly think of it as an observer, it isn't an observer with which we can kind of have, where we can translate its kind of internal perception of things into our internal perception of things.
What is your view on conscious experiences in the relationship to the Ruliat? Is the Ruliat more fundamental than conscious experiences or is consciousness more fundamental than the Ruliat in your view?
Well, I don't know. I mean, I think the rule yard is just an abstract object and you know, the fact and it is my, uh, sort of assumption perhaps, but it's working really well. That sort of everything that exists is somehow part of the rule yard, which means we are too, which means that the rule yard is sort of a substrate for everything that we are.
Now the question of whether you can go into the really add and say i'm pointed something and say that's the don hoffman set of teams in the really add so to speak and then what special features that might have.
That's that's that's something i mean we know a certain amount about that there's a lot more to figure out about that if you're asking is there something i mean for this is a complicated thing about what science is and what the point of science is and so on i mean there's there's there's the universe doing its thing and there's us having some narrative about what's going on in the universe.
i think you know science i think is about sort of taking not what the universe does but sort of trying to develop a narrative that we can kind of play in our minds that can say things about what the universe is doing in other words it's not you know i think you're you're you mentioned the concept of a sort of headset
For us to proceed what's actually going on out there so to speak and i agree that what what matters to our science.
Is what we perceive mean the things that are not done and if you look at the history of science what has happened in the history of science is we've been progressively able to perceive more kinds of things in the telescopes microscopes electronic amplifiers all these kinds of things and we have then you know found ways to describe the world that we can then see so to speak.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future there'll be more kinds of sensors that we somehow managed to transduce into the things that we go into the built-in sensors that we have and then will will will want to describe more things about the world but i think in your question of. I mean for me i've always thought of consciousness is incredibly slippery concept.
And so I haven't been that interested in kind of exactly how do I define it and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, perhaps to my detriment. But the one thing that was interesting to me a couple of years ago was realizing that I needed sort of pragmatic definitions of consciousness in order to understand more about how physics works.
In other words, it's, you know, for example, it's kind of like, if I say, okay, there's consciousness and observers like us have consciousness. What is the, what are the operational consequences of that? For example,
So for example one of them i think is this thing about single threads of experience. I think that's a now whether what do you say that's a defining feature of consciousness or not i don't know that's a question of what you mean by the word it's but i think there's a there's a significant feature of us as observers that we have this concept that we have this belief
That we have a single thread of experience and i don't know you know i'm sort of wondered what it's like you know if you could be in a kind of a multiway trance so to speak where really. Your brain is thinking about two different kind of you you have you know you have two different time narratives going on in your brain i can't imagine what that will be like.
I'm interested in something very very simple like the taste of mint.
And so the taste of mint as a conscious experience. So to keep it really, really simple, instead of all the threads and so forth, just a single specific conscious experience that an observer might have and how that would be related to the Rulliad. So for example, would you want to say that there's a computational substrate in the Rulliad that is, for example, necessary and sufficient for the experience of mint to occur?
Or not. I don't know what the experience of mint is. I mean, you know, in other words, I, I, I, you know, I have some experience of it. If you say, let's kind of scientificize that experience. Okay. What do we do to make it? And you know, this is the question and part of what science is and what science aspires to be.
Because there are, you know, if we say, how do I make that something that you can also sort of observe? You can also be part of because the experience that I have internally, as we discussed before, is not something other than by extrapolation. You don't know what that experience is. Right. So the question is, can I make a transportable version that is kind of a, a, a community science version of my experience of mint?
Or is it just something that happens inside me that can never be broken out of me and which is therefore not in some sense you know it isn't community science so to speak it isn't what we usually think of as being what we usually aspire to have in kind of the operation of science so if i say how do i break out that experience well i could start saying
You know, and by the way, it's going to get complicated very quickly because you could say, okay, I experienced this, a bunch of neurons in my brain, you know, are chirping away. And, um, you know, what does that mean for, you know, that these neurons are chirping away? Well, we can say no doubt the neurons in my brain that chop away at the, at the taste of mint will be different from the neurons in your brain that chop away. And we don't even know how to map, you know, neuron number,
If we were nematodes, we might know how to map our neurons, but we're humans with a lot more neurons and we don't know how to map our neurons and there won't be a unique mapping from one brain to another. I mean, in other words, a nematode, sort of interesting thought experiment, could one nematode communicate scientifically to another nematode its internal experience of the taste of mint?
Because after all the nematodes have a fixed set of nerve cells where we can say cell number 312 fired in this case and then the other nematode would say oh yeah I know what cell 312 firing feels like.
But it's a very different thing with us we in order to communicate a concept from one human brain to another we kind of have to package it in a robust form that will allow that communication and the you know the number one robust form that we have is human language.
Where we're taking all those random nerve firings that you think of when you imagine the taste of mint and you're packaging those up and you're saying to me the taste of mint and that's unpacking in my brain and maybe I get some notion that is something, some correspondence. I don't know what the correspondence is between your version of the taste of mint and my version of the taste of mint. Although if we were nematodes, we might know because it might be the very same nerve cell that was firing.
But we have a more general notion of concepts than that. And I think, you know, to this idea of being able to take a bundle of neural activity and package it up in a robust form so that it can be moved to another brain and unpacked.
I think that that's probably one of the key things that sort of our species discovered, which is that you can have things like words that are kind of transportable from one brain to another. And I guess, you know, I, there's sort of a fun analogy that, um, which is, you know, when you have a particle like an electron or a photon, a quark or something like this, one of the things it's doing is it is a, it is a carrier of existence through space and time.
That is the electron is a thing that you can identify as being the same electron when it moved to another place or another time. And that's sort of similar to this idea that concepts are also sort of transportable things. I mean, in our view of the way this works, you know, an electron is a something capable of pure motion, physical space.
A concept is something capable of motion of pure motion in real space. I mean, but by pure motion, what I mean is it is not obvious in our models, for example, that a thing can move without change.
So in physical space, you know, you move a book around, for example, and if the if it's near a space time singularity, the thing will be distorted like crazy. But most of the time we say I move a book from here to there, and it's still the same book. And I think that this this possibility of pure motion in our models is something that you have to kind of establish abstractly that that's possible.
And by the way, the idea that there is promotion again depends on observers because that book, you know, you moved it and some things about it changed. I mean, in our models, it's made of different atoms of space when it moved to a different place. And yet to us, it's the same book.
And so, similarly, I would say, you know, when you talk about the concept of mint, of the taste of mint, the experience of the taste of mint, it is a non-trivial fact, if it's true, that that is a transportable thing through time, that there is a consistent, persistent thing that is the engram or whatever it is that represents that concept,
And that it is robust and i think that that if you know the version of it that's locked inside your brain at some moment in time i don't think that's transportable i don't think that's science sizable i think that's the thing that you would say it is i mean if we were thinking about in terms of an LLM it would be some little you know some some activation of some neuron at some moment
And you know, then it's gone and we wouldn't say, you know, and we would argue, was that a conscious experience of the LLM? Well, it isn't robust. It's not something where we can pick it up and say, look, it's a conscious experience because it was a fleeting thing that just was there at that moment and then disappeared. And I would claim that, that, uh, that absent some way to robustify what you're talking about.
There isn't really a way to extract. I mean, if you say, show me that conscious experience, what is it? You know, physicalize that conscious experience. You can't physicalize it. So what does that mean? So to speak, I would claim that it is, it is not an obvious fact that things can be made robust enough to be sort of picked out as a separate thing. I mean, I'm reminded of, I have to say in your kind of
What is that essence of a conscious experience? I'm reminded of something that I kind of feel silly about myself because, you know, when I was a kid, 1960s and so on, it was, you know, you would run into people who would talk about sort of the eternal soul. And, you know, if you were kind of a physics-oriented kid as I was, you would always say things like, but how much does a soul weigh?
You know how can this be a real thing that you know what how much does it way you know when if a soul departs a body does that mean you know you lose a microgram or something you know how much is it why there must be some sort of if it's real it must have those physical attributes.
What's I realized in later on that's a very silly thing to have thought because you know computation the kind of the the idea of a sort of an eternal soul is very is kind of a a sort of primitive way I think to talk about.
You know abstract computation and it will be a very foolish thing to ask sort of how much does the abstract computation way and I kind of suspect and I'm not untangling it in real time as well as I might but I'm kind of suspecting that your kind of notion of the the intrinsic conscious experience of something and you saying look you can't pull it out and physicalize it is the same kind of mistake.
So let me see if I can paraphrase. So in your ontology, the rulliad is fundamental or close to fundamental, and the rules there, the computations. But any color, shape, motion, taste, experiences, those conscious experiences are not part of the fundamental ontology that you're considering. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood?
Okay, so, you know, in matters this fundamental, there are inevitably many different ways to look at the same elephant. Okay. Okay. So the really add, and for example, its representation in terms of computation and rules and so on, is the way that I understand best. And that I think people in general understand best.
It is probably not the only way to think about it. So for example, just as mentioned before, you can think about physics either as a kind of an underlying mechanistic structure that makes things happen, or you can invent kind of an axiomatic physics where you just say, this is a thing that's true. That's the thing that's true. And then you have to fit all the pieces together. So similarly, when it comes to the rule yard, there is certainly, I like to think of it from sort of the bottom up.
I can represented in terms of computations and things like this but in the end sort of observers like us. I'm making various observations about it and one could imagine reconstructing yet. It's i don't know how to do it exactly but one could imagine saying all i know is what i observe.
And that is that's my reality so to speak and now from that reality i can you know i could imagine a theory in which there is this really add thing with computations and so on my way of thinking about it the way i prefer to think about it just because i guess that's the way my particular mind is built.
Is from this kind of hard structure of computation building up to something where i might hope to be able to find somewhere in the really add a thing that corresponds to you know a brain with a feeling of mint and things like this. That's that's that's the way that for me is the most sort of gives me the most sort of hope of being able to make scientific progress.
but i don't think that's the only way to think about it i think you could as well say all i'm going to do like like the s matrix for example you know forget the mechanism all we want to know is the transformation from initial states to final states and we're going to just say there's this thing called s that represents that transformation and we're then going to talk about the properties of s i mean this was the you know the in the late 1950s early 1960s this was kind of what people thought was going to be the way that particle physics works
in in the strange electricity of science those ideas have come back again but you know at the time it was sort of a competition would we describe the world by saying there's just this s matrix and we're going to figure out properties of the s matrix by having i wouldn't call them conscious experiences but particle accelerator experiences of the s matrix that's
You know door number one door number two are we going to figure out the mechanism you know how all these particles are structured and how they you know what the little interaction vertices are and all this kind of thing that was door number two in in the nineteen seventies door number two one in particle physics.
In, uh, but I think it's, it's not the case that, you know, and we're seeing, in fact, a return to more of the kind of S matrix approach to saying, we don't really know what's going on inside, but we can describe certain constraints based on what we observe. And I absolutely think that there's a way of constructing kind of, uh, sort of the Ruliat, you know, you could, you could invent the Ruliat as the afterthought. Having started from something, which is just axioms about observers.
And my particular way of thinking about it, I like to start from something that I can, you know, run computer experiments on and that happens to, you know, that I at least imagine that I have a reasonably good handle on from a sort of, from the way my mind works, but I don't think it's the only way to think about it. Right. You know, for me, if you say, uh, you know, only start from things that an observer can observe, you know, which is kind of the S matrix idea.
Only start from things that are sort of externally observable. Sure, one could do that. I don't know how to set up that formalism. I mean, you know, I've got some ideas about that, but that's, I think for me, it's much more difficult than the bottom up approach. But I don't think it's, I think both approaches are perfectly viable. It's just a question of if one's goal is to have kind of a narrative description of how the world works.
What can make a choice between those approaches you know which is the way that is most likely to lead to a narrative that for example i understand. I mean again that this is and for me the narrative that has to do with really add and computation and so on is easier to understand it is more grounded for me than a description in terms of kind of starting with consciousness so to speak.
Right. So I think I'm understanding better. So to me, of course, I love the computational approach and the mathematically precise approach. That's what we need to do in science. And I guess what I'm doing is saying that the computations and the mathematics are describing the activity of consciousness as opposed to the activity of something that's not conscious. In other words, what I'm doing is biting the bullet up front and saying fundamental in my ontology are things like
Observers that have conscious experiences so because every observer if you imagine an observer that has no conscious experiences It's not really clear what we're talking about an observer with no conscious experiences Is Nothing I don't know what that means exactly. It's so I mean you and Leibniz seem to have a lot in common and
Probably so, except that he was much smarter. One of the things that I only very recently understood about Leibniz, as I mentioned earlier, is that Leibniz could not imagine a way that mind could arise from non-mind. And I think you think the same thing. That is, you can't imagine a way that mind can arise from non-mind. I can imagine how cognition, intelligence, and things like that could arise. But conscious experiences, what we call qualia,
I would be delighted to see the first scientific theory that ever tries to do that right now. There's nothing on the table Well, I mean so so what would I mean this question of what can arise from what? Is a first of all, you have to know what the thing you're trying to get to is, you know, like like people say, you know you know can life arise from non-life and
And again it's a messy business because what do we mean by life if we mean the specifics of life on earth with r&a and cell membranes and all this kind of thing that's one question if we say you know the thing we scoop up from the marsh and soil and it does something amazing that we've never seen before you know it is that life is that not life.
No it's it's i think we have to know and i think one of the difficulties about what you're talking about is if we if you say can conscious experience arise from something other than conscious experience if if we don't know. If we don't have a general description of the target is very hard to answer that question just like if we say can life arise from non life and we have only one example of life.
Hello and if you say can conscious experience arise from something that isn't conscious experience and you ultimately have only one instance of that which is what's happening inside you. You don't even know that i have that same conscious experience so you have you know you're trying to explain kind of an end of one.
thing of how does the thing that you feel internally arise from something that sort of isn't you and so on how does that arise and i think that's a i mean i i'd be very interested to understand how one would you know how one would get a positive answer to that no words forget you know there isn't a good enough theory and we don't know the electrochemistry and we you know we can't see how aggregates of neurons behave and so on i you know
There are obviously issues there, but there's a different question, which is, you know, how do I, what's the signal of success? Right. So one issue here is that as an observer, all I have are my conscious experiences. I actually, the notion of something physical beyond my conscious experiences is actually the leap.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. The only thing we have is what we, you know, it's the, the, uh, you know, cogito ergo sum type type story. Absolutely. And so we're on the same page on, on that. And, and, and I agree. I don't know that your world of experiences is anywhere similar to mine. I can never know that. But what I do know is that consciousness is what I know firsthand. What I call
Inanimate matter is an extrapolation. What's directly available to me are experiences, conscious experiences. And what I call an unconscious physical world is an is an extrapolation that I'm making. What I only have are my conscious experiences. I have nothing else. Let's go back to I hadn't thought about this before this conversation, but let's go back to the nematodes. Okay, which have precisely defined
You know, neural nets, where there really is a way to say, nematode number one feels this. And do you believe that if I could accurately measure kind of the electrochemistry of the nematode, that I would capture kind of that's the whole story? Or do you believe that there's something that is kind of beyond the physical that is kind of not capturable by any physical measurement?
that is what you know is something about what the nematode feels. What we call physical is going to be something inside a four-dimensional space time.
which is going to be just what I as a particular observer can observe because I am the kind of observer I am. The reality beyond that four dimensional space time that I happen to observe is infinitely complicated and I may need to go to that other deeper reality to give you a full. So in that sense, what I can do in terms of a physical thing inside space time is probably trivial and probably inadequate. I understand. So, I mean, this is at some level
You know, I could unkindly say it's kind of a Victorian theory, okay, because it posits that there is what we have physically in our minds, but what we can sort of, what we can sort of tell is there, but then there's a spirit world, which is beyond that, that might be, you know, for example, in the Ruliat,
For sure in my view we see just tiny little slices of the really add and there's much more that for the things that i mean the okay so one of the questions is.
Is it enough for doing physics that we sample only that tiny slice of the really add it might not be. It might be the case that we would sample that slice through the ad and miracles would keep on happening weird things weird random things would keep on happening that kind of poke in from other parts of the really add that we weren't able to sense so to speak.
And that in other words that we are that it isn't a closed system that the part of the really add that we are slicing the slice that we're taking isn't closed enough and so you know we constantly are being exposed to other things so an analogy in fluid dynamics for example most of the time it's okay to just think of a fluid is with a velocity field and things like that occasionally
You actually you know if you're making a hypersonic airplane you have to care about the fact that the fluid is made of molecules but that's a rare case but it could be that there are things about the world.
Perhaps even your consciousness things about the world where aspects of the rule add poke through and it isn't it isn't self-consistent to just look at the slice we are we we know we can it can kind of know that we know that we can observe so that's an interesting question of to what extent
Is the pocket of reducibility is i would call it the kind of slice where we can say things about what's gonna happen to what extent is that closed and to what extent does it have things feeding into it by the way there's an analogy of this in mathematics which is kind of to what extent can you do mathematics. At the level of kind of talking about things like the pythagorean theorem
And what do you have to can you talk about the Pythagorean theorem or every time you mention it do you have to go back and say oh and the definition real numbers that i'm using is this and the following axioms etc etc etc just kind of like going down to the level of molecules and talking about the fluid so i think it is a it is a non-trivial claim but a thing that that i i think we are deriving and for example our models of physics that there is a sort of self-consistent layer
that can be talked about merely in terms of general relativity and quantum mechanics and so on, without looking down below at the details of the whole hypergraph and all these atoms of space doing all their complicated things. It is a scientific claim
that it is enough to merely look at this kind of continuum level of general activity and so on. By the way, a thing that we would really love to do is to see things, other things poking through. I mean, that's what, you know, when people observe molecules, you know, they have water and fluid, but yet they saw that these little grains of pollen were kicked around and brown in motion. And that showed there was something below just this fluid description of water.
And we'd love to find the same kind of thing for physical space and that's one of my big activities right now is trying to see you know is there an effect are we gonna be lucky because molecules people pretty lucky molecules were big enough you could actually see them in nineteen hundred so to speak.
You know whether we will be able to see the atoms of space so to speak in in my lifetime i don't know um you know it's a question of you know what the what the scale is and and how clever we are and so on but i think that that um this this um you know this this whole idea of whether whether we are in a consistent bubble so to speak or whether we have to appeal to things sort of beyond our physics
is a reasonable question i mean that is there are things where you know i'm hoping that there are observations that we can make with telescopes or maybe with other kinds of systems but there are observations that we can make in which the
This nasty spiny parts of the really add will kind of poke through our usual continuum view of space. And so what you're, what you're asking, I think is in the case of conscious experience, is it enough to merely talk about kind of the laws of physics that we know, or is it, is that a place where there's a poke through from something beyond kind of the laws of physics that we know?
I think that's a very important and useful question. And there's also another way of looking at this issue and that is if we were trying to build a scientific theory and we're trying to find as few assumptions as possible for our scientific theory, we believe in Occam's razor. And so, and we both agreed that as an observer, all I know are my conscious experiences. So whatever conscious experiences are, they're all I know as an observer.
So so in the ontology that i'm going to assume in my scientific theory i have a big choice i can either put conscious experiences in that ontology as found as foundational or not and if i choose not to.
Then I've given myself the scientific duty to explain where those experiences come from. So I either postulate that they are, I say upfront, these are part of the ontology. These are the assumptions I make, or I say, no, they're not part of the assumptions. I therefore have the duty to explain consciously. So it's my choice now. I would like to just to stop me for a second there. I mean, it depends on what
Or something if you're doing a science that is about that then for sure But one of the things that happens in science, it's not obvious that it would be possible But it has proved possible is that you can separately look at physics biology chemistry You know, they have they have interfaces, but you can choose to concentrate on one aspect of the world
And you know, an obvious question is, is there, you know, you might make the claim there is no meaningful science that can be done without in training consciousness in it. That would be a potential claim. That is not what has been the observation of the last few hundred years of science. The few last few hundred years of science has achieved a lot.
Without solving the problem that you say nobody has solved and i agree nobody has solved um the but you know so it's a question of what it is that you think you're going to do in your science now when you talk about outcomes razor and you know i don't know why outcomes razor is true i mean it's an it's an interesting criterion it's um in a sense the really add
Denies Occam's razor because the really had has everything all these kinds of things going on in it at some level from the point of view of of abstract aesthetics The really odd is lovely because it assumes nothing but you know from the point of view of of you know, is it saying oh The the description of what's happening. For example, let's take an Occam's razor argument about what happens in a fluid and
the outcomes razor argument would probably be if the fluid is flowing from here to there all the molecules inside it must be flowing in exactly that direction that will be wrong in other words so you know and in fact what's true is that's very complicated stuff going on it just happens that the level of looking at the whole fluid it can be described by saying the fluid goes from here to there so i don't think i mean i think it will be a mistake
To say that there is something kind of there's any necessity if there's an ockham's razor that means anything it means something because of the way our minds work i mean one key feature of our minds is that they're very finite and you know we we take all the stuff going on in the world and we're trying to make a narrative about what's happening that is simple enough that we can stop in our minds and make inferences about it.
And for that, Occam's razor is very useful. Occasionally, things will poke through and be like, you know, Occam was wrong type thing. But, you know, I think it's, I think it's a feature, you know, I think perhaps one could even argue, you know, I've been on sort of the hunt for things that observers like us just take for granted.
And I think in some sense, the simplicity of explanation is something that we implicitly take for granted. Let me see if I understand you correctly. In the same way that we observe general relativity because of the kinds of observers we are in the Wolfram model and in the same way that we see quantum mechanics because of the kinds of observers we are in the Wolfram model, we also many people, many philosophers, many cognitive scientists, for instance, Don are willing to say, look, we can move beyond space time and we can find something that
can give rise to the physics that we have. And then in part by doing so, they appeal to Occam's razor, but you're saying that also Occam's razor itself may be something that we find appealing because of the kinds of observers we are. Yes. That's interesting. Yes. I don't think Occam's razor, the Rulliard does not know Occam's razor. Now what's interesting about what you said is that by assuming nothing, you assume everything.
So in some sense, when you take Occam's razor to its pinnacle, you then undo Occam's razor to the utmost. Well, yes, in some sense, that's right. I mean, in some sense, you know, the by by assuming nothing and getting the Ruliyad, you have something where sort of
To recover or comes razor in your observations of the really add is something is is is then a different sort of a different adventure. It's some but but i mean i want to come back to this idea. I mean this you take the point of view i think that there is a desire to construct conscious experience from something else.
And, and, you know, I agree, as I said, that it is like, you know, mechanism versus it's like the particle mechanism versus the S matrix and so on. There is, there are no doubt, complimentary descriptions of what's going on, which one is the easiest to build a formalism around is a matter of taste, probably.
And, you know, for me so far, I found it easiest to talk about the rule yard and so on and build up from, from that side of things. Now I will say that I'm pretty sure that there's a way of formulating a lot of the things that I've said about the rule yard, the principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility, all those kinds of things as essentially axiomatic statements about observers. That in other words, that one can, an alternative to going sort of bottom up
Is to simply say, for example, you know, Einstein did this in formulation, special relativity. He simply said, you know, there's the observers can't determine sort of simultaneity in an abstract fashion. Observers have these limitations and he took that as axiomatic. And from that, he constructed a physical theory.
And that was a sort of observer-first construction of a physical theory. In our way of deriving spectral relativity, it is not observer-first. It doesn't work that way. I suppose it makes one kind of observer-related assumption, which is it says the only thing that
We can in the sense pay attention to is the causal graph of relations of causal relationships between events. We are not in a position to independently discuss the relationship of atoms of space. The only way that we can sort of say anything about atoms of space is by their effect on other things and ultimately implicitly by their effect on us as observers.
But now observers like us, as we've discussed, have conscious experiences or we have nothing, right? If we have no conscious experiences, we have nothing that we've observed. I, I don't quite understand that. So let's walk through that for a second. Okay. So, so I mean, one of the problems that I'm having is you mention sort of conscious experience and you know,
I certainly have this internal feeling that I'm having conscious experiences. I, I try to imagine what it would be like if, you know, at some time in the future, you know, well, it is a few, a few, few different cases. Okay. So let's say, uh, let's say somebody does molecular scale manufacturing of a brain just like mine.
And somebody can, you know, scan my brain and, uh, you know, reconstruct every molecule. Then first question is, does that sort of copy of my brain also have conscious experiences or not? So you're asking me. No, I'm asking you, does that, does that in your view of things would a, okay. So I'm going to, you know, we're going to go through several different levels because one thing would be a.
A one question would be is a molecular scale copy of my brain able to have conscious experiences now you could say no you could say there's more there there's other pieces of the really out there poking into your brain that aren't part of the canon of physics that we know right now that will mean that the thing you copied of just molecules you didn't copy enough you could say that i don't know if you are saying that.
What will my now should we be more like again the zoom screen so right now i see pixels on the zoom screen some of them are your face and some of them are of inanimate objects in the back and i could try to get a mathematical model of how the pixels of your face.
dynamically behave versus the pixels of the books behind you that behave in different ways. And I wouldn't want to say that therefore because I understood I've got a model of how the pixels on your face are doing some other complicated computation different from the pixels of the wall behind you. That doesn't give me any real insight into the nature of the consciousness itself because in every case all I'm dealing with is just an interface. I'm not dealing with the consciousness itself. I'm seeing consciousness through an interface.
So space time, I'm saying is nothing but another zoom screen. I understand. Can I make a comment here? So there are two ways of copying. We can copy Stephen by duplicating the window right now. But then there's another way where if you clone Stephen or if Stephen happened to be cloned. So if there was an embryo and it's split, now would you say that, look, this embryo is operating in space time. So in some sense, this embryo is operating at the level of the pixels on our zoom screen. We could say that.
but then we would also see the two Stevens and say that both Stevens are conscious. I don't think that's what's, I don't think that's what Tom is saying. I know that this may not be what you're saying, Steven, but I'm, I'm curious. So what would be the difference in the embryo case splitting versus copying Steven that makes one not conscious? I think, I think we need to define this more. You know, I think one thing is if I had an identical twin,
You would obviously believe, I think that my identical twin, if the identical term was alive, would be just as conscious as me. Is that true? Right. I would, I would, I think it would be the best inference to make is that, you know, if it's fine. Okay. So the identical twin is conscious. Now let's imagine that in some future state of molecular manufacturing, I can make a molecule by molecule copy of myself.
Would the resulting molecule by molecule copy of myself be as conscious as I am or not? Well, so the answer is going to be partly about what we think about this space-time interface and its relationship to consciousness. So if we're taking a point of view in which space-time particles somehow give rise to conscious experiences by their complex interactions,
Then from that point of view, of course, I would then say, well, if those physical interactions in your body gave you consciousness, then presumably identical ones in another space time body that's identical to yours, but also, but what I'm denying is that physical objects inside space time actually give rise to consciousness, that space time itself is nothing but an experience of consciousness.
So I don't think that's the same issue. I mean, in other words, I think that that first point is if you, you know, you, it is not obvious that if I copy a proton, for example, that it could be the case that there's a special proton that is a proton in a conscious mind.
That is different from proton from other protons and it could be that when i copy the proton. It is no longer a conscious proton it's a it's kind of a you know it's a it's a lame dead proton you know i copied the thing but it wasn't it wasn't conscious anymore just like it could easily be the case that if i copied every molecule that the thing that i get wouldn't be alive it wouldn't have you know wouldn't be it wouldn't be operating so to speak.
I mean it's it's you know you can have a simple analogy in if i copy a lump of computer memory but that lump of computer memory is not being that there's no you know program counter that's starting to execute instructions in it that lump of computer memory while it is a copy of another lump of computer memory it's not it's not alive in the same sense that the that the original computer memory was but so i think i think the first distinction is whether there is
whether the the sort of electrons and protons and so on in me, if I were able to copy them, would they be if I were able to make kind of a physical copy of them? And yes, that physical copy will be something that I would perceive as being in a different place in space time. I don't think that's the most important aspect of it. I don't think that's that important for your theory, actually. But I think the first question is, you know, did that copy that got made? Was it
You know did it preserve its consciousness or not? Well, maybe an even prior question is do we believe in local realism? In space-time so I would want to argue that local realism is false and that and even stronger that that in fact particles Only exist in the act of observation and otherwise don't
So to be really out there i'll say neurons only exist when they're perceived and neurons do not exist when they're not perceived so local realism is false. And therefore this whole whole line of questioning goes away right is it's rather all i have is an observer are my conscious experiences period when i talk about inanimate objects and particles and so forth.
I'm now extrapolating from my firsthand evidence of conscious experience to something that I don't. I've never, they don't exist unless I actually perceive them. So, so, so I'm just to clarify what you're saying. I mean, and what I've, you know, it is the case that you could imagine constructing a science by talking only about conscious experiences and how those conscious experiences relate to each other. One could imagine building a science that way.
and you know even there are little shadows of that and things i've done there are shadows of that in the way special activities set up and so on but it is by the way it's explicit in chris fuke's quantum bayesianism okay and in cube so they call it cubism but basically yes i know that that's right so there in some sense what he's basically saying is
The observer is everything and all quantum mechanics is just the handbook that the observer uses to interpret their experiences.
