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Donald Hoffman on the fundamental nature of consciousness (MASSIVE technical analysis) [Reposted]
December 5, 2022
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Hi, this is Kurt Jaimungal from Theories of Everything. Last week, we released a Theolocution with Donald Hoffman and John Vervecky on Consciousness, God, Meaning, Purpose, as well as Reality and Fundamentality. People have asked for some of the mathematical inner workings of Don's theories, and many weren't aware that Don and I have conducted a behemoth, massive analysis, technical analysis, over three hours long, about two years ago. So, we are re-releasing this here for you to enjoy.
Enjoy. I mean you're asking the right questions for anybody that really knows the math and science and it must be hard to notice but you're asking exactly the right questions. Some of the the deepest questions I've gotten so I really appreciate it. How's it going man? Great, how about you Kurt? It's going well. How's the weather? Been like in Irvine? Oh it's well it's it's probably the best weather you could have in the world. I mean it's almost like we have the thermostat it's it's just gorgeous here year-round so I have no complaints. It's warm enough.
With all the quarantine and lockdowns, are you okay? Is it all right in your mental health? Do you prefer it? I'm okay. For me, it's great in the sense that I'm enjoying less distraction and I'm able to focus on studying some mathematics and physics that I'm interested in studying. So it's good. It's, of course, very, very sad to see the millions infected and hundreds of thousands, 140,000 at this point that are
I'm similar in that I'm ambivalent about it. I like it because it removes any distractions and I too am studying math and physics on the side and this whole situation has been salutary for me, but it's obviously not for everyone.
Has it changed your views? Has COVID given you any insight or any different ideas with regards to your theories, which we'll get into?
It just confirms what we learn from evolutionary psychology about human nature and in-groups and out-groups and the reasons we evolve, logic and reason, it wasn't in pursuit of truth but to support ideas that we already believe. So we just see this being played out in the big debates about masks and so forth that are going on. We see human nature being played out in a big way and we see the results in terms of
You know, a big failure in our country right now. The rates of infection are going up, the deaths were number one in the world in terms of the number of deaths and infections and so forth. Maybe not per capita, but still, for the world's richest country, with the wonderful scientific establishment that we have, you would think that there would be just no problem in us getting together, organizing and defeating this thing, but there's the
whole aspect of human evolutionary psychology and that's playing itself out large. And so I study evolutionary psychology and what's going on does make sense. It's tragic for us as a population, but it makes sense in terms of human nature. Do you meditate? Yes, daily. What kind of meditation, mindfulness or transcendental? It's silence.
Nothing else. Pure silence. No poses. I do whatever feels comfortable, but it's I spend probably at least three hours a day in pure silence. That's it. Not looking at a screen or reading. Nothing. Not walking. Not walking. Just silence. Sitting, lying. The pose doesn't matter to me, but it's just pure silence and being just being
aware of whatever I feel in the moment and being aware of thoughts as they come up and just if they come up then I'll let them go and go back to silence. It's very very simple. What I find tricky about meditation, this is why I don't do it, is that as soon as I start to not that the thoughts intrude but that great productive thoughts come up and then I have to write them down because I find that when I don't
It's rare that I get them again. So do you sit with a pen and paper? If you have a particularly brilliant thought, do you just allow that to escape? I let it go. Over the years, it's only maybe one or two times that I've actually written something down. I just don't.
I just let it come and I let it go. I have a fairly good memory for the stuff that comes up if I want to later. So maybe, maybe if I was really concerned that I would forget something that I really wanted, I might be doing it, but I'm not too concerned about it. I can remember stuff later, but I just, you know, it's, it's a matter. What I find it's the meditation process for me is what I can imagine it's like for a caterpillar to go through metamorphosis.
It turns out when the caterpillar is inside the chrysalis, the immune cells of the caterpillar attack and try to kill. In fact, they do kill the cells that are responsible for the transformation into a butterfly. They attack and kill, attack and kill until they're overwhelmed. And then most of the structure of the caterpillar liquefies and then is reformed into the butterfly.
From the point of view of the caterpillar, that can't be fun. And the immune system indicates that it's not welcomed by the caterpillar at all. It's fought to the death by the immune system until the immune system is overwhelmed. But from the point of view of the butterfly, it's a brand new creation. So it depends on whether you take the point of view of the caterpillar or the butterfly. Most of the time I've been the caterpillar.
But I'm starting a little bit to welcome the destruction of everything I know, the destruction of deeply held beliefs, the destruction of my fears and so forth, defense mechanisms, letting all that stuff slowly be destroyed just in pure silence and then watching whatever new might come up. I mean, it's hard to imagine that the Caterpillar has any idea
what it's going to be turned into. It's just fighting it to the death until it can't fight anymore, and then it liquefies. So from the caterpillar's point of view, it's just all loss and death and destruction, but there's a rebirth. And that's the way I feel about meditation, that I'm allowing a transformation to occur, of which I'm arbitrarily ignorant about its true nature, and I can only tell you after I've taken the next step what it was like.
Are you aware of any studies that have been done as to the memory of a caterpillar when it becomes into its butterfly phase, that it retains certain memories? That's right. I'm not an expert on it, but I do recall stories about that, that if you give some kind of aversive training to the caterpillar, the reactions might be there on the butterfly, that kind of thing.
I was watching a neuroscientist say that some memories might be non-local or not localized into the neuronal formation in the brain and the reason why he thinks so is controversial and it's extremely rudimentary in this research right now is because of the arctic squirrel the arctic squirrel when it goes into hibernation and I believe most creatures experience this their brain degenerates to such a degree that it's it's not clear that memory should certain memories should survive yet they do with the arctic squirrel interesting
Do you eat a certain kind of breakfast or follow a diet? I try to have a low acid diet. So I have lots of oatmeal. I have oatmeal, you know, for breakfast and try to do low acid, low fat. So I'll have an omelet with mostly egg whites, maybe one egg yolk and some fresh fruit.
My wife is a vegetarian. I'm not. She makes up vegetables all the time, so I eat her vegetables and then I'll cook some fish. Chicken, I don't do beef that often, but I don't avoid it either. I tend to focus on fish and chicken, but I'll have a little bit of red meat. I try to eat. I eat three times a day. I don't snack at all. I eat
After dinner, I don't eat any snacks. So I don't eat usually from 6.30 in the evening until at least 7.30 the next day. I never eat a bite. And that's just been my habit for decades. I don't eat at all for like 12 hours, 13 hours. See, I intermittent fast, but I do so because I'm filled with avarice and I just want to eat whatever I see. So I fast for like when I spoke to Eric Weinstein,
I think at that point during the interview I had not eaten for 65 hours or so, not plenty, but I do that before I conduct my podcasts or interviews generally. Do you have any rituals or habits that you do before you speak or before you study besides meditation? No, I'm pretty comfortable talking. I was a professor at the University of California for 37 years and had to give lectures all the time.
to big audiences. For me, talking is not an issue at all. I was working out just a couple minutes before we got onto this podcast. I had an hour window, so I got a little bench and dumbbells that I use. I weight train three times a week and do aerobics three or four times the other three or four days of the week. I try to have a regular thing. I was doing that just before the podcast.
So yeah, no, I don't usually have to, I mean, I usually just go and talk and enjoy it. I was looking at your background and it said you studied initially computational psychology. What is computational psychology? Yeah. So it was computational psychology was the name of my PhD at MIT. And there I was in the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT.
and in what's now the brain and cognitive sciences department. And so what I was doing was a combination of studying just artificial intelligence. And at the time it was, you know, good old fashioned artificial intelligence. It wasn't the neural network stuff at that point, because that was from 1979 to 1983. Neural networks came into their own a little bit, a few years later.
So I was doing more of the good old-fashioned AI stuff, but still it was, you know, I was studying human vision and computer vision, and the idea was you had a good theory if you could build a computer that could work. So if you have a theory about how we see in 3D, build it. If you can't build it, then I'm not sure you have a theory. So it was that really hard-nosed attitude. And then on the other side, I was looking in the brain and cognitive science department,
at human vision and the neurophysiology of human vision, psychophysical experiments about how we see in 3D, object recognition, colors and so forth. So the idea was to reverse engineer biological vision systems, which are the only ones that worked at the time, and take the insights and try to build computer vision systems that implemented what we learned.
That way we would know we weren't just fooling ourselves into thinking we understood. If it doesn't work, then you don't understand. Go back and scratch your head a little bit and figure out what's really going on. I'm sorry, around what year was this? I was there from 1979 till 1983 at MIT, and I was very fortunate to have two wonderful advisors, David Marr and Whitman Richards. So both of them had their foot
in the AI lab and in the brain and cognitive science department. Cool. Cool. You know, I, I see a few different strands to your theories in this, just for the people listening or watching, this is going to be extremely technical or much more so than most of the other interviews that you have online and which I think stay on a, at a cursory level, particularly, particularly because you're conversing with people who don't have a mathematical background or a physics background. So as far as I can delineate, you have the consciousness, the conscious agent model,
Interface theory of perception. That's number two. Bayesian decision theory, which I believe you mended to computational evolutionary perception. I could be wrong about that. And then number four, you have some new papers on eigenforms, which I haven't studied much because I don't know much about modular forms and heck algebras. So I didn't get a chance to read them. But are those
Is that a fair summary of your work or are there more? Yeah, so evolutionary game theory I work on, yeah, Bayesian models of perception, Markovian models of the dynamics of consciousness, yeah. Out of curiosity, this is getting somewhat out of left field. Why did you choose G to represent the the Braille space for decisions? Because when I was, for those listening, there's this
There's a relatively simple structure, though, non-trivial, called sigma-algebras, and then there's Markov kernels, and then you have W, which is the world state, and then you have X, which is experience. I imagine you chose X because of experience. World, W. Okay, great. But G, what does that have to do with decisions? Why did you choose that? Did you just run out of letters? Yeah, we were running out of letters, and we already had A for the kernel for actions. In some sense, G is a set of actions that you're going to take, and we already used action A for the action kernel. So I used G for the group,
of actions that you could take. I was thinking about it at the time that it might have a group structure as well as a measurable structure. That's why I use G, because I already take an A for the kernel itself. But the easiest way to think about the definition of a conscious agent is that it's just three kernels. There's a perception kernel,
So you get the world that influences you through a perception kernel. In other words, whatever the state of the world is, it probabilistically affects what your experiences are. That's what a kernel P does. So whatever the state of the world is, you get a probabilistic effect on your experiences. Then the D kernel is whatever my experiences are, they probabilistically affect the actions that I choose.
And then my action kernel is whatever actions I choose, they probabilistically affect the state of the world. Very, very simple triangle. The state of the world affects my experiences. My experiences affect the choices I make. The choices I make affect the state of the world. Right. Okay. Now, please forgive me if I jump around. I have 90 questions here. And what you're saying right now brings me to question number 80, let's say. So it's going to go all over the place.
Why did you have X when you could just go from W to G directly by composing D after P? So that is to say for the people, you can explain what I'm saying to the people. Right. So the idea when I was working on this model of perception, decision and action, the idea is first I'm trying to model
The process of observation.
It turns out when you look at all the specific mathematical models that we have, they all have a similar structure. I was trying to capture that similar structure, sort of a Bayesian inference kind of structure, but I wanted to actually capture the fact that we do have these conscious experiences, like I'm perceiving a three-dimensional object, like an apple, and I'm seeing its three-dimensional shape, its colors, its textures and so forth. So I needed to space X of experiences to capture what it was that I was perceiving. But then, you know,
Perception doesn't occur in a void. There's a perception action loop, right? There's this point that sort of an activist approaches highlight, and that is that perception and action sort of work together. And so I want a model in which I have experiences, but those are tied to my actions, and those actions affect the world and my experiences in a loop.
And so that's why there's this loop structure to it. And to leave out the experiences would actually be to leave out the whole point, which is to understand my perceptions. Okay. When I watch your interviews with people who most of the time aren't physicists, they seem to be resistant on that space-time is emergent.
like Michael Schermer, and he was saying, well, you probably talk to the minority of physicists that think that space-time is emergent. That's not, in fact, true. Most physicists, as far as I know, actually believe that space-time is emergent. Nima is one of them, Lee Smolin. So why do you think that there's this aversion to monist, that is, monoism, theories predicated on the primacy of consciousness rather than the primacy being material? Why is it that that's the sticking point?
Right. Well, and even among physicists who recognize that space-time isn't fundamental, you won't find very many of them arguing that therefore consciousness is a good candidate for what is fundamental. I've been to an FQXI meeting of physicists where they were looking at the role of the observer in physics at Banff a few years ago. And
Even in that context where they were looking at the role of the observer in physics, I didn't see any of the physicists there interested in taking consciousness as fundamental. I think the attitude is, why take such a huge leap? Letting go of space-time is one thing.
But jumping into consciousness, I mean, that for, I think most physicists would say that's a much bigger leap than we need to take. Let's try to find just some deeper structure beyond space time. For example, this is, I think the brilliant work that Nima or Connie Hamed is doing where he's saying, look, we can look at these so-called positive geometries behind space time, the amplitude hedron, associate hedron,
and other things that he's finding, positive Grassmannians, the bigger structure that includes many of these. And he doesn't know what that realm is about, which is fine, but he's finding the mathematical structure. So he's finding that there are these symmetries, like in the amplitude hedron, that can't be captured in space-time. They also have found that the mathematical description of the scattering amplitudes, the computations of the scattering amplitudes
become much more simpler when you let go of space-time. If you use Feynman diagrams and have virtual particles in space-time, then you could have hundreds or thousands of pages, but in this deeper space that he's finding, this pure math, it collapses to a few terms that you can compute by hand. And so I think that the physicists are saying, let's not jump further than we have to.
If we have to let go of space time, let's just find some, let's let the mathematics guide us first. And we can try things like, well, let's just try like quantum bits and quantum gates. Seth Lloyd, I think at MIT took an approach. Quantum bits and quantum what? Quantum bits and quantum gates. Gates, right. Okay. Right. So your space time isn't fundamental. Let's posit something that's not conscious, just quantum bits and quantum gates.
And what Seth Lloyd was able to show is that you could, in some sense, get little patches of space-time, general relativistic space-time, where the curvature of this little patch was proportional to the action of the gate. And so, instead of starting with space-time as fundamental, you start with quantum bits and quantum gates. Where those bits and gates come from, again, that's your new assumption. It's not space-time, it's just bits and gates. And you could ask, you know, who ordered that? Why should the universe be fundamentally that?
Now, so the reason why I go there, even though I think most physicists don't, is that as a cognitive neuroscientist, I'm very interested in the problem, what's called the heart problem of consciousness. We have lots of correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences. I like to use the example of area V4,
of cortex, you know, left hemisphere is back over here somewhere. If you take a magnet and just touch it to your skull there, a transcranial magnetic stimulator, and inhibit before, you will lose all color experiences in the right visual field. Everything to the right of where you're looking, you will lose color experiences. You turn off the magnet, color experiences come back. And we have dozens, maybe hundreds of correlations like that between specific kinds of neural activity and specific conscious experiences. But we have no scientific theories that can explain
that correlation. There are none. There's not a scientific theory that can explain even one specific conscious experience, like the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic, that says, for example, this pattern of brain activity or this functional aspect of brain activity must be the taste of chocolate. It couldn't be the smell of a rose. And these are the precise reasons why. There's just nothing on the table. And so I'm trying to
solve two problems. I'm trying to say the reason why space-time is not fundamental is because something else is, consciousness. And if I start with consciousness, I can perhaps get a theory that explains this correlation between conscious experiences and brain states, but I don't start with something in space-time, namely brain states. I don't start with brain states
and figure out how they cause consciousness, I go the other way around. I start with consciousness and show how it creates space-time as a data structure and brains and neurons as particular objects within that data structure. So the idea, the big picture idea is if space-time isn't fundamental, as the physicists are now recognizing, then
And just so people are clear, this is not new that space-time isn't fundamental. It's not like a kooky theory. This has been going around since the 80s, just so that they don't think you're glomming onto some fad. That's right. And I think, as you said, most physicists now, first-rank theoretical physicists just recognize that it's sort of just, of course, space-time isn't fundamental. And of course, our job is to try to figure out what's the next step.