This is, you know, it's a classic issue in lots of areas of science. You can describe things by mechanism or you can describe things by kind of what's achieved in the end. So, for example, if we're doing mechanics, we can describe the equations of motion for something, you know, a ball going through the air. We can describe, we can say there's an equation that says what the ball will do at the next moment in time, or we can say we're using an action principle and there is an overall constraint
that the motion of the ball should minimize the, you know, the, the action quantity by, by the trajectory it chooses. So this is a, you know, this is something, I mean, you know, it's been there since Aristotle and probably before these different forms of explanation of things. And my contention is that, and so I'll be very clear about it, that there is no mechanical explanation for any conscious experience. Not possible. Okay.
I'm arguing that Leibniz was right with his argument from the mill and that right now the work that's been done in cognitive neuroscience on the models of consciousness, these are all my friends and colleagues that are working on this,
I always ask them, okay, you're proposing a neurobiological mechanism, so what mechanism gives rise to the taste of mint? I understand, but you've got to have an endpoint. You've got to have an endpoint to make that a meaningful thing to talk about. You've got to be able to define what success means. In other words, what kind of an answer would satisfy you? Well, so these theories themselves
Tell you what they would say would be the answer so for example integrated information theory says you have to have the right causal architecture and you can specify it with a matrix i think these theories i'm not a big fan of these theories. I think i think what they're doing you know it's kind of like.
They're describing something which is sort of the whole elephant and they're describing how it flips its tail in a particular way. That may be a little bit unkind, but you know, it's, it's, I don't think, I think that it's, I mean, a case that perhaps is easier to pin down is things about the definition of life where it's like, you know, it's a little bit less controversial because there isn't this kind of inner experience type thing. It's like,
What does it mean to be alive is it self-reproduction is it beating certain thermodynamic things is it something about you know what is the you know what is the kind of the definition and it's a mess there isn't because in that case as i said it's a you know we have an n of one but at least we've had 10 to the 40th organisms that have lived on this earth um in the case in what you're describing you have
Really an N of one because it's only you yourself internally who can definitively You know have something to say about what conscious experience is. So I'm still I'm I'm fighting With the on on this issue. I don't think I'm not saying there isn't an answer, but I don't think you've given it Which is how do you define success? In other words what you know, let's say I'm and I'm going to you know that question of how do you define success?
You have rather dismissively said that my friends, the LLMs are all, you know, merely, you know, they're merely sort of regurgitating the things that went into them, so to speak. But you claim that, you know, we are not, so to speak. But so my question will be, you know, if you can define a notion of success for
You know, for consciousness as experienced by you and as extrapolated by you as experienced by me and other humans and so on. Then the question is what, you know, that, that definition of success of, of, did you manage to derive that? Can I then, is that definition of success transportable enough that I can really apply it to an LLM? And perhaps the answer will be, you know, the LLM is not conscious.
But right now, you haven't given me anything that is concrete enough that I can take it and, you know, fit it onto the LLM and say, do you win or do you lose? Right. So I owe you a mathematically precise theory of consciousness, a scientific theory of consciousness that could try to do that kind of thing. That's what we're trying to do. We have a theory we call the theory of conscious agents. And we have some papers that we've published where we have a mathematical model that uses Markovian dynamics.
What we're doing right now is to try to answer your question. I agree with you. What you're asking for is exactly what we have to do. The way we're going at it is as follows. The high energy theoretical physicists in the last 10 years have discovered these positive geometries beyond space-time and quantum theory. Behind those positive geometries, they found these combinatorial objects that classify them. They're called decorative permutations.
And so this is just in the last 10 years, but so we've taken off the headset, the space-time headset, and we've gone outside for the first time and we're finding these obelisks, these positive geometries outside of space-time and these combinatorial objects. So what we're doing to answer, to actually respond to your question is we're saying, let's start with a mathematical model of consciousness, qua-consciousness. So it's like a network of interacting conscious agents. So it's a social network.
And it's governed by Markovian dynamics. And what we're doing then is saying, can we take this Markovian dynamics and first show that we can project onto the decorator permutations that the physicists have found and then from there project onto the positive geometries? If so, then we can project all the way into space time. And then we would actually be able to make testable predictions inside space time from a theory that says consciousness is fundamental. And we start there.
So we've already published a paper last year where we actually showed some new mathematics apparently about Markovian dynamics and we showed how they can be classified with decorated permutations. So we published that and now what we're doing is showing we're trying to show that we can get the positive geometries
What you're asking for is exactly what should be asked for and what we're trying to do is to show that we could get all of physics plus more from a theory of conscious agents being assumed to be fundamental outside of space-time
and projecting through decorative permutations, positive geometries into space-time where we can make our empirical test. So that's what we have to do. But if we don't assume that consciousness is fundamental in the foundations of our theories, then we either have to dismiss consciousness and say it's not there or we have to give a theory in terms of unconscious entities about how consciousness emerges. And if we try to do that last
I claim that it's not logically possible to start with unconscious ingredients and to have consciousness emerge. Not possible. That is not my intuition. Okay. I mean, you and Leibniz have the same intuition. I think the reason I disagree with Leibniz's intuition, if you'd asked me in 1980,
Do i disagree with leibniz's intuition i would have said i don't know i don't know how you would get a mind like thing to arise from a non mind like sort of origin. But then by nineteen eighty one. I was starting to do all kinds of computer experiments and so on about what you know what simple rules can actually do.
What could emerge from something that seemed like it was too sterile?
to generate anything interesting i was completely wrong and i you know it's amazing that even after all these years you know i i do the experiments on different kinds of systems and i keep on being wrong i keep on thinking you know this thing is somehow too simple to do anything interesting and my intuition keeps on you know even though i think i've now developed much better intuition about this it is remarkable the extent to which sort of
Things much richer things than you might imagine can emerge from simple causes so to speak and so i think that's a foundational kind of piece of intuition that you know i've developed i you know it's kind of fun for me because this idea of computational irreducibility that i actually introduced about
For 40 years and a week ago, um, it is, uh, um, it is interesting to me that when I talk to some younger scientists and so on, for them, computational irreducibility is obvious. Could the world could not be any other way. And which is how I feel about it too. But it's, it's, you know, it's a thing where if you grow up with this idea, it's kind of an obvious idea in the end, it's, it's, it becomes obvious after you've kind of ground on it enough.
Correct me if I'm incorrect Don, I don't think you're disagreeing with what Stephen just said.
What you had said is that look, we can start with something that's simple, mechanically simple, and then get to something that is extremely mechanically complex, such that we would never think looking at the complex case that it could be made of these elementary elements. And Don is saying
That's correct. But notice the word mechanical there. You can get something that's simple mechanically and give rise to something that's complex, but that's a different question than jumping onto logical categories. Right. So the claim is that there's a spark of consciousness that can simply not be reached mechanically. That's the claim. That's the claim. Right. So, okay. So it's an interesting claim. It's a claim that I think the structure of the science that we have
Is not going to be able to talk about it. In other words, you can say let's turn science on its head and let's say that's our basis. And then let's see what we can construct about the rest of science. That's a perfectly intellectually valid thing to do. But if you're going to ask given given the fact that you're not able to give a kind of a science based definition,
You're not going to be able to get to you what you want from kind of, you know, you might very well be able to, as I keep on saying, you know, from a theory in which all that's real is what observers observe. I have no doubt that you can go from such a theory to, to deduce how things have to work in the world.
And even to be able to say, given this way of how things work in the world, we could come up with kind of a sort of a meta theory that is that corresponds to space and time and all these kinds of things that is a good description of what we have derived from this underlying theory that has to do that starts with observers. Actually, I want to ask something about that in what you described.
Do you think that that could just be one observer. In other words do you think it's important to the nature of observers that there are many of them and that they have some correspondence to each other what do you think that if in fact it was the case that you know you were the last human alive and there's no other sort of.
I don't know what you know, I don't think intelligence is relies on life forms, but, but imagine that it did and you were, you were the only thing in the universe that had, that was like you and quotes conscious. Is that an okay situation or is there something that would not work in your theory? Would your theory require that there's a whole flock of observers there? Yeah. So it was quite striking that
The paper we're writing right now that we'll be publishing hopefully later this year, we've discovered a new logic on the space of Markovian kernels. So we were able to associate a Markovian kernel to each conscious observer. And the Markovian kernel is basically is describing given that my current experience is red, what's the probability the next one will be green and so forth. You can write down a matrix of it. It's what we call the qualia kernel.
I think there's a horrible problem with that, but we'll come to that in a minute. Sure, sure. So then there's the question, can these conscious agents and the Markovian kernels combine to create new conscious agents with more experiences? And we discovered, we'll be in this new paper announcing a new logic on Markovian kernels that we just discovered. You probably know about taking a Markovian kernel and taking a trace chain on a subset of states?
I can immediately imagine what that means, but yes. A 10 by 10. I get it. And I only look at three of the states, it's going to induce the dynamics on the three by three and you'll get a new kernel on the three by three kernel that's induced by the 10 by 10. It's called a trace chain. So it turns out what we're going to publish is that the one kernel being the trace of another gives you a partial order on all kernels. So it turns out that's a partial order.
Sure. So it actually, you know, for example, you know, the trace of a trace is a trace. So it's transitive and irreflexive and so forth. So it's actually, so it gives you a logic and it gives you a logic about with an, you know, least upper bound, a greatest lower bound and so forth. It turns out it's a non-bullying logic of these Markovian kernels. There's no top. There's no top consciousness. There's an infinite number of directions that you can go infinitely far in terms of combining.
It's locally Boolean. So if I take a particular Markovian kernel, all the kernels that are less than it in this logic form a Boolean logic. So it's locally Boolean. So just just a technical question here. I mean, so these, you know, we can think of one of these Markovian kernels defined as defined by some matrix, some. Yes. Okay. So are these finite matrices or are these infinite matrices? Well, right now, what we've been doing are finite, but we in this paper, we're only going to deal with finite.
will then look you know at the continuous case and so forth beyond that okay so so i mean what you're saying is given that i have a probability matrix that says i mean you know your markovian matrices are kind of like random versions of s matrices in a sense that they're saying you know given this vector of what comes in this you you know you multiply by this matrix and you get this vector of what comes out um and you're doing that purely in terms of probabilities but now what you're saying is given
given i'm just trying to understand the technical aspect of what you're what you're describing given given such a matrix you are saying there are uh you can you can extract sub matrices by tracing out um by by i mean for anybody who's watching this who wants to know what that actually means it's it's your your you're just
Adding your you're getting rid of those components by just adding up a bunch of things and fixing fixing what happens so so we've got you know some part of our matrix is still flapping around you know free as a bird so to speak and another part has been locked down and what you're saying is if you if in the all the different forms of locking down they form a that there is the kind of a like
Subsets of a set or something they form some kind of partial order of you lock down this and you know that there will be pieces that are in you know you can lock down this part and if you lock down a part of that part it's sort of it's it's a it's it's a proper subset there and you can have another part that is sort of that's i mean.
Yeah, I'm gonna start spouting technical things about chains and anti-chains and so on, but which is probably not very useful, but at least helps me understand what's going on. That's right. But by the way, most Markovian kernels are not comparable, right? So if I give you a Markovian kernel, almost every Markovian kernel is not greater than or less than it, right? It's quite an accomplishment to have any kind of relationship at all with other Markovian kernels, which gets at the diversity
Of consciousness is in the relationship but it turns out you can't combine consciousness is unless where where the the states overlap they have the same trace you have to have the same trace on your overlapping states to allow consciousness is to combine you know i'm hoping that there's more to consciousness than marcovian matrices.
well because that's a shockingly minimal kind of um view of what i mean and and also to say i'm never a believer in theories that have probability as a fundamental component well so there's two things there so the first though i would bring up um something called the uh theory of computational equivalence that that i agree with you on
And it's a simple thing to point out that Markovian kernels are computationally universal. It's trivial. So the problem is as soon as you've got probability in the picture, you're no longer dealing with pure computational rules. Probability is a statement. I mean, you can if you're looking at the manifold of all possibilities and you're just viewing probability as a way as a parameter effectively to to sort of
Sample your space so for example let's say i say i've got a circle okay there's a well defined meaning to a disc let's say a region that's that's circular and then i say well actually i don't have a circle i just have this probability distribution that allows points to be dropped anywhere in this region.
Now i could describe the circle by saying that i have this probability distribution that in mathematical terms only has support within the circle only has a non-zero probability within the circle that will be a way of describing the circle but if i am to talk about the sequence of points that are dropped in the circle then i've got a whole bunch more it's it's no longer sort of accessible to pure computation
As soon as I can drop the points according to probability, I don't have a rule for where the points will land. Well, but there's a theorem in automata theory that the non-deterministic automata, Turing machines, for example, have exactly the same computational class as the deterministic. That's a much more detailed issue. Let's unroll that. That's not correct.
Deterministic and non-deterministic Turing machines absolutely have the same computational power, but that is not the same statement as the probabilistic Turing machine has the same kind of computational character as a Turing machine. Let's unpack that.
Well, I may have a different character. Sure. Sure. Right. Let's unpack that. We've got a Turing machine. A Turing machine has definite rules. You started from some initial state. It goes crunch, crunch, crunch and generates, you know, its succession of states. But now let's say it's a probabilistic Turing machine. And that means that it's what it does at every step.
Is not definite, it's determined by some probability, but it does it does something. It's just we don't know what it will do and has a probability of, you know, 30% of doing this and 70% of doing that, but at every step it does something. Right. So that's, that's the probabilistic Turing machine. We don't know what it does. It's going to do it every step, but at every step it does something.
A non-deterministic Turing machine is a different story. A non-deterministic Turing machine is asking, what are all the possible things that could happen? We've got many paths of history. The Turing machine could go left, it could go right. We actually take all of those paths. We build up this whole, you know, we call the multi-way graphs of all possible paths.
Okay, and and the and the statement is that if what you're interested in is does there exist a path that leads to this or that thing? That's that's you know, the the full put it this way the the multi-way graph can is computationally equivalent to the single way turning machine that's everything you can every computation that you can do with the the
Multi-way Turing machine you could in principle do with a single way Turing machine, but it'll be a lot of effort That is not true with a probabilistic Turing machine. So probabilistic Turing machine that choice at step three that you picked to go left That choice is unknowable Right by an ordinary Turing machine that came from outside the system That was you know, the probability the heat bath, you know the the random the the the
You know, God was playing dice and it came out this way that came from outside the system and you can't know that. So any, you know, as soon as you have a probabilistic theory, it's not the case. It's not the same story as not as non-deterministic theories and non-deterministic theory. There's still, you know, there's still a definite thing, which is the set of all possible non-deterministic paths, which is different from, you know, if you said, well, as I was saying with it, with it in the case of the disc, for example,
If the way you're describing the disk is to just say, let me look at all possible ways that the points could be, could be selected there. Then yes, it's a, it's a, it's a nice kind of computationally describable version of the disk. It's a somewhat roundabout way to describe it, but it's, it's the same kind of comp purely computational kind of concept. But if you say I'm going to, you know, notice where every raindrop fell on the desk, so to speak.
that is a different story you can't know whether you know if it's a probabilistic thing it is not from within the system to know where the raindrops for so i think i mean are you unhappy then with the notion of a probabilistic
fundamental framework you don't like yes i don't think that will i think that if you'd say that you are wheeling in you know who makes who makes the choice in the probabilistic system in other words does god make the choice in the probabilistic system how does that choice get made because in something like in a multi-way system in a in a non-deterministic system
There isn't a choice to be made all possible choices are made there's no there's no kind of you know there's no day to playing dice. Whereas in a probabilistic system you have to have something from outside the system deciding what's going to happen.
Unless what you're saying is you're merely using the probabilistic system as a proxy for this multi way thing, but I don't think you're doing that because our, because it's a fundamental feature of kind of, I think what you would call conscious experience that there is a single thread of conscious experience. Now, maybe I should ask you this question. I mean, in so far as you think, you know, what conscious experience is, is there a definite single thread through time of conscious experience?
Well, actually, from your discussion, I would actually say that the way I'm thinking about it is the multi-way thinking of it, that all possible consciousnesses, in fact, exist. All the threads are there. Wait a second. There's two issues. One is, do they exist? And the other is, are you experiencing them? Because I don't think you experience them. I don't think you think you experience them. No, I'm not experiencing your consciousness right now, for example.
Right, but I think that a critical feature of our typical conscious experience is that we believe we are persistent and we have a single thread of consciousness. We think definite things are happening in the world. We think definite things. We think that we are thinking definite things.
You know forget about what's happening outside world but we imagine that we have a definite train of thought so to speak we do not imagine that we have kind of there are a super position of a hundred thoughts i'm having right now rather.
We think at least we have the impression might be wrong but we have the impression that you know somehow we are just having a single thread of experience i mean do you agree with that that that's my subjective impression is that there's a single continuing me that that is taken has taken one path that i couldn't have predicted and so forth. What right so that that's the way i feel about it and i agree that if you bring probabilities into a scientific theory that's where explanation stops.
Right. Right.
But can I offer you one right now with probabilities in it where you say, Oh, okay, that's where your theory stops. And I say, Oh yes, that's where my theory stops. But, but if I can use that theory of consciousness and show that we can build up, forget these positive geometries, get space time of emerging, then, then maybe you'll grant me, you know, the dispensation to hold off on the probability until I show that I can actually do this. And then we can go back and say, now can we get rid of these probabilities in the matrices or not? Right. But so I suspect.
In, in your concept of kind of, I think from what I'm understanding, when I asked the question, could the world be, could that be just a single observer in the, in the world? I think what you're saying is no, because you're building a calculus of the combination of observers. And yet this, and there's no, it's not a Boolean logic, so there's no single top observer.
But there is in some sense you could talk about the whole of all the observers and and that if you want to say is that an observer i might say.
Okay, but so are you in your Markovian partial order?
Are you and I part of the same post set, or do we each have our own separate post sets? Well, we're part of this big whole post set, the Markovian post set, but we're partly in branches that are partly compatible because we're talking and presumably something's happening. We're not completely incompatible. All I know that Don is you're greater than liveness.
The partial order. Well, he has the advantage that time has gone by since Gottfried was around. His IQ was at least double mine, but anyway. Okay, so I'm fairly confused here because on the one hand, we agree, I think, that the only conscious experience that you can have any definiteness about is the N of one conscious experience that you are having.
Okay. So now in your theory, you're talking about multiple conscious experiences, multiple conscious agents or whatever that have certain relationships. That's right. And so I'm not even, I mean, so you're positing that you're taking your sort of
empirical inference that there are other conscious agents in the world. And you're saying I'm really going to believe in that because I'm going to make a theory that has many conscious agents in it. That is that fair? Yes. And I'm also going to believe that the experiences that I have had in my life do not cover all possible conscious experiences. I'm going to admit that there are experiences that I don't have yet. Okay.
And for example, as life has gone on, I've had brand new experiences I'd never had before. All of a sudden you go, Oh, I'd never had that experience before at all. Right. So why is that? I mean, but you're saying that somewhere in. Okay. So in your theory, there are sort of. Is it the case? First of all, is that time in your theory or is that, is it, is it merely the kind of the, the, the partial order sort of.
Is it merely the pecking order of consciousnesses or is there some kind of progression there? What's interesting is that, as you well know, you can have stationary Markovian processes, in which case there is no increase in entropy from step to step. So there's no entropic arrow of time. And so what I'm imagining is that the full dynamics of the whole consciousness is stationary.
But I am a projection of that. So I'm a trace. So I'm a projection. So I've lost information and it's a theorem pretty easy to prove that when you take a projection, say by conditional probability where you lose information, the projected chain will have increasing entropy. So I'm proposing that there is no time for the whole consciousness and time emerges as well as space.
As an artifact of the loss of information and projection. So what we're going to actually try to show is that time and space themselves are all artifacts of projection and not an insight into the true nature of the deeper whole conscious. So let's unpack that a bit. So one thing we can imagine if we take a fairly traditional space time view of the universe is we can imagine that there's this giant crystal that is the whole space time history of the universe.
Right. It's just there. And then we can imagine that our experience of the universe is merely motion in the time direction through this crystal that is the space time, the representation of all space time in the universe. So I think what you're, what you're saying is you are imagining, and I, I want to unpack this a bit because I, I think there's there, uh, you know, you're imagining that
You have this thing it's a partial order of mark of matrices basically and.
By the way, I think it's not really fair to talk about it as a logic. I mean, it is a logic in some sense of universal algebra or whatever else, but I don't think, you know, by saying the word logic, you're kind of making that sound like it has something to do with human, you know, logic as constructed by Aristotle is kind of this way of representing sort of the way humans construct arguments. And I don't think that kind of the mathematical structure that you're describing as a logic is, you know, it is
You could as some kind of mathematical definition, you could say it's a logic, but it certainly isn't logic with the same kind of import that Aristotle's version of logic has, you know, just to make that point. I mean, I think it's, it's a, well, if we think about problem, so think about probability measures as propositions, right? So they're propositions and we can talk about the,
When we talk about, it turns out we can put a partial order on probability measures. This is something we did 30 years ago and it's called the Lebesgue logic. It turns out if you say one probability measure is less than another, if it's a normalized restriction of the other. That gives you a partial order on the sort of all.
And so now the reason I would call that a logic is because I can think about probability measures as propositions, and here I am taking the and and the or and the conjunction, disjunction and negation and so forth. So in that sense, I'm calling it a logic because it's logical relationships among propositions. But wait a second. I mean, you know,
The notion of and and or which which i claim is a is a deeply derived notion i mean in other words it's not that is not a foundational notion that's a notion you know process through layers of kind of symbolic representations of the world by humans and all kinds of things like this but but be that as it may i don't view logic as being in any way fundamental but that but be that as it may you can say you know there's the there's the and of uh you know you you've got
I'm still trying to understand in your kind of Markov matrices, you can say, uh, well, do you, are you associating propositions in some way with these Markov matrices or not? Yeah. The probability that if I see red now, I'll see green next is the is 0.01 and the probability that I'll see blue next is 0.03. That's the proposition. Well, wait a minute. The proposition is, so you're saying the Markov matrix itself,
represents the proposition represents the statement i mean the markov matrix is a collection of probabilities and the assertion these are the probabilities is the proposition
that's written if you view it that way then when you have these um when you put a partial order and you look at the meat and the join then you could be thinking these are in some sense logical relationships among propositions and so why not just call it a logic but if you don't like that term fair enough that's a better answer than i i than i thought of okay so so i mean and and
So let me let me just understand what you said there. So, uh, and, um, maybe these explanations are helpful for anybody who's watching this. I don't know, but, uh, it's, um, I think, I mean, what, what you're saying is if I say the probability that I see red is 50% and whatever, and then another proposition is the problem that I see red is 30%. Right.
What you're asking is, and which I'm a little confused by, if I take the and of those propositions, I don't see how I construct that out of your kind of, I mean, those seem to be inconsistent to me. Those seem to be, you know, that they're on sort of an anti-chain of your partial order.
so how do i right so the only way that you can take the and of two probability measures is if they have the same normalized restriction on the okay propositions that they overlap on right okay fine same normalized restriction there otherwise you can't take okay so in other words i've got to have if one markup matrix says 50 probability of red
And eight percent probability of purple and the other one says fifty percent probability of red and six percent probability of yellow they're incompatible then i can combine them if they didn't have things to say about purple and yellow going between each other so in so far as the disjoint you can combine them.
Okay. If they speak about the same, if they both agree that red is twice as probable as blue, then they're fine. So as long as you agree about the relative probabilities on things, then you can take the disjunction and conjunction. Okay, fine, fine. So then, all right, so I'm buying more that you can, I mean, I think it's a very weak logic, but you can set something up that has some of those attributes. But so now,
I mean the the question is you're you're imagining that so one one question is what can you derive from what so one of the surprising things about our physics project is that what I had not imagined is that you could derive so much from so little and so
you know you would think that the statement considerable possible computations you know the entangled limit of all possible computations you would think you could write absolutely nothing from such a thing but the surprises that
You know, as soon as you put these conditions about how observers can sample that, you suddenly start to be able to derive things. I think the simplest case to see that is the molecular dynamics case, where you can say, you know, you've got all these molecules bouncing around, and we know that they can serve a number, maybe they can serve momentum and things that does not matter that much. But we've, we've, you know, we've, we've got all this microscopic sort of randomness, computational irreducibility going on.
And just from the fact that observers like us are computationally bounded, we can now derive the second law of thermodynamics. We can start to derive fluid mechanics, things like this. So in other words, it's very surprising that from so little you can get so much. And that's, you know, that's the thing that really I didn't expect at all. So what I want to understand for your, what you're doing is, you know, I think you're also attempting to get much from little.
Absolutely. So I want to understand what you know, and what you would like to get is, you know, things like, I mean, honestly, I think you're more likely to get the Ruliat than you are to get space time in its usual formulation. I think it will be easier to get from the kind of thing you're describing to the Ruliat than to get to all of the technical detail of space time and so on.
Because that that's but but let's let's just understand what it would mean so you know again i want to sort of posit this kind of axiomatic physics where all you're doing is you're saying i make these observations and all i know is that i have certain axioms about how these observations fit together. Which i think is what you are you know you you are positing certain axioms about how what you're describing is conscious agents fit together.
That is right. Critically, critically, I think you're positing something which seems completely on obvious to me, which is all we know is the end of one. We have an internal experience of being a conscious agent, right? But you are positing a, a network of relationships between conscious agents and your partial order and things like this.
And that to me, that's a big leap. Now you might argue the really odd is big leap too. But what you're doing there is you're saying, you know, all I know is what I have internally. And I'm talking about that as a conscious agent. But now I'm going to posit about conscious agents that they have these interrelationships. And by the way, I'm pretty sure if there was only one conscious agents in the world,
You know, the game will be over. You wouldn't be able to construct. There'd be no grist to construct a sort of a, an external model of the world. Cause what I think you're doing, as I understand it is you are going from the calculus of observers to construct an external model of the world, which is the opposite way round from what, you know, from what I've been trying to do. And, but the, you know, so, so now.
I claim if there's only one observer, there's no grist. There's no, there's nothing you can do to kind of build up that external model of the world. Just as I don't think you can tell in the solipsistic view of things, you can't really tell whether there's any external, whether there's something out there. You have, you are, you are taking your personal extrapolation
That there are conscious agents like you that have certain relationships. You're taking that and building what amounts to what Michael is a scientific theory. We might call it a, you know, a theory of the world somehow based on that. So, so if, if I think that there is what I call the whole, right? I could, so is this really infinite conscious agent? I can imagine it then choosing to look at itself through different traces.
I'm gonna choose to look at myself through the trace and this trace I'll call Don Hoffman and that trace I'll call Stephen Wolfram and these are just different. So it's the whole looking at itself through a straw through a straw hole, right? Because the hole is infinite and you know, I've got a finite IQ. So in that sense,
You wouldn't have the problem of not having the ability to have interesting worlds and so forth if there's this infinite consciousness that's looking at itself through an infinite number of different perspectives. So that's what I am and you are. So from this point of view, Don and Steven are just avatars of this deeper whole consciousness. The whole is talking to itself through a Don and Steven avatar right now.
You know, that's bizarrely close to what I would say about the liad. So in other words, coming into this, I actually thought that we were going to end up pretty much agreeing that we're doing the same thing. I'm just calling it consciousness and you're not right. Well, but, but, but, you know, the thing that I don't get in, so, you know, in what I'm doing, I'm, you know,
Imagine that there are these atoms of space and i'm imagining that there's this hyper graph and so on and do i know that these are real things. No that my way of describing the world i mean it's like you know occasionally people come and say things like you have a competition model of the world what kind of computer is it running on.
That's a hopelessly philosophically muddled point of view, right? And so, you know, this is merely a description. And, and I think what you are so so let me let me see if I can unpack your description. So you're saying your whole
is the set of all these possible connections between consciousnesses and and maybe maybe you're even going uh you know and i think you have to go this way in order to avoid sort of the trap of probabilities and the dead end of oh there's probabilities where we don't know whether you know what the particular role of the dice is right so the you know we're
You're going to end up with essentially a multi-way collection of all the possible histories and so on. Yes. So you've got this whole structure that is kind of the, I mean, I think, okay, so I think what you're constructing, I mean, the object that you're constructing, it's, you know, that is a mathematical object. I think your sort of Markov chain thing is weaker than it should be.
In other words, I think replace that with an arbitrary computation and you basically have the rule yard. You have the same object. So in other words, he's inviting you to co-publish done. I don't publish things. Well, I think you raise a really interesting, very technical question that I think we should really try to address is the relationship between the really add and what's possible with this infinite this lattice of
I'm pretty sure that what you've got is, you know, with this partial order of Markov chains and so on, that's a definite mathematical structure. It is, it is a much weaker mathematical structure than something where those sort of those, you know, your relationship of taking traces is much weaker than an arbitrary computation.
but i don't think it's a huge leap to say you know that's a particular sub model that might capture some aspect of uh you know of of how it might be a useful phenomenological model of certain aspects of
Conscious experience that you have or whatever else i think the the more general you know my feeling is you're gonna you're gonna you're slipping down a slope here first you have to you know and you're going to wind up with something i mean this is one of the things that again has been a surprise to me you know the rule yard is the end point of an awful lot of generalizations
So in other words there are you know in mathematics if you're you know looking at you know growth index work on higher category theory and you know infinity group points and things that object is basically the rule we had.
that object and in fact the the you know growth index hypothesis about the inevitability of what amounts to topology or space or whatever from a thing of that kind is precisely the assumption that we are also making or the thing that we think we can give some level of derivation of that space inevitably emerges from the from observers in this really add and so on so i think you know it would not be a surprise to me
That the end point of an effort of generalization is the same object because i think it's it's you know it's a it's a it's a typical end point of generalization but now the question is you know is that. You know if you're thinking about kind of.
what i might call i don't know what the right word for it is but i'd be calling it axiomatic physics i'm not sure if that's the right right characterization but it's it's a a you could think about it as a calculus of observers as opposed to or a um you know a a um where everything is just in terms of the relationship between observers
But it's really critical, I think, to what you're talking about, that there isn't just one observer. I don't think you can, I don't think, as I said, talking of mills, I think there is no grist for your mill without a multitude of observers. That is, I think you can't, you know, because if you're going to be able to construct extent and so on, you need that. And now the question is, if you, and so then I want to come back to your, you know, experience of mint.