It's not such a crazy idea either. When you were speaking with Michael Schirmer, he was just blown away. There's no way that space-time can't be fundamental. There's a cup in front of me. I see the cup. That's beside the point. There's been many times where we have an effective theory and then we find one that's more fundamental that produces that. There's no reason to think that our current theories aren't effective.
My colleagues in the cognitive neurosciences can be forgiven if they don't understand the state of the play in physics, right? They were taught some physics in their backgrounds and they have just absorbed the idea that space-time is fundamental and that's perfectly fine in a Newtonian universe and even in special relativity and in general relativity. When you put Einstein's theory of gravity together with quantum theory,
that you get the problem. And that's sort of beyond what you could expect a normal cognitive neuroscientist to really have studied. And so, you know, I don't blame my colleagues there for not understanding this. But for any real professional physicist, it's just obvious. The general logic of quantum field theory don't play well. I see there's two problems. One, if you encounter the general public, and when I say general public, I mean the rationally minded skeptics like Michael Shermer or maybe even Sam Harris.
and their sticking point might be the space-time fundamental aspect, but then when you speak to a physicist, their sticking point would be consciousness. You're saying consciousness is fundamental. I agree with you, space-time is emergent, but then consciousness is complicated. That's an emergent phenomenon for a neuroscientist to figure out, or some people like Penrose, there's a quantum mechanical aspect to it, but it's still somewhat complicated. It's not simple. Why would you start with consciousness?
Right, okay. I have a question about... Sure. Can I just respond to why I started? The idea is very, very simple. If space-time isn't fundamental, then objects in space-time aren't fundamental either. And if they're not fundamental, then they aren't the true source of causal power in the universe. Physical objects have no causal powers. It's useful fiction to think that the eight ball being hit by the cue ball
There's a causal interaction or that neurons have causal effects, but it's just a fiction and so that's why I tie the two together. Neurons being objects in space-time have no causal powers. My brain causes none of my behavior, it causes none of my experiences.
That means that therefore any attempt to show how we solve the hard problem of consciousness, starting with brain activity and trying to boot up consciousness, will fail. So my idea is simple. Let's start with the theory of consciousness and show how space-time is not fundamental. It's just a data structure within consciousness. That's why space-time isn't fundamental. It's merely a data structure.
a visualization tool that consciousness uses to interact with other consciousnesses. So this is all tied together. The space-time being not fundamental and the move to make consciousness fundamental is all part of one big move, recognizing that brain activity could not possibly cause our conscious experiences. So why don't we try the other way? Let's start with conscious experiences and show how they cause space-time and objects
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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Okay, getting to the neuro correlates aspect, you mentioned that it would be to say that, hey, because our brain is correlated with certain conscious experiences, it's
That's one thing, but then to say that the brain causes it is another, it would be akin to saying there's a train track, there's a subway station and people form right before the train comes. But it doesn't mean that the people themselves caused the train to come. However, you just mentioned that there's transcranial magnetic stimulation, where we can, in fact, perturb neurons.
And then seeing it would be one thing if we saw conscious experience, then looked at the neurons and then saw that there's an association that's correlation. But then if we can perturb the neurons to elicit a conscious experience, why is that not evidence for the causal power going from neurons to conscious experience?
Great question. And that's what my colleagues would all point to is that, look, they'd say, look, we can intervene. I can literally manipulate the brain and get a change in conscious experience. The fact that I can intervene means I'm showing you the true causal structure of what's going on there. And that's a logical error. And it's very easy to see the logical error. Imagine you're playing a virtual reality game and you're driving a car. You're driving a Mustang in a virtual reality game, right?
And you have a steering wheel. And it turns out you can intervene in that. If I turn the steering wheel to the left, my car actually turns left in the game. If I turn the steering wheel to the right, the car turns right. Therefore, there must be a real steering wheel and it must have real causal powers. No, there's no real steering wheel. That's not the claim. Well, that might be their claim, my claim.
or my question is, it is correct to say that the turning of the steering wheel causes turning in the game. Now it might not be that the turning of the steering wheel is akin in causal power to the way that we would think the turning of the steering wheel in a real car changes the wheels and the axis. But all that we need for causation to be shown is A implies B. It doesn't matter that they're intermediate steps.
Do you understand what I'm saying or am I not explaining it correctly? The thing about the steering wheel that you see in the virtual reality game is that if you turn your headset to the side, the steering wheel ceases to exist. There is no steering wheel because I'm not looking at it anymore. When I look back over to where the steering wheel should be, I see a steering wheel. The steering wheel is something that I create and destroy as I need. It's gone, now it's back. It has no causal powers.
The steering wheel literally has no causal powers. It informs me as the player about actions that I can take to interact with the game. And the way I see myself, the way I visualize what I'm doing is I visualize myself turning the steering wheel. But that's all just a useful fiction. And the steering wheel itself literally has no causal powers. It's literally only in my head.
There is no external steering wheel with causal powers. And I'm saying that that's true not just in virtual reality but in everyday life because space-time is not fundamental, it's just your headset. When you go around in everyday life, think virtual reality. I create the moon when I look up in the sky. I delete it when I look away. There is no moon just in the same way that there is no steering wheel in the virtual reality game. So when Einstein asked
someone that was with him, do you really believe the Moon is only there when you look and it's not there when no one looks? My answer is, yeah, it's not there when no one looks. There is no Moon because there is no space-time. And see, that's the part that Einstein wouldn't like, right? Because his theory was the theory of space-time. Space-time is not fundamental. When we really understand what that means, nothing inside space-time is fundamental. Nothing. And therefore nothing inside space-time
has genuine causal powers. It emerges from something deeper. It's a useful fiction that our species has to think that physical objects have causal powers. I throw a rock, it hits a window, the rock caused the window to break. That's a useful fiction. I inhibit area V4, color disappears. Aha, therefore V4 causes color. It's a useful fiction, but it's just a fiction, just like the steering wheel in the virtual reality game.
Okay, let's remove the virtual reality. Let's just pretend it's a regular game with a TV screen and you have a controller in front of you. Right. And then you move your analog stick to the left and the character moves to the left. Then would you say that the move that you moving the analog stick to the left causes the character to move to the left? Yeah, in that metaphor, now you within that metaphor, you would say that the the the icon on the screen wasn't the thing that caused things to move, right? So if I see myself right, I would go paddle hit the thing like in Pong, I hit hit a ball with the
In that metaphor, it would be the joystick that was the real thing. Once you get that, recognize that the world around you is just the screen. Even the joystick in your hand is in your head itself. That's the real point about what physics has discovered. Space-time is not fundamental. It's hard for us to really grasp that.
It's really, we so deeply believe that of course, space-time is fundamental. Of course, the moon is there when no one looks. But when you really grasp space-time is not fundamental, and it's actually our construction, then physical objects don't even exist when they're not perceived. They don't have causal powers. They don't even exist. You can think of this, of what I'm doing right now as, as partly
to convince because I already have a predilection towards your ideas I already like you and I like your ideas so you don't need to convince me too much although I do have some objections but I'm demarcating where I feel people like Michael Shermer and so on have problems because they take that virtual reality metaphor and there's some there are some problems with it because well like I said forget the virtual reality just imagine a screen and then you have an analog stick and then those two get conflated
Okay, there's another problem that I see with the virtual reality metaphor. When you take off the headset
There is still the computer rendering it to the LCD. Now, there are some monitors, there are some virtual reality headsets that detect when your forehead is there and then just shut it off. But let's imagine that's not there. Then they're like, well, it still persists. Even if when I look to the left, it renders what's on the left or look to the right, it renders. But I can even simulate someone going through a game without a conscious perceiver. And then I can set my video camera up to record that. And that person, that character is moving through the game.
There is no perceiver right then and there. That's why I see this virtual reality metaphor as having some limitations. But what would you say to that? That, look, even without a perceiver, I put the headset down, it's still rendering. Well, that now in terms of physics is the question of
Do physical objects literally exist and have definite values of their properties when they're not perceived? So that's the question of local realism, right? So this is a technical question of physics, and this is what we're really addressing here is the question of local realism. Do physical objects really exist and have definite values of physical properties like position, momentum, and spin when they're not observed? And is it true that those properties have effects that propagate no faster than the speed of light?
And you might intuitively think, well, of course, the Moon has a position, it has a momentum, an electron has a position, a momentum, a spin value, a spin axis, when it's not observed, of course. But when we do the experiments, first, when this was first raised, Einstein was one of the ones who asked this question back in the EPR paper back in 1935, right?
A number of physicists, including Wolfgang Pauli, thought that this was ludicrous, that Einstein was asking a question that was no more interesting than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. How could you possibly answer Einstein's question, does an electron have a position, a definite value of position or momentum, when it's not observed? That seems silly by definition. If you're not observing, how could you tell whether it has a position or momentum or not?
It turned out in 1963 or so, the physicist John Bell discovered that we can answer that question. There is a series of experiments that you can do, measurements that you can do, that will give you certain statistics that can allow you to decide whether or not local realism is true. And that was a real stunning achievement, one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history, John Bell's inequalities.
And then a year later, John Bell and Koken and Specker, apparently independently, also came up with a way to test non-contextual realism. Non-contextual realism is the claim that objects exist and have definite values of their properties when they're not observed. That's the realism. And the values of those properties don't depend on the way you measure them. That's the non-contextual part.
And once again quantum theory entails that non-contextual realism is false. It also entails that local realism is false. And it's been tested and it's true. Local realism is false and therefore either realism is false, that is the electron has a position when it's not observed, or locality is false, the influences propagate no faster than the speed of light, or both.
And I think that both, both are false. Local realism is just plain false. Non-contextual realism is false. And once we understand that, that means that there are— Did you say that non-local realism is also false?
Yeah, because space-time is not fundamental. The big take-home is space-time is not fundamental and therefore particles and their properties inside space-time are not fundamental. For a physicist, this is obvious because as soon as you say space-time is not fundamental, it's emergent from something else, well that takes particles with them because particles are nothing but
Irreducible representations of the symmetries of space-time, the Poincare group. So particles are irreducible representations of the Poincare group, which are just the symmetries of space-time. The space-time is not fundamental, neither are particles. So my colleagues in cognitive neurosciences, we're still back thinking that, oh, we have this reductionist view. Space-time is fundamental. You start off with protons and neutrons, or if you're more sophisticated, quarks and leptons and gluons and gravitons.
And those are the elementary particles. The laws that govern them are the fundamental laws of all of reality. And we can, in a reductive fashion, build up everything from that. Well, that whole foundation is gone. Space-time is not fundamental. Those particles are not fundamental. Reductionism is dead. Space-time reductionism is dead. We need a completely new framework. Now, brilliant physicists like Neymar, Kani, Hamad, going after the amplitude hydron and so forth, are looking for new
Does Nima say that consciousness is fundamental or are you just saying well Nima has a theory that simplifies space and time down to something else and maybe with your theory the cognitive the conscious agent theory you can imply the amplitude of hedron and therefore you can imply whatever Nima's implying or does Nima think that consciousness is fundamental?
I have no idea what Nima thinks about consciousness. I haven't seen him talk about it myself in any of his writings or lectures. I mean, I would be surprised if it turned out he thinks consciousness is fundamental. I would be very, very surprised. But the right answer is I don't know what he thinks about that. I would bet good odds that he doesn't think consciousness is fundamental, but I don't know. I certainly would not want to ascribe that point of view to him.
I've seen from his lectures and writing is that there are these beautiful mathematical structures, these positive geometries, amplituhedra, sociahedra, that are more fundamental than space-time and that in magical ways seem to give rise to the scattering amplitudes. They're like two glow-ons hitting each other, four gluons go spraying out. Those scattering amplitudes turn out to be volumes of these geometric objects he's finding, these positive geometries.
But what this new, deeper realm is about, I haven't seen him speculate about, you know, what is this telling us is the realm behind space time? What is that realm about? I haven't seen him speculate that. He might have some speculations, but I haven't seen him. He just goes with the math.
As for Bell's inequality, I'm sure you're aware that there are some ways around it. So for example, super determinism, as well as a couple others that I can't recall right now, Edwin James, he didn't particularly think Bell's inequalities or the experiments that validate Bell's inequalities demonstrate that non realism is the way to go. What do you say to those objections? Well, I would say that the deeper
problems between general relativity and quantum field theory that force us to recognize that space-time isn't fundamental are the ones that clinch it for me against realism. Because realism about entities that are merely representations of space-time, when space-time itself is not fundamental, is now beside the point. What made you choose NEMA's amplitude-ahedron as opposed to the other
perhaps simpler models that demonstrate that space-time is emergent. We mentioned a few others before this call, like causal dynamic triangulation. There's also spin foam networks. Right. I've been intrigued and I'm studying Nima's work because he explains in ways that I really understand why we can't really
even have a vestige of space-time as being fundamental, right? So we can't take one part of a time or one part of a space and try to boot up the other. And Nima recognizes that we also can't expect that quantum theory is fundamental. He's saying, look, it's deeper than just space-time. We're going to have to have a deeper framework in which space-time and quantum theory
together arise joined at the hip. And so many of the techniques are saying, look, general relativity is not a quantum theory. It's a classical theory. It's a continuous space and so forth. So maybe what we need to do is let quantum be fundamental, and then we'll try to somehow quantize space-time.
And Nima is going far more deep. He's saying we need a new framework in which locality in space-time and unitarity of quantum theory arise together from something that's neither local in space-time and non-unitary. And that's, I think, so I'm going after Nima
Um, partly because I think that he makes a good case that that space time and quantum theory both have to emerge from something deeper and that we really need them. We need to bite the bullet and recognize we can't go halfway. We need to go really a radical new foundation. The constraint on the new foundation, of course, is that it has to give rise to space, time and quantum theory in ways that we know and love. And in particular, it has to give
The only observable of quantum gravity in our space, in an asymptotically flat space-time like ours, the only observable that there is, is scattering amplitude, the scattering amplitude. That's the only observable. There are no local observables, and Neema explains that. So when we look at how to get the only observable in asymptotically flat space-time,
What I'm asking is that there are several contenders to fundamental theories of everything, which they have to be fundamental theory of everything. But there are several.
And I'm glad that you're pursuing Nima's amplitude of hedron, because I'm also interested in how consciousness can give rise to some of those other potential theories of everything, and I only have a finite amount of time. So I'm glad that you're doing it. But I'm curious to why you chose that one, though criteria you just said, which is QFT and general relativity have to come from something else. And you would prefer that that not be embedded within space time, but in fact have some other structure that gives rise to space time.
But there are quite a few. For example, I just have a list here. And I'm just curious why you chose the amplitude of Hedron other than you have to start somewhere. So for example, Wolfram's theory of everything, which starts with computation, which seems so similar to yours, actually. We can get to that later. And there's Pati Salam. There's SL10. There is E8 as well. Right. Right. Right. And there's Strand model from Christopher Schiller. There's also one more, Fridens. Fridens
There's a couple of reasons. One is I'm convinced by Nima's argument that scattering amplitudes are the only observable and his is the only theory that
predicts from first principles the exact scattering amplitudes and shows deep symmetries behind those scattering amplitudes. And that also explains why when we look at these deeper symmetries outside of space-time, hundreds or thousands of pages of computation that you get from Feynman diagrams on the scattering amplitudes turns into two or three terms. So he's got the beef. He starts with something outside of space-time,
He gives rise to quantum theory, unitarity, and locality, and the precise Phi-Cube theory, Phi to the fourth theory, Yang-Mills, super Yang-Mills, gravity. He's getting one after another. He's getting these scattering amplitudes. He's got the beef. These other theories are, you know, saying we can do this, we can do this. He's doing it. I see. In other words, he's the closest so far. Yeah, he's the closest. And then there's one other thing that also
is making me pursue this and that is I'm starting with this theory of Markovian kernels, this dynamical system of conscious agents. Now Markovian kernels in general are not associated with positive geometries, right? And Nima is saying this deeper structure is positive geometries. But, and this is what I'm working with my mathematician colleague Chetan Prakash and others on
I claim, and we'll see if I'm right, I claim that the asymptotic and invariant behavior of Markovian systems is identified with positive geometries. So even though the step-by-step dynamics of… Repeat that one more time, repeat that one more time. So when you have a Markovian system, right, you have the step-by-step dynamics, but you can also ask what happens
long term. If you look at the broad view, technically, I have a Markovian kernel P. I'm looking at P to the end, which is P composed with P, composed with P ten times, as N goes to infinity. Those kernels, I claim, are invariably associated with positive geometries. Without adding more structure? That's all you need. P to the N,
If you take kernel P, P to the n will be associated with positive geometry as n goes to infinity. Okay, that's interesting. I gotta think about that. One of your papers with your friend, I love this guy, Prakash Chetan, right? Yeah. I haven't had a chance to look at any of his papers that weren't co-authored with you though. Either way, one of the papers, a recent one, was showing that the payoff functions
that are homomorphic to totally ordered sets, as well as permutation groups, cyclic groups, and one other. If you take their number and you divide it by the total amount that's admissible, that it tends to zero. And for the people listening, what I've
What I hear from you is saying that therefore the probability that we see reality as it is is zero. But I don't know if that was but but I see that as a leap, so I must be missing a step because the leap is that there's a hidden claim. You can go from the total size of the set of admissible functions.
over the sorry under as the denominator of the total functions that are homomorphic to certain groups and certain structures that's fine you can say that that goes to zero but then you have to say that there's an even probability distribution that we could have gotten any one of them for you to say that the probability then as n goes to infinity of us seeing truth or reality as it is or homomorphic to the structure is also zero
Excellent point. So this is a very technical point, but it's an important one. So in evolutionary theory, the fitness payoff functions depend on the state of the world. Whatever objective reality might be, it depends on that. But it also depends on the organism, its state, its action, and the competitors, and so forth. So it's a complicated function with a very complicated domain, including the state of the world. And the range of the function are the payoff values. You may like from 1 to n, if they're n payoff values.
And of course, evolutionary theory, evolutionary game theory is saying that our senses will be tuned to the payoffs, right? In other words, organisms that better perceive how to get high payoffs are the ones that survive. So our senses will be tuned to the payoffs. So the question then, the technical question is, what is the probability that the payoff functions preserve
information about the structure of the world. Say the world has a group structure or total order, and I ask what is the probability that a payoff function will preserve that structure? We looked at two kinds of symmetry groups and total orders and also measurable structures. What we did is we assumed a discrete set of states on the world, a finite set of states, and a finite set of payoff values.
N states in the world, M states of the payoff values and then what we can do is literally using combinatorial arguments count the number of payoff functions that preserve the structure like the group structure and divide as you say by the total number which is a finite number. This is a finite number of total payoff functions.
There, of course, counting measure, literally counting the number of functions, is the canonical measure. And then we take the limit as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff values goes to infinity. Now, someone could argue, raise the question that you just raised, why is counting measure the measure that we used? Why should there be some other measure? And the answer is that evolutionary theory gives us no argument for any other measure. So if someone
Well what if the
The extra condition doesn't come from evolutionary theory, but instead classical physics, like people like NEMA or even Michael Shermer might think, which is saying that, okay, there is a probability distribution that favors certain structure preservedness for whatever reason, much like we don't know why the fundamental laws are the way they are. Now, of course you're saying, well, I can derive the fundamental laws. Forget that because I'm going to another model. Them saying that the fundamental laws are fundamental.
And one of them is that the probability distribution of your perceptions will tend, not necessarily tend to, but they're not uniform. Absolutely. And if someone can do that, fabulous, that would destroy our theorem. So that's the challenge. You could think of our theorem as putting out that challenge. Come up with some new principle that explains why there's a bias toward payoff functions that are homomorphic to the structure of reality.
What is the conspiracy in nature that makes that happen? Evolution by natural selection is currently formulated, and physics is currently formulated, gives us no belief that there's a conspiracy going on to make the homomorphic functions more probable. But if someone can come up with a theory that explains why nature conspires that way, I'll be the first to listen very intently.
By the way, do you also have a measure of structure preservativeness that isn't a strict homomorphism? Because if, okay, just for people listening in the way that it's written that I saw from the paper that you published recently is it's like you have one, two, three, four, five. Imagine that's a totally or set one, two, three, four, five. And that's how the world is. But if someone sees the world as one, two, three, four, five, four, I'd be like, Nope, no, you're not seeing the world as it is, but yet it's still similar.
Right, so you can use things like the L2 norm or the L infinity norm to look at how many so for you could say suppose that here's a payoff function that's purely homomorphic. We can ask how many payoff functions are within a certain distance like an L2 distance or an L infinity distance of that payoff function and we can for each distance that we look at we can ask how many
payoff functions, even if they're not exactly homomorphic, are that close to homomorphism, and then we can look at the ratio of those to all payoff and see again if they go to zero or not. And so in the case of total orders, it turns out that if you allow a very, very generous width of 20% variation, the set of payoff functions that were within 20% variation of any
homomorphic function still went to zero. In the case of symmetric groups that was not true, if you allowed just a small window around the homomorphic functions, then most of them
Then they would have full weight. Most payoff functions were very close to a function which was homomorphism of the symmetry. Same thing for measurable structures. In measurable structures, almost every function was close to a payoff function that is homomorphic. But notice that that won't buy you anything.
because there are countless structures that nature might have, countless. The fact that a random function, a randomly chosen payoff function is close to a symmetric, something that's homomorphism, a symmetry preserving function, also a measurable function, you could now give me thousands of different kinds of homomorphisms that it's close to.
Well, which one is natural selection choosing to shape you to? A random function is close to all of these. Where is the selection pressure to push you toward one or the other? In other words, all you get is that, yeah, a randomly chosen payoff function, you could show it's close to lots of different things that are homomorphic to all else. But where's the selection pressure there? There's no selection pressure there at all.
Now, one more critique is that gravity is not a cyclic group, it's not a totally ordered set, it's not a permutation group, it's not a measurable maybe, but either way the structure of the fundamental physics coming from a different frame, that is where consciousness is not fundamental. It doesn't follow what
I've seen so far, I think you've done totally ordered permutations, cyclic and measurable spaces, but it's not as if the fundamental laws or the fundamental space of being from the materialist point of view are those. So what you're counting isn't necessarily reality per se, it could be, it could be, but it's not as if as far as we know, and the Lagrangian is a condition on that, and it's not as if the Lagrangian is a cyclical group. So,
Fair point. Okay, so why does that, does what you've studied demonstrate anything about reality? Right, so yeah, so I think a good argument against our paper is we've looked at four different structures and we showed in each case that the probability is zero, that a randomly chosen payoff function would be a homomorphism. And what we want is a paper that proves that
for any possible structure, right? Not just the four structures that we looked at. We don't have that theorem yet. So someone could come along and say, look, we have independent evidence that this is the structure of the world and we can prove that for that structure of the world payoff, almost every payoff function is a homomorphism of that structure. So we're throwing down that gun that we're saying for you, for someone to argue that natural selection will of course,
favor vertical perceptions, seeing the truth, the true structure of the world, then what you have to do, it's not obvious that that's the case. Here's four counter examples. We give four counter examples, right? Total orders. So here are four counter examples. So it's not just obviously true that that's going to happen for the structure of the world. So you now, to convince me that natural selection favors vertical perceptions, you have to tell me exactly the structure of the world and prove
that in fact the homomorphisms have full measure. So we've thrown the gauntlet down. All of my colleagues, almost all of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience who study perception have just assumed that of course natural selection favors vertical perception. We gave four counter examples and we're basically throwing down the gauntlet to our field and saying, if you believe that, you need to come up with a beef. Where is the beef? What is the structure of the world that would have full measure for the homomorphisms?
If you can't do that, then what is the conspiracy in the laws of nature? So in other words, what we've done is thrown down the gauntlet. In some sense, we're saying, hey, the burden of proof is now on the person who claims that evolution is going to shape vertical perceptions. Here are four counter examples. Give us an example of where it possibly could. And good luck trying. Because here's why they're not going to succeed.
To be a homomorphism, a function has to satisfy some strict equations. Most functions don't satisfy them. End of proof.
It's just that simple. Good luck. So we've thrown down the gauntlet. The argument I just gave you is going to be the heart of a deeper theory, a deeper paper that we hope to get, in which we just proved that no matter what… Yeah, I'm excited about that. Have you pursued category theory? That's the most abstract of all the mathematical theories. That's where we're headed. Exactly right. Category theory. Okay, cool.
What about partially ordered sets? Not as if, even if you proved it in the partially ordered set case, it's like, okay, that's... Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'd like to do partial orders and also topologies, right? So those are some obvious big ones. So if we can't get the full category, I mean, we'd like to get the full category theory proof that just basically says, you got a structure in the world, your payoff functions won't preserve it, almost surely. End of story. That's what we want. We've got only four examples.
Or perhaps you find the one structure, maybe there's even one or two structures, a finite amount, that satisfy that
the vertical perception and then from that you're like okay that's interesting that's uniqueness among all the structures and therefore there's something special maybe we can imply the laws of physics from that either way it'd be interesting
Oh, absolutely. I don't care how it comes out. I just want to pursue and see what does come out, right? But what I'm saying is it's way too fast. My colleagues are thinking, oh, of course natural selection favors true perception. Oh, that's way, way too fast. Why do they think that if they come from an evolutionary background? Because evolution just is all about what works. And what works, who cares about what's true? True in the materialist sense. And I should say, there are
Many of my colleagues and friends like Steve Pinker, a good colleague and longtime friend, who clearly understands that natural selection does not in general favor true beliefs, right? And he's got a brilliant paper published called
So how does the mind work? It's a wonderful paper. So if you look up Steve Pinker, so how does the mind work? He gives in that paper five good reasons for why evolution will not lead us to have true beliefs in general. And also real Robert Trevers has argued brilliantly on evolutionary grounds that there are reasons why we should be deeply self-deceived. The best liar
The best, the most convincing liar in social situations is the one who believes his own lie. And so there are selection pressures for us to be deeply deceived. Now in Trivers case, however, he then, even though he understands that aspect of evolution and leading to false beliefs, when it came to perception, Trivers still believed and wrote that seeing the structure of reality as it is would make you more fit. And that's the argument that most people believe.
The argument goes like this, those of our ancestors who saw reality more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw the world less accurately.
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The basic activities of life, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. Therefore, those who saw more accurately were more likely to pass on their genes that code for the more accurate perceptions.
And therefore we can be quite confident that we may not see all of the truth, but we see those aspects of the truth that we need to survive. And that kind of argument completely persuades most of my colleagues. It apparently persuaded Trivers, because he wrote that it's more fit to see reality as it is. It didn't persuade Pinker, although Pinker in that brilliant paper that I mentioned, so how does the mind work, he does
At the end of his discussion of the five reasons why evolution wouldn't lead to true beliefs, he does make an exception for everyday middle-sized objects and for the quotidian beliefs of our friends, the everyday quotidian beliefs. So he doesn't explain why he makes those exceptions, but he does make those two exceptions. And so I'm really focusing on that exception about everyday middle-sized objects, not saying that
Our perception of everyday middle-sized objects is also not an example of a true belief. It's just an example of something, as you said, that's fit enough to keep you alive. Okay, well this is a question more about evolutionary modeling in general. And please forgive me as I verbally fumble through this because my thoughts on this aren't fully developed.
Our fitness payoff is as simple as just a one-dimensional case. So for example, an issue that I have with utilitarians is that they will project pleasure and pain down to the one-dimensional axis, which to me neglects that there are different kinds of pleasures or that you can combine pleasure and pain or that there are different kinds of pain.
This means to me that projecting onto the real line is either not possible or it's not trivial or it's not useful. And I've always wondered the same about fitness payoffs. I see something similar happening. So perhaps fitness is a complex multi-dimensional space and the choice between any given two points in order for you to make it, you need to employ a metric or norm and then that would need to be justified. In other words, do you have, do you see any problems with fitness payoffs being real R1 to R1?
Well, yes, I do. And the reason is that the domain need not be R1. The domain could be as high, high dimensional as you want, or the very notion of dimension may not even apply. So but but sticking with, you know, the domain having it could be, you know, a 50 dimensional image going into R1. Yeah. So going down to R1. Now, fitness in terms of evolution is very, very simple.
Do you have more kids in the competition? End of story. That's our one. So the, but what you were talking about though, the pain and pleasure and so forth, the, the kinds of emotions that we may evolve to guide our behaviors in an evolutionary theory could be as complicated as you want. Right? So, so the payoff is reproductive success. That's it. That's the only payoff that there is.
We will talk about payoff functions as like points in the game, but ultimately the idea is that the number of points you get in playing the game is really translated into how many kids do you have? How many genes do you pass on? So that's why in evolutionary theory, the domain can be as complicated as you want. The ranges are what? Kids. It's not the absolute number of kids. All that matters is that you have more than the competition.
Right? So it's not like you have to be perfect or anything like that. It's just a satisfying solution. So we have to distinguish the payoff value, which is reproductive success, versus all the complicated emotions that will guide our behaviors to get
enough payoff value, right? So we don't want to conflate those two things. So evolutionary theory allows you to have as complicated a set of emotions and motivations as you want. Very, very complicated. The payoff value is R1.
I got it. All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. We're gonna have to schedule another call if you don't mind. No, you're asking. It's fun for me because this is far more technical than most questions. So and it's enjoyable. I just hope that your audience will be able to follow. This is probably some of them won't be able to but that's fine. I feel like most people one of the reasons why I've been successful to the degree that I have is that people are watching more because
I as an interviewer I'm engaged like I'm asking you questions that I want to know the answer to rather than what I think the audience cares about and there's a bit of a facade there of manufacturing. Good well I think for a certain audience then these are the right questions absolutely for any I mean you're asking the right questions for anybody that really knows their math and science and you must be hard knows about you're asking exactly the right questions.
Thanks, man. I appreciate that. It gets a little bit more technical. Why are you choosing the geometric algebra with the signature 1, 3, and then saying that implies spacetime? Because that's going to be putting extra structure on. OK, well, we can get to that later. I don't recall exactly where we left off, but it's all right. I'll put intermission and people will understand if there isn't a change in topic.