Well, let me first just agree with you on the two points you've made. First, I agree that I would be delighted if it turns out that the Markovian dynamics that we're doing and the partial order turns out to be equivalent to the roulette that I would be delighted. It won't be equivalent. It will be a subset. It's a small piece of it. Well, again, you can get computational universality out of two or three Markov kernels.
I don't think that quite makes sense because Markov chains are probabilistic and involve real numbers and you're kind of out of the game of computation theory by the time you're dealing with those kinds of things. Two or three kernels that are not probabilistic, they have only zeros and ones in the matrix.
Get copy. So remember the mark of kernels include zero one matrices and they include the deterministic ones as a special case. So we get even just from those, we'll get the rule yet. Hold on, hold on. It's not so simple because let's talk about how you actually apply. I mean, this is you've got these matrices and you know, if you say what you are constructing is a product of many matrices.
Which is not what i've heard you say what i've heard you say is that you're taking these matrices and you're tracing out components and you're looking at the partial order of matrices that's a different statement from the statement that you are taking products and matrices and i agree with you that it's not quite as simple as that i mean you can't uh you know to get let me think about this for a second
Certainly with finite matrices, you will not get computation universality. You're going to need infinite matrices. And in fact, okay, so here's a construction that you could easily make. So you could imagine building a cellular automaton by just taking a vector that represents a one-dimensional cellular automaton, a vector that represents current state, and you have an infinite matrix. No, that's not going to work. That doesn't work. That only gives you a subset of cellular automata. You can't get
So if you have a single matrix, and you're simply doing matrix multiplication, there's linearity to matrix multiplication, and you're only going to get a very small subset, which by the way, aren't universal.
of cellular automata. Now, if you say, oh, I'm going to make these matrices be like elements of a group, generators in a group, and I'm going to say I'm going to multiply these together in all sorts of different ways, then that construction, yes, you can get computation out of it. But I don't think that's what you're talking about. And that's what we do. So I hadn't talked about that part of the theory yet. So I only talked about this one, what I call the quality kernel. It turns out the quality kernel is actually a product of three kernels.
So we actually so we actually in the basic formalism of the conversation i send you the paper on the conversation third we have a decision colonel an action colonel and a perception colonel when i take the product of all those i get what we call the quality of the single quality of colonel but what we're imagining is that there's this infinite social network.
and that there's actions, you know, message passing and so forth is happening and it's all going to be done by products of Markovian kernels throughout this whole thing. So it's going to be a computationally universal network and we're going to get, you know, some of the kernels can have no probabilities in them at all. They're just zeros and ones.
And and so so we got rid of those problems you gonna have a much easier theory if you get rid of the problems cuz you cuz as soon as you have the problems as as you are you say it's kind of you you're admitting you know incompleteness of your theory so to speak you're saying. There's you know i just don't know where these where the dice rolls are coming from but let's not let's not. What are the incompleteness of theories i would say that every scientific theory starts with assumptions.
And those are the miracles that the theory doesn't explain. Well, that's a point. Okay. So that's the bizarre thing that I didn't see coming about the story with the really add. Okay. You know, it doesn't, you know, the representation of the really add in a particular form, that is a sort of arbitrary choice that you can think of as an assumption. But the thing, the actual, you know, object you construct, I don't think that has
It's not the kind of a thing that starts from assumptions. It has been the experience of all of scientific theories to date.
That all scientific theories have been, you know, they've been models. And as a model, they are not the system itself. There's some, you know, some projection from the system itself, some simplified, you know, narrative about the system itself, the thing that's bizarre with with the really odd and I I'm still I'm still trying to wrap my arms around this this thing because it really surprises me a lot. It is inevitable. And it is it is something
That is just it's a unique inevitable thing that doesn't it isn't like a you know you said something theories have assumptions because i think one's imagining us as one usually has done that the theory is a model where it's assuming oh it doesn't matter that such and such is such and such a way. So i think the i mean in in our theory with the ruling out and so on.
The assumptions come in and assumptions about what we are like as observers, which is a different kind of a, you know, and that's the underlying theory. The underlying reality, as you might call it, is just the rule we had. And in some sense it's everything, but it tells you nothing. To have it tell you something, you have to take these slices and these slices are particularized by, you know, features of us as observers, so to speak.
Let me just ask a question about it. There are two questions. One is, does the Ruliat admit something like Gödel's incompleteness theorem that would hold for the Ruliat? It's in some sense, even though you're talking about this infinite thing, with mathematics in general, Gödel says that any system that has the formal power of arithmetic, there will always be
Yes, I mean, okay, this is this is complicated to untangle. Let's do it for a second. Okay. I mean, you know, Gödel's theorem is built on top of a bunch of assumptions about truth and so on. I think it is more useful to think about, let's see, where do we start here? The point is that sort of
The thing that i think is the underlying phenomenon that goodles theorem is built on is computational irreducibility. Because what you know what you might say is i'm going to start from these actions of arithmetic and then any theorem. I must be able to just finitely prove from those actions.
But in fact, there's no upper bound on how many steps you might have to take to get to the theorem that you care about. Unfortunately, okay, it takes, so the basic point is computational irreducibility, which is kind of the core of Goethals theorem, is absolutely alive and well in the Rulliad. In fact, without it,
There wouldn't be time, there wouldn't be, there wouldn't be space, there wouldn't be lots of things. I mean, the fact that the passage of time is meaningful is a consequence of computational irreducibility. If it wasn't for computational irreducibility, the, you know, the leading of our lives would be, there would be nothing that was actually happening. It would just be, oh, we could jump to the end and say the answer is 42 or whatever.
I'm it would be so that that's a you know and suddenly in the fact that there is an extent to space that is also a consequence of computationally reducibility so in those things i mean computationally reducibility is absolutely fundamental to the non collapse of the really are the really have a collapse without computer or disability that.
That's beautiful. The fact that there's, you know, the fact that it has extent is a consequence of that. So now you can ask questions about, well, let's talk about mathematics for a second, because one of the things about the Rulliad that's again something I didn't see coming is the Rulliad is not only the foundation of physics, it's also the foundation of mathematics. And so, and in fact, it has the bizarre consequence that, you know, in the sort of platonic view of mathematics, that there's a there there, so to speak,
That what you end up concluding is if you believe that physical reality exists you must believe that there is a mathematical reality that exists does it also work the other way around. If you believe in the sort of platonic view of mathematics then.
I think so. I haven't thought about it that way around because people are usually people usually maybe Don is an exception, but people usually believe in physical reality. People usually don't have a problem with with the notion of physical reality. Well, Plato would have said that the true reality is the platonic reality. And then this one is the illusory one. Yes. Right. Yes. Fair enough. Right. So I mean, in
In but but you know just understand how that works in mathematics and how that sort of how good will serum works there and such like so. In mathematics and this is in mathematics as as it was formulated in the twentieth century.
Perhaps not in the best possible way, but the formulation of the 20th century and from Hilbert and people like that was we put down these axioms and then we see what theorems we can derive from those axioms. So, for example, the particular case Gödel looked at was we put down the piano axioms for arithmetic, you know, x plus y equals y plus x and a whole bunch of other axioms. And then from those axioms, we try and fit them together to derive other theorems.
And the question is, if we fit together those axioms, do we, you know, is there a finite path to every, where do we get the, you know, we get certain things that we can construct from those axioms. One of the things that's tricky about Gödel's theorem, as it's usually stated, is it's not a question of what one can construct. It has this notion of truth, which is an overlay on top of what one can construct. So, you know, I can construct
The statement x plus y equals y plus x from that and associativity of addition. I could also construct the statement that x plus y plus x equals y plus x plus x. For example, that's a, that's a thing I can construct. And you know, first question is, is, is every, well, this, this, this notion of, um, what, uh,
Let's see. I mean, of, of what, um, uh, the question of what's true is more complicated than the question of what you can construct. And that was the point of girl, right? Is that the notion of truth transcends the notion of proof? Yeah. I think that's a technical detail. Actually. I think that's a, it's a confusing feature and it's confused people a lot. The real essence. Okay. What did good actually show?
What Godel did was he wanted to take the statement, this statement is unprovable, which is a statement doesn't seem to be a statement about arithmetic.
And the remarkable thing that he did was to show that that statement can be compiled into a statement about equations about integers, you know, that you can have an interpretation of that statement that is just a statement about equations about integers. And then the, and that, that fact that you can compile that into a statement about integers was an early version of the idea of computation universality. That is that you can take this thing and, you know,
Compile it into this sort of set of primitives and then having done that it you know then then you can kind of feed that but you know that statement this notion of provability is then something that sort of tangles itself up through that statement but the remarkable thing is not that that statement doesn't you know that statement is a is a kind of a paradoxical mess the remarkable thing is that that statement is actually a statement of arithmetic
That's right. But what's interesting though is that someone like Roger Penrose, for example, looks at this and says what he takes from Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that something about me that allows me to understand what this formal system cannot do. I can understand the truth of this thing, but I understand it and the formal system cannot.
And so that's really the key. For Roger Penrose, that was sort of the big take home point from this. And I would agree, but it sounds like you disagree. Don and Steven, would you say that it's correct to characterize you, Steven, as a computationalist and Don, that you think there's something more to reality or to consciousness than mere computation?
Yeah, I'm suggesting that Gödel's incompleteness theorem suggests that the notion of truth transcends the notion of proof. So I'm all for the Rulliad and I'm all for mathematical models, but I'm suggesting that there's something deeper. Yeah, but I think the problem is this notion of truth is a complicated, derived human concept. And I don't think it's the right thing to think about as a foundational thing. I think that constructing things
Is a much more useful foundational idea so for example in i've been talking about some kind of i mean obviously what was trying to do was kind of a play to nest and what was trying to do was to blow up kind of hillbats idea that wasn't there for mathematics so to speak but i think the you know this this notion of for example
To have truth you have to have a notion of falsity. What is the notion of falsity in something where you're constructing things well here's what it is in our so you know i've i've had the i had the nice opportunity to go to talk about the arithmetization of mathematics i.
I should even put together a book that I talked about the physicalization of mathematics. The fact that that the the network of all possible theorems, how they prove how you can prove one theorem for another turns out to be the same kind of construct as the way that physical space can be constructed in the universe. And these are both, you know, both of these things sort of are the really add. And then the question of how we perceive mathematics
is a question of what we are like as mathematical observers. Mathematical observers are rather different from physical observers. You know, a mathematical observer, you know, a view of a mathematical observer is, a mathematical observer doesn't care so much about time, but a mathematical observer is just trying to put a bag of theorems into their mind. They say, this is true. They say, this is true. This is true. That's the notion of truth is, this is a theorem I'm going to say is true. It's a thing I'm going to put in my mind. I'm going to say it's true.
So now what's the question is, what is falsehood? In other words, what is, you know, I've got these theorems, I'm foraging in the forest of theorems and I'm keep on putting more things in my bag. Turns out that, um, the, I think that what falsehood is in our models is what you get from kind of this medieval concept of the principle of explosion. If you have something which is false.
From a falsehood, you can derive every statement, right? Exactly. And so, so then what happens in our models is that normally you're putting these theorems in your bag and you're saying, these are the ones I think are true, but suddenly you put a false theorem in your bag. And then what happens is then everything is true. And so what goes wrong? What goes wrong is if you have a finite mind, your mind is exploded at that point. You can't fit
You know, so in other words, it's a, it's a, you know, that's a, so I'm kind of describing a more, a kind of physicalized version of the notion of truth and so on. And I think, you know, this idea that, I mean, there's sort of the glib statement, which I don't even know where it came from. I've never, never really traced this history of, you know, statements which are true, but unprovable. I think it's a super confusing way to think about Gödel's theorem. Okay. But, you know, I think,
I mean, this whole question about whether, I mean, you know, this, I still want to come back to, cause I'm really interested in this question about what, you know, your statement about, you know, the experience of mint, the, the, um, and, and your, your kind of, you know, I think the theory you're constructing is a theory that extrapolates far away from your internal experience of mint.
Your theory talks about the interaction between observers and between consciousnesses and so on. In some sense, it's kind of a flip around of the theory that starts from the particles. It's a flip around to a theory which talks only about the effects.
and
Starting only with this dynamics of consciousness outside of space. Yeah, you won't get there that that won't work But but I think you'll go if you can you you will probably be able to get from from this kind of formalism My guess is that you will be able to get basically to the really add and then you know then it's I'm all in favor of more people pushing to get from the really add to the momentum distribution of you know to the structure functions of protons and Distribution and momentum distributions of protons. That's a that's a heavy lift
The notion of mass of a particle is a projection of the entropy rate of the communicating class and the spin is a projection of the determinant.
And the entropy, the momentum is a projection of the number of asymptotic events inside the communicating class. In other words, we're building up a dictionary that says these physical properties are projections of these properties of the Markovian dynamics. And so we'll see. And then context that we're going to try to get the momentum distributions inside the prototype.
I don't think that's the right target.
The I mean it's um, you know, I think that for example in in our model They you know, one of the things that surprised me a lot was the very easy interpretation of what energy is So it turns out that energy is basically the amount of activity in this network I mean more formally if you make the causal graph of
It's the flux of causal edges through space like hypersurfaces. Momentum is the flux of causal edges through time like hypersurfaces, which by the way is something I could imagine you being able to get as well. I mean, you being able to make that interpretation from, I think the thing that surprises me and what you just described. So, you know, let's talk about entropy for a minute because entropy is another one of these often misunderstood, you know, constructs. I mean, you know, entropy.
What's the definition of entropy? I mean, in a sense, entropy is basically you take a system, you know, certain things about that system, and then you say, how many states are there in the system that are consistent with the things we know about it? And you take the log of that, and that's the entropy. So, so let me understand when you talk about, you know, when we talk about entropy increasing, it's a,
I mean again this is another layer of complexity and what we're talking about because the the you know what. What we're doing is we're saying the the number of states of the system consistent with what we observe is is is increasing let's say but if we have a system.
which is a deterministic system and we know everything about what it's doing and it's also let's say a reversible system so we can always take a state of the system and you know find previous states of the system as we can find future states of the system in that case if we could observe everything about the system its entropy would always be equal to one zero rather because there's only one possible state of the system is the state of the system future state of the system and so on so what leads to our perception of the increase of entropy
Is that we are not observing every detail of the system where instead observing only certain features of the system and with respect to those features we know where we say given these features there are states that there are more more and more states of the system consistent with those features so can you say again what cause i didn't understand what what you meant by so you were saying something about entropy being related to something else.
Well, the entropy. So one proposal is that the mass of a particle is a projection of the entropy rate of a communicating class. So the entropy rate, you know, you know, the definition of entropy rate for Markov kernel. Tell me, tell me it. Okay. Yeah. So everybody else is watching that. Even if I know it, the chance that everybody watching knows it is incredibly low.
Well, the toe audience is quite technical and they not only can keep up but enjoy it. So okay, don't. So I have a recurrent communicating class, it's got a stationary measure. So it means there's a long term probability of being state one through state M. Okay, so I got the stationary measure, and then each each row of the matrix is the you know, how is a probability measure. And so it has an entropy.
hold on hold on hold on hold on let's unpack this a bit so so you know we've got this matrix that says here's a vector of what's happening right now and a vector probabilities for right now and we're going to apply this matrix to get a new vector probabilities for the next step so to speak right right okay and now you say let's apply that matrix a zillion times
And the result of that is we're going to go some limit and that limit is the stationary measure as you're calling it that that there is a limiting matrix in which every entry in that matrix has some particular value that corresponds to the ultimate limiting
probability of being in that state, that's right. Okay, I got that. So the stationary measure gives you the ultimate probability of being in state one, state two, through state N. And then now if you're in state one, right, there's a transition row. There's a probability measure about where you're going to go next. Yep. That probability measure, you can take its entropy, right? So you can take the probability measure, take its entropy. Now you just multiply that entropy by the stationary weight.
I mean, here's where I'm getting into trouble, because yes, at a mathematical level, you can compute, you know, sum of P log P for all these entries in the, in the, in the matrix. Um, what the interpretation of that is, and maybe you don't need an interpretation of that, but for me, you know, the entropy, again, this is, you know, by putting probabilities in your,
You know you kind of cooking things in a certain way for me when i'm talking about entropy i want to know what are those individual states is kind of the frequentest version i'm not i'm not just saying there's a probability i'm actually saying what what are the things underneath that probability so you're but i don't know whether.
I'm taking these probabilities as the foundations of this particular theory. So it's a purely mathematical thing that you're doing. There's no interpretation of entropy here. It's merely the mathematics of URP.
And of course, entropy rate, for example, is a big deal in communication theory. If the source has an entropy rate that's too big, bigger than the channel capacity, you get distortion and so forth. So it's that kind of thing that comes up in communication. It's always fun to trace those things through for like 5G and see how, you know, the fact is all these things that people said, it's a theorem that you'll never be able to communicate faster than this. And then somehow, you know, we managed to have
You know cell phone channels that break all those theories. Anyway, that that's a separate different discussion But okay, but so I'll just say one little fun thing that comes out of this when if we define the entropy rate the mass to be a projection of entropy rate Then that that forces us to make certain predictions. So a mass zero would correspond to an entropy rate of zero and that would correspond to a Markovian matrix that has only zeros and ones in it a single one in each row and all else
And well, so we know that in space-time, massless objects must move at the speed of light. So it better fall out of our theory that you get the maximum travel speed in our theory for the things that have zero entropy rate. And it turns out, if you look at what's called the commuting time between states in a Markov kernel, the maximum commuting time, the fastest commuting times, so the smallest commuting times, the fastest travel times,
hold on you you're commuting lots of different concepts here i mean the the you know when you're talking about things traveling from here to there in this markov chain it's like you have a vector and this thing is is kind of moving the probability measure from one part of the vector to another
Yeah, you're going from one state from one conscious experience to another conscious experience and the question is how fast can the conscious experiences change? Right, but by conscious experience here, you are taking what I would consider to be a kind of a, you know, I hope that
In a sense, I feel my conscious experience is a lot richer than, you know, than this, than your kind of probability vector. I mean, you know, this is again, one of the things that is difficult about this, the intuition about all these kinds of things. For example, in, you know, this idea that you can have richness of things emerge from simplicity.
Or another thing that took me a long time to come to terms with i'm not sure i completely come to terms with even now is that the universe is an unbelievably profligate waster of computational resources and you know i had always imagined that.
There would have to be a definite history in the universe but it couldn't be the case that the universe is just sloughing off these immense numbers of different histories most of which are completely irrelevant to us so you know i'm i guess my question here is your your imagining that you're summarizing conscious experience.
I mean you know you first you started off by saying look conscious experiences is very rich thing that people can't reproduce from theories and so on and so what you're doing is you're flipping that around as i understand and saying conscious experience is the axiomatic.
I think you know the question is what goes into it because as soon as you're saying you've got these families of Markov chains and so on you know that's real content that's not you know that's a that's a model like I say
You know the universe is made of hypergraphs and somebody else says no it's made of cream cheese or something you know it's some you know you're making your positive something definite the the atoms of your. Of your ontology so to speak are these conscious experiences or whatever i mean you know.
i find that so so by the way i mean to to either support or attack both of our points of view you know i can no more pick up an eme one of our sort of atoms of existence and say here it is than that i claim you can pick up
That conscious experience and say, here it is. Right, right. So, so both of us are in the situation where we have to say, look, the effects of what we're talking about are all very good, even though the thing we're ultimately talking about is not a thing we can pick up. Now, you know, to me, the, the, you know, the, the problem, the thing, one of the things that's nice about Eames and hypergraphs and really ads and things like that.
Is there extremely non-human. So we do not have sort of we don't make the mistake of saying oh it's truth it's falsity it's you know experiences this that and the other because they are by construction in a sense they are deeply abstract and deeply non-human so
We don't come to it with a prejudice about how things should work. What worries me about starting from sort of consciousness as the element, so to speak, is that many, you know, we think, we imagine, and in fact, even the way you're talking about, you know, the sensation of mint and so on, is we come with a bag of prejudices about how that all works.
And so it is a challenging thing to erect the science without being sort of pulled in the direction of some prejudice or another. Fair enough. And I think that that's a very important point. And what I would say to anybody who wanted to do the research along the lines that I'm doing is to, I would say, the set of experiences that you've had is measure zero compared to the set of experiences that are out there. So don't make the silly
That's a very challenging thing to do. Living paradigms is, you know, I got to say in my life, for example, you know,
i started studying simple computational systems i don't know 40 45 years ago basically and you know it took me embarrassingly long to realize things that were plainly observable in experiments i did i mean i you know just it happens to be the a few years ago it was the 40th anniversary of of my not my discovery of this rule 37 automaton that does all kinds of cool complicated things
i it would be nice if i could say it was a discovery it wasn't it was the discovery of it was three years earlier it took me three years to understand what the heck was going on and to not ignore it and i i think this is the you know it is a huge challenge to kind of rise above one's kind of one's assumptions about what's going on and i mean maybe one thing i could ask is like i said that's a clue to what it means to be an observer
That it is hard to rise outside of one's previous impressions of things. Well, but I think so. So a question would be, you know, observers like us human observers, things like that. We have an internal experience of it. We have a way of projecting what human observers might be like, you know, when we go
two observers with very different human observers very different backgrounds very different kind of belief systems kind of ways of thinking about the world you know you go we're talking about the spirit world animism whatever else we're talking about you know sorts of eastern philosophy ways of viewing the world.
it's even even then it can be difficult I think at least it has been for me to wrap one's you know simple western kind of scientific mind around these kinds of different ways of thinking about the world. That's right that's right I agree I've faced the same thing but one thing that trying to do that has I've come to conclude is that
I love science. I love mathematics. I love concepts and being precise and everything. But I've concluded that reality, whatever it is, infinitely transcends anything we can describe. And that's a very humbling, humbling thing. Yeah, well, right. You know, I have to say, I've had this experience now, you know, with the Rulliad and thinking of myself as this little tiny bundle of Eames in the Rulliad. I would like to be able to characterize
What bundle of Eames is a thing like me versus what bundle of Eames is not an observer like me?
I don't yet know how to do that. It will be interesting to understand, for example, and this is why I'm asking a little bit about, do they have to be many observers? Because, you know, for example, that gets you into, oh, you need kind of self replication. You need some kind of, you need some way of replicating the number of observers. Do you need the observers to be non-identical? Probably you do. If all the observers are in lockstep doing exactly the same thing, they're not very interesting observers.
And one of the things again, I sort of haven't seen coming, but I've now realized is relevant is, you know, I happened to, well, I just recently did some, some things about sort of foundations of biological evolution and, uh, which surprised me a lot. Cause I've thought about biological evolution off and on for four decades. And, um, I'd always thought, you know, I'd always had a hard time coming up with sort of a minimal model for what was happening.
And I finally have this very minimal model with a cellular automaton, with a few simple rules, and you're asking, you know, the fitness is something like, how long does the pattern live before it dies out? And what you find is that, you know, with that tiny genome, a very sort of small number of bits in the rule, it turns out you can evolve, you can adapt to produce these long-lived things that are unbelievably complicated.
And where there is no kind of, you know, there isn't an, you know, when you say, what's the narrative scientific explanation of why the thing lives a long time, there really isn't one. It's just, that's the, you know, the bits do what the bits do. And the answer is it lives for 10,000 steps or something. Um, but you know, one of the things I've been curious about is whether, uh, sort of the, the sort of what it takes to make an observer.
does what it takes to make an observer relate to things that we are used to, that are very routine to us, like the idea of life, the idea of sort of replicating multiple similar but not identical copies of minds, things like this. Is that thing that is routine for observers specifically like us actually something that is sort of critically important in the notion of an observer like us?
And, you know, as I say, the big surprise for me has been the derivation of core laws of physics, just from very coarse statements about observers like us. And as we get finer statements about observers like us, what more might we be able to derive? And, you know, I'm sort of curious about whether, you know, for example, the thing that I find surprising is the existence of the rouillard I think is inevitable.
The existence of us as observers within the rule yard is something that you have to derive. It's not self evident in the in the abstract. It is not obvious from the existence of the really add that there will ever be an observer like us. It's something that is presumably in a sense mathematically derivable i don't know how to drive it.
But that's the, you know, to simply say as an axiomatic matter, if there is an observer like us, then the observer like us will observe physics of the kind we observe. But the question is, can we derive from the very nature of the Rulliad that there must be observers like us? You know, that's something which I think would be interesting. I think it will be doable
But then we can ask questions like, okay, there are observers like us, you know, how, for example, how common are observers like us? You talked about a set of measure zero of our ways of observing the universe. You know, this relates to, um, earthquake here. I just, I just, I was, yeah, yeah, that was, we had a big earthquake here just now, but I'm good. We're getting closer to the truth. That's the sign.
Yes, these are shaking ideas. But Don, you're okay. Like, let's just make sure you're okay. And the people in your home. Yeah, they're fine. I think our cats are probably scared. But that's okay. All right. And now the question is, what is the cat's perception of the physical world?
We on our cat perception. That's right. It was very different from mine. And right now they're probably under the bed hiding because there's there's something that just growled or just something really nasty to them. But right. But I mean, you know, this is this. So one thing that will be nice to be able to derive is what is the density of observers like us and really had? Yes. I mean, by the way, we have the same problem in my framework, right? I'm saying that space time is just one of an infinite number of headsets.
So what we're perceiving as observers like we are is just one out of an infinite infinity. And so I'm going to try to model this particular little headset and his properties and protons and so forth. But then once we do that and sort of establish that we can do that, then I want to look and say, what are other there's an infinite number of other things to explore. What are the other headsets that I can't even concretely imagine, but I can use mathematics to try to imagine them.
Yeah, don't go off to protons. Go off to general activity. You'll get to do it. So do you have a serious chance there, right? I think protons are hopeless, but just, just I'll give us the talk. This, this point that you're making that, uh, you know, in the really ad, it is not difficult to kind of construct what an observer different from us would observe.
And to give an example of that, uh, one of the things, you know, in the sort of computational universe of all possible programs, one of the things that a little bit of a different, different issue, but related is there are programs that we know we care about and we're kind of, you know, there's a certain like in mathematics, there are theorems we know we care about. There's an infinite space of all possible theorems.
Most of which we don't care about yet at least. And if we look at the computational universe, there are certain rules that we might have used in technology or whatever else that we know we care about. And then there's an infinite set of other ones. One thing that's interesting about the computational universe, or for that matter, the rule we add, which is closely related, is that it is very straightforward for us to do the experiment of just jumping anywhere we want in the computational universe. We just
Pick a program at random start running and see what it does right most of what it does is deeply alien to us exactly exactly and so the question is you know in a sense the view of what we're doing is we started from the place where we are on this earth with life as it is and so on.
And we gradually expanding gradually colonizing more of what i would call real space kind of more the space of possible paradigms and so on we gradually also sending out space craft that colonize you know physical space but. What we can do which is very disorienting is. We can actually jump to random places in the really add and see what's that.
But we don't have a connection you know in other words this notion and i think it may be what you're doing as well is you know we we to build up something which we can have a real experience over something i'm not sure if experience is the right word.
we kind of have to go in steps like first we understand this we get familiar with that then we go to this and so on we're not we're not able you know if we're just throwing out there anywhere in real space it's just totally disorienting and i and i think i know it's kind of a so
You can't grok it. There's a grokking thing and you can't grok it if you don't get there in the right way. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I mean, you know, it's like people say, you know, are the AIs going to sort of discover, you know, are they going to jump sort of to science that we don't, you know, and this is the same issue that what is, you know, the question of what is science? If science is the construction of narratives that humans can understand about how the world works,
It's not all that useful to have something, you know, it's a different problem to just say, we can go out there and get to these things that are deeply non not connected to humans. So as I'm curious in your, um, in your view of things, if you're starting from consciousness as atoms, so to speak, to what extent, I mean, if you were just starting from cat consciousness, would you build the same theory?
In other words, if it was consciousness or let me be more extreme, if you believe and maybe you don't, that the weather is in some sense conscious, then if you were to build your theory based on weather consciousness or cat consciousness or nematode consciousness, would you build the same theory or would you build a different theory? Well, I can tell you how we built this one. We said there's lots of things that you could do to talk about consciousness. There's lots of things.
We picked only two. We said there are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences. And we said those are the only two things we're going to take.