Sure. Okay, how's it going Donald? I'm doing great. How about you Kurt? Good man. Okay, you were just mentioning that some of your practices of meditation are intense and they usually are. Today was particularly intense or average intensity? Just average, but it's always pretty intense. Okay, what do you see? What happens during it? Well, it's going into the unknown, letting go of all thoughts.
and there's an innate fear of the unknown and so facing that fear and letting it go can be can be very very intense just so if you you know try just sitting for 10 minutes with absolutely no thoughts just being in the moment you'll find that thoughts just come up and they invade
And if you let them go and go back into quiet, you'll see the thoughts just keep coming back up. But when you actually go into a space where you do let go of thoughts, and it's utter silence, then it starts to appear that those thoughts are part of a defense mechanism, that they're hiding behind them a good deal of
fear of the unknown. And we're always, you know, one thing about our species is that we build models of our environment and we rely on our models to protect us, right? We predict, you know, some, some creatures don't build models or don't build very sophisticated models of their environment. And their strategy is like, you know, with some bacteria, you just multiply and multiply and multiply.
And that's how you survive, you know, just vast multiplication. Our species is different. We have very few kids and we have a big cerebral cortex, a frontal lobe that's building models of our environment and we're simulating what will happen. And so that we, you know, in the simulation, something goes wrong, we see, oh, I shouldn't do that. Instead of sacrificing our bodies, we sacrifice our virtual body in the simulation, right?
And we learn. So when you start letting go of all of your thoughts, you're letting go of this very deeply ingrained protective mechanism that we have of building models and analyzing things and looking into the future and running through scenarios and so forth. It's one of the great strengths of our species. It's all a big defense. Do you feel like all our thoughts are defense mechanisms? Well,
No. But it's pretty much like this. It's like, if we look at eating, we all have to eat. And so it's a necessary part of life to eat. But if you decide that you've had lunch and you're just going to do something else, but you find that you can't stop thinking about food, and you keep walking over to the refrigerator,
And you get, well, that's different. That's now something healthy that's turned into an obsession. It's a problem, right? And it's the same thing with thoughts. Thoughts are great. We use them to go to the moon. We use them to build all this technology. We use them to cure disease. They're wonderful. But if you find that when you say, okay, thought is a great tool, but for the next 10 minutes, I would just like to relax without any thoughts. And then you find you can't do it.
You find that these thoughts invade and that when you let go of the thoughts and you just go into pure silence, that you're afraid and you retreat back into the thoughts. Well, that suggests that just like in the case of the food, right, there's a useful usage of food.
And it's very, very necessary, but there's a case where it becomes an obsession and there's a problem. Same thing with thought. It's a great tool, but when you can't let go of thought for 10 minutes and the thoughts invade and you find that going into the silence triggers an innate fear, then you know that there's something else that's going on. And so in the meditation, it's a matter of, for me, facing the silence,
and the fears that come up without judgment, without condemnation, without trying, just being with that and just watching that whole amazing process is sort of finding out, wow, I didn't know that this was part of me. I just was living in my thoughts. I had no idea that it would be so hard to let go of thoughts. So it's nothing wrong about thoughts, but when they're obsessive, then that's a different thing.
And in the case, the analogy with the fridge and the food, it's an obsession when it becomes maladaptive. Is that what you're defining as obsession? Right, yeah. So your thoughts are always about the refrigerator and getting the next food and you find yourself gaining tons and tons of weight and to the point where you have heart disease and things like that, right? At some point you realize, okay, well, maybe I've got
Food is necessary, but too much food and too much thinking about food is a sign of something maladaptive. You also mentioned in the case against reality that illusions are a failure to guide adaptive behavior. I don't know if you mentioned that quoting someone else or if you mentioned that because you believe it. Either way, do you agree with that statement or disagree? Yeah, I do agree with that.
And it was sort of a statement that I was making, in contrast to what most of my colleagues in perception science would say. Most of my colleagues would say that an illusion is a perception that fails to match reality. So I see a stick in the water, it looks bent, but the stick isn't bent, so my perception fails to match the reality. I see something that looks bent, but the stick isn't bent. That kind of thing.
I'm suggesting on evolutionary grounds, well, I'm claiming that the theory of evolution entails mathematically that the probability that any of our perceptions in any way match the structure of reality is zero. In other words, none of our perceptions tell us truths about the structure of objective reality according to evolutionary theory.
Are you aware of the various notions of truth such as correspondence and deflationary and pragmatic? Sure, absolutely. So most of my colleagues are taking a correspondence notion, right? They're saying that I see a red apple, that's because in fact in objective reality there is something with that shape and that color that would continue to exist even if no one were there to perceive it. And so there's
a correspondence. No one thinks it's perfect correspondence. We don't see all of the structure of objective reality. But the idea of truth that I'm talking about is reality, whatever it is, has certain structures to it. Topologies perhaps, group structures, metrics, whatever it might be, whatever the structures of reality are. And our perceptions then tell us
Now, are you taking more of a pragmatic stance on the definition of truth? I'm not.
So what's interesting is when I talk about... If you don't mind, just for the audience, do you mind defining the difference between correspondence and then pragmatic and then where you differ from pragmatic? As far as I can tell, it sounds like yours is pragmatic because it's about adaptive behavior. So I'm curious to know where the difference is. Right. So in the correspondence theory of truth, the idea is that
There is an objective reality that has a definite state, a definite structure. And to see truly, to perceive truly, is to have the structures of your perception be homomorphic to at least some of the structures in objective reality, so to preserve those structures. A pragmatist would say, that's not possible.
There are no true perceptions of that kind. All we can ask of our perceptions is, do they work? So do our concepts work? Do our perceptions work? And what I'm saying is that from an evolutionary point of view, the theory of evolution gives us no reason to believe that our cognitive or perceptual systems were shaped
to give us the correspondence kinds of truths. No reason. Now that doesn't mean that evolutionary theory is true. My attitude about scientific theories is very, very pragmatic in the following sense. I don't think that any of our scientific theories are true, including mine, but they're the best tools that we have so far. And so what we do as scientists is to very carefully study these tools. We study
evolution by natural selection. We study general relativity, we study quantum field theory, and we see what these theories entail. Not because they're the final answer, they're not. I don't think any good scientist thinks they're the final answer. They're the answers we've got so far, the tools that we have so far. So I'm saying that evolution by natural selection absolutely entails that none of our perceptions correspond
to a true structure of an objective reality. Now, does that mean that I'm a pragmatist? No, I'm just telling you what evolutionary theory entails. That's all. So I'm just being very, very hard-nosed. This is what the theory entails. We've got theorems about it. If someone wants to argue, I can show my theorem and we can argue about the theorems. But now, once I've said that about evolutionary theory, I can step back and say, is there a deeper point of view that I would like to take, in which I'd still argue for a correspondence theory of truth?
And I'm absolutely open to a deeper point of view in which there is a correspondence theory of truth. Whatever that deeper point of view is though, and this is the interesting and tricky part about it, whatever deeper point of view I take, it better be the case that I can explain why within space and time and evolution by natural selection, that those theories
entail only a pragmatic view of perceptions, not a truth view. So if I'm going to take a deeper point of view in which I say there is a correspondence theory of truth, then for that to work I have to be able to explain why such a successful theory is evolution of a natural selection and is spectacularly successful. Why that theory entails a pragmatic view of our perceptions and our cognitive
abilities. They're all pragmatic, not about truth. And so that's sort of the subtlety of this point of view. A lot of people will contradict or critique what I'm saying on two counts. They'll say first, how in the world can you say that we don't see the truth about the world? Do you know what the truth about reality is? If you don't know what the truth about reality is, then how could you ever know that we don't see it? Okay?
That's the first argument and the reply is, and this is the power of mathematical models like evolution by natural selection, that mathematical model entails that whatever the structure of objective reality is, we don't need to propose that we know what the structure of objective reality is. Whatever it is, the probability is zero that natural selection would shape us to see it. So the nice thing about that answer is
I don't need to guess or know what objective reality is. To know that evolution by natural selection entails that whatever the reality is, we don't see it. We don't perceive it. So the first objection is a very natural objection, by the way. How could you know that we don't see reality? Because you don't know what reality is. Well, the answer is the mathematics is so sophisticated, it's allowing you to say that whatever reality is, you don't see it.
claiming to know what reality is. The second point then is that, you know, often people will say, well, you know, so you've just said that none of our perceptions, none of our cognitive capacities are about the truth. And then you try to come up with a model of objective reality, right? This theory of conscious agents and so forth. Well, and indeed I am. And that's because I don't take evolution by natural selection as the final word. It's just a tool.
That tool entails a pragmatic view. Great! That's what that tool entails. I would like to get a deeper view in which consciousness is fundamental and from that deeper view show how space-time emerges as an interface representation of this deeper reality and show within that interface why the dynamics of this deeper realm looks, at least in certain cases, like evolution by natural selection and why it looks like
the kind of structure that we see in evolutionary theory. So, evolution of a natural selection will be a constraint on any deeper theory of reality that I propose. Any deeper theory, when it projects into space-time, it better look like general relativity, quantum field theory, evolution of a natural selection when you project it into space-time, or improvements on those theories.
but not less than those theories. It has to explain everything those theories explain and more within space-time. This is maybe subtle for those who aren't scientists, but this is just standard. What I'm saying here is just the standard view of scientists. We take our theories not as the truth, just the best accounts that we have so far, the best tools that we have so far.
A good theory will tell you where it stops, where it fails. And by the way, general relativity and quantum field theory very, very clearly tell us that they fail, that space-time itself is only an emergent concept, it cannot be fundamental. And so the very foundations of quantum field theory, which is fields on space-time, and the very nature of general relativity, which is the dynamics of space-time,
can't be fundamental. So those theories are good enough to tell us that despite their successes, they're not the final answer. There's something deeper, but they can't tell us what that deeper thing is. And that's where the creativity of the scientific endeavor kicks in. It's up to the scientist to take a leap of imagination. What deeper notion
of reality. What deeper theoretical structures could we come up with that would project down into what we call space-time? And in that projection, they would look like general relativity. They would look like quantum field theory and evolution by natural selection. What's the deeper dynamics in this deeper realm that would project into that? And so there
Our current theories can only give us very, very loose guidance. There's a lot of creative imagination that then is required to go into this deeper realm. And that's where the most creative scientists, of course, want to go. It's great fun when we find a hole in our current theories and get the chance to discover something new. And so that's the fun part of it.
When it comes to space and time, I've heard you describe it as a data compression tool for us conscious agents. Why do we need as conscious agents data compression? Why is there a limit to how much we can process? Well, that's going to be a very interesting thing for this deeper theory to try to explain. Why is there this limit? It may be that all conscious systems are necessarily finite.
And that's one theory that I'm playing with, that the realm of conscious agents may be such that there is no bound to the complexity that a conscious agent can have, but it's always finite. So it's as big as you wish, but always finite. And in which case, no matter how complex you are, compared to all the possible complexity, your measure is zero, your probability is zero, right?
So in that sense if, but there may be a really really deep point of view in which consciousness may be taking these, dividing itself into sort of sub-consciousnesses which are sort of different perspectives that are looking at the whole and these different perspectives would necessarily then have limited
information about the whole. They'll only be able to see through an interface, but necessarily. It's sort of the kind of thing like in the Twitterverse, there's tens of millions of users, billions of tweets. I could talk with one or two Twitter users extensively and follow all of their tweets. Maybe, if I'm really into it, maybe a hundred of them and follow all their tweets. But there's
10 million or more Twitter users. So there's no way, there's absolutely no way. So if I want to get a feel for what's happening in general in the Twitterverse, I'm going to need to have some kind of data compression tool, some visualization tool. Right. We see this all the time. Whenever there's big social media data, we use visualization tools to see what's going on. And that's what I think space time is. Space time
is our headset. We've mistaken the headset for reality. We've assumed that space and time are fundamental or space time is fundamental. We've assumed that that's the objective reality. And it's just a rookie mistake. It's our headset. It's our visualization tool. And what's behind it is this vast network of other conscious agents. Now, it's one thing for me to say this, it sounds, you know, interesting.
But where's the beef? And where the beef is going to have to come from is a precise mathematical description of the dynamics of conscious agents. So it's, for those interested in math, it's dynamics on networks. So it's network theory. So the kind of stuff that you use when you're studying like the internet and the dynamics of information flow on the internet and so forth. It's that kind of mathematics. So it's
proposing a specific mathematical dynamics on a network of conscious agents. Then the way I think it'll go is that the asymptotic behavior of that dynamics
That just means you can't see every single tweet, you can't interact with every single user, but you can see the long-term trends. What are the things that are trending long-term? What are the big picture kinds of things? That's what I mean by the asymptotics. What happens if you look at it over a long period of time? What are the patterns over a long period of time? And I think that that is what is behind space-time and modern physics.
What they're seeing, what the physicists right now, when they try to get structures beyond space-time, you know, they're trying to take the next step beyond space-time, they are seeing some interesting structures called positive geometries, amplitude hydra, sociohedra, and so forth, these positive geometries. I want, the direction I'm going is to show that those positive geometry structures that they're coming up with are representations of the asymptotic behavior
of this dynamics of conscious agents. And if I can do that, then I will be able to use their work and pull the thread all the way from a theory of conscious agents and their dynamics through the asymptotics of that into these positive geometries that they found. And then they tell you how to go from that to the actual prediction of scattering events like at the Large Hadron Collider. So that's my goal. The beef will be if I can start with a theory of consciousness
Look at its asymptotics and show that the asymptotics of that theory of consciousness, through this route that the physicists have found already, leads to the scattering amplitudes that we can then test at the Large Hadron Collider. That's where we have the beef. Space and time aren't fundamental in your theory. Is causality fundamental? Certainly not causality in space and time, right? So when we think about causality,
We think about, for example, the cue ball hitting the eight ball and making a crane into the corner pocket. Or we think about neurons in the brain causing our behaviors and causing our experiences. And so I flat out deny that anything in space-time has any causal powers.
Can you help me? Something I'm working on is a definition of causality. It turns out it's extremely elusive, even though it seems like it's intuitive. The closer you look, the more slippery it gets. How are you defining causality in your theory? So you're absolutely right. In fact, there's a handbook of causality, a bunch of philosophers and others talking about causality, the Oxford handbook of causality or something like that.
If you read through it, there are many, many different views on causality, and there is no agreed upon universal definition of causality. Mathematically, in computer science, when we talk about causality, some of the best work there is based on the notion of directed acyclic graphs.
So Judea Pearl, professor at UCLA, and his students and many collaborators have been modeling causality, whatever it is, as directed acyclic graphs. But I think that even Judea Pearl doesn't hazard definition of causality, right? It's much like how do you define, if you're in geometry, how do you define a point?
Well, it's sort of a primitive concept. But two of them make a line, right? Two of them define a line. And so for many scientific theories, the notion of causality is a primitive. It's a place where explanation stops. And that's not a unique problem to the notion of causality. Every scientific theory
must stop at some point it can't explain everything there will be some primitive notions and this is unavoidable so there are no scientific theories that explain everything every scientific theory will have some handful hopefully as small as possible of primitive notions
that where you just say you know like if you have a little kid that says but what why is that and you tell them and say but but how come that and then so at some point you just say it just is right your theory just stops and says that's just the way it is and so so for causality you know we tend to think of causality well if i can intervene in some system and then change things change as a result of my intervention that's a proof of causality
But that turns out not to work. You can get counter examples to that. What about causes always precede their effects? Well, you can have you can set up thought experiments where that where the effects hear that sound.