Occam's razor basically the fewer assumptions the better off you are and so I decided to I can't get a if there are no conscious experiences I can't do anything and I need at least probabilistic relationships and let's just see if we can do do it with that and nothing more so I tried to get as general a theory with as few assumptions as possible so so the answer is as best as I can understand I would say I would get the same theory of consciousness no matter where I started because I tried to get the minimal things that you could possibly have but but again
That may be just my lack of being able to think outside of my little box. Well, I mean, you know, my guess is that there is a certain category of, of, yeah, I mean, you're erecting a theory based on calculus of observers and it is, you know, it's a change of basis, so to speak, to think about a different kind of observer, whether the theory you end up with after that change of basis looks the same.
is not i don't know and that's a question in part it seems to me the translation from one kind of consciousness to another which by the way we have been singularly unsuccessful at achieving i mean you i doubt you can have a philosophical discussion with your cat right right right exactly i i completely agree i completely agree and and so i think that it's it's easy for me to think that i've got a general theory of consciousness and and and
Absolutely not. I can only, in some sense, have a theory of consciousness of the kind that I can grok. And what I can grok right now may be absolutely trivial compared to what's in the whole really out of the whole space of conscious agents. But so let's talk about AIs for a second, because the thing that you're doing, you know, in a sense, you could now, you know,
You don't know, we don't know, we're all saying, you're saying nobody knows what consciousness really is and so on. So you're going to take it as an atom. You're going to take it as just the starting point for your theory. But in an AI, we can take it apart any way we want. We can't take about human brains. There are things we don't know. Are the microtubules important? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a bunch of stuff we don't know. For your friendly LM, we know every bit.
So now the question would be if you start having lms that can interact with each other for example and can have you know would we build. Since you said you expect that you know based on a cat consciousness or whatever else you probably get the same kind of theory.
So my next question would be let's take an LLM consciousness which maybe you know maybe there's something wrong with it maybe there isn't but let's just take that as a basis we can still talk about the relationships between LLMs we can talk about kind of there you know you could talk about approximating what happens with LLMs using your Markov chains and so on.
And now, but now the question is now we've got a foundation, which is a foundation that sort of relates. It's a computational foundation. We're no longer having to say there's this mysterious thing that we're just taking as axiomatic. We've actually got something which whose axiomatization kind of goes all the way down to, you know, my kind of axiomatization, so to speak, or, you know, the computational foundation. So I guess the question would be if you were to take a bunch of LLMs
And you were to say you know you were to make a model as you have made a model of how you know consciousness is like us interact. You could say you could ask the question if you do the experiment on the lambs will land ok so i mean.
You've got an assumption about how consciousnesses like us interact, which is sort of, and you're saying you're going to make that experimentally testable by deducing from those interactions between consciousnesses, what the inferred space time structure is. So now we could do the same thing with LLMs. We could say, you know, we take these LLMs, they're interacting in a certain way. Could you erect from the observation of interactions between LLMs,
sort of a structure of space time. So for example, let's, let's take a, um, and you know, it's, that's an interesting thing to imagine because if you actually think about a bunch of LLMs, they're probably on the internet and the internet doesn't live in, I mean, it is ultimately built in space time presumably, but the connectivity of the internet is not the structure of a three plus one dimensional space. Right, right, right.
So now the question would be if our conscious elements are AIs living on the internet interacting by the rules of the internet, so to speak, which are a bit different from the rules that we, I mean, I don't know whether they're in your model, whether they're different. The question would be those agents erecting their model of space time. What is that model of space time? Right. Well, and I would imagine within our framework,
That there is an infinite number of different space times that could be in principle constructed, but by the way, the positive geometries at the high energy theoretical physicists have something like the amplitude hadron. It turns out that one of the parameters and that this has parameters NKM and Z. One of the parameters M for our space time is four.
But their their positive geometries allowed them to be any positive integer you want. So so instead of a four dimensional space time, they can have positive geometries for a billion dimensional space time. So in other words, already in the new structures that the Neymar, Connie Hamed and others have found beyond space time.
They're realizing that our space time is just a parameter four, but there's a whole range of parameters that they've discovered are possible and so other headsets are effectively possible. So my answer would be there's an infinite number of them and that's just in our first step out of space time we're finding this
I presume there'll be even more dimensions of variation that we'll find. M equal four is just the first, right? So my assumption is that the reason we believe space is three plus one dimensional right now in the history of the universe is because of some aspect of us as observers. That's my belief. I can't, you know, I haven't established that. This is dramatic. We're getting another, this is, yeah, this is earth shaking stuff.
Well, are you in a place where there's some kind of, you know, warning if the fault is going, you know, speed of light being faster than seismic waves and so on? Well, I'm in Southern California. We're used to earthquakes here. Okay. So this is not out of the ordinary. Well, this is unusual that we've been having a few earthquakes in the last couple of days. So it's unusual.
So Don, how about I do a summary for yourselves and I'll tell you how I see the conversation so far and hopefully I do so in a straightforward manner. Sure. So it started off with you, Don, asking Steven, look, can you give me a scientific account of the taste of mint or the scent of garlic or whatever it may be? And what is a theory of consciousness that has a scientific basis? Like, go ahead, Don, go ahead, Steven, try me, do it.
In other words, there's an adage that says something like, if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there. And then, Don, you say, okay, well,
Stephen, you have it backward. It's not that consciousness is this place you have to get to. It's rather what you know most intimately. It's where you start. And then this material world that you think is a fundamental notion is actually the derived one. And then Stephen says, okay, so fair enough. However, Dawn, you claim you have a scientific account of consciousness. So how can you sign to fives this? I believe you use that word, Stephen. So how are you going to do that?
And even worse than that, Don, if you take your intimate notions so seriously, then where are you getting this proliferation of consciousnesses from? When all you intimately know is this N equals one, but yet your theory has multiple consciousnesses.
So then I believed on, you said something like, well, you could have an N equals one if you take it to be the totality of consciousness and we're instantiations. But by the way, I think that's a really, we didn't, we didn't pursue that particular point about the, you know, the, the Uber consciousness, so to speak, which, which feels like kind of the God theory, you know, it feels like kind of the, the, uh, the, the limit you said, there's no upper bound. So there is no, you know, it's kind of like, uh, you know, But is there a lower bound?
If you believe that the end of one story is that infinite limit, you are claiming you are God basically.
That's basically what you have to say is, is that if there's an end of one and there's only one, because you only know that one thing, but you are also then that one thing, that unique thing is this upper limit, this infinite limit of this whole sort of pile of progressively uber uber consciousnesses. Yeah, I'm willing to go there, but I'm taking you with me saying that, that you and I are both God looking at, at the self talk to yourself through two different avatars for three different avatars.
i think i think that limit thing is basically your version of the really add i mean i think that that that's what um you know i think uh anyway that's which is kind of interesting i mean it's it's it's always good when you know when we can as i say it is for me it has been the the the limit of many kinds of uh positive thinking okay but curt sorry we we interrupted you good good sir this sounds like a foreign notion but many people say
All there is is the universe and these glasses, the cell phone, yourself, your eyeballs, their expressions of the universe. So this is just the similar sentiment in different language. Is that correct? I think we're going into a different direction here, but we're going to, we're going to go on for another hour. I think you gave a pretty good summary, Kurt. I mean, I think the only part that perhaps you left out is this, is this, you know,
These two different complimentary ways of viewing the world. Do you go from the Eames up or from the conscious observers down, so to speak? Yeah. And I was also going to say that Don, you'd then talk about Markovian dynamics, giving rise to consciousness. And Stephen believes that's at least initially that's too simplistic to reproduce the intricate experience that we have.
while caveating that Stephen you know full well the power of rudimentary simple items giving rise to what looks convoluted and elaborate and as you helped pioneer computational emergence so you caveated with that and then there was some some really add pushing of Stephen like a you're with a leather jacket at the back of a Mathematica conference saying like yeah you got to try some some really add you got to take sniff of this sniff of this causal way graph
I really enjoyed this conversation and I would welcome a chance to talk some more and explore this further.
Yeah, very interesting stuff. And now I think I understand just a little bit about what you've, you know, I bought myself a copy of this book. Oh, oh yes. I know it's very old, but very old and I didn't read it yet. So, so now maybe I'm, I probably have to look at the 30 years after version, but John Wheeler cited that book and is it from bit paper? Oh, that's interesting.
I, I, unfortunately I met John Wheeler only once. I mean, I exchanged letters with him a bunch of times, but I met him only once when he was 95 years old. It's kind of a sad story because I I'm talking to him about a bunch of things and he looks up and he says, you know who you should talk to about all this stuff? It's a chap over at the Institute. His name is John von Neumann. Oh wow. And I said, unfortunately he died before I was born.
oh boy yeah that's that's sad yeah yeah anyway not not to end on a down note that's right well thank you all for spending three hours with myself and with the the audience yes the audience that will eventually see this and take care yeah great pleasure
Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like.
That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " Stephen Wolfram, welcome. Hello there. Donald Hoffman, welcome. Thank you. It's my understanding this is the first time you both are meeting."
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"text": " That's great. Yes. People, people say to me, you know, about things I worked on in physics and so on. Oh, that's related to things that Emmanuel Kant did. And they say might be related to things that Donald Hoffman has done. Well, Emmanuel Kant, I'm too late for, but Donald Hoffman, we get a chance to actually talk about things. That'd be fun. Absolutely. Don, do you see yourself as Kant 2.0?"
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"text": " Well, I'm not nearly as smart as him, so it would be a lesser version, but similar. It's idealism, but with some mathematics behind it. Are you a Leibniz 2.0 as well?"
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"text": " Yeah, much, much less smart than Leibniz, that's for sure. But yeah, it's very, very similar. I like Leibniz's monadology. There's a lot of good ideas in there. And the work I'm doing on conscious agents, in some sense, I can view it as simply a mathematization of Leibniz's ideas. Interesting. I still have to, you know, people have told me for four decades that things I'm doing are sort of Leibniz related. And at various times I have tried to understand Leibniz's monad idea"
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"text": " I've usually failed. Although one thing that helped me a lot recently was realizing, and maybe you can comment on this, that Leibniz didn't imagine that you could have mind made from non-mind. So for him, a monad, if there was ever going to be anything mind-like about it, it had to start by being a mind, so to speak. Right."
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"text": " Analogy of the mill labnitz mill analogy writes where he says you so he's looking at the hard what we call the hard problem of consciousness from a physicalist point of view. Any gives it just one paragraph in the in the monology that's up that's all he thinks it deserves and he basically says look you know if you're trying to get consciousness out of some kind of physical system it's like going inside of a mill and"
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"text": " going down and seeing all the gears and so forth, you know, whatever it is, the gear is not going to give you an explanation for what is going on in consciousness. And so he, you know, he felt that whatever mechanical physical explanation we give will fail. And he figured one paragraph was enough and he moved right on. Don, what would be your position on that? Well, so physicalists have been trying to give theories of consciousness"
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"text": " Quite strongly now for the last three decades, right? So we have integrated information theory, global workspace theory, orchestrated collapse of quantum states of microtubules and so forth. But I know that the players and their brilliant people and their friends and they know what I'm going to ask them every time I talk with them or get on stage with them is what specific conscious experience can your theory explain? Taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic,"
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"text": " The taste of men. We're interested in scientific theories that explain specific conscious experiences. What experience can you give me? Humans can experience around a trillion different experiences. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. There's a trillion experiences. Which ones have you done? The answer is zero. Right now, we have no example"
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"text": " a physical theory that can explain even one specific conscious experience so for example what i would ask for example of integrated information theory they said there's gonna be some causal structure that's the substrate and if you have the right causal structure then they say you can represent that in a particular with it with a matrix"
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"text": " It seems like we have an easier problem in the last year or two than we've had in the time before that, because now we have LLMs that can talk to us a little bit like we talk to each other."
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"text": " Yes and you know for humans it's both practically and ethically not possible to kind of take our brains apart and see what's going on inside but for an LLM so far it seems ethically just fine to do that."
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"text": " You know, so what would you imagine? I mean, you know, you've got your LLM and it's, you know, it's talking to you and it's discussing the kind of tea it likes and all kinds of other things. What would be the kind of thing that you would think you should want to identify that is its internal experience? Uh, nothing. My guess is that they don't have any internal experiences. Uh, and they're what, what, you know, what,"
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"text": " Our LLMs right now are doing or just sophisticated correlations and computations. They're looking for statistics. And how convinced are you that you are more than that? Well, I would say that I have the taste of mint and the smell of garlic and I can hear the middle C on a piano and"
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"text": " Right now, can you convince me that you can hear those things or feel those things? Oh, absolutely not. And you can't convince me either that you have it. So it's a matter of me just believing that you're, you're relatively similar to me in certain ways. So, so I absolutely agree that there's, there's no proof of anybody else. Solipsism is certainly a logical possibility."
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"text": " Right. But so, but you believe that I might have those internal experiences, but you don't believe that the LLM could have those internal experiences. Well, so it's, it's a little more complicated. So I'll say a little bit more about, so I think that our experience of space and time and physical objects is, um, just a headset. So it's, it's my consciousness is, is created a headset to interact with other consciousnesses."
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"text": " And so when I look at you on the screen, for example, all I see is pixels and the pixels on the screen, I wouldn't want to say are conscious, but through the pixels, I'm getting a portal into, I think your consciousness. I can guess what you're thinking about and guess what your, what your beliefs might be right now and so forth, but you know, probabilistically and not, not all the completely accurately."
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"text": " But I wouldn't want to say that pixels are conscious. They're just part of my headset that's given me access to the consciousness. So I want to say that consciousness is fundamental. It's the fundamental existence. And what we call space-time is a fairly trivial headset that some consciousnesses use, but probably most don't. Probably there's a variety of much more interesting headsets out there than just a four-dimensional one."
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"text": " If you see a frog, are you interacting with consciousness inside the frog or not?"
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"text": " not inside the frog but i meant it's sort of like the frog is like the pixels on my screen that's uh giving me access to certain aspects of consciousness so but the but the frog internally has a feeling of i don't know what it might have a feeling of a mosquito or something like that a feeling of of uh it it has a an inner experience all right yes yes we understand steven so let's say there's a frog feeling sub one and then a frog feeling sub two"
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"text": " Well, well, yeah, I would say that there is a conscious experience that I'm interacting with a conscious experience or a series of experiences behind the frog. And in the case of the LLM, there is going to be beyond the headset, conscious experiences, but it's not going to be what we typically think of as somehow a physical machine gave rise to consciousness."
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"text": " It's rather that even the very components of the computer that are running the LLM are like pixels on my headset and behind that is consciousness."
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"text": " Absolutely. So it's like the LLM is the digest of eight billion souls and that's the way you see it? That's right. So it's really a bunch of conscious agents outside of space-time and we are opening different portals into consciousness beyond our headset."
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"text": " So we humans are sort of the ultimate seat of those elements of consciousness in your view. Is that right? Not at all. We're probably among the less sophisticated ones. So what's an example of a more sophisticated one? Well, our headset has only got four dimensions. Why not have consciousnesses that are using headsets with a billion dimensions?"
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"text": " But I mean, but then I'm a little surprised, you know, in we, I mean, so do you view our sort of, if you imagine, first of all, do you believe there are laws of physics, for example, or do you believe that there are, in other words, are there things that are laws on top of which our brains and the electrochemistry of them and so on operate?"
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"text": " What do you think that it's sort of that is there some substrate underneath or are you somehow imagining that your scientific theory is built I mean okay for example we could imagine that you never had a theory of physics all you had in physics was a collection of experimental results."
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"text": " And you would have a bunch of you know you could even imagine sort of axioms about how i've seen that this thing correlates with that thing and we would have this kind of uh sort of um observational version of physics that never had anything sort of underneath. I'm just curious how do you imagine kind of the the nature of kind of what's happening in brains relating to sort of the substrate or the potentially laws of physics. Right so"
},
{
"end_time": 768.2,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 738.797,
"text": " So my view is very, very similar to what some high energy theoretical physicists are doing right now, which they're looking for for new principles and structures beyond space time. So this is Neemar Kani Hamed and a bunch of other people. There's the European Research Council just announced the universe plus project and put putting 10 million euros into what are called positive geometries beyond space time and beyond quantum theory. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 793.251,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 768.695,
"text": " They just had their first workshop in February where they brought together about a hundred PhDs in mathematics and theoretical physics. What they've discovered are these new structures beyond space-time called positive geometries, amplituhedron, the sociohedron, cosmological polytopes, that their volumes encode scattering amplitudes."
},
{
"end_time": 822.995,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 793.848,
"text": " Yeah, I used to do particle physics when I was a kid. I know these things are these things are a bit more recent than that. But I mean, I think the thing to understand about sort of particle physics and where it's gone is I think what you're describing is kind of the limit of what one can view as the S matrix approach to particle physics. I mean, you know, the one view of what happens when sort of particles interact is you see all the details of what's happening and the mechanism of the interaction."
},
{
"end_time": 846.442,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 823.37,
"text": " Another approach that heisenberg introduced was just this we don't know what's happening inside we're just going to say what are the things that are coming in what are the initial states what are the final states and we're just going to define this thing we call it the s matrix that sort of describes the transformation from initial states to final states without having to address this question about sort of the mechanism of what's happening inside"
},
{
"end_time": 858.763,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 846.442,
"text": " you know it's a thing that i learned recently is a piece of uh history of science trivia but it's interesting to me at least is about how heisenberg ended up coming up with the s matrix okay so the the um"
},
{
"end_time": 889.326,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 859.326,
"text": " You know, one of the things that's relevant to, you know, my efforts to understand fundamental physics is the question of, you know, what's discrete, what's continuous, you know, back in antiquity, you know, people are arguing about everything, you know, is matter can dispute or continuous and so on that finally got resolved at the end of the 19th century, basically. And yes, you know, matter is discrete, it's made of molecules. We can see Brownian motion, all those kinds of things. And then very soon after, you know, light is consistent with being thought of as being discrete."
},
{
"end_time": 898.865,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 889.326,
"text": " At the time hundred and something years ago most of the office for the tests were convinced that space was also discrete but."
},
{
"end_time": 926.954,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 899.087,
"text": " They kept on trying to make that work from a mathematical point of view and particularly make it compatible with relativity and they kept on failing and Heisenberg, as I recently learned, was kind of in the middle of that whole effort when he said, I just can't make this work. And he said, forget it all. I'm not going to try and describe the mechanism. I'm not going to describe what's happening in space. I'm just going to set up the S matrix and say, you know, this is given this initial configuration. What, you know, how will that translate to final configurations?"
},
{
"end_time": 952.585,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 926.954,
"text": " So I think, you know, it is certainly possible to, you know, in terms of what we experience in the world, there's no question that you can describe our experience of the world, just in terms of kind of the initial states, the final states, you can describe just, you know, as I was mentioning, sort of an axiomatic physics, where all you describe is what relates to what, and you don't really talk about what the underlying substrate, the mechanism of physics is."
},
{
"end_time": 980.64,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 952.585,
"text": " i think that's a a and it's interesting you know in our models of physics at some level that's what's happening at some level what really matters are things like causal graphs let's say how you know one event relates to another event the question of what is the you know how are those events kind of uh what's you know when we start setting up things like space and time space and time are very different in our kinds of models"
},
{
"end_time": 1008.814,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 980.64,
"text": " But when we when we sort of say, this is a lump of space, it's that's something which is something we can do as a convenience for understanding what's going on. But ultimately, in terms of our experience, what matters is this causal graph of relationships between events. So I think I mean, in that, you know, so I'm, I'm, I'm certainly on board with the idea that what matters to us is"
},
{
"end_time": 1034.155,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1008.814,
"text": " Just this cause of events now whether that means and for example that the very construction of space for instance is something that i view as being kind of a coincidental feature of our scale in the universe. That is no the fact that we say there's a state of space at a particular moment in time yes you know i look around this room it's you know i can see maybe ten meters away."
},
{
"end_time": 1061.305,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1034.155,
"text": " I you know lights gets to me in a microsecond from ten meters away but it takes me milliseconds to process what i saw and so i kind of integrated this whole you know i've aggregated all those photons that are coming in and i can reasonably say there's a state of space that i can talk about and then that might change over time whereas if i was for example i don't know if i thought a million times faster than i do then"
},
{
"end_time": 1089.462,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1061.305,
"text": " You know i wouldn't probably integrate space and i wouldn't talk about space and if somebody told me oh by the way there's this way of thinking about the physical world that involves the idea of space i'd say well that's kind of interesting but it's not necessarily something that is relevant to my particular way of observing the world so i i mean i. I think that's a i don't disagree that the the construction of space is a feature of certain details of us."
},
{
"end_time": 1119.411,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1089.804,
"text": " Being the way that we are, so to speak. I agree and that seems to be what the this universe plus the positive geometry approach to physics is after as well. One of their banners is they say space time is doomed. It cannot be fundamental because it ceases to have operational meaning beyond the Planck scale. So they're actually looking for new foundations for physics entirely outside of space time and remarkably entirely beyond quantum theory. So these new structures, for example, have no Hilbert spaces."
},
{
"end_time": 1131.869,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1120.026,
"text": " And they're saying there are no Hilbert spaces here. There is no unitarity and so forth. This is beyond quantum theory, but they want to get space time and quantum theory emerging together from"
},
{
"end_time": 1154.258,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1132.329,
"text": " Yeah, I'm not sure that's the best way to do it. I think one of the things, you know, I have to say, I did physics when I was much younger and then I haven't, didn't do physics for a long time and then kind of got back into doing it when I realized that a bunch of things that I'd figured out for other reasons were sort of converging on giving us a view of how physics might work."
},
{
"end_time": 1182.824,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1154.258,
"text": " And it's been super exciting to me to actually you know i think i think we got it and i think we know how it works and i think nema and folks like that i know know something about what we've done but i think that the paradigm is is it's interesting because the paradigm is a bit different from traditional mathematical physics. But there are very beautiful connections to lots of work that's been done in traditional mathematical physics sorry just a moment the paradigm of space time is doomed or the paradigm of the amplitude he drawn."
},
{
"end_time": 1212.381,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1183.507,
"text": " No, no, the paradigm of what people call Wolfram physics project. I mean, it's something where sort of the foundational machine code is very computational. What that turns into at the level of things that we can do experiments on and so on is sort of looks much more like traditional mathematical physics. And what's really cool is that a bunch of limits of our model clearly are kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1235.708,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1213.114,
"text": " map into things that have been studied in traditional mathematical physics and that's that's kind of what you would hope would be the case because you know what we're trying to do is is deal with something that is sort of a lower level machine code of the structure of the universe the structure of reality basically um than than the things you know i i'd always thought of what i was doing is kind of going underneath space and time"
},
{
"end_time": 1251.476,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1235.708,
"text": " Something which is sort of more fundamental than space and time i think it is not helped the progress of a lot of kind of physics that people have sort of had this idea that space and time of the same kind of thing which is kind of i think."
},
{
"end_time": 1273.933,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1251.476,
"text": " You know in terms of doing the ideas that is a doomed idea that was that was the thing that you know i'm starting didn't have that idea that idea came in when minkowski said it's really cool that there's this quadratic form that we can write with space pieces in a time piece and they all sort of put together and that's how kind of this concept of space time was was born."
},
{
"end_time": 1287.176,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1273.933,
"text": " And i think it's sort of a mistake because i think that you know time as i see it is this kind of progressive application of computational rules and space is this thing that you can"
},
{
"end_time": 1311.169,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1287.5,
"text": " you can reasonably construct as a way to describe what's in the universe. It's kind of the structure, there's sort of a data structure of the universe that you can slice into pieces of space. You could slice it into quite different things as well. And, you know, I think it's a feature of observers like us, I think, that we believe in space. I mean, it's the same thing that"
},
{
"end_time": 1338.404,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1311.459,
"text": " The fact that we believe in fluids, as opposed to just saying they're all a bunch of molecules bouncing around. That's a feature of observers like us, and not necessarily a feature of all observers. I mean, I do think, by the way, in terms of dimension, you mentioned, you know, is three plus one dimensions kind of the fundamental thing? I'm sure the answer is no. And, you know, my guess is that there is some"
},
{
"end_time": 1349.275,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1338.695,
"text": " Totally obvious feature of the nature of the observations that we make. That leads us to believe that the universe is three plus one dimensional i mean and you know."
},
{
"end_time": 1379.053,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1349.616,
"text": " In terms of sort of the computational kind of representation of the universe, it really doesn't make much difference that it's three plus one dimensional. We could as well be, you know, exploring it on some one dimensional space filling curve or some such other thing. It's, you know, I think that's a, I'd love to know what feature of us makes us believe that it's three plus one dimensional. Right. Right. So you have the, you're really at right, which is all, all the possible different computational rules and"
},
{
"end_time": 1406.937,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1379.343,
"text": " And our projection of that really add into a three plus one dimensional space time is just one of an infinite number of different projections you could take, right? Yes. Yes, indeed. I think the thing that has been very exciting to me and was not something I saw coming at all was the way in which one can, given the idea of the really add the way in which one can derive the known laws of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1423.626,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1407.619,
"text": " And that's something that you know if you'd asked me five years ago even would that be a way to derive general relativity derived quantum mechanics. I would have said well there might be an underlying theory from which those emerge."
},
{
"end_time": 1450.794,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1423.951,
"text": " But I don't think that there would be any way to that would make those theories necessary. Those are theories which just happen to be the way they are because the universe happens to be the way it is. If you'd asked me about second world thermodynamics, for example, I would have said, as people have said for a hundred and something years, that yeah, it's probably derivable in some way, but we don't quite know how to do it. But the thing that's been super surprising to me is that"
},
{
"end_time": 1471.698,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1451.186,
"text": " General to the quantum mechanics and it turns out the second law all seem to be derivable. What's the assumption that you need to drive them well the really add doesn't really have assumptions the really add is just this abstract thing that you set up the assumptions have to do with what kind of observers we are."
},
{
"end_time": 1491.954,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1472.022,
"text": " And, you know, it seems like there are two critical assumptions, although I'm guessing that there are actually more assumptions that I haven't correctly identified yet. But the two that have identified is, you know, we're computationally bounded. We don't get to trace every detail. We only get to notice certain aggregate things, and we believe we're persistent in time."
},
{
"end_time": 1520.52,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1492.261,
"text": " We believe that, which is something I'd be really interested to talk about is kind of the, you know, to me, it seems like a crucial feature of observers like us is that we have this persistent thread of experience. We don't, and we have, we have a single persistent thread of experience. We, you know, we, it's not the case that we kind of are"
},
{
"end_time": 1550.555,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1520.947,
"text": " You know, have our multiple thoughts kind of branching out in all possible ways, nor is it the case that we are sort of here just for a moment and then it's a different us at the next moment. We kind of have this perception at least that we have a sort of consistent thread of experience. And anyway, the, I mean, from point of view of physics, the big surprise to me is those two assumptions seem to be sufficient to allow us to derive the laws of physics that we have."
},
{
"end_time": 1579.428,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1550.93,
"text": " Now clearly if those assumptions were changed, if we were observers different from the way we are, we would get different physics. We might not be able to communicate with those other observers who have such very different qualities, but those other observers, were we to be able to get inside them, their view of the physical world would be different. So there's an infinite number of different views of the world that could be in general relativity is just one of the infinite varieties of them, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 1607.858,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1579.735,
"text": " For observers like us. Well, for observers like us, general relativity is inevitable. But not for observers, just for observers like us. Yeah, for observers like us. But there are conceivably other observers that don't observe general relativity. Well, the problem with that, and the reason this is tricky is, you know, I view, for example, you know, the weather as having a mind of its own. But the weather"
},
{
"end_time": 1635.145,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1608.712,
"text": " one might think and this is a question of what its internal quotes conscious experiences might have an experience of the world that might not have general relativity as one of the things that it experiences the problem is that as we were talking about before you imagine that i'm enough like you that you can kind of get some idea of sort of what's going on inside but"
},
{
"end_time": 1660.828,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1635.367,
"text": " In the case of the weather, I don't think it's enough like us that we can have a good projection of what its internal view of things is. So while it may be, while we could abstractly think of it as an observer, it isn't an observer with which we can kind of have, where we can translate its kind of internal perception of things into our internal perception of things."
},
{
"end_time": 1671.886,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1661.63,
"text": " What is your view on conscious experiences in the relationship to the Ruliat? Is the Ruliat more fundamental than conscious experiences or is consciousness more fundamental than the Ruliat in your view?"
},
{
"end_time": 1697.688,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1673.729,
"text": " Well, I don't know. I mean, I think the rule yard is just an abstract object and you know, the fact and it is my, uh, sort of assumption perhaps, but it's working really well. That sort of everything that exists is somehow part of the rule yard, which means we are too, which means that the rule yard is sort of a substrate for everything that we are."
},
{
"end_time": 1711.374,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1698.012,
"text": " Now the question of whether you can go into the really add and say i'm pointed something and say that's the don hoffman set of teams in the really add so to speak and then what special features that might have."
},
{
"end_time": 1735.35,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1711.834,
"text": " That's that's that's something i mean we know a certain amount about that there's a lot more to figure out about that if you're asking is there something i mean for this is a complicated thing about what science is and what the point of science is and so on i mean there's there's there's the universe doing its thing and there's us having some narrative about what's going on in the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 1758.387,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1735.896,
"text": " i think you know science i think is about sort of taking not what the universe does but sort of trying to develop a narrative that we can kind of play in our minds that can say things about what the universe is doing in other words it's not you know i think you're you're you mentioned the concept of a sort of headset"
},
{
"end_time": 1767.5,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1758.387,
"text": " For us to proceed what's actually going on out there so to speak and i agree that what what matters to our science."
},
{
"end_time": 1789.582,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1767.824,
"text": " Is what we perceive mean the things that are not done and if you look at the history of science what has happened in the history of science is we've been progressively able to perceive more kinds of things in the telescopes microscopes electronic amplifiers all these kinds of things and we have then you know found ways to describe the world that we can then see so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 1815.162,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1789.582,
"text": " I wouldn't be surprised if in the future there'll be more kinds of sensors that we somehow managed to transduce into the things that we go into the built-in sensors that we have and then will will will want to describe more things about the world but i think in your question of. I mean for me i've always thought of consciousness is incredibly slippery concept."