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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories. Don't perceive the causes, but where there's yes, right. So that's the reason why I forget the person's name Pearl. You mentioned the April, right? That's why he said acyclic.
Because he doesn't want the causes to proceed effects, or because he doesn't want it to get to some place where you cause yourself. Right. Yeah, once you get cycles, it gets pretty complicated and the notion of causalities would start to slip through your fingers. Things where you were in everyday life, you see cycles, you can unwrap them as an ever extending directed acyclic graph.
So you can just take the time parameter. Instead of cycling back, you go to new states downward. So ways to, to avoid cycles, even in what we in everyday life think of as, as cyclic behavior. So I would say that causality, you're, you're right to pick on it. It's the best and brightest. When I look at that, I think it's the Oxford handbook of causality, wonderful articles, brilliant thinkers, and they disagree.
They don't know, so there's no received opinion about what causality is. Is there one that you feel like is getting close to the truth? I'll tell you why I ask. All the ones I saw there, I think that they all were touching different parts of the elephant in interesting ways, right?
But it may be that ultimately causality is one of these primitives, like points in geometry. Okay. When you say that reality is innately objective, so there's the W, the world state, X, G experience, so that's like the conscious agent, then I assume what you're saying is objective reality is the W, the world state? And the agents, right.
Then later you do this, I love this, you then take, well, W could also be composed of different conscious agents. And then we can have a string of them. Why are you calling that objective to me? And this just might be semantics. I hear that as subjective given that it's a conscious agent. That is, it's a subject all the way through the chain.
Right. If it was just, if you were like, hey, there's one world or there's a few, but W is not dependent on other causal, sorry, conscious agents, then I could see using the term objective, why is it that you still use the term objective when we can extend the graph to just conscious agents? Right. So, so the, the proposal is that what the universe is fundamentally,
is a vast network of interacting conscious agents. So when I say that that's the objective truth, of course each agent is a subject, right? Each agent is a conscious entity. But what I'm saying is that even when I'm asleep, the network still exists. That's all. So even if I'm sound asleep and I'm not having any conscious experiences or anything like that, the eye that's talking to you right now
That network of conscious agents is just like a Twitter user, right? Whether or not I happen to be reading tweets or sending tweets, the Twitterverse exists. It's out there. Even though really the Twitterverse is just a bunch of other subjects. So the intersubjectivity implies the objectivity? That's right. And specifically the fact that it's
It still exists even if I don't perceive it. Okay, we're going to get philosophical. I was going to get to this later, but now that we're here, what's the I in this conscious agent model? Right. So in the conscious agent model, the notion of a self is not fundamental. So conscious agents are just these mathematical structures that have experiences, make decisions,
Okay, I might stop you every once in a while to clarify just for myself. You're saying that a self is a conglomeration of conscious agents? It's a data structure that they build. Does that mean that right now I'm talking to Donald,
You're not one conscious agent. I'm speaking to quite a few. Probably a countless collection of conscious. Uncountable. Well, I don't know if it's uncountable, but I certainly couldn't count them. But as you know, uncountable is a technical term in mathematics. So I just want to make sure people who know that, I'm not saying that it's uncountable in that sense. It may be, but I'm not claiming that. But it's certainly not countable by me. So the idea is that, for example, we know
that there are at least two different subjects in me. We can see that if I take a knife and cut the corpus callosum, which I have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. You do too. There's a band of fibers called the corpus. Hopefully I do. Sometimes I wonder. 225 million fibers. And if you cut those fibers, it turns out you can actually get clear evidence in a few people that this has been done with.
that there's a different personality in the left hemisphere than the right hemisphere. In one case, the left hemisphere believed in God, the right hemisphere was an atheist. The left hemisphere wanted to have a desk job, the right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver. And they can even fight. The left hemisphere controls the right hand, the right hemisphere controls the left hand, and they can fight. The left hand can be fighting what the right hand is doing.
You know, trying to cook, the left hand might destroy an omelet that you're making. You've tried to put on some clothes, the left hand might be taking off the clothes, the right hand is trying to put on. So it's two different consciousnesses. And I'm saying the tip of an iceberg, there's this whole lattice of conscious agents that together cooperate to create the conscious agent, that's me, but the self,
that I have. The sense of myself with my personal history and so forth is a data structure that I create. Okay. I, you know, I, I feel like I'm slipping up because I don't know. And this is another one, by the way, causality is elusive. Identity is also one of those where the closer you look, the more liquid, liquid it gets. Are you using self and identity synonymously? Well, so no.
So I'm thinking about self in the colloquial sense that we most think about, you know, I am so-and-so, here's my name, this is my personal history, this is what's important to me, this is my goals. That kind of self that we experience ourselves, the thing that we're afraid of losing in death and so forth, right? That is a data structure.
That's interesting. You're saying that the self is also a data structure. Yes, that's right. Sorry, continue. At least in this theory that I'm working on, that I can explain why we're going that direction if you want. But the notion of a self, right, so there's certain views of the self that it's
There's no such thing as a persisting self, but this is called the pearl view. It's like the number of pearls on a string. So there's a pearl, a different instantiation of the self at each moment along the string. So there are certain Eastern mystical traditions, but also certain Western philosophers who take this point of view. You don't have one persisting self, but you have a sequence of selves. And something, William James point of view,
But the Pearl analogy would imply that there's a continuum, there's a string. There's a string, and for James, James said the thought itself is the thinker, which is interesting. I don't know exactly what James means by that, but he was saying that there's no thinker, no self beyond the occurring thought right now.
But the thought itself is creating the illusion of a persisting thinker, of a persisting self. Now many Western religions, on the other hand, will take just the opposite point of view. They'll say there is, of course, a self and it's eternal. And what you do here determines whether that self will go to heaven or to hell or something like that. So you can see there's a lot riding on this notion of self and they're widely differing points of view.
And the reason in my theory that I've been working, by the way, by my theory, of course, I'm not alone. I've got a bunch of wonderful collaborators, Chetan Prakash, Bruce Bennett, Manish Singh, Chris Fields, Robert Prentner, Patrick Lefeugin, a bunch of really brilliant people. So when I say my theory, you know, that's in quotes. And also when you say my, that you're implying self, but you're questioning at the same time.
Sorry, continue. It's so tricky to talk about this, but anyway. That's right, but it's fun when our everyday assumptions that we have never questioned in many cases, or just assumed, I find it really refreshing to have everything that I thought I knew blown away. I mean, it's really quite fun. It's maybe an acquired taste.
But it's an interesting thing to be surprised. What I thought I knew, I don't know. But in the case of the Self, when I was trying to come up with the theory of consciousness, as a scientist, what you try to do when you're creating a theory is you're trying to put as few assumptions as possible up front, right? Because every assumption you build in is something you're not explaining, it's something you're assuming.
So you want to assume as little as possible. So in the theory of conscious agents, I don't, I mean, of course I could have said, okay, they also have a self and they have an I and so forth. But, but I decided not to do that because it turned out if I just said there are these entities, I'll just call them formal structural entities called conscious agents, they may not at all be aware of themselves as entities. So they may not have any self-awareness at all. They just have
conscious experiences that's all they have they make decisions and they take actions but those actions all they do is affect the conscious experience of the other entities that's it there's no self there's nothing like that there's no memory by the way there's no intelligence nothing it's just experiences leading to decisions at the fundamental atomic level that's right the very foundational level so that i do this on purpose
The goal is to make the foundations of your theory as sparse as possible. That's just, we do as scientists, as few assumptions as possible. Sure, I could have thrown in a self. I could throw in the kitchen sink. Let me throw in intelligence. Let me throw in just, well, there's nothing left to explain. I've just assumed it all, right? There we go. Well, there's no theory there. So the reason I stopped where I stopped was
Very nice theorem. By writing down a set of experiences, conscious experiences, and a so-called Markovian kernel, which is a way of talking about the probabilities of the different decisions that you could take. The Markovian kernels are provably computationally universal. That means that with that little foundation, experiences and
decisions to act that are modeled by Markovian kernels. I am computationally universal. Anything that can be simulated by any computer, quantum or otherwise, but I believe can be simulated by this network of conscious agents. So even though my foundations are incredibly sparse, there are, there are agents which have experiences and make choices based on those experiences. That's it.
networks of agents can provably compute anything that's computable at all, period. So, because I know in cognitive neuroscience, for example, that we have mathematical models that are very, very good at problem solving, intelligence, creating all sorts of structures, I can build networks of conscious agents that can do anything that cognitive neuroscience can do right now. So that's why I stopped. I don't need anything more.
I can build models of the self out of networks of conscious agents. So there's no reason for me to assume them. I should force myself to build them from networks of conscious agents. That's the fun part of this. What we've got is essentially the tinker toys of consciousness. Now we can build up any structure that we want, provably.
Going back to this D and A and P model, let's forget about the P, because it's just conscious agents. The decisions and the actions are stochastic, so they're Markov kernels. Where's the free will there? Right, so all the, of course, this raises a deep question about the relationship between mathematics and the thing that you're modeling with the mathematics, right? So all I've got are
measurable structures that I say are conscious experiences, spaces of conscious experiences, right? And then I've got these Markovian kernels, which I say are modeling the choices. And you can say, well, you know, I just see, I see probabilities there, but I don't see any free will. And so it's a matter of how I interpret those probabilities. One could interpret those probabilities as pure objective chance. And I think many of my physicalist colleagues would
would say, you know, if you see probabilities somewhere, then if it's not due to ignorance, if the probabilities are not due to my ignorance, then it's due to an objective chance in nature. But I want to be a monist in my theory. I don't want to be a dualist. If I'm going to say that consciousness is fundamental, then I
don't also want to propose as a dualist that there are other sources of novelty outside of consciousness into the universe. I want consciousness to be the only source of novelty in this universe. Objective chance, what do we mean when we say objective chance as a physicalist? Suppose I'm a physicalist, I believe space-time is fundamental,
And I believe that there are things called objective chance that are not just due to my ignorance. This is something that we call objective chance. What I'm saying is these probabilities, objective chance, I'm saying there is a source of novelty coming into my universe that I cannot explain. There is where a miracle is happening. So I'll be very, very clear. Objective chance is a miracle.
It's in the following sense. You're saying my theory has no resources to explain those outcomes. I cannot predict those outcomes. That's why I'm calling it objective chance. Well, that reinterpreted, re-explained is in the language of your theory, you have no resources to explain what's happening. So in terms of your theory, that's a miracle. It's unexplainable.
Now, so every theory, and this is not a put down, every theory has its miracles. We just have to own that. Every scientific theory. Right, right. And you're using miracles as a synonym for axioms? That's right. It's where, it's a miracle for your theory. If your theory has to assume it, it can't explain it. Okay. Right? Okay. Now, when you have probabilities, there are two kinds of miracles that you can imagine.
If it's not just due to lack of knowledge, right? So sometimes you have probabilities because there's a true state of affairs, but you don't have enough knowledge. That's a different kind of thing. But when it's a fundamental probability, you can either ascribe it to the miracle of objective chance or free will. They're both equally miracles. But since I'm trying to have a monist theory, I interpret probability not as objective chance, but as free will choices.
And then it's up to me then in the mathematics to unpack what does that free will choice idea amount to. And it's really quite interesting because this is a network dynamics. Each agent at each level of the dynamics is making its own contributions to free will choices. And there are bottom up influences. The free will choices of lower level agents influence higher agents and vice versa. And the whole system of conscious agents also
itself is an agent by the mathematics. The mathematics says collections of agents also form an agent. And so what you get is this really interesting analysis and synthesis approach where I can get a dynamical model of free will bottom up and top down at the same time. And that would be my model of the free will choice of the one single agent. And so it's going to be, it's again forcing me to do the work.
is forcing me to do the work of what ultimately do I mean by free will by assigning it only to local agents and then saying what do you mean by free will when you have agents interact? What does it mean? Right, right. So a question I have for you, let's imagine we have this graph and it's extended and they're all conscious agents. Okay, we pick one of them and there's free will associated and they influence one another. Does that mean from sheer will can one
drastically change the game for the rest? There may be cases where that can happen, but it looks like every agent makes its contribution. And it's almost like a symphony, right? Every member of the symphony makes their contribution to the whole. There may be a conductor, but
It's an organic whole. Where would the conductor be in this model? Well, that's the thing. There would only be relative conductors that the agents above would have sort of top-down influence.
But the agents below have really strong bottom up influence on the free will decision. So it's hard for me to say at this point that one is more important than the other. Yeah. And I'm having a difficult time when you say that one is above another, because as far as I know from just from reading the papers, and it could be mistaken, it's not as if one is privileged. One node is privileged over another. Right. So that's right. When I say above, it's like my two hemispheres in my brain, right?
When the corpus callosum is intact, there seems to be a unified me that I call Don, right? But if you come on the corpus callosum, you could easily, it turns out, and this is how strange you can get. They were able to get these split-brain patients to play 20 questions with themselves. The right hemisphere has a word in mind. The left hemisphere doesn't know what it is.
And then the left hemisphere, which can talk, can start asking questions. Is it animal? Is it vegetable? Is it mineral? Things like that. And the right hemisphere, which can't talk, but can understand language, can use, say, the left hand to thumbs up for yes, thumbs down for no. And so these, a split brain patient has two separate spheres of consciousness so separate that they can play 20 questions and the left hemisphere doesn't know the answer.
The left hemisphere does not know and sometimes will fail to guess in 20 questions what's in the mind of the right hemisphere. Some people argue that there's no separate personalities, no separate consciousnesses. Good luck making that point when the left hemisphere can fail to win a 20 questions game with the right hemisphere, even giving its level best. I'm saying that's just the tip of an iceberg, but it goes all the way down to what I call these one bit agents.
basically two conscious experiences, say red or nothing or something like that. And so it's in that sense when I talk about agents being above and whatever agent is me that's talking to you seems to be a combination of my left hemisphere and my right hemisphere agents. If we split my corpus callosum, that higher level agent apparently would be gone and there would be two different agents that could now play 20 questions with each other and lose, lose the game of 20 questions with each other.
Are you familiar with Douglas Hofstadter's work?
What do you think of his theory of consciousness? It sounds similar to what you're describing in the sense of a strange loop that, well, you can do a much better job at describing it than I can. So there's a fundamental difference in the approach that we're taking. Hofstadter is brilliant. He's a world-class genius. He's
going after the notion of self-referential systems, and those have really interesting properties. If I have a sentence of the form, this sentence is false, the sentence is referring to itself by saying this sentence is false, the sentence has got a strange loop, it's got a self-referential loop in it.
and then you get all sorts of weird things that happen because is that sentence true? I mean the sentence says the sentence is false. Well if it's true, then it's false. But if it's false, then it's true. And you get caught in this weird thing. And so Hofstadter has a lot of brilliant ideas and I don't want to claim that I'm doing justice to them, but the key is that
there's an essential role to this self-referential kind of structure that we see in that kind of sentence, this sentence is false, and that you get in the work of Kurt Gödel when he proves his incompleteness theorems and so forth, there's this really clever use of mathematics to refer to itself and get self-referential kinds of loops. And his idea is that these kinds of self-referential loops are somehow critical perhaps
to booting up consciousness, to booting up what we call a self, and so forth. And there's a fundamental difference in philosophy in the following sense. You mean between you and Hofstadter? That's right. And my colleagues who, and many of my colleagues who are taking a similar kind of thing that's saying that
Consciousness is the result of some property of computational systems, like this ability to have self-reference and so forth. But it could be other properties. It could be some kind of other computational properties of systems. This is called the computational theory of mind and so forth. But the idea is that you start with systems that are not conscious.