},
{
"end_time": 1841.937,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1815.367,
"text": " And so I haven't been that interested in kind of exactly how do I define it and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, perhaps to my detriment. But the one thing that was interesting to me a couple of years ago was realizing that I needed sort of pragmatic definitions of consciousness in order to understand more about how physics works."
},
{
"end_time": 1860.23,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1842.466,
"text": " In other words, it's, you know, for example, it's kind of like, if I say, okay, there's consciousness and observers like us have consciousness. What is the, what are the operational consequences of that? For example,"
},
{
"end_time": 1885.162,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1861.049,
"text": " So for example one of them i think is this thing about single threads of experience. I think that's a now whether what do you say that's a defining feature of consciousness or not i don't know that's a question of what you mean by the word it's but i think there's a there's a significant feature of us as observers that we have this concept that we have this belief"
},
{
"end_time": 1906.425,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1885.162,
"text": " That we have a single thread of experience and i don't know you know i'm sort of wondered what it's like you know if you could be in a kind of a multiway trance so to speak where really. Your brain is thinking about two different kind of you you have you know you have two different time narratives going on in your brain i can't imagine what that will be like."
},
{
"end_time": 1930.589,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1906.425,
"text": " I'm interested in something very very simple like the taste of mint."
},
{
"end_time": 1956.084,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1931.63,
"text": " And so the taste of mint as a conscious experience. So to keep it really, really simple, instead of all the threads and so forth, just a single specific conscious experience that an observer might have and how that would be related to the Rulliad. So for example, would you want to say that there's a computational substrate in the Rulliad that is, for example, necessary and sufficient for the experience of mint to occur?"
},
{
"end_time": 1979.974,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1956.63,
"text": " Or not. I don't know what the experience of mint is. I mean, you know, in other words, I, I, I, you know, I have some experience of it. If you say, let's kind of scientificize that experience. Okay. What do we do to make it? And you know, this is the question and part of what science is and what science aspires to be."
},
{
"end_time": 2009.258,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1980.35,
"text": " Because there are, you know, if we say, how do I make that something that you can also sort of observe? You can also be part of because the experience that I have internally, as we discussed before, is not something other than by extrapolation. You don't know what that experience is. Right. So the question is, can I make a transportable version that is kind of a, a, a community science version of my experience of mint?"
},
{
"end_time": 2031.271,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2009.804,
"text": " Or is it just something that happens inside me that can never be broken out of me and which is therefore not in some sense you know it isn't community science so to speak it isn't what we usually think of as being what we usually aspire to have in kind of the operation of science so if i say how do i break out that experience well i could start saying"
},
{
"end_time": 2058.524,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2031.271,
"text": " You know, and by the way, it's going to get complicated very quickly because you could say, okay, I experienced this, a bunch of neurons in my brain, you know, are chirping away. And, um, you know, what does that mean for, you know, that these neurons are chirping away? Well, we can say no doubt the neurons in my brain that chop away at the, at the taste of mint will be different from the neurons in your brain that chop away. And we don't even know how to map, you know, neuron number,"
},
{
"end_time": 2080.06,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2058.524,
"text": " If we were nematodes, we might know how to map our neurons, but we're humans with a lot more neurons and we don't know how to map our neurons and there won't be a unique mapping from one brain to another. I mean, in other words, a nematode, sort of interesting thought experiment, could one nematode communicate scientifically to another nematode its internal experience of the taste of mint?"
},
{
"end_time": 2094.241,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2080.64,
"text": " Because after all the nematodes have a fixed set of nerve cells where we can say cell number 312 fired in this case and then the other nematode would say oh yeah I know what cell 312 firing feels like."
},
{
"end_time": 2113.114,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2094.684,
"text": " But it's a very different thing with us we in order to communicate a concept from one human brain to another we kind of have to package it in a robust form that will allow that communication and the you know the number one robust form that we have is human language."
},
{
"end_time": 2142.875,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2113.114,
"text": " Where we're taking all those random nerve firings that you think of when you imagine the taste of mint and you're packaging those up and you're saying to me the taste of mint and that's unpacking in my brain and maybe I get some notion that is something, some correspondence. I don't know what the correspondence is between your version of the taste of mint and my version of the taste of mint. Although if we were nematodes, we might know because it might be the very same nerve cell that was firing."
},
{
"end_time": 2162.176,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2142.875,
"text": " But we have a more general notion of concepts than that. And I think, you know, to this idea of being able to take a bundle of neural activity and package it up in a robust form so that it can be moved to another brain and unpacked."
},
{
"end_time": 2191.527,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2162.295,
"text": " I think that that's probably one of the key things that sort of our species discovered, which is that you can have things like words that are kind of transportable from one brain to another. And I guess, you know, I, there's sort of a fun analogy that, um, which is, you know, when you have a particle like an electron or a photon, a quark or something like this, one of the things it's doing is it is a, it is a carrier of existence through space and time."
},
{
"end_time": 2217.415,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2192.039,
"text": " That is the electron is a thing that you can identify as being the same electron when it moved to another place or another time. And that's sort of similar to this idea that concepts are also sort of transportable things. I mean, in our view of the way this works, you know, an electron is a something capable of pure motion, physical space."
},
{
"end_time": 2231.084,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2217.875,
"text": " A concept is something capable of motion of pure motion in real space. I mean, but by pure motion, what I mean is it is not obvious in our models, for example, that a thing can move without change."
},
{
"end_time": 2261.032,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2231.954,
"text": " So in physical space, you know, you move a book around, for example, and if the if it's near a space time singularity, the thing will be distorted like crazy. But most of the time we say I move a book from here to there, and it's still the same book. And I think that this this possibility of pure motion in our models is something that you have to kind of establish abstractly that that's possible."
},
{
"end_time": 2279.77,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2261.288,
"text": " And by the way, the idea that there is promotion again depends on observers because that book, you know, you moved it and some things about it changed. I mean, in our models, it's made of different atoms of space when it moved to a different place. And yet to us, it's the same book."
},
{
"end_time": 2304.991,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2280.282,
"text": " And so, similarly, I would say, you know, when you talk about the concept of mint, of the taste of mint, the experience of the taste of mint, it is a non-trivial fact, if it's true, that that is a transportable thing through time, that there is a consistent, persistent thing that is the engram or whatever it is that represents that concept,"
},
{
"end_time": 2330.657,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2305.282,
"text": " And that it is robust and i think that that if you know the version of it that's locked inside your brain at some moment in time i don't think that's transportable i don't think that's science sizable i think that's the thing that you would say it is i mean if we were thinking about in terms of an LLM it would be some little you know some some activation of some neuron at some moment"
},
{
"end_time": 2359.753,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2330.964,
"text": " And you know, then it's gone and we wouldn't say, you know, and we would argue, was that a conscious experience of the LLM? Well, it isn't robust. It's not something where we can pick it up and say, look, it's a conscious experience because it was a fleeting thing that just was there at that moment and then disappeared. And I would claim that, that, uh, that absent some way to robustify what you're talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 2389.548,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2360.35,
"text": " There isn't really a way to extract. I mean, if you say, show me that conscious experience, what is it? You know, physicalize that conscious experience. You can't physicalize it. So what does that mean? So to speak, I would claim that it is, it is not an obvious fact that things can be made robust enough to be sort of picked out as a separate thing. I mean, I'm reminded of, I have to say in your kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 2418.439,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2389.957,
"text": " What is that essence of a conscious experience? I'm reminded of something that I kind of feel silly about myself because, you know, when I was a kid, 1960s and so on, it was, you know, you would run into people who would talk about sort of the eternal soul. And, you know, if you were kind of a physics-oriented kid as I was, you would always say things like, but how much does a soul weigh?"
},
{
"end_time": 2436.459,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2418.439,
"text": " You know how can this be a real thing that you know what how much does it way you know when if a soul departs a body does that mean you know you lose a microgram or something you know how much is it why there must be some sort of if it's real it must have those physical attributes."
},
{
"end_time": 2454.599,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2436.988,
"text": " What's I realized in later on that's a very silly thing to have thought because you know computation the kind of the the idea of a sort of an eternal soul is very is kind of a a sort of primitive way I think to talk about."
},
{
"end_time": 2480.811,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2455.026,
"text": " You know abstract computation and it will be a very foolish thing to ask sort of how much does the abstract computation way and I kind of suspect and I'm not untangling it in real time as well as I might but I'm kind of suspecting that your kind of notion of the the intrinsic conscious experience of something and you saying look you can't pull it out and physicalize it is the same kind of mistake."
},
{
"end_time": 2506.749,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2482.756,
"text": " So let me see if I can paraphrase. So in your ontology, the rulliad is fundamental or close to fundamental, and the rules there, the computations. But any color, shape, motion, taste, experiences, those conscious experiences are not part of the fundamental ontology that you're considering. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood?"
},
{
"end_time": 2528.302,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2507.739,
"text": " Okay, so, you know, in matters this fundamental, there are inevitably many different ways to look at the same elephant. Okay. Okay. So the really add, and for example, its representation in terms of computation and rules and so on, is the way that I understand best. And that I think people in general understand best."
},
{
"end_time": 2558.404,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2528.677,
"text": " It is probably not the only way to think about it. So for example, just as mentioned before, you can think about physics either as a kind of an underlying mechanistic structure that makes things happen, or you can invent kind of an axiomatic physics where you just say, this is a thing that's true. That's the thing that's true. And then you have to fit all the pieces together. So similarly, when it comes to the rule yard, there is certainly, I like to think of it from sort of the bottom up."
},
{
"end_time": 2578.643,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2558.575,
"text": " I can represented in terms of computations and things like this but in the end sort of observers like us. I'm making various observations about it and one could imagine reconstructing yet. It's i don't know how to do it exactly but one could imagine saying all i know is what i observe."
},
{
"end_time": 2599.565,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2578.643,
"text": " And that is that's my reality so to speak and now from that reality i can you know i could imagine a theory in which there is this really add thing with computations and so on my way of thinking about it the way i prefer to think about it just because i guess that's the way my particular mind is built."
},
{
"end_time": 2624.906,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2599.565,
"text": " Is from this kind of hard structure of computation building up to something where i might hope to be able to find somewhere in the really add a thing that corresponds to you know a brain with a feeling of mint and things like this. That's that's that's the way that for me is the most sort of gives me the most sort of hope of being able to make scientific progress."
},
{
"end_time": 2654.48,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2624.906,
"text": " but i don't think that's the only way to think about it i think you could as well say all i'm going to do like like the s matrix for example you know forget the mechanism all we want to know is the transformation from initial states to final states and we're going to just say there's this thing called s that represents that transformation and we're then going to talk about the properties of s i mean this was the you know the in the late 1950s early 1960s this was kind of what people thought was going to be the way that particle physics works"
},
{
"end_time": 2676.647,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2654.957,
"text": " in in the strange electricity of science those ideas have come back again but you know at the time it was sort of a competition would we describe the world by saying there's just this s matrix and we're going to figure out properties of the s matrix by having i wouldn't call them conscious experiences but particle accelerator experiences of the s matrix that's"
},
{
"end_time": 2694.599,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2676.647,
"text": " You know door number one door number two are we going to figure out the mechanism you know how all these particles are structured and how they you know what the little interaction vertices are and all this kind of thing that was door number two in in the nineteen seventies door number two one in particle physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2724.377,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2694.599,
"text": " In, uh, but I think it's, it's not the case that, you know, and we're seeing, in fact, a return to more of the kind of S matrix approach to saying, we don't really know what's going on inside, but we can describe certain constraints based on what we observe. And I absolutely think that there's a way of constructing kind of, uh, sort of the Ruliat, you know, you could, you could invent the Ruliat as the afterthought. Having started from something, which is just axioms about observers."
},
{
"end_time": 2753.285,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2724.684,
"text": " And my particular way of thinking about it, I like to start from something that I can, you know, run computer experiments on and that happens to, you know, that I at least imagine that I have a reasonably good handle on from a sort of, from the way my mind works, but I don't think it's the only way to think about it. Right. You know, for me, if you say, uh, you know, only start from things that an observer can observe, you know, which is kind of the S matrix idea."
},
{
"end_time": 2779.121,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2753.558,
"text": " Only start from things that are sort of externally observable. Sure, one could do that. I don't know how to set up that formalism. I mean, you know, I've got some ideas about that, but that's, I think for me, it's much more difficult than the bottom up approach. But I don't think it's, I think both approaches are perfectly viable. It's just a question of if one's goal is to have kind of a narrative description of how the world works."
},
{
"end_time": 2802.261,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2779.121,
"text": " What can make a choice between those approaches you know which is the way that is most likely to lead to a narrative that for example i understand. I mean again that this is and for me the narrative that has to do with really add and computation and so on is easier to understand it is more grounded for me than a description in terms of kind of starting with consciousness so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 2831.971,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2803.063,
"text": " Right. So I think I'm understanding better. So to me, of course, I love the computational approach and the mathematically precise approach. That's what we need to do in science. And I guess what I'm doing is saying that the computations and the mathematics are describing the activity of consciousness as opposed to the activity of something that's not conscious. In other words, what I'm doing is biting the bullet up front and saying fundamental in my ontology are things like"
},
{
"end_time": 2852.551,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2832.79,
"text": " Observers that have conscious experiences so because every observer if you imagine an observer that has no conscious experiences It's not really clear what we're talking about an observer with no conscious experiences Is Nothing I don't know what that means exactly. It's so I mean you and Leibniz seem to have a lot in common and"
},
{
"end_time": 2882.108,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2852.79,
"text": " Probably so, except that he was much smarter. One of the things that I only very recently understood about Leibniz, as I mentioned earlier, is that Leibniz could not imagine a way that mind could arise from non-mind. And I think you think the same thing. That is, you can't imagine a way that mind can arise from non-mind. I can imagine how cognition, intelligence, and things like that could arise. But conscious experiences, what we call qualia,"
},
{
"end_time": 2906.8,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2882.688,
"text": " I would be delighted to see the first scientific theory that ever tries to do that right now. There's nothing on the table Well, I mean so so what would I mean this question of what can arise from what? Is a first of all, you have to know what the thing you're trying to get to is, you know, like like people say, you know you know can life arise from non-life and"
},
{
"end_time": 2927.773,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2907.108,
"text": " And again it's a messy business because what do we mean by life if we mean the specifics of life on earth with r&a and cell membranes and all this kind of thing that's one question if we say you know the thing we scoop up from the marsh and soil and it does something amazing that we've never seen before you know it is that life is that not life."
},
{
"end_time": 2952.927,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2927.773,
"text": " No it's it's i think we have to know and i think one of the difficulties about what you're talking about is if we if you say can conscious experience arise from something other than conscious experience if if we don't know. If we don't have a general description of the target is very hard to answer that question just like if we say can life arise from non life and we have only one example of life."
},
{
"end_time": 2971.561,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2953.268,
"text": " Hello and if you say can conscious experience arise from something that isn't conscious experience and you ultimately have only one instance of that which is what's happening inside you. You don't even know that i have that same conscious experience so you have you know you're trying to explain kind of an end of one."
},
{
"end_time": 2998.933,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2971.561,
"text": " thing of how does the thing that you feel internally arise from something that sort of isn't you and so on how does that arise and i think that's a i mean i i'd be very interested to understand how one would you know how one would get a positive answer to that no words forget you know there isn't a good enough theory and we don't know the electrochemistry and we you know we can't see how aggregates of neurons behave and so on i you know"
},
{
"end_time": 3023.2,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2999.326,
"text": " There are obviously issues there, but there's a different question, which is, you know, how do I, what's the signal of success? Right. So one issue here is that as an observer, all I have are my conscious experiences. I actually, the notion of something physical beyond my conscious experiences is actually the leap."
},
{
"end_time": 3052.517,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3023.49,
"text": " Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. The only thing we have is what we, you know, it's the, the, uh, you know, cogito ergo sum type type story. Absolutely. And so we're on the same page on, on that. And, and, and I agree. I don't know that your world of experiences is anywhere similar to mine. I can never know that. But what I do know is that consciousness is what I know firsthand. What I call"
},
{
"end_time": 3080.998,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3052.961,
"text": " Inanimate matter is an extrapolation. What's directly available to me are experiences, conscious experiences. And what I call an unconscious physical world is an is an extrapolation that I'm making. What I only have are my conscious experiences. I have nothing else. Let's go back to I hadn't thought about this before this conversation, but let's go back to the nematodes. Okay, which have precisely defined"
},
{
"end_time": 3110.486,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3081.681,
"text": " You know, neural nets, where there really is a way to say, nematode number one feels this. And do you believe that if I could accurately measure kind of the electrochemistry of the nematode, that I would capture kind of that's the whole story? Or do you believe that there's something that is kind of beyond the physical that is kind of not capturable by any physical measurement?"
},
{
"end_time": 3119.753,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3111.067,
"text": " that is what you know is something about what the nematode feels. What we call physical is going to be something inside a four-dimensional space time."
},
{
"end_time": 3146.766,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3120.316,
"text": " which is going to be just what I as a particular observer can observe because I am the kind of observer I am. The reality beyond that four dimensional space time that I happen to observe is infinitely complicated and I may need to go to that other deeper reality to give you a full. So in that sense, what I can do in terms of a physical thing inside space time is probably trivial and probably inadequate. I understand. So, I mean, this is at some level"
},
{
"end_time": 3171.391,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3147.466,
"text": " You know, I could unkindly say it's kind of a Victorian theory, okay, because it posits that there is what we have physically in our minds, but what we can sort of, what we can sort of tell is there, but then there's a spirit world, which is beyond that, that might be, you know, for example, in the Ruliat,"
},
{
"end_time": 3183.899,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3171.749,
"text": " For sure in my view we see just tiny little slices of the really add and there's much more that for the things that i mean the okay so one of the questions is."
},
{
"end_time": 3205.247,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3184.326,
"text": " Is it enough for doing physics that we sample only that tiny slice of the really add it might not be. It might be the case that we would sample that slice through the ad and miracles would keep on happening weird things weird random things would keep on happening that kind of poke in from other parts of the really add that we weren't able to sense so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 3229.258,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3205.367,
"text": " And that in other words that we are that it isn't a closed system that the part of the really add that we are slicing the slice that we're taking isn't closed enough and so you know we constantly are being exposed to other things so an analogy in fluid dynamics for example most of the time it's okay to just think of a fluid is with a velocity field and things like that occasionally"
},
{
"end_time": 3241.374,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3229.599,
"text": " You actually you know if you're making a hypersonic airplane you have to care about the fact that the fluid is made of molecules but that's a rare case but it could be that there are things about the world."
},
{
"end_time": 3263.439,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3241.766,
"text": " Perhaps even your consciousness things about the world where aspects of the rule add poke through and it isn't it isn't self-consistent to just look at the slice we are we we know we can it can kind of know that we know that we can observe so that's an interesting question of to what extent"
},
{
"end_time": 3287.927,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3263.439,
"text": " Is the pocket of reducibility is i would call it the kind of slice where we can say things about what's gonna happen to what extent is that closed and to what extent does it have things feeding into it by the way there's an analogy of this in mathematics which is kind of to what extent can you do mathematics. At the level of kind of talking about things like the pythagorean theorem"
},
{
"end_time": 3317.722,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3288.114,
"text": " And what do you have to can you talk about the Pythagorean theorem or every time you mention it do you have to go back and say oh and the definition real numbers that i'm using is this and the following axioms etc etc etc just kind of like going down to the level of molecules and talking about the fluid so i think it is a it is a non-trivial claim but a thing that that i i think we are deriving and for example our models of physics that there is a sort of self-consistent layer"
},
{
"end_time": 3334.138,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3318.063,
"text": " that can be talked about merely in terms of general relativity and quantum mechanics and so on, without looking down below at the details of the whole hypergraph and all these atoms of space doing all their complicated things. It is a scientific claim"
},
{
"end_time": 3363.404,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3334.531,
"text": " that it is enough to merely look at this kind of continuum level of general activity and so on. By the way, a thing that we would really love to do is to see things, other things poking through. I mean, that's what, you know, when people observe molecules, you know, they have water and fluid, but yet they saw that these little grains of pollen were kicked around and brown in motion. And that showed there was something below just this fluid description of water."
},
{
"end_time": 3379.991,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3363.404,
"text": " And we'd love to find the same kind of thing for physical space and that's one of my big activities right now is trying to see you know is there an effect are we gonna be lucky because molecules people pretty lucky molecules were big enough you could actually see them in nineteen hundred so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 3408.882,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3380.23,
"text": " You know whether we will be able to see the atoms of space so to speak in in my lifetime i don't know um you know it's a question of you know what the what the scale is and and how clever we are and so on but i think that that um this this um you know this this whole idea of whether whether we are in a consistent bubble so to speak or whether we have to appeal to things sort of beyond our physics"
},
{
"end_time": 3427.142,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3409.582,
"text": " is a reasonable question i mean that is there are things where you know i'm hoping that there are observations that we can make with telescopes or maybe with other kinds of systems but there are observations that we can make in which the"
},
{
"end_time": 3453.319,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3427.585,
"text": " This nasty spiny parts of the really add will kind of poke through our usual continuum view of space. And so what you're, what you're asking, I think is in the case of conscious experience, is it enough to merely talk about kind of the laws of physics that we know, or is it, is that a place where there's a poke through from something beyond kind of the laws of physics that we know?"
},
{
"end_time": 3479.974,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3453.814,
"text": " I think that's a very important and useful question. And there's also another way of looking at this issue and that is if we were trying to build a scientific theory and we're trying to find as few assumptions as possible for our scientific theory, we believe in Occam's razor. And so, and we both agreed that as an observer, all I know are my conscious experiences. So whatever conscious experiences are, they're all I know as an observer."
},
{
"end_time": 3493.251,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3480.401,
"text": " So so in the ontology that i'm going to assume in my scientific theory i have a big choice i can either put conscious experiences in that ontology as found as foundational or not and if i choose not to."
},
{
"end_time": 3520.128,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3493.575,
"text": " Then I've given myself the scientific duty to explain where those experiences come from. So I either postulate that they are, I say upfront, these are part of the ontology. These are the assumptions I make, or I say, no, they're not part of the assumptions. I therefore have the duty to explain consciously. So it's my choice now. I would like to just to stop me for a second there. I mean, it depends on what"
},
{
"end_time": 3547.705,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3523.78,
"text": " Or something if you're doing a science that is about that then for sure But one of the things that happens in science, it's not obvious that it would be possible But it has proved possible is that you can separately look at physics biology chemistry You know, they have they have interfaces, but you can choose to concentrate on one aspect of the world"
},
{
"end_time": 3568.729,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3548.114,
"text": " And you know, an obvious question is, is there, you know, you might make the claim there is no meaningful science that can be done without in training consciousness in it. That would be a potential claim. That is not what has been the observation of the last few hundred years of science. The few last few hundred years of science has achieved a lot."
},
{
"end_time": 3592.5,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3569.121,
"text": " Without solving the problem that you say nobody has solved and i agree nobody has solved um the but you know so it's a question of what it is that you think you're going to do in your science now when you talk about outcomes razor and you know i don't know why outcomes razor is true i mean it's an it's an interesting criterion it's um in a sense the really add"
},
{
"end_time": 3620.247,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3592.995,
"text": " Denies Occam's razor because the really had has everything all these kinds of things going on in it at some level from the point of view of of abstract aesthetics The really odd is lovely because it assumes nothing but you know from the point of view of of you know, is it saying oh The the description of what's happening. For example, let's take an Occam's razor argument about what happens in a fluid and"
},
{
"end_time": 3648.575,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3620.828,
"text": " the outcomes razor argument would probably be if the fluid is flowing from here to there all the molecules inside it must be flowing in exactly that direction that will be wrong in other words so you know and in fact what's true is that's very complicated stuff going on it just happens that the level of looking at the whole fluid it can be described by saying the fluid goes from here to there so i don't think i mean i think it will be a mistake"
},
{
"end_time": 3675.23,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3648.575,
"text": " To say that there is something kind of there's any necessity if there's an ockham's razor that means anything it means something because of the way our minds work i mean one key feature of our minds is that they're very finite and you know we we take all the stuff going on in the world and we're trying to make a narrative about what's happening that is simple enough that we can stop in our minds and make inferences about it."
},
{
"end_time": 3697.039,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3675.23,
"text": " And for that, Occam's razor is very useful. Occasionally, things will poke through and be like, you know, Occam was wrong type thing. But, you know, I think it's, I think it's a feature, you know, I think perhaps one could even argue, you know, I've been on sort of the hunt for things that observers like us just take for granted."
},
{
"end_time": 3726.425,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3697.585,
"text": " And I think in some sense, the simplicity of explanation is something that we implicitly take for granted. Let me see if I understand you correctly. In the same way that we observe general relativity because of the kinds of observers we are in the Wolfram model and in the same way that we see quantum mechanics because of the kinds of observers we are in the Wolfram model, we also many people, many philosophers, many cognitive scientists, for instance, Don are willing to say, look, we can move beyond space time and we can find something that"
},
{
"end_time": 3752.466,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3726.698,
"text": " can give rise to the physics that we have. And then in part by doing so, they appeal to Occam's razor, but you're saying that also Occam's razor itself may be something that we find appealing because of the kinds of observers we are. Yes. That's interesting. Yes. I don't think Occam's razor, the Rulliard does not know Occam's razor. Now what's interesting about what you said is that by assuming nothing, you assume everything."
},
{
"end_time": 3774.428,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3752.756,
"text": " So in some sense, when you take Occam's razor to its pinnacle, you then undo Occam's razor to the utmost. Well, yes, in some sense, that's right. I mean, in some sense, you know, the by by assuming nothing and getting the Ruliyad, you have something where sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 3799.991,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3774.787,
"text": " To recover or comes razor in your observations of the really add is something is is is then a different sort of a different adventure. It's some but but i mean i want to come back to this idea. I mean this you take the point of view i think that there is a desire to construct conscious experience from something else."
},
{
"end_time": 3825.435,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3800.623,
"text": " And, and, you know, I agree, as I said, that it is like, you know, mechanism versus it's like the particle mechanism versus the S matrix and so on. There is, there are no doubt, complimentary descriptions of what's going on, which one is the easiest to build a formalism around is a matter of taste, probably."
},
{
"end_time": 3855.981,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3826.015,
"text": " And, you know, for me so far, I found it easiest to talk about the rule yard and so on and build up from, from that side of things. Now I will say that I'm pretty sure that there's a way of formulating a lot of the things that I've said about the rule yard, the principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility, all those kinds of things as essentially axiomatic statements about observers. That in other words, that one can, an alternative to going sort of bottom up"
},
{
"end_time": 3877.312,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3856.51,
"text": " Is to simply say, for example, you know, Einstein did this in formulation, special relativity. He simply said, you know, there's the observers can't determine sort of simultaneity in an abstract fashion. Observers have these limitations and he took that as axiomatic. And from that, he constructed a physical theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3900.282,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3877.688,
"text": " And that was a sort of observer-first construction of a physical theory. In our way of deriving spectral relativity, it is not observer-first. It doesn't work that way. I suppose it makes one kind of observer-related assumption, which is it says the only thing that"
},
{
"end_time": 3926.988,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3900.913,
"text": " We can in the sense pay attention to is the causal graph of relations of causal relationships between events. We are not in a position to independently discuss the relationship of atoms of space. The only way that we can sort of say anything about atoms of space is by their effect on other things and ultimately implicitly by their effect on us as observers."
},
{
"end_time": 3952.739,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3927.79,
"text": " But now observers like us, as we've discussed, have conscious experiences or we have nothing, right? If we have no conscious experiences, we have nothing that we've observed. I, I don't quite understand that. So let's walk through that for a second. Okay. So, so I mean, one of the problems that I'm having is you mention sort of conscious experience and you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3978.695,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3953.473,
"text": " I certainly have this internal feeling that I'm having conscious experiences. I, I try to imagine what it would be like if, you know, at some time in the future, you know, well, it is a few, a few, few different cases. Okay. So let's say, uh, let's say somebody does molecular scale manufacturing of a brain just like mine."
},
{
"end_time": 4008.37,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3979.189,
"text": " And somebody can, you know, scan my brain and, uh, you know, reconstruct every molecule. Then first question is, does that sort of copy of my brain also have conscious experiences or not? So you're asking me. No, I'm asking you, does that, does that in your view of things would a, okay. So I'm going to, you know, we're going to go through several different levels because one thing would be a."
},
{
"end_time": 4034.377,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4008.848,
"text": " A one question would be is a molecular scale copy of my brain able to have conscious experiences now you could say no you could say there's more there there's other pieces of the really out there poking into your brain that aren't part of the canon of physics that we know right now that will mean that the thing you copied of just molecules you didn't copy enough you could say that i don't know if you are saying that."
},
{
"end_time": 4049.104,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4034.991,
"text": " What will my now should we be more like again the zoom screen so right now i see pixels on the zoom screen some of them are your face and some of them are of inanimate objects in the back and i could try to get a mathematical model of how the pixels of your face."
},
{
"end_time": 4078.285,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4049.838,
"text": " dynamically behave versus the pixels of the books behind you that behave in different ways. And I wouldn't want to say that therefore because I understood I've got a model of how the pixels on your face are doing some other complicated computation different from the pixels of the wall behind you. That doesn't give me any real insight into the nature of the consciousness itself because in every case all I'm dealing with is just an interface. I'm not dealing with the consciousness itself. I'm seeing consciousness through an interface."