But if they have certain interesting properties like self-reference or other computational properties, for example, certain kind of integrated information that Tanoni and Koch are looking at, so they have certain kinds of computational properties like that they call high integrated information, then these unconscious systems give rise to consciousness. Now, I
That's a fundamentally different point of view than the one I'm taking. I'm saying, look, I'm not starting with a universe that's unconscious. I'm proposing, at the foundation, that conscious experiences are fundamental. That's where explanation stops. I'm not explaining how conscious experiences arise. I'm saying that they are what exists.
Just like a physicalist who believes in space-time and takes it as fundamental says, I don't know where space-time comes from, I'm assuming it. I'm assuming that space-time and fundamental particles except, right? Every theory is going to make its own assumptions. So we're all equal footing in that regard. We all have miracles at the start. The question is, what miracles do you pick? And the reason I don't go with a physicalist starting point, like a computational system that
that most of the time is going to be unconscious, but if it has the right integrated information or it has the right kind of self-reference, then the magic of consciousness somehow emerges. The reason I don't go after that is a couple of reasons. One, no one has been able to use that approach to predict exactly even how one specific conscious experience could arise, right?
How could self-reference or integrated information or orchestrated collapses of microtubule states in certain neurons be or cause my experience of the taste of vanilla? What specific patterns of activity of the brain or computational system must be or must cause the taste of vanilla and why is it that it could not be the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic?
Those theories have utterly failed to explain even one specific conscious experience. In other words, there's not one success for even one specific conscious experience on the table. That is to say, why does this brain state or this computational model correspond to this qualia and not another? And does your theory deal with that? So I choose a different miracle. So their miracle is, grant me computational systems in space and time.
I will predict qualia. Well, they can't predict qualia. So I've granted them what they want and they can't give me what they've promised. They can't give me even one specific qualia. It's a failure. And by the way, these are my friends. They're brilliant. They're doing great work. But I think that they've given themselves an impossible task. You can't start with unconscious ingredients and Buddha of consciousness can't be done.
So what I'm doing is I'm saying, look, they can't explain qualia. No one's been able to explain conscious experiences. I'm going to start with qualia. I'm going to start with conscious experiences, the taste of garlic, the smell of chocolate, all of these things. Those are the things I'm going to start with. So those are my miracles. I'm not explaining them, I'm assuming them. Now, my goal is to say, grant me this model of that, my conscious agent model.
Then I will show you how space-time and quantum mechanics and general relativity and evolution by natural selection come out as interface representations of the dynamics of consciousness. So instead of starting with space-time as my miracle and booting up consciousness, I'm going the other way. Start with conscious experiences of my miracle. I will show you how to boot up space-time. Now the
The winner will be whoever can explain the most with the least assumptions. Right now, my colleagues, my good friends who are physicalists are assuming space-time and computational systems, and they have yet failed to explain even one conscious experience. I'm starting with conscious experiences that no one can explain. I can't explain them either. I'm assuming them. But if I can explain how space-time and quantum mechanics and general relativity come out, then I have fewer miracles than them.
So that wins. Whichever theory has the fewer miracles is the one we should prefer. That's sort of Occam's razor. In your theory, why is it that we would, let's say, taste vanilla, why is it that we would have one experience, taste of vanilla versus the sight of Tickle Myelmo, which is another conscious experience? Well, I don't have an answer to that right now.
And the very existence of conscious experiences is something that I don't explain. It's something I assume, right? So my colleagues and my physicalist colleagues would like to say just the opposite of what I'm saying. They would like to say, we don't assume that conscious experiences are fundamental. In fact, at the big bang, there were no conscious experiences. There was just space, time and matter and energy. And so we will tell you how conscious experiences emerge from that.
but they failed to do so. I'm saying you guys assume space time and matter and energy. I'm going to assume conscious experiences. What I'm asking for is I understand that you're assuming the various qualia, but why is it that one is chosen versus another? It sounds to me like a similar problem that the physicalists have, which is to explain why one qualia over another.
And I don't have an answer to that. That's a very, very good question. And to really make that question intense, we can look at people with synesthesia, right? So there was a synesthesia, about 4% of the population has synesthesia, a human population has synesthesia. And to be… 100% if you take LSD. I want to talk about psychedelics, by the way. Sorry, continue.
So there's this one guy like Michael Watson, his synesthesia was that everything he tasted with his tongue, he felt as a three-dimensional shape in space. That's your friend? He wasn't a friend of mine, but he was studied extensively by a neurologist. He died, he's dead now, but he was a great cook. Everything that he tasted... That's interesting, that's interesting. ...felt with his hands. So mint,
was a tall, cold, smooth column of glass. He could feel it. He could feel the weight of it. He could feel the coldness of the surface. He could feel the smoothness of the surface with his hand. Angostura bitters, which is something you put in drinks, felt like a basket of ivy. He could feel the leaves, the sponginess, the texture, the warmth. So it was a very rich sensory experience that he had. And so
You and I don't have, most of us don't have those experiences when we cook. He did, and it allowed him to be an exceptional cook. He had this other way of dealing with complex tastes when he was putting foods together. So that raises your question really, really sharply. Why is it that we experience, when we put something on our tongue, why do we experience it as what we call taste?
saltiness, sweetness, and so forth. Why don't we all experience it like Michael Watson did, as shapes that we feel with our hands in space? Now, what's interesting is that there, mathematically, there was probably some kind of homomorphism that you could write down mathematically between the shapes and the textures and the weights and so forth he felt with his hands, and the
experiences of taste that we all feel. So there's probably some homomorphism, some mapping, some dictionary between what he felt with his hand and what we experience with our taste. And that's why your question is so difficult. In many cases, from a functional point of view, the details of exactly why you have that experience don't matter
Lots of other kinds of qualitative experiences could have the same functional structure as those experiences. In fact, you count them in one of your papers. You count the amount of homomorphism. That's right. Which makes me wonder, like you raised, why this and not another, given that there are so many homomorphisms.
The only idea I've got right now that I think is interesting enough is based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Yeah, I'm going to ask you about that later. Right, so Gödel's incompleteness theorem intuitively basically says that there's no end to the exploration of mathematical structure. If we take consciousness as fundamental, as I'm proposing, then there's only one thing that mathematical structure could be about.
which is consciousness, conscious experiences. And so in that context, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, I would interpret as saying that there's an infinite variety of kinds of conscious experience that are out there, of possible structures of conscious experience. And for each kind of structure that there is, there's an infinite variety of conscious experiences that all share that structure. Right? So I would call this Gödel's candy store,
infinite variety of possible structures of conscious experiences, and for each structure, probably an infinite variety of conscious experiences that share that structure. So it's very, very rich. And the goal of consciousness then on this theory would be to explore Gödel's candy store. That's what consciousness is up to. Gödel basically, his incompleteness theorem is saying, no matter how much mathematics you have,
you haven't even begun. No matter how much structure you've explored, you've not even begun, because there's endless, endless exploration. In some sense, God could never know it all. So God has endless, whatever you think about God, there's an endless structure for even God to explore, right? And so that endless exploration of all the rich varieties, and it's
Here I don't know, here I don't know how to think about it yet. Is it an exploration of a pre-existing candy store or is it an invention of all the new candies in this endless store? My feeling right now is it's an invention that Gödel is telling us, Gödel's incompleteness theorem is saying there's an infinite variety of structures to be invented. And then in the context of consciousness, I interpreted as saying,
an infinite variety of conscious experiences to be invented. I think it's invented, not explored in terms of pre-existing conscious experiences. But there, I must say, my intuitions at this point fail me. I don't know. Okay, let's go even further off the deep end. You're completely allowed to speculate. I'm not Michael Shermer. I'm not going to throw skepticism to you straight out the gate.
Where in your model does God lie? Well, the word God is something that's been used in various forms for thousands of years by human beings, and it's never been precisely defined, right? Never been precisely defined. There's quite a few of those words, causality, free will, identity, God, slippery, slippery. They all might be related.
But we don't kill each other over our differences about the word causality. We do kill each other over our differences about the word God. And so that's a particularly troublesome problem that we have that we think that's a very, very important word, and in many cases in human history we've proven that we're willing to kill millions of people who disagree with us about what we mean by that word. And the remarkable thing is that's
When there's no precise definition. So I would like to propose a precise definition of God. And of course I'm wrong. Of course I'm wrong. But the idea is to have something on the table so that we can now begin to figure out why it's wrong. So I have this definition of a conscious agent. I'll just propose that God is any conscious agent that has an infinite set of
That to me sounds like there could be multiple gods because you could have multiple agents with infinite sets. That's exactly right. So now, by the way, with that definition, it may end up being a theorem that polytheism is true, not monotheism.
But notice all of a sudden that we get this thing where now I gave you a definition of God and you immediately saw an implication. Try that with most other religious views of God. They're not precise enough to have these kinds of inferential implications where we can actually… What if someone said, okay, I can save monotheism by saying that God is the amalgam of all the conscious agents?
And that would be another way to go at it. And that might be the critique that you give of my first definition of God. It would be my critique of my first definition of God would be to say, well, no, let God be the top conscious agent, the one that's the unit, the combination of all the other agents that exist.
But then it may turn out as we look at the dynamics of conscious agents and the combination, we may find that at any moment there may not be a single maximum. So it may not be a lattice where there's one peak to the whole network. There may be multiple and no single maximal at any one moment in the dynamics. So again, it would be a matter of
And it may turn out to be a property of the kind of dynamics of conscious agents that you propose, that in these kinds of dynamics it's a polytheism and this one there's a monotheism. So that's what's so fun about this, is now all of a sudden we're already engaging, by the way, like this on
the word God in a way that we could never before engage. This is now a technical term. And again, of course, everything that we've said so far is almost surely deeply wrong, but it's precise. And so we can find out precisely where it's wrong. And by the way, notice now we're in a very different space. I'm not tempted to kill you
or hurt you because you disagree with me. I'm rather tempted to listen to your ideas and go, oh well, that's really cool. I hadn't thought about that. Let me rethink my position. It's a very, very different kind of thing. And so can we, I mean, it seems that the word God is very, very important to us. Instead of having it be an ambiguous term that we fight to the death over and hate each other over, why not have it be, since we think it's so important,
It's important enough to be precise. If it's that important to us, then it's important enough that we should be precise about what we mean. And if we're precise about what we mean, then we can start to have a dialogue and try to refine it and come to some kind of mutual understanding. So that's sort of the scientific attitude of be precise so that we
Don't get stuck in the same thoughts that we've had for thousands of years. We don't end up being dogmatic defenders of something that's not even well defined. Rather, it's a sense of humility. These are the best ideas that I, in my tradition, have had so far about God. There's probably a lot of insight in those ideas, and there's probably some mistakes. Let me listen to your ideas. Let's
Have you listened to my ideas? And can we then get to a new and deeper and more precise notion of God, since we agree that this seems to be an important concept for us, can we together work in humility and both admit upfront that maybe we don't have it quite right? That's sort of the scientific attitude about this thing. Being precise is an ultimate act of humility on the one hand,
because you're making yourself vulnerable to being shown wrong. But it's also the ultimate act of true inquisitiveness. It's saying, this is precisely the best idea I've got so far, but I really want to understand. So I'm stating it precisely so I can figure out why I'm wrong and then we can move on into a deeper inquiry. So that's what I would like to see in the discussion of God. I would love to see in this sense a
scientific spirituality, which doesn't mean a dry, desiccated, you know, academic kind of discipline. It's rather taking these very important notions and giving them the respect that they deserve, a precise definition and a precise inquiry into what we mean, that could eventually then lead to a deeper understanding of right and wrong, of morals, what is a good life, what is the meaning of life and so forth.
But if we can't even define our basic terms, how will we ever?
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Okay, we're in the deep end already. Let's go to the Mariana Trench. What happens when you die? Well, if you're a physicalist, it's quite clear, right? Your consciousness is entirely the product of your brain or your embodied
I mean, some of my colleagues will emphasize the cycle between sort of an inactive point of view that it's not just the brain, it's the brain and the body in the environment in that loop, that loop. Fine. But when you die, that loop stops. And therefore your consciousness stops. And so from that point of view, the prediction is quite clear. There's nothing that survives death. From the view that I'm proposing here, space-time itself is not fundamental.
The brain does not cause anything, including our conscious experiences. Instead, space-time is like our headset. It's a virtual reality headset. So, consciousness does not have to die when the body dies. But, as I said, the Self is not fundamental in the theory that I'm developing.
The self is just a data structure, like space time is a data structure. So from the point of view that I'm working on right now, my death does not mean that my consciousness disappears, but myself may. I don't know yet. I mean, that's going to be something I want to work on in this theory. The self just being a data structure, maybe that data structure dissolves. Or maybe it's like,
What happens in metamorphosis? A caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In some sense, there's not much recognizable left of the caterpillar when the butterfly emerges. There is a continuity, but the butterfly has only six legs.
The caterpillar had quite a few more. The caterpillar eats leaves. The butterfly can't eat leaves. The butterfly drinks nectar. The caterpillar never drank nectar. The butterfly has wings. The caterpillar has no concept of wings. They're the same creature at different stages, but they're utterly alien and maybe the thing that survives death is as different for me as a butterfly is from a caterpillar.
I'll give you an analogy that may be helpful here. Suppose you go to a virtual reality arcade with some friends to play say virtual volleyball.
You put on your headset and body suit and you see yourself immersed in a beach volleyball scene. You see palm trees and the net and sand and the avatars of your friends across the net. And so you serve the virtual volleyball and you guys play for a while. And then one of your friends, Bob, says, excuse me, I'm thirsty, I'm going to go get a drink. And he takes off his headset and his body suit to go get a drink. And his avatar collapses on the sand. Well, within
that virtual reality, he's effectively dead. But of course Bob isn't dead, he just stepped out of the interface. And so there's this sense in the theory that I'm developing, that your body is just an avatar. The death of your body, just like the death of Bob in the virtual reality game, is not the death of Bob, Bob just was out getting a drink. So death may just be stepping out of the interface, but
Even if consciousness survives, the consciousness that survives may be as different from the consciousness that you now have as you could imagine a butterfly being different from a caterpillar, even more. In the analogy of Bob going to get a drink, there's a retainment of memory in your model. I recall you saying earlier in the conversation that you don't have a theory for memory or there is no memory. I could be wrong, you might, but regardless does
Memories are data structures as well. So those data structures may or may not be preserved. So that will be another aspect of this whole thing. But right now I have no reason to say upfront that I would claim that they necessarily are preserved. So I can't claim that your current notion of self would be preserved or your current memories would be preserved.
and the issue would then be could I build models of conscious agents in which I first model what the death process is as in terms of stepping out of a particular interface and can I find models so but but notice what I'm saying here now I'm actually trying to model the death process with a mathematical model in terms of conscious agents and then I'm asking a technical question could certain data structures
the self data structure memory my own personal episodic memory data structures be retained in this other process that that is leading to the extraction of a conscious agent out of a particular interface that I don't know the answer to it but for me it's a technical question and a really interesting one and and one that I don't think is beyond our scope I think it's one that we can address we can try to find what I like about
What I like about your approach is it reminds me of Newtonian approximation, where you just guess at what one of the roots are, and you know full well that it's likely to be wrong. But because of that guess, you can get closer and closer to the truth. That's how science works, right? You guess at the foundations. You guess at what the right assumptions are. Newton did a brilliant job. He's probably one of the smartest men that ever lived, maybe the smartest.
incredible brilliance. And where he was wrong, the new theories give Newton as an approximation. Like Einstein gives Newton as a limiting case, as the speed of light goes to infinity. Newton is wrong, but he's deeply right too. He had his hands on something. So we would like to have assumptions in this area of consciousness
as minimal as possible but that then lead that turn all the kinds of questions you're asking into technical problems that we can in principle solve and all the questions you're asking so far are ones I think that we can pose as technical questions and try to solve them. Let's get back to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. People like Penrose and Lucas would say that any system that's computational in nature
which yours sounds like, or at least is algorithmic or rule-based, would necessarily fail at a model of consciousness because within that system there are truths that that system cannot see as being true, but we can. How do you deal with that? What do you think of that? Well, so there are non-computable functions.