},
{
"end_time": 4107.193,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4078.609,
"text": " So space time, I'm saying is nothing but another zoom screen. I understand. Can I make a comment here? So there are two ways of copying. We can copy Stephen by duplicating the window right now. But then there's another way where if you clone Stephen or if Stephen happened to be cloned. So if there was an embryo and it's split, now would you say that, look, this embryo is operating in space time. So in some sense, this embryo is operating at the level of the pixels on our zoom screen. We could say that."
},
{
"end_time": 4133.063,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4107.517,
"text": " but then we would also see the two Stevens and say that both Stevens are conscious. I don't think that's what's, I don't think that's what Tom is saying. I know that this may not be what you're saying, Steven, but I'm, I'm curious. So what would be the difference in the embryo case splitting versus copying Steven that makes one not conscious? I think, I think we need to define this more. You know, I think one thing is if I had an identical twin,"
},
{
"end_time": 4160.469,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4133.729,
"text": " You would obviously believe, I think that my identical twin, if the identical term was alive, would be just as conscious as me. Is that true? Right. I would, I would, I think it would be the best inference to make is that, you know, if it's fine. Okay. So the identical twin is conscious. Now let's imagine that in some future state of molecular manufacturing, I can make a molecule by molecule copy of myself."
},
{
"end_time": 4188.609,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4161.988,
"text": " Would the resulting molecule by molecule copy of myself be as conscious as I am or not? Well, so the answer is going to be partly about what we think about this space-time interface and its relationship to consciousness. So if we're taking a point of view in which space-time particles somehow give rise to conscious experiences by their complex interactions,"
},
{
"end_time": 4214.821,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4189.309,
"text": " Then from that point of view, of course, I would then say, well, if those physical interactions in your body gave you consciousness, then presumably identical ones in another space time body that's identical to yours, but also, but what I'm denying is that physical objects inside space time actually give rise to consciousness, that space time itself is nothing but an experience of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 4239.804,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4215.128,
"text": " So I don't think that's the same issue. I mean, in other words, I think that that first point is if you, you know, you, it is not obvious that if I copy a proton, for example, that it could be the case that there's a special proton that is a proton in a conscious mind."
},
{
"end_time": 4267.329,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4240.213,
"text": " That is different from proton from other protons and it could be that when i copy the proton. It is no longer a conscious proton it's a it's kind of a you know it's a it's a lame dead proton you know i copied the thing but it wasn't it wasn't conscious anymore just like it could easily be the case that if i copied every molecule that the thing that i get wouldn't be alive it wouldn't have you know wouldn't be it wouldn't be operating so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 4297.312,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4267.585,
"text": " I mean it's it's you know you can have a simple analogy in if i copy a lump of computer memory but that lump of computer memory is not being that there's no you know program counter that's starting to execute instructions in it that lump of computer memory while it is a copy of another lump of computer memory it's not it's not alive in the same sense that the that the original computer memory was but so i think i think the first distinction is whether there is"
},
{
"end_time": 4327.585,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4297.892,
"text": " whether the the sort of electrons and protons and so on in me, if I were able to copy them, would they be if I were able to make kind of a physical copy of them? And yes, that physical copy will be something that I would perceive as being in a different place in space time. I don't think that's the most important aspect of it. I don't think that's that important for your theory, actually. But I think the first question is, you know, did that copy that got made? Was it"
},
{
"end_time": 4352.858,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4328.131,
"text": " You know did it preserve its consciousness or not? Well, maybe an even prior question is do we believe in local realism? In space-time so I would want to argue that local realism is false and that and even stronger that that in fact particles Only exist in the act of observation and otherwise don't"
},
{
"end_time": 4375.282,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4353.387,
"text": " So to be really out there i'll say neurons only exist when they're perceived and neurons do not exist when they're not perceived so local realism is false. And therefore this whole whole line of questioning goes away right is it's rather all i have is an observer are my conscious experiences period when i talk about inanimate objects and particles and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 4404.292,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4375.845,
"text": " I'm now extrapolating from my firsthand evidence of conscious experience to something that I don't. I've never, they don't exist unless I actually perceive them. So, so, so I'm just to clarify what you're saying. I mean, and what I've, you know, it is the case that you could imagine constructing a science by talking only about conscious experiences and how those conscious experiences relate to each other. One could imagine building a science that way."
},
{
"end_time": 4426.203,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4404.684,
"text": " and you know even there are little shadows of that and things i've done there are shadows of that in the way special activities set up and so on but it is by the way it's explicit in chris fuke's quantum bayesianism okay and in cube so they call it cubism but basically yes i know that that's right so there in some sense what he's basically saying is"
},
{
"end_time": 4437.073,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4426.817,
"text": " The observer is everything and all quantum mechanics is just the handbook that the observer uses to interpret their experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 4465.145,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4437.483,
"text": " This is, you know, it's a classic issue in lots of areas of science. You can describe things by mechanism or you can describe things by kind of what's achieved in the end. So, for example, if we're doing mechanics, we can describe the equations of motion for something, you know, a ball going through the air. We can describe, we can say there's an equation that says what the ball will do at the next moment in time, or we can say we're using an action principle and there is an overall constraint"
},
{
"end_time": 4490.794,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4465.145,
"text": " that the motion of the ball should minimize the, you know, the, the action quantity by, by the trajectory it chooses. So this is a, you know, this is something, I mean, you know, it's been there since Aristotle and probably before these different forms of explanation of things. And my contention is that, and so I'll be very clear about it, that there is no mechanical explanation for any conscious experience. Not possible. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 4505.811,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4491.118,
"text": " I'm arguing that Leibniz was right with his argument from the mill and that right now the work that's been done in cognitive neuroscience on the models of consciousness, these are all my friends and colleagues that are working on this,"
},
{
"end_time": 4529.326,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4506.305,
"text": " I always ask them, okay, you're proposing a neurobiological mechanism, so what mechanism gives rise to the taste of mint? I understand, but you've got to have an endpoint. You've got to have an endpoint to make that a meaningful thing to talk about. You've got to be able to define what success means. In other words, what kind of an answer would satisfy you? Well, so these theories themselves"
},
{
"end_time": 4548.899,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4529.326,
"text": " Tell you what they would say would be the answer so for example integrated information theory says you have to have the right causal architecture and you can specify it with a matrix i think these theories i'm not a big fan of these theories. I think i think what they're doing you know it's kind of like."
},
{
"end_time": 4576.51,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4549.514,
"text": " They're describing something which is sort of the whole elephant and they're describing how it flips its tail in a particular way. That may be a little bit unkind, but you know, it's, it's, I don't think, I think that it's, I mean, a case that perhaps is easier to pin down is things about the definition of life where it's like, you know, it's a little bit less controversial because there isn't this kind of inner experience type thing. It's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 4604.326,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4576.8,
"text": " What does it mean to be alive is it self-reproduction is it beating certain thermodynamic things is it something about you know what is the you know what is the kind of the definition and it's a mess there isn't because in that case as i said it's a you know we have an n of one but at least we've had 10 to the 40th organisms that have lived on this earth um in the case in what you're describing you have"
},
{
"end_time": 4634.906,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4604.94,
"text": " Really an N of one because it's only you yourself internally who can definitively You know have something to say about what conscious experience is. So I'm still I'm I'm fighting With the on on this issue. I don't think I'm not saying there isn't an answer, but I don't think you've given it Which is how do you define success? In other words what you know, let's say I'm and I'm going to you know that question of how do you define success?"
},
{
"end_time": 4663.626,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4635.486,
"text": " You have rather dismissively said that my friends, the LLMs are all, you know, merely, you know, they're merely sort of regurgitating the things that went into them, so to speak. But you claim that, you know, we are not, so to speak. But so my question will be, you know, if you can define a notion of success for"
},
{
"end_time": 4694.292,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4664.599,
"text": " You know, for consciousness as experienced by you and as extrapolated by you as experienced by me and other humans and so on. Then the question is what, you know, that, that definition of success of, of, did you manage to derive that? Can I then, is that definition of success transportable enough that I can really apply it to an LLM? And perhaps the answer will be, you know, the LLM is not conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 4724.343,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4694.718,
"text": " But right now, you haven't given me anything that is concrete enough that I can take it and, you know, fit it onto the LLM and say, do you win or do you lose? Right. So I owe you a mathematically precise theory of consciousness, a scientific theory of consciousness that could try to do that kind of thing. That's what we're trying to do. We have a theory we call the theory of conscious agents. And we have some papers that we've published where we have a mathematical model that uses Markovian dynamics."
},
{
"end_time": 4751.852,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4724.718,
"text": " What we're doing right now is to try to answer your question. I agree with you. What you're asking for is exactly what we have to do. The way we're going at it is as follows. The high energy theoretical physicists in the last 10 years have discovered these positive geometries beyond space-time and quantum theory. Behind those positive geometries, they found these combinatorial objects that classify them. They're called decorative permutations."
},
{
"end_time": 4779.923,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4752.329,
"text": " And so this is just in the last 10 years, but so we've taken off the headset, the space-time headset, and we've gone outside for the first time and we're finding these obelisks, these positive geometries outside of space-time and these combinatorial objects. So what we're doing to answer, to actually respond to your question is we're saying, let's start with a mathematical model of consciousness, qua-consciousness. So it's like a network of interacting conscious agents. So it's a social network."
},
{
"end_time": 4805.674,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4780.759,
"text": " And it's governed by Markovian dynamics. And what we're doing then is saying, can we take this Markovian dynamics and first show that we can project onto the decorator permutations that the physicists have found and then from there project onto the positive geometries? If so, then we can project all the way into space time. And then we would actually be able to make testable predictions inside space time from a theory that says consciousness is fundamental. And we start there."
},
{
"end_time": 4824.599,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4805.896,
"text": " So we've already published a paper last year where we actually showed some new mathematics apparently about Markovian dynamics and we showed how they can be classified with decorated permutations. So we published that and now what we're doing is showing we're trying to show that we can get the positive geometries"
},
{
"end_time": 4847.329,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4824.94,
"text": " What you're asking for is exactly what should be asked for and what we're trying to do is to show that we could get all of physics plus more from a theory of conscious agents being assumed to be fundamental outside of space-time"
},
{
"end_time": 4876.834,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4847.585,
"text": " and projecting through decorative permutations, positive geometries into space-time where we can make our empirical test. So that's what we have to do. But if we don't assume that consciousness is fundamental in the foundations of our theories, then we either have to dismiss consciousness and say it's not there or we have to give a theory in terms of unconscious entities about how consciousness emerges. And if we try to do that last"
},
{
"end_time": 4899.053,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4877.176,
"text": " I claim that it's not logically possible to start with unconscious ingredients and to have consciousness emerge. Not possible. That is not my intuition. Okay. I mean, you and Leibniz have the same intuition. I think the reason I disagree with Leibniz's intuition, if you'd asked me in 1980,"
},
{
"end_time": 4923.166,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4899.189,
"text": " Do i disagree with leibniz's intuition i would have said i don't know i don't know how you would get a mind like thing to arise from a non mind like sort of origin. But then by nineteen eighty one. I was starting to do all kinds of computer experiments and so on about what you know what simple rules can actually do."
},
{
"end_time": 4932.159,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4923.609,
"text": " What could emerge from something that seemed like it was too sterile?"
},
{
"end_time": 4959.872,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4932.466,
"text": " to generate anything interesting i was completely wrong and i you know it's amazing that even after all these years you know i i do the experiments on different kinds of systems and i keep on being wrong i keep on thinking you know this thing is somehow too simple to do anything interesting and my intuition keeps on you know even though i think i've now developed much better intuition about this it is remarkable the extent to which sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 4979.753,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4960.247,
"text": " Things much richer things than you might imagine can emerge from simple causes so to speak and so i think that's a foundational kind of piece of intuition that you know i've developed i you know it's kind of fun for me because this idea of computational irreducibility that i actually introduced about"
},
{
"end_time": 5007.108,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4980.043,
"text": " For 40 years and a week ago, um, it is, uh, um, it is interesting to me that when I talk to some younger scientists and so on, for them, computational irreducibility is obvious. Could the world could not be any other way. And which is how I feel about it too. But it's, it's, you know, it's a thing where if you grow up with this idea, it's kind of an obvious idea in the end, it's, it's, it becomes obvious after you've kind of ground on it enough."
},
{
"end_time": 5026.357,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5007.483,
"text": " Correct me if I'm incorrect Don, I don't think you're disagreeing with what Stephen just said."
},
{
"end_time": 5042.09,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5026.749,
"text": " What you had said is that look, we can start with something that's simple, mechanically simple, and then get to something that is extremely mechanically complex, such that we would never think looking at the complex case that it could be made of these elementary elements. And Don is saying"
},
{
"end_time": 5071.493,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5042.415,
"text": " That's correct. But notice the word mechanical there. You can get something that's simple mechanically and give rise to something that's complex, but that's a different question than jumping onto logical categories. Right. So the claim is that there's a spark of consciousness that can simply not be reached mechanically. That's the claim. That's the claim. Right. So, okay. So it's an interesting claim. It's a claim that I think the structure of the science that we have"
},
{
"end_time": 5096.442,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5072.09,
"text": " Is not going to be able to talk about it. In other words, you can say let's turn science on its head and let's say that's our basis. And then let's see what we can construct about the rest of science. That's a perfectly intellectually valid thing to do. But if you're going to ask given given the fact that you're not able to give a kind of a science based definition,"
},
{
"end_time": 5118.49,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5096.954,
"text": " You're not going to be able to get to you what you want from kind of, you know, you might very well be able to, as I keep on saying, you know, from a theory in which all that's real is what observers observe. I have no doubt that you can go from such a theory to, to deduce how things have to work in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 5145.435,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5118.848,
"text": " And even to be able to say, given this way of how things work in the world, we could come up with kind of a sort of a meta theory that is that corresponds to space and time and all these kinds of things that is a good description of what we have derived from this underlying theory that has to do that starts with observers. Actually, I want to ask something about that in what you described."
},
{
"end_time": 5165.64,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5146.186,
"text": " Do you think that that could just be one observer. In other words do you think it's important to the nature of observers that there are many of them and that they have some correspondence to each other what do you think that if in fact it was the case that you know you were the last human alive and there's no other sort of."
},
{
"end_time": 5193.968,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5166.049,
"text": " I don't know what you know, I don't think intelligence is relies on life forms, but, but imagine that it did and you were, you were the only thing in the universe that had, that was like you and quotes conscious. Is that an okay situation or is there something that would not work in your theory? Would your theory require that there's a whole flock of observers there? Yeah. So it was quite striking that"
},
{
"end_time": 5219.445,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5194.599,
"text": " The paper we're writing right now that we'll be publishing hopefully later this year, we've discovered a new logic on the space of Markovian kernels. So we were able to associate a Markovian kernel to each conscious observer. And the Markovian kernel is basically is describing given that my current experience is red, what's the probability the next one will be green and so forth. You can write down a matrix of it. It's what we call the qualia kernel."
},
{
"end_time": 5246.152,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5220.213,
"text": " I think there's a horrible problem with that, but we'll come to that in a minute. Sure, sure. So then there's the question, can these conscious agents and the Markovian kernels combine to create new conscious agents with more experiences? And we discovered, we'll be in this new paper announcing a new logic on Markovian kernels that we just discovered. You probably know about taking a Markovian kernel and taking a trace chain on a subset of states?"
},
{
"end_time": 5274.974,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5246.664,
"text": " I can immediately imagine what that means, but yes. A 10 by 10. I get it. And I only look at three of the states, it's going to induce the dynamics on the three by three and you'll get a new kernel on the three by three kernel that's induced by the 10 by 10. It's called a trace chain. So it turns out what we're going to publish is that the one kernel being the trace of another gives you a partial order on all kernels. So it turns out that's a partial order."
},
{
"end_time": 5303.422,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5275.469,
"text": " Sure. So it actually, you know, for example, you know, the trace of a trace is a trace. So it's transitive and irreflexive and so forth. So it's actually, so it gives you a logic and it gives you a logic about with an, you know, least upper bound, a greatest lower bound and so forth. It turns out it's a non-bullying logic of these Markovian kernels. There's no top. There's no top consciousness. There's an infinite number of directions that you can go infinitely far in terms of combining."
},
{
"end_time": 5330.52,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5303.797,
"text": " It's locally Boolean. So if I take a particular Markovian kernel, all the kernels that are less than it in this logic form a Boolean logic. So it's locally Boolean. So just just a technical question here. I mean, so these, you know, we can think of one of these Markovian kernels defined as defined by some matrix, some. Yes. Okay. So are these finite matrices or are these infinite matrices? Well, right now, what we've been doing are finite, but we in this paper, we're only going to deal with finite."
},
{
"end_time": 5358.899,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5330.52,
"text": " will then look you know at the continuous case and so forth beyond that okay so so i mean what you're saying is given that i have a probability matrix that says i mean you know your markovian matrices are kind of like random versions of s matrices in a sense that they're saying you know given this vector of what comes in this you you know you multiply by this matrix and you get this vector of what comes out um and you're doing that purely in terms of probabilities but now what you're saying is given"
},
{
"end_time": 5381.664,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5359.906,
"text": " given i'm just trying to understand the technical aspect of what you're what you're describing given given such a matrix you are saying there are uh you can you can extract sub matrices by tracing out um by by i mean for anybody who's watching this who wants to know what that actually means it's it's your your you're just"
},
{
"end_time": 5408.439,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5381.664,
"text": " Adding your you're getting rid of those components by just adding up a bunch of things and fixing fixing what happens so so we've got you know some part of our matrix is still flapping around you know free as a bird so to speak and another part has been locked down and what you're saying is if you if in the all the different forms of locking down they form a that there is the kind of a like"
},
{
"end_time": 5431.271,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5408.439,
"text": " Subsets of a set or something they form some kind of partial order of you lock down this and you know that there will be pieces that are in you know you can lock down this part and if you lock down a part of that part it's sort of it's it's a it's it's a proper subset there and you can have another part that is sort of that's i mean."
},
{
"end_time": 5459.411,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5431.271,
"text": " Yeah, I'm gonna start spouting technical things about chains and anti-chains and so on, but which is probably not very useful, but at least helps me understand what's going on. That's right. But by the way, most Markovian kernels are not comparable, right? So if I give you a Markovian kernel, almost every Markovian kernel is not greater than or less than it, right? It's quite an accomplishment to have any kind of relationship at all with other Markovian kernels, which gets at the diversity"
},
{
"end_time": 5477.978,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5459.411,
"text": " Of consciousness is in the relationship but it turns out you can't combine consciousness is unless where where the the states overlap they have the same trace you have to have the same trace on your overlapping states to allow consciousness is to combine you know i'm hoping that there's more to consciousness than marcovian matrices."
},
{
"end_time": 5503.66,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5478.643,
"text": " well because that's a shockingly minimal kind of um view of what i mean and and also to say i'm never a believer in theories that have probability as a fundamental component well so there's two things there so the first though i would bring up um something called the uh theory of computational equivalence that that i agree with you on"
},
{
"end_time": 5530.265,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5504.121,
"text": " And it's a simple thing to point out that Markovian kernels are computationally universal. It's trivial. So the problem is as soon as you've got probability in the picture, you're no longer dealing with pure computational rules. Probability is a statement. I mean, you can if you're looking at the manifold of all possibilities and you're just viewing probability as a way as a parameter effectively to to sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 5551.544,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5530.845,
"text": " Sample your space so for example let's say i say i've got a circle okay there's a well defined meaning to a disc let's say a region that's that's circular and then i say well actually i don't have a circle i just have this probability distribution that allows points to be dropped anywhere in this region."
},
{
"end_time": 5577.346,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5551.971,
"text": " Now i could describe the circle by saying that i have this probability distribution that in mathematical terms only has support within the circle only has a non-zero probability within the circle that will be a way of describing the circle but if i am to talk about the sequence of points that are dropped in the circle then i've got a whole bunch more it's it's no longer sort of accessible to pure computation"
},
{
"end_time": 5604.155,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5577.551,
"text": " As soon as I can drop the points according to probability, I don't have a rule for where the points will land. Well, but there's a theorem in automata theory that the non-deterministic automata, Turing machines, for example, have exactly the same computational class as the deterministic. That's a much more detailed issue. Let's unroll that. That's not correct."
},
{
"end_time": 5622.295,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5604.394,
"text": " Deterministic and non-deterministic Turing machines absolutely have the same computational power, but that is not the same statement as the probabilistic Turing machine has the same kind of computational character as a Turing machine. Let's unpack that."
},
{
"end_time": 5644.241,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5622.295,
"text": " Well, I may have a different character. Sure. Sure. Right. Let's unpack that. We've got a Turing machine. A Turing machine has definite rules. You started from some initial state. It goes crunch, crunch, crunch and generates, you know, its succession of states. But now let's say it's a probabilistic Turing machine. And that means that it's what it does at every step."
},
{
"end_time": 5665.623,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5644.633,
"text": " Is not definite, it's determined by some probability, but it does it does something. It's just we don't know what it will do and has a probability of, you know, 30% of doing this and 70% of doing that, but at every step it does something. Right. So that's, that's the probabilistic Turing machine. We don't know what it does. It's going to do it every step, but at every step it does something."
},
{
"end_time": 5687.278,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5665.964,
"text": " A non-deterministic Turing machine is a different story. A non-deterministic Turing machine is asking, what are all the possible things that could happen? We've got many paths of history. The Turing machine could go left, it could go right. We actually take all of those paths. We build up this whole, you know, we call the multi-way graphs of all possible paths."
},
{
"end_time": 5716.067,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5687.278,
"text": " Okay, and and the and the statement is that if what you're interested in is does there exist a path that leads to this or that thing? That's that's you know, the the full put it this way the the multi-way graph can is computationally equivalent to the single way turning machine that's everything you can every computation that you can do with the the"
},
{
"end_time": 5746.237,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5716.903,
"text": " Multi-way Turing machine you could in principle do with a single way Turing machine, but it'll be a lot of effort That is not true with a probabilistic Turing machine. So probabilistic Turing machine that choice at step three that you picked to go left That choice is unknowable Right by an ordinary Turing machine that came from outside the system That was you know, the probability the heat bath, you know the the random the the the"
},
{
"end_time": 5775.981,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5746.63,
"text": " You know, God was playing dice and it came out this way that came from outside the system and you can't know that. So any, you know, as soon as you have a probabilistic theory, it's not the case. It's not the same story as not as non-deterministic theories and non-deterministic theory. There's still, you know, there's still a definite thing, which is the set of all possible non-deterministic paths, which is different from, you know, if you said, well, as I was saying with it, with it in the case of the disc, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 5801.578,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5775.981,
"text": " If the way you're describing the disk is to just say, let me look at all possible ways that the points could be, could be selected there. Then yes, it's a, it's a, it's a nice kind of computationally describable version of the disk. It's a somewhat roundabout way to describe it, but it's, it's the same kind of comp purely computational kind of concept. But if you say I'm going to, you know, notice where every raindrop fell on the desk, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 5817.142,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5802.09,
"text": " that is a different story you can't know whether you know if it's a probabilistic thing it is not from within the system to know where the raindrops for so i think i mean are you unhappy then with the notion of a probabilistic"
},
{
"end_time": 5840.282,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5817.278,
"text": " fundamental framework you don't like yes i don't think that will i think that if you'd say that you are wheeling in you know who makes who makes the choice in the probabilistic system in other words does god make the choice in the probabilistic system how does that choice get made because in something like in a multi-way system in a in a non-deterministic system"
},
{
"end_time": 5855.742,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5840.486,
"text": " There isn't a choice to be made all possible choices are made there's no there's no kind of you know there's no day to playing dice. Whereas in a probabilistic system you have to have something from outside the system deciding what's going to happen."
},
{
"end_time": 5885.862,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5855.913,
"text": " Unless what you're saying is you're merely using the probabilistic system as a proxy for this multi way thing, but I don't think you're doing that because our, because it's a fundamental feature of kind of, I think what you would call conscious experience that there is a single thread of conscious experience. Now, maybe I should ask you this question. I mean, in so far as you think, you know, what conscious experience is, is there a definite single thread through time of conscious experience?"
},
{
"end_time": 5911.527,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5886.237,
"text": " Well, actually, from your discussion, I would actually say that the way I'm thinking about it is the multi-way thinking of it, that all possible consciousnesses, in fact, exist. All the threads are there. Wait a second. There's two issues. One is, do they exist? And the other is, are you experiencing them? Because I don't think you experience them. I don't think you think you experience them. No, I'm not experiencing your consciousness right now, for example."
},
{
"end_time": 5930.606,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5911.698,
"text": " Right, but I think that a critical feature of our typical conscious experience is that we believe we are persistent and we have a single thread of consciousness. We think definite things are happening in the world. We think definite things. We think that we are thinking definite things."
},
{
"end_time": 5946.357,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5931.032,
"text": " You know forget about what's happening outside world but we imagine that we have a definite train of thought so to speak we do not imagine that we have kind of there are a super position of a hundred thoughts i'm having right now rather."
},
{
"end_time": 5975.316,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5946.357,
"text": " We think at least we have the impression might be wrong but we have the impression that you know somehow we are just having a single thread of experience i mean do you agree with that that that's my subjective impression is that there's a single continuing me that that is taken has taken one path that i couldn't have predicted and so forth. What right so that that's the way i feel about it and i agree that if you bring probabilities into a scientific theory that's where explanation stops."
},
{
"end_time": 5999.872,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5975.435,
"text": " Right. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 6030.111,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6000.282,
"text": " But can I offer you one right now with probabilities in it where you say, Oh, okay, that's where your theory stops. And I say, Oh yes, that's where my theory stops. But, but if I can use that theory of consciousness and show that we can build up, forget these positive geometries, get space time of emerging, then, then maybe you'll grant me, you know, the dispensation to hold off on the probability until I show that I can actually do this. And then we can go back and say, now can we get rid of these probabilities in the matrices or not? Right. But so I suspect."
},
{
"end_time": 6057.551,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6030.674,
"text": " In, in your concept of kind of, I think from what I'm understanding, when I asked the question, could the world be, could that be just a single observer in the, in the world? I think what you're saying is no, because you're building a calculus of the combination of observers. And yet this, and there's no, it's not a Boolean logic, so there's no single top observer."
},
{
"end_time": 6068.114,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6058.37,
"text": " But there is in some sense you could talk about the whole of all the observers and and that if you want to say is that an observer i might say."
},
{
"end_time": 6097.756,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6068.575,
"text": " Okay, but so are you in your Markovian partial order?"
},
{
"end_time": 6123.899,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6098.37,
"text": " Are you and I part of the same post set, or do we each have our own separate post sets? Well, we're part of this big whole post set, the Markovian post set, but we're partly in branches that are partly compatible because we're talking and presumably something's happening. We're not completely incompatible. All I know that Don is you're greater than liveness."
},
{
"end_time": 6154.974,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6125.964,
"text": " The partial order. Well, he has the advantage that time has gone by since Gottfried was around. His IQ was at least double mine, but anyway. Okay, so I'm fairly confused here because on the one hand, we agree, I think, that the only conscious experience that you can have any definiteness about is the N of one conscious experience that you are having."
},
{
"end_time": 6174.957,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6155.469,
"text": " Okay. So now in your theory, you're talking about multiple conscious experiences, multiple conscious agents or whatever that have certain relationships. That's right. And so I'm not even, I mean, so you're positing that you're taking your sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 6202.91,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6175.776,
"text": " empirical inference that there are other conscious agents in the world. And you're saying I'm really going to believe in that because I'm going to make a theory that has many conscious agents in it. That is that fair? Yes. And I'm also going to believe that the experiences that I have had in my life do not cover all possible conscious experiences. I'm going to admit that there are experiences that I don't have yet. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 6230.128,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6203.746,
"text": " And for example, as life has gone on, I've had brand new experiences I'd never had before. All of a sudden you go, Oh, I'd never had that experience before at all. Right. So why is that? I mean, but you're saying that somewhere in. Okay. So in your theory, there are sort of. Is it the case? First of all, is that time in your theory or is that, is it, is it merely the kind of the, the, the partial order sort of."
},
{
"end_time": 6259.172,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6230.265,
"text": " Is it merely the pecking order of consciousnesses or is there some kind of progression there? What's interesting is that, as you well know, you can have stationary Markovian processes, in which case there is no increase in entropy from step to step. So there's no entropic arrow of time. And so what I'm imagining is that the full dynamics of the whole consciousness is stationary."
},
{
"end_time": 6288.097,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6260.145,
"text": " But I am a projection of that. So I'm a trace. So I'm a projection. So I've lost information and it's a theorem pretty easy to prove that when you take a projection, say by conditional probability where you lose information, the projected chain will have increasing entropy. So I'm proposing that there is no time for the whole consciousness and time emerges as well as space."
},
{
"end_time": 6317.244,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6288.353,
"text": " As an artifact of the loss of information and projection. So what we're going to actually try to show is that time and space themselves are all artifacts of projection and not an insight into the true nature of the deeper whole conscious. So let's unpack that a bit. So one thing we can imagine if we take a fairly traditional space time view of the universe is we can imagine that there's this giant crystal that is the whole space time history of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 6344.48,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6317.739,
"text": " Right. It's just there. And then we can imagine that our experience of the universe is merely motion in the time direction through this crystal that is the space time, the representation of all space time in the universe. So I think what you're, what you're saying is you are imagining, and I, I want to unpack this a bit because I, I think there's there, uh, you know, you're imagining that"
},
{
"end_time": 6351.408,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6344.906,
"text": " You have this thing it's a partial order of mark of matrices basically and."
},
{
"end_time": 6381.391,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6351.63,
"text": " By the way, I think it's not really fair to talk about it as a logic. I mean, it is a logic in some sense of universal algebra or whatever else, but I don't think, you know, by saying the word logic, you're kind of making that sound like it has something to do with human, you know, logic as constructed by Aristotle is kind of this way of representing sort of the way humans construct arguments. And I don't think that kind of the mathematical structure that you're describing as a logic is, you know, it is"
},
{
"end_time": 6407.295,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6381.715,
"text": " You could as some kind of mathematical definition, you could say it's a logic, but it certainly isn't logic with the same kind of import that Aristotle's version of logic has, you know, just to make that point. I mean, I think it's, it's a, well, if we think about problem, so think about probability measures as propositions, right? So they're propositions and we can talk about the,"
},
{
"end_time": 6428.319,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6408.08,
"text": " When we talk about, it turns out we can put a partial order on probability measures. This is something we did 30 years ago and it's called the Lebesgue logic. It turns out if you say one probability measure is less than another, if it's a normalized restriction of the other. That gives you a partial order on the sort of all."
},
{
"end_time": 6450.538,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6428.831,
"text": " And so now the reason I would call that a logic is because I can think about probability measures as propositions, and here I am taking the and and the or and the conjunction, disjunction and negation and so forth. So in that sense, I'm calling it a logic because it's logical relationships among propositions. But wait a second. I mean, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6479.974,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6450.776,
"text": " The notion of and and or which which i claim is a is a deeply derived notion i mean in other words it's not that is not a foundational notion that's a notion you know process through layers of kind of symbolic representations of the world by humans and all kinds of things like this but but be that as it may i don't view logic as being in any way fundamental but that but be that as it may you can say you know there's the there's the and of uh you know you you've got"
},
{
"end_time": 6508.012,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6480.589,
"text": " I'm still trying to understand in your kind of Markov matrices, you can say, uh, well, do you, are you associating propositions in some way with these Markov matrices or not? Yeah. The probability that if I see red now, I'll see green next is the is 0.01 and the probability that I'll see blue next is 0.03. That's the proposition. Well, wait a minute. The proposition is, so you're saying the Markov matrix itself,"
},
{
"end_time": 6520.043,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6508.575,
"text": " represents the proposition represents the statement i mean the markov matrix is a collection of probabilities and the assertion these are the probabilities is the proposition"
},
{
"end_time": 6540.708,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6520.708,
"text": " that's written if you view it that way then when you have these um when you put a partial order and you look at the meat and the join then you could be thinking these are in some sense logical relationships among propositions and so why not just call it a logic but if you don't like that term fair enough that's a better answer than i i than i thought of okay so so i mean and and"
},
{
"end_time": 6570.077,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6541.015,
"text": " So let me let me just understand what you said there. So, uh, and, um, maybe these explanations are helpful for anybody who's watching this. I don't know, but, uh, it's, um, I think, I mean, what, what you're saying is if I say the probability that I see red is 50% and whatever, and then another proposition is the problem that I see red is 30%. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 6594.172,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6570.93,
"text": " What you're asking is, and which I'm a little confused by, if I take the and of those propositions, I don't see how I construct that out of your kind of, I mean, those seem to be inconsistent to me. Those seem to be, you know, that they're on sort of an anti-chain of your partial order."
},
{
"end_time": 6618.302,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6594.582,
"text": " so how do i right so the only way that you can take the and of two probability measures is if they have the same normalized restriction on the okay propositions that they overlap on right okay fine same normalized restriction there otherwise you can't take okay so in other words i've got to have if one markup matrix says 50 probability of red"
},
{
"end_time": 6636.817,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6618.302,
"text": " And eight percent probability of purple and the other one says fifty percent probability of red and six percent probability of yellow they're incompatible then i can combine them if they didn't have things to say about purple and yellow going between each other so in so far as the disjoint you can combine them."
},
{
"end_time": 6665.538,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6636.817,
"text": " Okay. If they speak about the same, if they both agree that red is twice as probable as blue, then they're fine. So as long as you agree about the relative probabilities on things, then you can take the disjunction and conjunction. Okay, fine, fine. So then, all right, so I'm buying more that you can, I mean, I think it's a very weak logic, but you can set something up that has some of those attributes. But so now,"
},
{
"end_time": 6687.005,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6666.169,
"text": " I mean the the question is you're you're imagining that so one one question is what can you derive from what so one of the surprising things about our physics project is that what I had not imagined is that you could derive so much from so little and so"
},
{
"end_time": 6701.049,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6687.398,
"text": " you know you would think that the statement considerable possible computations you know the entangled limit of all possible computations you would think you could write absolutely nothing from such a thing but the surprises that"
},
{
"end_time": 6730.998,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6701.305,
"text": " You know, as soon as you put these conditions about how observers can sample that, you suddenly start to be able to derive things. I think the simplest case to see that is the molecular dynamics case, where you can say, you know, you've got all these molecules bouncing around, and we know that they can serve a number, maybe they can serve momentum and things that does not matter that much. But we've, we've, you know, we've, we've got all this microscopic sort of randomness, computational irreducibility going on."
},
{
"end_time": 6759.138,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6731.34,
"text": " And just from the fact that observers like us are computationally bounded, we can now derive the second law of thermodynamics. We can start to derive fluid mechanics, things like this. So in other words, it's very surprising that from so little you can get so much. And that's, you know, that's the thing that really I didn't expect at all. So what I want to understand for your, what you're doing is, you know, I think you're also attempting to get much from little."
},
{
"end_time": 6784.787,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6759.377,
"text": " Absolutely. So I want to understand what you know, and what you would like to get is, you know, things like, I mean, honestly, I think you're more likely to get the Ruliat than you are to get space time in its usual formulation. I think it will be easier to get from the kind of thing you're describing to the Ruliat than to get to all of the technical detail of space time and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 6811.476,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6784.787,
"text": " Because that that's but but let's let's just understand what it would mean so you know again i want to sort of posit this kind of axiomatic physics where all you're doing is you're saying i make these observations and all i know is that i have certain axioms about how these observations fit together. Which i think is what you are you know you you are positing certain axioms about how what you're describing is conscious agents fit together."
},
{
"end_time": 6836.63,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6812.159,
"text": " That is right. Critically, critically, I think you're positing something which seems completely on obvious to me, which is all we know is the end of one. We have an internal experience of being a conscious agent, right? But you are positing a, a network of relationships between conscious agents and your partial order and things like this."
},
{
"end_time": 6864.94,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6837.244,
"text": " And that to me, that's a big leap. Now you might argue the really odd is big leap too. But what you're doing there is you're saying, you know, all I know is what I have internally. And I'm talking about that as a conscious agent. But now I'm going to posit about conscious agents that they have these interrelationships. And by the way, I'm pretty sure if there was only one conscious agents in the world,"
},
{
"end_time": 6895.316,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6865.538,
"text": " You know, the game will be over. You wouldn't be able to construct. There'd be no grist to construct a sort of a, an external model of the world. Cause what I think you're doing, as I understand it is you are going from the calculus of observers to construct an external model of the world, which is the opposite way round from what, you know, from what I've been trying to do. And, but the, you know, so, so now."
},
{
"end_time": 6918.387,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6895.759,
"text": " I claim if there's only one observer, there's no grist. There's no, there's nothing you can do to kind of build up that external model of the world. Just as I don't think you can tell in the solipsistic view of things, you can't really tell whether there's any external, whether there's something out there. You have, you are, you are taking your personal extrapolation"
},
{
"end_time": 6948.507,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6918.592,
"text": " That there are conscious agents like you that have certain relationships. You're taking that and building what amounts to what Michael is a scientific theory. We might call it a, you know, a theory of the world somehow based on that. So, so if, if I think that there is what I call the whole, right? I could, so is this really infinite conscious agent? I can imagine it then choosing to look at itself through different traces."
},
{
"end_time": 6970.589,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6949.087,
"text": " I'm gonna choose to look at myself through the trace and this trace I'll call Don Hoffman and that trace I'll call Stephen Wolfram and these are just different. So it's the whole looking at itself through a straw through a straw hole, right? Because the hole is infinite and you know, I've got a finite IQ. So in that sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 7001.015,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6971.22,
"text": " You wouldn't have the problem of not having the ability to have interesting worlds and so forth if there's this infinite consciousness that's looking at itself through an infinite number of different perspectives. So that's what I am and you are. So from this point of view, Don and Steven are just avatars of this deeper whole consciousness. The whole is talking to itself through a Don and Steven avatar right now."
},
{
"end_time": 7026.613,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7001.596,
"text": " You know, that's bizarrely close to what I would say about the liad. So in other words, coming into this, I actually thought that we were going to end up pretty much agreeing that we're doing the same thing. I'm just calling it consciousness and you're not right. Well, but, but, but, you know, the thing that I don't get in, so, you know, in what I'm doing, I'm, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7046.459,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7027.073,
"text": " Imagine that there are these atoms of space and i'm imagining that there's this hyper graph and so on and do i know that these are real things. No that my way of describing the world i mean it's like you know occasionally people come and say things like you have a competition model of the world what kind of computer is it running on."
},
{
"end_time": 7066.408,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7046.886,
"text": " That's a hopelessly philosophically muddled point of view, right? And so, you know, this is merely a description. And, and I think what you are so so let me let me see if I can unpack your description. So you're saying your whole"
},
{
"end_time": 7089.138,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7066.937,
"text": " is the set of all these possible connections between consciousnesses and and maybe maybe you're even going uh you know and i think you have to go this way in order to avoid sort of the trap of probabilities and the dead end of oh there's probabilities where we don't know whether you know what the particular role of the dice is right so the you know we're"
},
{
"end_time": 7116.749,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7089.582,
"text": " You're going to end up with essentially a multi-way collection of all the possible histories and so on. Yes. So you've got this whole structure that is kind of the, I mean, I think, okay, so I think what you're constructing, I mean, the object that you're constructing, it's, you know, that is a mathematical object. I think your sort of Markov chain thing is weaker than it should be."
},
{
"end_time": 7145.213,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7116.937,
"text": " In other words, I think replace that with an arbitrary computation and you basically have the rule yard. You have the same object. So in other words, he's inviting you to co-publish done. I don't publish things. Well, I think you raise a really interesting, very technical question that I think we should really try to address is the relationship between the really add and what's possible with this infinite this lattice of"
},
{
"end_time": 7170.384,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7145.52,
"text": " I'm pretty sure that what you've got is, you know, with this partial order of Markov chains and so on, that's a definite mathematical structure. It is, it is a much weaker mathematical structure than something where those sort of those, you know, your relationship of taking traces is much weaker than an arbitrary computation."
},
{
"end_time": 7185.06,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7170.947,
"text": " but i don't think it's a huge leap to say you know that's a particular sub model that might capture some aspect of uh you know of of how it might be a useful phenomenological model of certain aspects of"
},
{
"end_time": 7206.596,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7185.486,
"text": " Conscious experience that you have or whatever else i think the the more general you know my feeling is you're gonna you're gonna you're slipping down a slope here first you have to you know and you're going to wind up with something i mean this is one of the things that again has been a surprise to me you know the rule yard is the end point of an awful lot of generalizations"
},
{
"end_time": 7220.384,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7206.596,
"text": " So in other words there are you know in mathematics if you're you know looking at you know growth index work on higher category theory and you know infinity group points and things that object is basically the rule we had."
},
{
"end_time": 7248.251,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7220.794,
"text": " that object and in fact the the you know growth index hypothesis about the inevitability of what amounts to topology or space or whatever from a thing of that kind is precisely the assumption that we are also making or the thing that we think we can give some level of derivation of that space inevitably emerges from the from observers in this really add and so on so i think you know it would not be a surprise to me"
},
{
"end_time": 7265.435,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7248.251,
"text": " That the end point of an effort of generalization is the same object because i think it's it's you know it's a it's a it's a typical end point of generalization but now the question is you know is that. You know if you're thinking about kind of."
},
{
"end_time": 7287.142,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7265.862,
"text": " what i might call i don't know what the right word for it is but i'd be calling it axiomatic physics i'm not sure if that's the right right characterization but it's it's a a you could think about it as a calculus of observers as opposed to or a um you know a a um where everything is just in terms of the relationship between observers"
},
{
"end_time": 7317.688,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7287.773,
"text": " But it's really critical, I think, to what you're talking about, that there isn't just one observer. I don't think you can, I don't think, as I said, talking of mills, I think there is no grist for your mill without a multitude of observers. That is, I think you can't, you know, because if you're going to be able to construct extent and so on, you need that. And now the question is, if you, and so then I want to come back to your, you know, experience of mint."
},
{
"end_time": 7344.906,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7318.387,
"text": " Well, let me first just agree with you on the two points you've made. First, I agree that I would be delighted if it turns out that the Markovian dynamics that we're doing and the partial order turns out to be equivalent to the roulette that I would be delighted. It won't be equivalent. It will be a subset. It's a small piece of it. Well, again, you can get computational universality out of two or three Markov kernels."
},
{
"end_time": 7369.889,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7345.401,
"text": " I don't think that quite makes sense because Markov chains are probabilistic and involve real numbers and you're kind of out of the game of computation theory by the time you're dealing with those kinds of things. Two or three kernels that are not probabilistic, they have only zeros and ones in the matrix."
},
{
"end_time": 7396.203,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7370.708,
"text": " Get copy. So remember the mark of kernels include zero one matrices and they include the deterministic ones as a special case. So we get even just from those, we'll get the rule yet. Hold on, hold on. It's not so simple because let's talk about how you actually apply. I mean, this is you've got these matrices and you know, if you say what you are constructing is a product of many matrices."
},
{
"end_time": 7418.473,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7396.834,
"text": " Which is not what i've heard you say what i've heard you say is that you're taking these matrices and you're tracing out components and you're looking at the partial order of matrices that's a different statement from the statement that you are taking products and matrices and i agree with you that it's not quite as simple as that i mean you can't uh you know to get let me think about this for a second"
},
{
"end_time": 7448.268,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7418.933,
"text": " Certainly with finite matrices, you will not get computation universality. You're going to need infinite matrices. And in fact, okay, so here's a construction that you could easily make. So you could imagine building a cellular automaton by just taking a vector that represents a one-dimensional cellular automaton, a vector that represents current state, and you have an infinite matrix. No, that's not going to work. That doesn't work. That only gives you a subset of cellular automata. You can't get"
},
{
"end_time": 7462.039,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7448.439,
"text": " So if you have a single matrix, and you're simply doing matrix multiplication, there's linearity to matrix multiplication, and you're only going to get a very small subset, which by the way, aren't universal."
},
{
"end_time": 7490.094,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7462.329,
"text": " of cellular automata. Now, if you say, oh, I'm going to make these matrices be like elements of a group, generators in a group, and I'm going to say I'm going to multiply these together in all sorts of different ways, then that construction, yes, you can get computation out of it. But I don't think that's what you're talking about. And that's what we do. So I hadn't talked about that part of the theory yet. So I only talked about this one, what I call the quality kernel. It turns out the quality kernel is actually a product of three kernels."
},
{
"end_time": 7509.241,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7490.776,
"text": " So we actually so we actually in the basic formalism of the conversation i send you the paper on the conversation third we have a decision colonel an action colonel and a perception colonel when i take the product of all those i get what we call the quality of the single quality of colonel but what we're imagining is that there's this infinite social network."
},
{
"end_time": 7528.797,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7509.582,
"text": " and that there's actions, you know, message passing and so forth is happening and it's all going to be done by products of Markovian kernels throughout this whole thing. So it's going to be a computationally universal network and we're going to get, you know, some of the kernels can have no probabilities in them at all. They're just zeros and ones."
},
{
"end_time": 7555.742,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7528.797,
"text": " And and so so we got rid of those problems you gonna have a much easier theory if you get rid of the problems cuz you cuz as soon as you have the problems as as you are you say it's kind of you you're admitting you know incompleteness of your theory so to speak you're saying. There's you know i just don't know where these where the dice rolls are coming from but let's not let's not. What are the incompleteness of theories i would say that every scientific theory starts with assumptions."
},
{
"end_time": 7585.981,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7556.169,
"text": " And those are the miracles that the theory doesn't explain. Well, that's a point. Okay. So that's the bizarre thing that I didn't see coming about the story with the really add. Okay. You know, it doesn't, you know, the representation of the really add in a particular form, that is a sort of arbitrary choice that you can think of as an assumption. But the thing, the actual, you know, object you construct, I don't think that has"
},
{
"end_time": 7594.309,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7586.288,
"text": " It's not the kind of a thing that starts from assumptions. It has been the experience of all of scientific theories to date."
},
{
"end_time": 7624.309,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7594.701,
"text": " That all scientific theories have been, you know, they've been models. And as a model, they are not the system itself. There's some, you know, some projection from the system itself, some simplified, you know, narrative about the system itself, the thing that's bizarre with with the really odd and I I'm still I'm still trying to wrap my arms around this this thing because it really surprises me a lot. It is inevitable. And it is it is something"
},
{
"end_time": 7650.23,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7624.309,
"text": " That is just it's a unique inevitable thing that doesn't it isn't like a you know you said something theories have assumptions because i think one's imagining us as one usually has done that the theory is a model where it's assuming oh it doesn't matter that such and such is such and such a way. So i think the i mean in in our theory with the ruling out and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 7677.483,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7650.759,
"text": " The assumptions come in and assumptions about what we are like as observers, which is a different kind of a, you know, and that's the underlying theory. The underlying reality, as you might call it, is just the rule we had. And in some sense it's everything, but it tells you nothing. To have it tell you something, you have to take these slices and these slices are particularized by, you know, features of us as observers, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 7706.937,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7677.892,
"text": " Let me just ask a question about it. There are two questions. One is, does the Ruliat admit something like Gödel's incompleteness theorem that would hold for the Ruliat? It's in some sense, even though you're talking about this infinite thing, with mathematics in general, Gödel says that any system that has the formal power of arithmetic, there will always be"
},
{
"end_time": 7733.473,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7707.619,
"text": " Yes, I mean, okay, this is this is complicated to untangle. Let's do it for a second. Okay. I mean, you know, Gödel's theorem is built on top of a bunch of assumptions about truth and so on. I think it is more useful to think about, let's see, where do we start here? The point is that sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 7754.411,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7734.053,
"text": " The thing that i think is the underlying phenomenon that goodles theorem is built on is computational irreducibility. Because what you know what you might say is i'm going to start from these actions of arithmetic and then any theorem. I must be able to just finitely prove from those actions."
},
{
"end_time": 7776.783,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7754.872,
"text": " But in fact, there's no upper bound on how many steps you might have to take to get to the theorem that you care about. Unfortunately, okay, it takes, so the basic point is computational irreducibility, which is kind of the core of Goethals theorem, is absolutely alive and well in the Rulliad. In fact, without it,"
},
{
"end_time": 7802.022,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7777.142,
"text": " There wouldn't be time, there wouldn't be, there wouldn't be space, there wouldn't be lots of things. I mean, the fact that the passage of time is meaningful is a consequence of computational irreducibility. If it wasn't for computational irreducibility, the, you know, the leading of our lives would be, there would be nothing that was actually happening. It would just be, oh, we could jump to the end and say the answer is 42 or whatever."
},
{
"end_time": 7822.773,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7802.022,
"text": " I'm it would be so that that's a you know and suddenly in the fact that there is an extent to space that is also a consequence of computationally reducibility so in those things i mean computationally reducibility is absolutely fundamental to the non collapse of the really are the really have a collapse without computer or disability that."
},
{
"end_time": 7851.527,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7822.773,
"text": " That's beautiful. The fact that there's, you know, the fact that it has extent is a consequence of that. So now you can ask questions about, well, let's talk about mathematics for a second, because one of the things about the Rulliad that's again something I didn't see coming is the Rulliad is not only the foundation of physics, it's also the foundation of mathematics. And so, and in fact, it has the bizarre consequence that, you know, in the sort of platonic view of mathematics, that there's a there there, so to speak,"
},
{
"end_time": 7869.889,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7851.527,
"text": " That what you end up concluding is if you believe that physical reality exists you must believe that there is a mathematical reality that exists does it also work the other way around. If you believe in the sort of platonic view of mathematics then."
},
{
"end_time": 7894.957,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 7870.384,
"text": " I think so. I haven't thought about it that way around because people are usually people usually maybe Don is an exception, but people usually believe in physical reality. People usually don't have a problem with with the notion of physical reality. Well, Plato would have said that the true reality is the platonic reality. And then this one is the illusory one. Yes. Right. Yes. Fair enough. Right. So I mean, in"
},
{
"end_time": 7911.169,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 7895.828,
"text": " In but but you know just understand how that works in mathematics and how that sort of how good will serum works there and such like so. In mathematics and this is in mathematics as as it was formulated in the twentieth century."
},
{
"end_time": 7938.404,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 7911.63,
"text": " Perhaps not in the best possible way, but the formulation of the 20th century and from Hilbert and people like that was we put down these axioms and then we see what theorems we can derive from those axioms. So, for example, the particular case Gödel looked at was we put down the piano axioms for arithmetic, you know, x plus y equals y plus x and a whole bunch of other axioms. And then from those axioms, we try and fit them together to derive other theorems."
},
{
"end_time": 7966.015,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 7938.404,
"text": " And the question is, if we fit together those axioms, do we, you know, is there a finite path to every, where do we get the, you know, we get certain things that we can construct from those axioms. One of the things that's tricky about Gödel's theorem, as it's usually stated, is it's not a question of what one can construct. It has this notion of truth, which is an overlay on top of what one can construct. So, you know, I can construct"
},
{
"end_time": 7994.411,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 7966.476,
"text": " The statement x plus y equals y plus x from that and associativity of addition. I could also construct the statement that x plus y plus x equals y plus x plus x. For example, that's a, that's a thing I can construct. And you know, first question is, is, is every, well, this, this, this notion of, um, what, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 8019.616,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 7994.838,
"text": " Let's see. I mean, of, of what, um, uh, the question of what's true is more complicated than the question of what you can construct. And that was the point of girl, right? Is that the notion of truth transcends the notion of proof? Yeah. I think that's a technical detail. Actually. I think that's a, it's a confusing feature and it's confused people a lot. The real essence. Okay. What did good actually show?"
},
{
"end_time": 8031.049,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8020.213,
"text": " What Godel did was he wanted to take the statement, this statement is unprovable, which is a statement doesn't seem to be a statement about arithmetic."
},
{
"end_time": 8060.93,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8031.903,
"text": " And the remarkable thing that he did was to show that that statement can be compiled into a statement about equations about integers, you know, that you can have an interpretation of that statement that is just a statement about equations about integers. And then the, and that, that fact that you can compile that into a statement about integers was an early version of the idea of computation universality. That is that you can take this thing and, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 8090.538,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8061.374,
"text": " Compile it into this sort of set of primitives and then having done that it you know then then you can kind of feed that but you know that statement this notion of provability is then something that sort of tangles itself up through that statement but the remarkable thing is not that that statement doesn't you know that statement is a is a kind of a paradoxical mess the remarkable thing is that that statement is actually a statement of arithmetic"
},
{
"end_time": 8114.821,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8091.049,
"text": " That's right. But what's interesting though is that someone like Roger Penrose, for example, looks at this and says what he takes from Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that something about me that allows me to understand what this formal system cannot do. I can understand the truth of this thing, but I understand it and the formal system cannot."
},
{
"end_time": 8135.23,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8115.247,
"text": " And so that's really the key. For Roger Penrose, that was sort of the big take home point from this. And I would agree, but it sounds like you disagree. Don and Steven, would you say that it's correct to characterize you, Steven, as a computationalist and Don, that you think there's something more to reality or to consciousness than mere computation?"
},
{
"end_time": 8162.978,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8136.135,
"text": " Yeah, I'm suggesting that Gödel's incompleteness theorem suggests that the notion of truth transcends the notion of proof. So I'm all for the Rulliad and I'm all for mathematical models, but I'm suggesting that there's something deeper. Yeah, but I think the problem is this notion of truth is a complicated, derived human concept. And I don't think it's the right thing to think about as a foundational thing. I think that constructing things"
},
{
"end_time": 8191.834,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8163.131,
"text": " Is a much more useful foundational idea so for example in i've been talking about some kind of i mean obviously what was trying to do was kind of a play to nest and what was trying to do was to blow up kind of hillbats idea that wasn't there for mathematics so to speak but i think the you know this this notion of for example"
},
{
"end_time": 8210.811,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8192.261,
"text": " To have truth you have to have a notion of falsity. What is the notion of falsity in something where you're constructing things well here's what it is in our so you know i've i've had the i had the nice opportunity to go to talk about the arithmetization of mathematics i."
},
{
"end_time": 8238.865,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8211.152,
"text": " I should even put together a book that I talked about the physicalization of mathematics. The fact that that the the network of all possible theorems, how they prove how you can prove one theorem for another turns out to be the same kind of construct as the way that physical space can be constructed in the universe. And these are both, you know, both of these things sort of are the really add. And then the question of how we perceive mathematics"
},
{
"end_time": 8268.695,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8239.104,
"text": " is a question of what we are like as mathematical observers. Mathematical observers are rather different from physical observers. You know, a mathematical observer, you know, a view of a mathematical observer is, a mathematical observer doesn't care so much about time, but a mathematical observer is just trying to put a bag of theorems into their mind. They say, this is true. They say, this is true. This is true. That's the notion of truth is, this is a theorem I'm going to say is true. It's a thing I'm going to put in my mind. I'm going to say it's true."
},
{
"end_time": 8294.735,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8269.172,
"text": " So now what's the question is, what is falsehood? In other words, what is, you know, I've got these theorems, I'm foraging in the forest of theorems and I'm keep on putting more things in my bag. Turns out that, um, the, I think that what falsehood is in our models is what you get from kind of this medieval concept of the principle of explosion. If you have something which is false."
},
{
"end_time": 8322.466,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8295.418,
"text": " From a falsehood, you can derive every statement, right? Exactly. And so, so then what happens in our models is that normally you're putting these theorems in your bag and you're saying, these are the ones I think are true, but suddenly you put a false theorem in your bag. And then what happens is then everything is true. And so what goes wrong? What goes wrong is if you have a finite mind, your mind is exploded at that point. You can't fit"
},
{
"end_time": 8350.469,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8322.961,
"text": " You know, so in other words, it's a, it's a, you know, that's a, so I'm kind of describing a more, a kind of physicalized version of the notion of truth and so on. And I think, you know, this idea that, I mean, there's sort of the glib statement, which I don't even know where it came from. I've never, never really traced this history of, you know, statements which are true, but unprovable. I think it's a super confusing way to think about Gödel's theorem. Okay. But, you know, I think,"
},
{
"end_time": 8378.882,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8350.964,
"text": " I mean, this whole question about whether, I mean, you know, this, I still want to come back to, cause I'm really interested in this question about what, you know, your statement about, you know, the experience of mint, the, the, um, and, and your, your kind of, you know, I think the theory you're constructing is a theory that extrapolates far away from your internal experience of mint."
},
{
"end_time": 8401.22,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8379.309,
"text": " Your theory talks about the interaction between observers and between consciousnesses and so on. In some sense, it's kind of a flip around of the theory that starts from the particles. It's a flip around to a theory which talks only about the effects."
},
{
"end_time": 8411.493,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8401.903,
"text": " and"
},
{
"end_time": 8440.299,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8411.869,
"text": " Starting only with this dynamics of consciousness outside of space. Yeah, you won't get there that that won't work But but I think you'll go if you can you you will probably be able to get from from this kind of formalism My guess is that you will be able to get basically to the really add and then you know then it's I'm all in favor of more people pushing to get from the really add to the momentum distribution of you know to the structure functions of protons and Distribution and momentum distributions of protons. That's a that's a heavy lift"
},
{
"end_time": 8464.121,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8440.299,
"text": " The notion of mass of a particle is a projection of the entropy rate of the communicating class and the spin is a projection of the determinant."
},
{
"end_time": 8486.323,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8464.889,
"text": " And the entropy, the momentum is a projection of the number of asymptotic events inside the communicating class. In other words, we're building up a dictionary that says these physical properties are projections of these properties of the Markovian dynamics. And so we'll see. And then context that we're going to try to get the momentum distributions inside the prototype."
},
{
"end_time": 8516.852,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8486.852,
"text": " I don't think that's the right target."
},
{
"end_time": 8540.179,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8516.852,
"text": " The I mean it's um, you know, I think that for example in in our model They you know, one of the things that surprised me a lot was the very easy interpretation of what energy is So it turns out that energy is basically the amount of activity in this network I mean more formally if you make the causal graph of"
},
{
"end_time": 8569.889,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8540.469,
"text": " It's the flux of causal edges through space like hypersurfaces. Momentum is the flux of causal edges through time like hypersurfaces, which by the way is something I could imagine you being able to get as well. I mean, you being able to make that interpretation from, I think the thing that surprises me and what you just described. So, you know, let's talk about entropy for a minute because entropy is another one of these often misunderstood, you know, constructs. I mean, you know, entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 8597.398,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8570.794,
"text": " What's the definition of entropy? I mean, in a sense, entropy is basically you take a system, you know, certain things about that system, and then you say, how many states are there in the system that are consistent with the things we know about it? And you take the log of that, and that's the entropy. So, so let me understand when you talk about, you know, when we talk about entropy increasing, it's a,"
},
{
"end_time": 8618.746,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8598.336,
"text": " I mean again this is another layer of complexity and what we're talking about because the the you know what. What we're doing is we're saying the the number of states of the system consistent with what we observe is is is increasing let's say but if we have a system."