Right? And this is something that Penrose knows quite well and is focused on in some of his work. So, in fact, it's quite remarkable. If you just look at the integers, or even just the natural numbers, let's say the integers, no. And you ask, look at all the functions from the integers to the integers. Right? Well, it's
Mathematicians can show that there's an uncountable set of functions from the integers to the integers, because the number of functions is the power set of the integers, so it's higher cardinality than the integers. So it's an uncountable set. But Turing proved that the set of all computable functions is countable. Therefore, when we look at just
the collection of functions from the integers to the integers, which is uncountable. What that means is that almost no function is computable. When you look at the set of all functions, the set of computable functions is probability zero for some interesting measure. So the reason we focus on computable functions is partly because of our lack of imagination. It's hard for us to imagine
un-computable functions, right? If you've taken a class in computer science where you actually have to, like, deal with un-computable functions, you can get there. You can study a non-computable function, but boy is it hard. It really strips all the gears in your head. It's just so hard for us. So most functions are not computable. Our brains have a hard time even understanding one of them. So it's a real limitation of our brains.
In my field, cognitive neuroscience, we're giving computational theories of mind. There is a way to look at this, what my field is doing, and say, what are you guys up to? You're trying to give computational theories of cognition.
If you're saying that cognition is only based on computation, you're claiming that of all the functions that are available, there's this probability zero subset of functions that are only responsible for our minds and for consciousness, right? Like, you know, the Tononi and Koch approach of, you know, integrated information. It's a computational function. So why should we assume that cognition in general and consciousness
is restricted to this probability zero subset of functions. What's the principled reason for that? And most of my colleagues don't even understand that this is an issue and certainly don't have an answer for it, but of course Penrose is an exception. Penrose is saying he understands all this. But I still don't agree with where Penrose goes on this, right? Penrose is saying he still wants to start with a physicalist framework
and get consciousness to emerge by some kind of objective reduction of… Forget about that. I'd say it's more fundamental. The conscious agent model looks to me to be algorithmic or rule-based, and the statement from Penrose, independent of whether or not consciousness emerges from physicality, just forget about that, is that a rule-based system
can't account for our conscious behavior, given that we have an understanding of what's true, but not provable within that rule based system, any rule based system. And because we have that quality, our consciousness can't be relegated to an algorithm, which yours seems like now, it could just be this is rudimentary form like I'm at step one, or there might be another counter and I'm just curious to know what you think. Well, so
Again, the framework of what I'm doing is different from what he's trying to do. I'm not trying to explain how consciousness arises. I'm assuming it. So consciousness is given. Now there's a question, do consciousnesses interact only by rules? Right now I'm studying rules, but I'm completely open to non-computational
I see, I see.
Surely if there, I don't want to exclude rule-based interactions, but I may find that I don't want to restrict to rule-based interaction. So I'm starting with the rule-based ones, partly because of my background and my limitations, but eventually I'd love to go beyond. So I would say point well taken. Non-computational approaches may be very, very interesting in this. Absolutely. There's a cognitive scientist named Jonathan Vervecky or John Vervecky, and he says that there are four
I don't know if they're orthogonal, they're definitely related, but there's four different modes of knowledge, and one is propositional, and that's what, since the development of the scientific method, we've relegated our knowledge to, the propositions are what are true. But he says while there are others, there's participatory knowing, there's procedural knowledge, obviously, like that one anyone can get, and then there's perspectival. And I'm curious, it's like, how would one even
If your theory would incorporate, then how the heck can you even write down, because this notion of writing down is a proposition, how would one model the other three fundamentally? Well, so in current neural network models, the way that the network learns is not by acquiring new propositions, it's by updating connection weights in the network.
That's a procedural knowledge. So the history of AI, I was in the artificial intelligence lab at MIT. I did my PhD there and in the brain and cognitive science department at MIT from 79 to 83. At the time, AI was mostly about propositional. It was good old-fashioned AI. So it was explicit algorithms with specific things that you could write down as propositions and so forth.
But with neural networks, you have this kind of thing where the system learns, but it's not learning propositions. You're just updating weights and you're getting behaviors. And that turns out to be very, very effective for modeling procedural memories, like motor memories and so forth. And in fact, at Boston Dynamics, I believe they've made great progress by having
robots that fall down and try things and they walk, fall down, but their neural networks are just updating and updating and updating. They don't get any list of propositions, do this actuator, then do that actuator. No, it's just this procedural memory. There's been this big debate between propositional and procedural that's gone on between the neural network modelers and the good old-fashioned AI kinds of modelers and so forth. It's a profitable
debate and then there's the inactive or embodied cognition kind of thing that comes into it as well. I'm taking a perspectival thing as well, right, so I'm saying that in some sense conscious experiences and perspectives therefore are fundamental but I see within the network of conscious agents being able to get both procedural and explicit propositional kinds of representations coming out.
But I think also, as you said, I should be looking at non-computational approaches to this. And I've got some mathematician friends working with me who are expert in category theory. So category theory is a great way to explode this into a very, very general mathematical framework. And we intend to go there. I know you got to go soon. I'm going to just get to the best of questions, or the ones that I answered, which might be more technical. At some point, you use Landau's limit.
You know what I'm, you recall what I'm referring to. Okay. Why do you use that when LANDR's limit presupposes space and time? Why do you use that as a limit for the amount of ticks or the energy that goes into a tick?
We've used that and this is largely the brilliance of my friend Chris Fields who's a physicist who's been working on that. So he likes to look at the information theoretic things using Landauer's principle and to look, so most of his analyses are in terms of quantum theory and what are the limits of information transfer in quantum systems. So that's usually the context in which we bring that up. Ultimately if we
get a theory
is capturing features of the information dynamics of conscious agents. So it will come there as a property of the interface, but not as a fundamental limit of consciousness. Okay. Okay. And does that give a bound for the amount of time for each click? So just so people are aware, there was that model that I'll show on the screen. There's the WXG. I was simplifying it. There's a T that's in the middle that counts the amount of revolutions in the system.
I could be wrong. Just correct me. But either way, that to me seems akin to time. And then in the paper, it seemed like you were giving a lower limit to time saying that the amount that a conscious agent can experience is something like 100 femtoseconds. Please correct me if I'm incorrect here. And I thought that, well, that sounds like a theoretical prediction too. That if we can get a camera or conscious experience of a quicker time, then that would invalidate it. Or if we can't, then that would be evidence for it.
Right, so I don't go that direction with it. And I don't think that Chris Fields goes that direction with it either, and for the following reason. There is no fundamental pixelation of space-time, right? So, space-time is doomed.
not because we run into pixels at the Planck scale, but rather because space-time itself ceases to be well-defined. It's not an empirically observable construct at that level. The attempts to think about space-time as being pixelated at roughly the Planck scale run into a very serious problem
They're not Lorentz invariant. The pixels, what's tiny for you may not be tiny for someone else. So it's been, no one has a way to make the pixelation of space-time Lorentz invariant. And so I wouldn't want to go there, and I don't think Chris Fields would want to go there. Nevertheless, we may find, I mean, the Landauer limit does play a role in information transfers in space-time. So we will want to understand where that limit comes from, from our theory of consciousness,
and our theory of emergent space-time, but I don't see us getting any predictions about a pixelation of time or a pixelation of space because it would violate Lorentz invariance. On the interface theory, when I'm not looking at, let's say, the Moon, it doesn't necessarily exist, but you're saying that
What doesn't exist is our idea of the Moon, or that our idea is representing something and that something still persists. It's just our idea of the Moon doesn't exist. Right. So when I say the Moon doesn't exist, I'm saying it in the same way that if I look like at an image and see an illusory cube, and sometimes the cube I see one corner, one face in front, and sometimes it flips and I see another face in front.
And then when I look away, I say that there is no such thing as the cube because the cube only exists when I look at it and then I see the cube and it's flipping. The same thing with the Moon. The Moon is like that cube. Now, there is some reality that I'm interacting with and it continues to exist whether or not I look. But that reality is not inside space and time at all, much less is it the Moon. Space and time themselves
are not a fundamental reality. They are data structures that we create. So anything that's in space-time is in some sense no more real than the illusory cube that I look and then destroy when I look away. Space-time itself is created and destroyed by us. So it only exists in the same way that that illusory cube exists. Which isn't to say that there isn't something that exists but is not even in space and time. Whatever it exists that's outside of space and time, it's outside of my headset.
I see, I see. So let's imagine there's Tickle Me Elmo, and I see the Tickle Me Elmo, and you're like, okay, you look, it's gone, it's destroyed, it's not rendered anymore, but a camera that I just press record on can record the Tickle Me Elmo, then I can go and press play. How do you account for that? Well, notice you only see the Elmo on the camera when you look. You only see the camera when you look.
So the camera itself is again just something that exists when you perceive it. It's pointing to another reality. There is a reality that exists independent of you but the reality is not the camera and it's not the digital recording on the camera. Those are just again your own icons. So the camera itself is just a symbol.
I know you've covered this before, but just for the people who are listening, how does your theory account for intersubjective agreement? Now that is one of our current projects. So one of the papers we're working on right now is exactly that problem because it is critical to science. The way scientists typically talk about it
about what science is doing is that what makes science special in some sense is that one scientist can look at a physical system like this animal or this planet and another scientist can make their own independent measurements of that animal, that specific animal or that planet and then we can go and compare notes. In other words we have this notion of public physical objects, objects that are really there whether or not
We exist like dinosaur bones, right? The dinosaur bones have been there for 200 million years. They were there. If no one had ever been around, they would still be there. I can look at the dinosaur bones. You can look at the dinosaur bones. They're public physical objects. We can make our measurements, get the DNA and so forth. That's gone in my point of view. That whole point of view is gone because space-time itself is doomed. Space-time isn't fundamental. There are no public physical objects. So how do we rethink
what we mean by objectivity in science, where objectivity has to do with, again, having independent scientists do their own experiments and come to some agreement. So the framework that I'm working on right now poses that as a really serious question. And so we're writing a paper on that right now and we're going to be running simulations. But here's the kind of idea that I'm playing with. I think
that we have to take the possibility of synesthesia very seriously. We actually know synesthesia occurs. It could be easily in the cards that your visual experiences that you described with the words red and round and square and so forth. And I described, if I could get inside your head for all I know, I would go, Whoa,
That's not what I would call red and round. That's what I would call the smell of garlic and the taste of butter or a headache. Just like Michael Watson, he tastes mint, but he feels a tall, cold, smooth column of glass. I don't feel that. If all Michael Watson ever experienced were the feelings in his hand, he would have a perfectly good taste sensation. He could cook. He could figure out what foods
So in other words, you and I as scientists could absolutely agree, believe that we're talking the same language and yet your experiences could be synesthetically utterly different from mine and we would never know. And I think that that's going to turn out to be a fundamental and unbreachable limit to what we can know
and to the degree of objectivity that we can have in science. The technical thing would be that we can only agree up to effectively a homomorphism, a homomorphism of your set of perceptual representations and experiences and mine. The homomorphism could be as radical as the difference between the taste of mint and a tall, cold, smooth column of glass. It could be that different and we would never know
The only reason we know in Michael Watson's case is because he had both and he could tell us about both. We could say, oh, I understand the one, but gee, I never thought about the other. That's incredible. So we're going to have to understand what is the most confirmation and what's the greatest level of agreement that scientists can have given this possibility of
synesthetic complete divergence between us. And I would love to, I was talking with my colleagues on this in the paper that we're writing, we may actually do this, not just as a thought experiment paper, we may actually do this. I would love to create this really interesting virtual reality game, two player game or multiplayer, but
For one player, they're immersed in what seems like, say, Grand Theft Auto. The other player is immersed in a completely different game, like Super Mario Bros. But I've arranged it, so they both think that they're playing the same game, and they are actually playing, and they win and lose, but they have no idea that the other person is in a completely different virtual world.
and they but they're also they're they're using language there they seem to agree right you take them out of their heads to have them swap and blow their minds when they find out what the other person was doing i think we can do that and so we have to be if that's true if that's possible in category theory that would be the idea that you might have this one category for your representation that other scientists might have another category but if there's some functor if there's some functor that maps
the objects and relations that you have in your interface to the objects and relations that the other scientist has in their interface. If you have the right functor, then the scientists will have the appearance of agreement and they will never know that they're separated by this functor. And so I think that there's going to be
Category theoretic analysis ahead on this that are going to be really quite stunning. But I think that's going to be the future of the philosophy of science is this category theoretic fundamental limitation on the agreement that scientists can have. There are no public physical objects. So what does it mean for us to get
laboratory independent verification. My laboratory gets it, your laboratory gets it. What are we really doing in that case? It's going to be up to some functor. Right. It sounds to me, and I only have three, three more questions and they might be long, but I have three questions. It sounds to me like you're saying that there is some homomorphic functions between us and that's responsible for why we feel like we share a similar world. However, can we not use the same argument that you use to show that the
probability that we see the truth is zero, that is that the immiscible functions grow much larger than the homomorphic functions to the structure? Can we not use that to say that the probability that we share any interface is also zero, including homomorphic aspects? Not at least within the theory of conscious agents and the dynamics that I'm talking about now, because what we can do is we can ask, are there certain
strategies of interaction that conscious agents can have where they would converge in the limit to homomorphic things, right? So it's different evolutionary game theory where the rules have been spelled out. I mean, in that, I don't get to play with their constraints. So it's not just uniform probability. That's right. So I see. So in the case of conscious agents, the question is, can we find dynamics in which the agents can converge up to homomorphisms? And I think we can.
Okay, here's one that's super philosophical. If what you're saying is that we're not tuned for truth, because truth is deleterious, at least compared to fitness, which is salubrious. However, let's imagine your theory is correct. Then we're starting to see the truth. Does that not mean that it's deleterious? We shouldn't do that. We're not designed for that. Absolutely not. And so here's where it's very, very careful to, to again, see the game that I'm playing. The game that I'm playing is
I take evolution on its own terms and I see what its implications are. I don't say I believe evolution. I'm just playing the game. This is what the math of evolution says. It says very clearly we don't see the truth. Okay, that's what evolution says. Probability is zero that we see the truth. That's not what Hoffman says. Hoffman doesn't care about that except to understand that that's what evolution says. But evolution says that doesn't mean I believe it. So I'm free on the one hand to prove
that evolution entails we don't see the truth. I'm free to prove that, and then to step back and say, I still believe we see the truth. Here's my theory in which we see the truth. But, the constraint will then be, okay then, if you have this theory in which we see the truth, you have to explain how it is, in that framework where you see the truth, that you end up arriving at the theory of evolution by natural selection which says otherwise. If you can't do that, then you're wrong.