},
{
"end_time": 8649.002,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8619.104,
"text": " which is a deterministic system and we know everything about what it's doing and it's also let's say a reversible system so we can always take a state of the system and you know find previous states of the system as we can find future states of the system in that case if we could observe everything about the system its entropy would always be equal to one zero rather because there's only one possible state of the system is the state of the system future state of the system and so on so what leads to our perception of the increase of entropy"
},
{
"end_time": 8677.193,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8649.002,
"text": " Is that we are not observing every detail of the system where instead observing only certain features of the system and with respect to those features we know where we say given these features there are states that there are more more and more states of the system consistent with those features so can you say again what cause i didn't understand what what you meant by so you were saying something about entropy being related to something else."
},
{
"end_time": 8702.363,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8677.671,
"text": " Well, the entropy. So one proposal is that the mass of a particle is a projection of the entropy rate of a communicating class. So the entropy rate, you know, you know, the definition of entropy rate for Markov kernel. Tell me, tell me it. Okay. Yeah. So everybody else is watching that. Even if I know it, the chance that everybody watching knows it is incredibly low."
},
{
"end_time": 8725.35,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8702.568,
"text": " Well, the toe audience is quite technical and they not only can keep up but enjoy it. So okay, don't. So I have a recurrent communicating class, it's got a stationary measure. So it means there's a long term probability of being state one through state M. Okay, so I got the stationary measure, and then each each row of the matrix is the you know, how is a probability measure. And so it has an entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 8749.07,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8725.828,
"text": " hold on hold on hold on hold on let's unpack this a bit so so you know we've got this matrix that says here's a vector of what's happening right now and a vector probabilities for right now and we're going to apply this matrix to get a new vector probabilities for the next step so to speak right right okay and now you say let's apply that matrix a zillion times"
},
{
"end_time": 8768.063,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8749.07,
"text": " And the result of that is we're going to go some limit and that limit is the stationary measure as you're calling it that that there is a limiting matrix in which every entry in that matrix has some particular value that corresponds to the ultimate limiting"
},
{
"end_time": 8797.193,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8768.063,
"text": " probability of being in that state, that's right. Okay, I got that. So the stationary measure gives you the ultimate probability of being in state one, state two, through state N. And then now if you're in state one, right, there's a transition row. There's a probability measure about where you're going to go next. Yep. That probability measure, you can take its entropy, right? So you can take the probability measure, take its entropy. Now you just multiply that entropy by the stationary weight."
},
{
"end_time": 8827.21,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 8797.773,
"text": " I mean, here's where I'm getting into trouble, because yes, at a mathematical level, you can compute, you know, sum of P log P for all these entries in the, in the, in the matrix. Um, what the interpretation of that is, and maybe you don't need an interpretation of that, but for me, you know, the entropy, again, this is, you know, by putting probabilities in your,"
},
{
"end_time": 8847.005,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 8827.671,
"text": " You know you kind of cooking things in a certain way for me when i'm talking about entropy i want to know what are those individual states is kind of the frequentest version i'm not i'm not just saying there's a probability i'm actually saying what what are the things underneath that probability so you're but i don't know whether."
},
{
"end_time": 8862.022,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 8847.005,
"text": " I'm taking these probabilities as the foundations of this particular theory. So it's a purely mathematical thing that you're doing. There's no interpretation of entropy here. It's merely the mathematics of URP."
},
{
"end_time": 8888.746,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 8862.022,
"text": " And of course, entropy rate, for example, is a big deal in communication theory. If the source has an entropy rate that's too big, bigger than the channel capacity, you get distortion and so forth. So it's that kind of thing that comes up in communication. It's always fun to trace those things through for like 5G and see how, you know, the fact is all these things that people said, it's a theorem that you'll never be able to communicate faster than this. And then somehow, you know, we managed to have"
},
{
"end_time": 8918.404,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 8888.746,
"text": " You know cell phone channels that break all those theories. Anyway, that that's a separate different discussion But okay, but so I'll just say one little fun thing that comes out of this when if we define the entropy rate the mass to be a projection of entropy rate Then that that forces us to make certain predictions. So a mass zero would correspond to an entropy rate of zero and that would correspond to a Markovian matrix that has only zeros and ones in it a single one in each row and all else"
},
{
"end_time": 8947.363,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 8919.445,
"text": " And well, so we know that in space-time, massless objects must move at the speed of light. So it better fall out of our theory that you get the maximum travel speed in our theory for the things that have zero entropy rate. And it turns out, if you look at what's called the commuting time between states in a Markov kernel, the maximum commuting time, the fastest commuting times, so the smallest commuting times, the fastest travel times,"
},
{
"end_time": 8976.681,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 8947.602,
"text": " hold on you you're commuting lots of different concepts here i mean the the you know when you're talking about things traveling from here to there in this markov chain it's like you have a vector and this thing is is kind of moving the probability measure from one part of the vector to another"
},
{
"end_time": 8995.026,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 8976.971,
"text": " Yeah, you're going from one state from one conscious experience to another conscious experience and the question is how fast can the conscious experiences change? Right, but by conscious experience here, you are taking what I would consider to be a kind of a, you know, I hope that"
},
{
"end_time": 9018.575,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 8995.623,
"text": " In a sense, I feel my conscious experience is a lot richer than, you know, than this, than your kind of probability vector. I mean, you know, this is again, one of the things that is difficult about this, the intuition about all these kinds of things. For example, in, you know, this idea that you can have richness of things emerge from simplicity."
},
{
"end_time": 9034.36,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9018.882,
"text": " Or another thing that took me a long time to come to terms with i'm not sure i completely come to terms with even now is that the universe is an unbelievably profligate waster of computational resources and you know i had always imagined that."
},
{
"end_time": 9053.831,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9034.36,
"text": " There would have to be a definite history in the universe but it couldn't be the case that the universe is just sloughing off these immense numbers of different histories most of which are completely irrelevant to us so you know i'm i guess my question here is your your imagining that you're summarizing conscious experience."
},
{
"end_time": 9069.275,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9053.831,
"text": " I mean you know you first you started off by saying look conscious experiences is very rich thing that people can't reproduce from theories and so on and so what you're doing is you're flipping that around as i understand and saying conscious experience is the axiomatic."
},
{
"end_time": 9098.797,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9069.275,
"text": " I think you know the question is what goes into it because as soon as you're saying you've got these families of Markov chains and so on you know that's real content that's not you know that's a that's a model like I say"
},
{
"end_time": 9120.947,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9098.797,
"text": " You know the universe is made of hypergraphs and somebody else says no it's made of cream cheese or something you know it's some you know you're making your positive something definite the the atoms of your. Of your ontology so to speak are these conscious experiences or whatever i mean you know."
},
{
"end_time": 9140.52,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9121.425,
"text": " i find that so so by the way i mean to to either support or attack both of our points of view you know i can no more pick up an eme one of our sort of atoms of existence and say here it is than that i claim you can pick up"
},
{
"end_time": 9170.009,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9140.981,
"text": " That conscious experience and say, here it is. Right, right. So, so both of us are in the situation where we have to say, look, the effects of what we're talking about are all very good, even though the thing we're ultimately talking about is not a thing we can pick up. Now, you know, to me, the, the, you know, the, the problem, the thing, one of the things that's nice about Eames and hypergraphs and really ads and things like that."
},
{
"end_time": 9189.462,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9170.384,
"text": " Is there extremely non-human. So we do not have sort of we don't make the mistake of saying oh it's truth it's falsity it's you know experiences this that and the other because they are by construction in a sense they are deeply abstract and deeply non-human so"
},
{
"end_time": 9213.558,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9189.991,
"text": " We don't come to it with a prejudice about how things should work. What worries me about starting from sort of consciousness as the element, so to speak, is that many, you know, we think, we imagine, and in fact, even the way you're talking about, you know, the sensation of mint and so on, is we come with a bag of prejudices about how that all works."
},
{
"end_time": 9242.056,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9213.814,
"text": " And so it is a challenging thing to erect the science without being sort of pulled in the direction of some prejudice or another. Fair enough. And I think that that's a very important point. And what I would say to anybody who wanted to do the research along the lines that I'm doing is to, I would say, the set of experiences that you've had is measure zero compared to the set of experiences that are out there. So don't make the silly"
},
{
"end_time": 9261.408,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9242.329,
"text": " That's a very challenging thing to do. Living paradigms is, you know, I got to say in my life, for example, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 9287.927,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9261.869,
"text": " i started studying simple computational systems i don't know 40 45 years ago basically and you know it took me embarrassingly long to realize things that were plainly observable in experiments i did i mean i you know just it happens to be the a few years ago it was the 40th anniversary of of my not my discovery of this rule 37 automaton that does all kinds of cool complicated things"
},
{
"end_time": 9312.91,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9288.507,
"text": " i it would be nice if i could say it was a discovery it wasn't it was the discovery of it was three years earlier it took me three years to understand what the heck was going on and to not ignore it and i i think this is the you know it is a huge challenge to kind of rise above one's kind of one's assumptions about what's going on and i mean maybe one thing i could ask is like i said that's a clue to what it means to be an observer"
},
{
"end_time": 9335.538,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9314.036,
"text": " That it is hard to rise outside of one's previous impressions of things. Well, but I think so. So a question would be, you know, observers like us human observers, things like that. We have an internal experience of it. We have a way of projecting what human observers might be like, you know, when we go"
},
{
"end_time": 9353.848,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9336.22,
"text": " two observers with very different human observers very different backgrounds very different kind of belief systems kind of ways of thinking about the world you know you go we're talking about the spirit world animism whatever else we're talking about you know sorts of eastern philosophy ways of viewing the world."
},
{
"end_time": 9380.981,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9354.241,
"text": " it's even even then it can be difficult I think at least it has been for me to wrap one's you know simple western kind of scientific mind around these kinds of different ways of thinking about the world. That's right that's right I agree I've faced the same thing but one thing that trying to do that has I've come to conclude is that"
},
{
"end_time": 9408.575,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9381.681,
"text": " I love science. I love mathematics. I love concepts and being precise and everything. But I've concluded that reality, whatever it is, infinitely transcends anything we can describe. And that's a very humbling, humbling thing. Yeah, well, right. You know, I have to say, I've had this experience now, you know, with the Rulliad and thinking of myself as this little tiny bundle of Eames in the Rulliad. I would like to be able to characterize"
},
{
"end_time": 9417.227,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9409.002,
"text": " What bundle of Eames is a thing like me versus what bundle of Eames is not an observer like me?"
},
{
"end_time": 9447.193,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9417.466,
"text": " I don't yet know how to do that. It will be interesting to understand, for example, and this is why I'm asking a little bit about, do they have to be many observers? Because, you know, for example, that gets you into, oh, you need kind of self replication. You need some kind of, you need some way of replicating the number of observers. Do you need the observers to be non-identical? Probably you do. If all the observers are in lockstep doing exactly the same thing, they're not very interesting observers."
},
{
"end_time": 9472.79,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9447.568,
"text": " And one of the things again, I sort of haven't seen coming, but I've now realized is relevant is, you know, I happened to, well, I just recently did some, some things about sort of foundations of biological evolution and, uh, which surprised me a lot. Cause I've thought about biological evolution off and on for four decades. And, um, I'd always thought, you know, I'd always had a hard time coming up with sort of a minimal model for what was happening."
},
{
"end_time": 9502.381,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9473.046,
"text": " And I finally have this very minimal model with a cellular automaton, with a few simple rules, and you're asking, you know, the fitness is something like, how long does the pattern live before it dies out? And what you find is that, you know, with that tiny genome, a very sort of small number of bits in the rule, it turns out you can evolve, you can adapt to produce these long-lived things that are unbelievably complicated."
},
{
"end_time": 9530.384,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9502.722,
"text": " And where there is no kind of, you know, there isn't an, you know, when you say, what's the narrative scientific explanation of why the thing lives a long time, there really isn't one. It's just, that's the, you know, the bits do what the bits do. And the answer is it lives for 10,000 steps or something. Um, but you know, one of the things I've been curious about is whether, uh, sort of the, the sort of what it takes to make an observer."
},
{
"end_time": 9557.534,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9531.084,
"text": " does what it takes to make an observer relate to things that we are used to, that are very routine to us, like the idea of life, the idea of sort of replicating multiple similar but not identical copies of minds, things like this. Is that thing that is routine for observers specifically like us actually something that is sort of critically important in the notion of an observer like us?"
},
{
"end_time": 9583.387,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9557.534,
"text": " And, you know, as I say, the big surprise for me has been the derivation of core laws of physics, just from very coarse statements about observers like us. And as we get finer statements about observers like us, what more might we be able to derive? And, you know, I'm sort of curious about whether, you know, for example, the thing that I find surprising is the existence of the rouillard I think is inevitable."
},
{
"end_time": 9605.674,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9583.985,
"text": " The existence of us as observers within the rule yard is something that you have to derive. It's not self evident in the in the abstract. It is not obvious from the existence of the really add that there will ever be an observer like us. It's something that is presumably in a sense mathematically derivable i don't know how to drive it."
},
{
"end_time": 9630.077,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9606.067,
"text": " But that's the, you know, to simply say as an axiomatic matter, if there is an observer like us, then the observer like us will observe physics of the kind we observe. But the question is, can we derive from the very nature of the Rulliad that there must be observers like us? You know, that's something which I think would be interesting. I think it will be doable"
},
{
"end_time": 9657.193,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9630.247,
"text": " But then we can ask questions like, okay, there are observers like us, you know, how, for example, how common are observers like us? You talked about a set of measure zero of our ways of observing the universe. You know, this relates to, um, earthquake here. I just, I just, I was, yeah, yeah, that was, we had a big earthquake here just now, but I'm good. We're getting closer to the truth. That's the sign."
},
{
"end_time": 9676.203,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 9657.534,
"text": " Yes, these are shaking ideas. But Don, you're okay. Like, let's just make sure you're okay. And the people in your home. Yeah, they're fine. I think our cats are probably scared. But that's okay. All right. And now the question is, what is the cat's perception of the physical world?"
},
{
"end_time": 9704.701,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 9676.8,
"text": " We on our cat perception. That's right. It was very different from mine. And right now they're probably under the bed hiding because there's there's something that just growled or just something really nasty to them. But right. But I mean, you know, this is this. So one thing that will be nice to be able to derive is what is the density of observers like us and really had? Yes. I mean, by the way, we have the same problem in my framework, right? I'm saying that space time is just one of an infinite number of headsets."
},
{
"end_time": 9726.766,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 9704.701,
"text": " So what we're perceiving as observers like we are is just one out of an infinite infinity. And so I'm going to try to model this particular little headset and his properties and protons and so forth. But then once we do that and sort of establish that we can do that, then I want to look and say, what are other there's an infinite number of other things to explore. What are the other headsets that I can't even concretely imagine, but I can use mathematics to try to imagine them."
},
{
"end_time": 9756.527,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 9727.415,
"text": " Yeah, don't go off to protons. Go off to general activity. You'll get to do it. So do you have a serious chance there, right? I think protons are hopeless, but just, just I'll give us the talk. This, this point that you're making that, uh, you know, in the really ad, it is not difficult to kind of construct what an observer different from us would observe."
},
{
"end_time": 9784.428,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 9757.875,
"text": " And to give an example of that, uh, one of the things, you know, in the sort of computational universe of all possible programs, one of the things that a little bit of a different, different issue, but related is there are programs that we know we care about and we're kind of, you know, there's a certain like in mathematics, there are theorems we know we care about. There's an infinite space of all possible theorems."
},
{
"end_time": 9812.346,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 9784.735,
"text": " Most of which we don't care about yet at least. And if we look at the computational universe, there are certain rules that we might have used in technology or whatever else that we know we care about. And then there's an infinite set of other ones. One thing that's interesting about the computational universe, or for that matter, the rule we add, which is closely related, is that it is very straightforward for us to do the experiment of just jumping anywhere we want in the computational universe. We just"
},
{
"end_time": 9831.903,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 9812.346,
"text": " Pick a program at random start running and see what it does right most of what it does is deeply alien to us exactly exactly and so the question is you know in a sense the view of what we're doing is we started from the place where we are on this earth with life as it is and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 9856.749,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 9831.903,
"text": " And we gradually expanding gradually colonizing more of what i would call real space kind of more the space of possible paradigms and so on we gradually also sending out space craft that colonize you know physical space but. What we can do which is very disorienting is. We can actually jump to random places in the really add and see what's that."
},
{
"end_time": 9872.654,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 9857.142,
"text": " But we don't have a connection you know in other words this notion and i think it may be what you're doing as well is you know we we to build up something which we can have a real experience over something i'm not sure if experience is the right word."
},
{
"end_time": 9892.346,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 9873.029,
"text": " we kind of have to go in steps like first we understand this we get familiar with that then we go to this and so on we're not we're not able you know if we're just throwing out there anywhere in real space it's just totally disorienting and i and i think i know it's kind of a so"
},
{
"end_time": 9919.292,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 9893.234,
"text": " You can't grok it. There's a grokking thing and you can't grok it if you don't get there in the right way. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I mean, you know, it's like people say, you know, are the AIs going to sort of discover, you know, are they going to jump sort of to science that we don't, you know, and this is the same issue that what is, you know, the question of what is science? If science is the construction of narratives that humans can understand about how the world works,"
},
{
"end_time": 9947.739,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 9919.718,
"text": " It's not all that useful to have something, you know, it's a different problem to just say, we can go out there and get to these things that are deeply non not connected to humans. So as I'm curious in your, um, in your view of things, if you're starting from consciousness as atoms, so to speak, to what extent, I mean, if you were just starting from cat consciousness, would you build the same theory?"
},
{
"end_time": 9978.439,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 9948.729,
"text": " In other words, if it was consciousness or let me be more extreme, if you believe and maybe you don't, that the weather is in some sense conscious, then if you were to build your theory based on weather consciousness or cat consciousness or nematode consciousness, would you build the same theory or would you build a different theory? Well, I can tell you how we built this one. We said there's lots of things that you could do to talk about consciousness. There's lots of things."
},
{
"end_time": 9990.964,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 9979.053,
"text": " We picked only two. We said there are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences. And we said those are the only two things we're going to take."
},
{
"end_time": 10020.367,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 9991.186,
"text": " Occam's razor basically the fewer assumptions the better off you are and so I decided to I can't get a if there are no conscious experiences I can't do anything and I need at least probabilistic relationships and let's just see if we can do do it with that and nothing more so I tried to get as general a theory with as few assumptions as possible so so the answer is as best as I can understand I would say I would get the same theory of consciousness no matter where I started because I tried to get the minimal things that you could possibly have but but again"
},
{
"end_time": 10046.425,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 10020.776,
"text": " That may be just my lack of being able to think outside of my little box. Well, I mean, you know, my guess is that there is a certain category of, of, yeah, I mean, you're erecting a theory based on calculus of observers and it is, you know, it's a change of basis, so to speak, to think about a different kind of observer, whether the theory you end up with after that change of basis looks the same."
},
{
"end_time": 10074.121,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 10046.783,
"text": " is not i don't know and that's a question in part it seems to me the translation from one kind of consciousness to another which by the way we have been singularly unsuccessful at achieving i mean you i doubt you can have a philosophical discussion with your cat right right right exactly i i completely agree i completely agree and and so i think that it's it's easy for me to think that i've got a general theory of consciousness and and and"
},
{
"end_time": 10096.732,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 10074.718,
"text": " Absolutely not. I can only, in some sense, have a theory of consciousness of the kind that I can grok. And what I can grok right now may be absolutely trivial compared to what's in the whole really out of the whole space of conscious agents. But so let's talk about AIs for a second, because the thing that you're doing, you know, in a sense, you could now, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 10125.964,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 10097.705,
"text": " You don't know, we don't know, we're all saying, you're saying nobody knows what consciousness really is and so on. So you're going to take it as an atom. You're going to take it as just the starting point for your theory. But in an AI, we can take it apart any way we want. We can't take about human brains. There are things we don't know. Are the microtubules important? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a bunch of stuff we don't know. For your friendly LM, we know every bit."
},
{
"end_time": 10145.776,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 10126.766,
"text": " So now the question would be if you start having lms that can interact with each other for example and can have you know would we build. Since you said you expect that you know based on a cat consciousness or whatever else you probably get the same kind of theory."
},
{
"end_time": 10165.691,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 10146.118,
"text": " So my next question would be let's take an LLM consciousness which maybe you know maybe there's something wrong with it maybe there isn't but let's just take that as a basis we can still talk about the relationships between LLMs we can talk about kind of there you know you could talk about approximating what happens with LLMs using your Markov chains and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 10193.575,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 10165.691,
"text": " And now, but now the question is now we've got a foundation, which is a foundation that sort of relates. It's a computational foundation. We're no longer having to say there's this mysterious thing that we're just taking as axiomatic. We've actually got something which whose axiomatization kind of goes all the way down to, you know, my kind of axiomatization, so to speak, or, you know, the computational foundation. So I guess the question would be if you were to take a bunch of LLMs"
},
{
"end_time": 10209.616,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 10193.575,
"text": " And you were to say you know you were to make a model as you have made a model of how you know consciousness is like us interact. You could say you could ask the question if you do the experiment on the lambs will land ok so i mean."
},
{
"end_time": 10239.053,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 10210.145,
"text": " You've got an assumption about how consciousnesses like us interact, which is sort of, and you're saying you're going to make that experimentally testable by deducing from those interactions between consciousnesses, what the inferred space time structure is. So now we could do the same thing with LLMs. We could say, you know, we take these LLMs, they're interacting in a certain way. Could you erect from the observation of interactions between LLMs,"
},
{
"end_time": 10263.814,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 10239.804,
"text": " sort of a structure of space time. So for example, let's, let's take a, um, and you know, it's, that's an interesting thing to imagine because if you actually think about a bunch of LLMs, they're probably on the internet and the internet doesn't live in, I mean, it is ultimately built in space time presumably, but the connectivity of the internet is not the structure of a three plus one dimensional space. Right, right, right."
},
{
"end_time": 10293.848,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 10264.241,
"text": " So now the question would be if our conscious elements are AIs living on the internet interacting by the rules of the internet, so to speak, which are a bit different from the rules that we, I mean, I don't know whether they're in your model, whether they're different. The question would be those agents erecting their model of space time. What is that model of space time? Right. Well, and I would imagine within our framework,"
},
{
"end_time": 10314.855,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 10293.985,
"text": " That there is an infinite number of different space times that could be in principle constructed, but by the way, the positive geometries at the high energy theoretical physicists have something like the amplitude hadron. It turns out that one of the parameters and that this has parameters NKM and Z. One of the parameters M for our space time is four."
},
{
"end_time": 10331.613,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 10315.691,
"text": " But their their positive geometries allowed them to be any positive integer you want. So so instead of a four dimensional space time, they can have positive geometries for a billion dimensional space time. So in other words, already in the new structures that the Neymar, Connie Hamed and others have found beyond space time."
},
{
"end_time": 10348.456,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 10332.312,
"text": " They're realizing that our space time is just a parameter four, but there's a whole range of parameters that they've discovered are possible and so other headsets are effectively possible. So my answer would be there's an infinite number of them and that's just in our first step out of space time we're finding this"
},
{
"end_time": 10377.483,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 10348.456,
"text": " I presume there'll be even more dimensions of variation that we'll find. M equal four is just the first, right? So my assumption is that the reason we believe space is three plus one dimensional right now in the history of the universe is because of some aspect of us as observers. That's my belief. I can't, you know, I haven't established that. This is dramatic. We're getting another, this is, yeah, this is earth shaking stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 10400.776,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 10378.063,
"text": " Well, are you in a place where there's some kind of, you know, warning if the fault is going, you know, speed of light being faster than seismic waves and so on? Well, I'm in Southern California. We're used to earthquakes here. Okay. So this is not out of the ordinary. Well, this is unusual that we've been having a few earthquakes in the last couple of days. So it's unusual."
},
{
"end_time": 10428.677,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 10400.964,
"text": " So Don, how about I do a summary for yourselves and I'll tell you how I see the conversation so far and hopefully I do so in a straightforward manner. Sure. So it started off with you, Don, asking Steven, look, can you give me a scientific account of the taste of mint or the scent of garlic or whatever it may be? And what is a theory of consciousness that has a scientific basis? Like, go ahead, Don, go ahead, Steven, try me, do it."
},
{
"end_time": 10448.78,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 10429.48,
"text": " In other words, there's an adage that says something like, if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there. And then, Don, you say, okay, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 10474.36,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10449.514,
"text": " Stephen, you have it backward. It's not that consciousness is this place you have to get to. It's rather what you know most intimately. It's where you start. And then this material world that you think is a fundamental notion is actually the derived one. And then Stephen says, okay, so fair enough. However, Dawn, you claim you have a scientific account of consciousness. So how can you sign to fives this? I believe you use that word, Stephen. So how are you going to do that?"
},
{
"end_time": 10488.712,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10474.804,
"text": " And even worse than that, Don, if you take your intimate notions so seriously, then where are you getting this proliferation of consciousnesses from? When all you intimately know is this N equals one, but yet your theory has multiple consciousnesses."
},
{
"end_time": 10517.944,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10489.36,
"text": " So then I believed on, you said something like, well, you could have an N equals one if you take it to be the totality of consciousness and we're instantiations. But by the way, I think that's a really, we didn't, we didn't pursue that particular point about the, you know, the, the Uber consciousness, so to speak, which, which feels like kind of the God theory, you know, it feels like kind of the, the, uh, the, the limit you said, there's no upper bound. So there is no, you know, it's kind of like, uh, you know, But is there a lower bound?"
},
{
"end_time": 10528.353,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10518.78,
"text": " If you believe that the end of one story is that infinite limit, you are claiming you are God basically."
},
{
"end_time": 10557.79,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10529.138,
"text": " That's basically what you have to say is, is that if there's an end of one and there's only one, because you only know that one thing, but you are also then that one thing, that unique thing is this upper limit, this infinite limit of this whole sort of pile of progressively uber uber consciousnesses. Yeah, I'm willing to go there, but I'm taking you with me saying that, that you and I are both God looking at, at the self talk to yourself through two different avatars for three different avatars."
},
{
"end_time": 10587.432,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 10558.797,
"text": " i think i think that limit thing is basically your version of the really add i mean i think that that that's what um you know i think uh anyway that's which is kind of interesting i mean it's it's it's always good when you know when we can as i say it is for me it has been the the the limit of many kinds of uh positive thinking okay but curt sorry we we interrupted you good good sir this sounds like a foreign notion but many people say"
},
{
"end_time": 10615.418,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 10587.773,
"text": " All there is is the universe and these glasses, the cell phone, yourself, your eyeballs, their expressions of the universe. So this is just the similar sentiment in different language. Is that correct? I think we're going into a different direction here, but we're going to, we're going to go on for another hour. I think you gave a pretty good summary, Kurt. I mean, I think the only part that perhaps you left out is this, is this, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 10638.114,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 10615.725,
"text": " These two different complimentary ways of viewing the world. Do you go from the Eames up or from the conscious observers down, so to speak? Yeah. And I was also going to say that Don, you'd then talk about Markovian dynamics, giving rise to consciousness. And Stephen believes that's at least initially that's too simplistic to reproduce the intricate experience that we have."
},
{
"end_time": 10664.957,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 10638.336,
"text": " while caveating that Stephen you know full well the power of rudimentary simple items giving rise to what looks convoluted and elaborate and as you helped pioneer computational emergence so you caveated with that and then there was some some really add pushing of Stephen like a you're with a leather jacket at the back of a Mathematica conference saying like yeah you got to try some some really add you got to take sniff of this sniff of this causal way graph"
},
{
"end_time": 10685.896,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 10665.316,
"text": " I really enjoyed this conversation and I would welcome a chance to talk some more and explore this further."
},
{
"end_time": 10713.797,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 10686.664,
"text": " Yeah, very interesting stuff. And now I think I understand just a little bit about what you've, you know, I bought myself a copy of this book. Oh, oh yes. I know it's very old, but very old and I didn't read it yet. So, so now maybe I'm, I probably have to look at the 30 years after version, but John Wheeler cited that book and is it from bit paper? Oh, that's interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 10743.2,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 10714.138,
"text": " I, I, unfortunately I met John Wheeler only once. I mean, I exchanged letters with him a bunch of times, but I met him only once when he was 95 years old. It's kind of a sad story because I I'm talking to him about a bunch of things and he looks up and he says, you know who you should talk to about all this stuff? It's a chap over at the Institute. His name is John von Neumann. Oh wow. And I said, unfortunately he died before I was born."
},
{
"end_time": 10763.08,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 10744.002,
"text": " oh boy yeah that's that's sad yeah yeah anyway not not to end on a down note that's right well thank you all for spending three hours with myself and with the the audience yes the audience that will eventually see this and take care yeah great pleasure"
},
{
"end_time": 10779.087,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 10764.087,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like."
},
{
"end_time": 10805.503,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 10779.275,
"text": " That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 10824.002,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 10805.503,
"text": " Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn"
},
{
"end_time": 10852.244,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 10824.206,
"text": " Greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 10872.193,
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 10895.589,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 10872.193,
"text": " And donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 10902.227,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 10895.794,
"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
}
]
}No transcript available.