So this is a really, and by the way it's a great question because I get this question in emails quite a bit. So the key thing is this, Hoffman doesn't say we don't see the truth. Evolution by natural selection says we don't see the truth. I don't say that. Evolution by natural selection says that. I just
I'm just pointing out what one of our best theories entails. Now I'm stepping back and I'm going, I would like to see the truth. Of course, maybe I can't. I'm not saying I know that we can see the truth. I'm just saying, as a scientist, I would like to come up with a theory
which entails that we see the truth. That's why I'm looking at consciousness because I am conscious. So if I'm conscious and the reality is consciousness, there is some connection between me and reality. I might actually be able to understand that reality because I'm conscious. But then the burden is on me to then explain how my theory where I see the truth of these conscious agents leads to an interface of space-time and in that interface this theory of evolution and natural selection which says you don't see the truth.
Well, that won't be so strikingly strange because evolution is telling you that what you see in the interface isn't the truth. Well, I'm also saying that from this bigger picture. I'm saying that there's this realm of conscious agents outside this FaceTime interface that's the truth, and you can't see it within the interface. Well, it's not going to be a surprise that evolution by natural selection says that inside the interface. So it'll all work out.
So that's, I hope that gives, that's a great question. Okay. Let me quick, let me rephrase it so that I get it across because I don't think I portrayed it correctly. You're saying that, and I'm sorry, evolutionary theory is saying that we're not designed for the truth. We're designed for fitness. Right. And those are two completely separate phenomena. Okay. If we were designed for truth, if we were able to see the truth, that would be horrible for us. But at the same time, you're like, I want to look at the truth.
Let's say you're actually uncovering the truth. Is that not harmful, given the presupposition that we should be pursuing fitness and not truth? No, it's not, because by stepping outside of the entire framework of evolution, I'm stepping outside of its assumptions. I'm saying there's a deeper framework in which the assumptions of evolution aren't true. I see, I see. Only true within the headset. The headset is just a headset. There's this deeper reality outside the headset.
It's like if I see the Twitterverse only through my headset and there's certain rules about how I perceive in the headset and I assume that those rules of what I see in the headset must apply to all the Twitter users, well that's stupid. The Twitter users are doing their own thing. My headset is just smashing all this complexity into this trivial little headset and that's why evolution has to tell us that it's not seeing the truth because what's happened from this bigger framework is space-time and objects in space-time is this a
Incredible smashing down information losing map from the reality this vast social network into this trivial little space-time Interface so it's no surprise that evolution by natural selection is saying you know what? You're not going to see the truth. You're just going to see little interface symbols. That's what it's telling us and I say I agree We're only seeing interface symbols, but that's only in space-time We're not stuck in space-time you and I are not in space-time we create space-time
The rules of the game apply within the game, but you can step out of the game. That's right. Okay. Okay. The authors of the game. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. I'm going to, I'm going to, instead of asking you, I'm going to list the last questions and then you just choose one. Cause I know you got to go. Okay. So I was going to say, where does, where do people like Deepak Chopra take your message too far? So that's an option. You can answer that. Another one is when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the light.
What truth do you think he was referring to? And then the other question, what determines the initial world state? Well, those are all tough. With Deepak, Deepak and I have been good friends for several years now. He's a spiritual teacher. I'm not. We respect each other. I respect him as
as a seeker and he's learning to be careful about how he throws around words like quantum mechanics and so forth. I mean he's been he's been I'm aware he's taken hits in the past and I think that that but I have really he and I and this is really important science and spirituality do need to have a dialogue and whenever there's a dialogue even within
members of two different scientific disciplines, you have to have a lot of patience with the other person. So, you know, someone who is not a cognitive scientist coming to talk to me say he's a chemist. Well, when I start talking chemistry with him, I'm going to feel like and be really stupid compared to him. When he talks cognitive science to me, he's going to be really pedestrian to me. It's going to be the same thing in science and spirituality. So if I want productive dialogue, of course, I'm going to be saying things that to someone who's spiritually
trained is going to sound, you know, scientific nonsense and immature and not very deep and vice versa. So, of course, I'll have said things that Deepak thinks are spiritually stupid and then he says things that, you know, in quantum mechanics and so forth that, you know, most scientists would say that's not what a really trained scientist would say. Fine.
But if we want to have a dialogue that's really productive, we have to cut each other some slack. We have to listen past the barriers and understand. You know, it took me many, many years to understand what I know about cognitive science. I can't expect someone to just pop into my field and sound like they know what they're talking about.
If I'm not willing to cut them some slack, we'll never get a dialogue. And I learned from my dialogue with Deepak, he learns in his dialogue with me, and we've learned to have this respect of what each other knows and trying to learn from the other. So that's what I hope
We mirror, and of course it's my job to gently correct him when I see things that he says that might be wrong, and it's his job to gently correct me when I misstate his tradition, for example. So that's perfectly fine. On Jesus, I don't know what to say about... I mean, I was raised... My father was a fundamentalist Christian minister, so I read the Bible cover to cover more than once.
I know what the standard interpretation of the Bible is among Protestant fundamentalist Christians. What Jesus meant when he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, I don't know. I'll just say, I don't know. I will say that I think that there are many beautiful insights in the Bible.
And I think there's also nonsense. And I think that just like in scientific theories there are many beautiful insights and then there are places where we know we're absolutely wrong. And my attitude for any scripture and for any scientific theory is the same. Let's treasure the insights and let's recognize humbly that we can be wrong.
Any religious tradition, any scripture, any scientific theory, if we're not willing to be wrong, to open up to the possibility that something we deeply believe could be deeply wrong, we can't grow. That's the place where we stop growing. So it's a matter of humility
both to listen to other traditions, other points of view, to be open that they may have insights I've never had, I may have insights that they've never had, I may have nonsense that they can point out, they may have nonsense that I can point out. If we can do it in this respectful way, again like the kind of thing I'm trying to do with Deepak, I don't want to have him say something wrong about quantum mechanics and go, oh, you said that about quantum mechanics, forget it, I'm not going to talk to you anymore, you got that wrong. That's not the way to do it.
to have a respectful dialogue if others are willing to humbly also put out their ideas and listen. That I think is the heart of true religion. When we talk about loving each other, what deeper love can you have than to respectfully and carefully listen to the thoughts and opinions of others and be willing to entertain the possibility that they may be right in some places and you may be wrong. That's a deep respectful and humble
Thank you. Don, where can the audience find out more about you? If you Google Donald Hoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-N, my homepage at the University of California comes up and I've got links to my papers and I have a book, The Case Against Reality, published by Norton. So The Case Against Reality is a great place to get
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, et cetera,
It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you.
▶ 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."
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
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"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
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"text": " Hi, this is Kurt Jaimungal from Theories of Everything. Last week, we released a Theolocution with Donald Hoffman and John Vervecky on Consciousness, God, Meaning, Purpose, as well as Reality and Fundamentality. People have asked for some of the mathematical inner workings of Don's theories, and many weren't aware that Don and I have conducted a behemoth, massive analysis, technical analysis, over three hours long, about two years ago. So, we are re-releasing this here for you to enjoy."
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"text": " Enjoy. I mean you're asking the right questions for anybody that really knows the math and science and it must be hard to notice but you're asking exactly the right questions. Some of the the deepest questions I've gotten so I really appreciate it. How's it going man? Great, how about you Kurt? It's going well. How's the weather? Been like in Irvine? Oh it's well it's it's probably the best weather you could have in the world. I mean it's almost like we have the thermostat it's it's just gorgeous here year-round so I have no complaints. It's warm enough."
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"text": " With all the quarantine and lockdowns, are you okay? Is it all right in your mental health? Do you prefer it? I'm okay. For me, it's great in the sense that I'm enjoying less distraction and I'm able to focus on studying some mathematics and physics that I'm interested in studying. So it's good. It's, of course, very, very sad to see the millions infected and hundreds of thousands, 140,000 at this point that are"
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"text": " I'm similar in that I'm ambivalent about it. I like it because it removes any distractions and I too am studying math and physics on the side and this whole situation has been salutary for me, but it's obviously not for everyone."
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"text": " Has it changed your views? Has COVID given you any insight or any different ideas with regards to your theories, which we'll get into?"
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"text": " It just confirms what we learn from evolutionary psychology about human nature and in-groups and out-groups and the reasons we evolve, logic and reason, it wasn't in pursuit of truth but to support ideas that we already believe. So we just see this being played out in the big debates about masks and so forth that are going on. We see human nature being played out in a big way and we see the results in terms of"
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"text": " You know, a big failure in our country right now. The rates of infection are going up, the deaths were number one in the world in terms of the number of deaths and infections and so forth. Maybe not per capita, but still, for the world's richest country, with the wonderful scientific establishment that we have, you would think that there would be just no problem in us getting together, organizing and defeating this thing, but there's the"
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"text": " whole aspect of human evolutionary psychology and that's playing itself out large. And so I study evolutionary psychology and what's going on does make sense. It's tragic for us as a population, but it makes sense in terms of human nature. Do you meditate? Yes, daily. What kind of meditation, mindfulness or transcendental? It's silence."
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"text": " Nothing else. Pure silence. No poses. I do whatever feels comfortable, but it's I spend probably at least three hours a day in pure silence. That's it. Not looking at a screen or reading. Nothing. Not walking. Not walking. Just silence. Sitting, lying. The pose doesn't matter to me, but it's just pure silence and being just being"
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"text": " aware of whatever I feel in the moment and being aware of thoughts as they come up and just if they come up then I'll let them go and go back to silence. It's very very simple. What I find tricky about meditation, this is why I don't do it, is that as soon as I start to not that the thoughts intrude but that great productive thoughts come up and then I have to write them down because I find that when I don't"
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"text": " It's rare that I get them again. So do you sit with a pen and paper? If you have a particularly brilliant thought, do you just allow that to escape? I let it go. Over the years, it's only maybe one or two times that I've actually written something down. I just don't."
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"text": " I just let it come and I let it go. I have a fairly good memory for the stuff that comes up if I want to later. So maybe, maybe if I was really concerned that I would forget something that I really wanted, I might be doing it, but I'm not too concerned about it. I can remember stuff later, but I just, you know, it's, it's a matter. What I find it's the meditation process for me is what I can imagine it's like for a caterpillar to go through metamorphosis."
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"text": " It turns out when the caterpillar is inside the chrysalis, the immune cells of the caterpillar attack and try to kill. In fact, they do kill the cells that are responsible for the transformation into a butterfly. They attack and kill, attack and kill until they're overwhelmed. And then most of the structure of the caterpillar liquefies and then is reformed into the butterfly."
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"text": " From the point of view of the caterpillar, that can't be fun. And the immune system indicates that it's not welcomed by the caterpillar at all. It's fought to the death by the immune system until the immune system is overwhelmed. But from the point of view of the butterfly, it's a brand new creation. So it depends on whether you take the point of view of the caterpillar or the butterfly. Most of the time I've been the caterpillar."
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"text": " But I'm starting a little bit to welcome the destruction of everything I know, the destruction of deeply held beliefs, the destruction of my fears and so forth, defense mechanisms, letting all that stuff slowly be destroyed just in pure silence and then watching whatever new might come up. I mean, it's hard to imagine that the Caterpillar has any idea"
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"text": " what it's going to be turned into. It's just fighting it to the death until it can't fight anymore, and then it liquefies. So from the caterpillar's point of view, it's just all loss and death and destruction, but there's a rebirth. And that's the way I feel about meditation, that I'm allowing a transformation to occur, of which I'm arbitrarily ignorant about its true nature, and I can only tell you after I've taken the next step what it was like."
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"text": " Are you aware of any studies that have been done as to the memory of a caterpillar when it becomes into its butterfly phase, that it retains certain memories? That's right. I'm not an expert on it, but I do recall stories about that, that if you give some kind of aversive training to the caterpillar, the reactions might be there on the butterfly, that kind of thing."
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"text": " I was watching a neuroscientist say that some memories might be non-local or not localized into the neuronal formation in the brain and the reason why he thinks so is controversial and it's extremely rudimentary in this research right now is because of the arctic squirrel the arctic squirrel when it goes into hibernation and I believe most creatures experience this their brain degenerates to such a degree that it's it's not clear that memory should certain memories should survive yet they do with the arctic squirrel interesting"
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"text": " Do you eat a certain kind of breakfast or follow a diet? I try to have a low acid diet. So I have lots of oatmeal. I have oatmeal, you know, for breakfast and try to do low acid, low fat. So I'll have an omelet with mostly egg whites, maybe one egg yolk and some fresh fruit."
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"text": " My wife is a vegetarian. I'm not. She makes up vegetables all the time, so I eat her vegetables and then I'll cook some fish. Chicken, I don't do beef that often, but I don't avoid it either. I tend to focus on fish and chicken, but I'll have a little bit of red meat. I try to eat. I eat three times a day. I don't snack at all. I eat"
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"text": " After dinner, I don't eat any snacks. So I don't eat usually from 6.30 in the evening until at least 7.30 the next day. I never eat a bite. And that's just been my habit for decades. I don't eat at all for like 12 hours, 13 hours. See, I intermittent fast, but I do so because I'm filled with avarice and I just want to eat whatever I see. So I fast for like when I spoke to Eric Weinstein,"
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"text": " I think at that point during the interview I had not eaten for 65 hours or so, not plenty, but I do that before I conduct my podcasts or interviews generally. Do you have any rituals or habits that you do before you speak or before you study besides meditation? No, I'm pretty comfortable talking. I was a professor at the University of California for 37 years and had to give lectures all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 710.657,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 681.544,
"text": " to big audiences. For me, talking is not an issue at all. I was working out just a couple minutes before we got onto this podcast. I had an hour window, so I got a little bench and dumbbells that I use. I weight train three times a week and do aerobics three or four times the other three or four days of the week. I try to have a regular thing. I was doing that just before the podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 740.691,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 711.067,
"text": " So yeah, no, I don't usually have to, I mean, I usually just go and talk and enjoy it. I was looking at your background and it said you studied initially computational psychology. What is computational psychology? Yeah. So it was computational psychology was the name of my PhD at MIT. And there I was in the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT."
},
{
"end_time": 765.282,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 741.459,
"text": " and in what's now the brain and cognitive sciences department. And so what I was doing was a combination of studying just artificial intelligence. And at the time it was, you know, good old fashioned artificial intelligence. It wasn't the neural network stuff at that point, because that was from 1979 to 1983. Neural networks came into their own a little bit, a few years later."
},
{
"end_time": 790.179,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 765.725,
"text": " So I was doing more of the good old-fashioned AI stuff, but still it was, you know, I was studying human vision and computer vision, and the idea was you had a good theory if you could build a computer that could work. So if you have a theory about how we see in 3D, build it. If you can't build it, then I'm not sure you have a theory. So it was that really hard-nosed attitude. And then on the other side, I was looking in the brain and cognitive science department,"
},
{
"end_time": 813.439,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 790.503,
"text": " at human vision and the neurophysiology of human vision, psychophysical experiments about how we see in 3D, object recognition, colors and so forth. So the idea was to reverse engineer biological vision systems, which are the only ones that worked at the time, and take the insights and try to build computer vision systems that implemented what we learned."
},
{
"end_time": 841.647,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 814.002,
"text": " That way we would know we weren't just fooling ourselves into thinking we understood. If it doesn't work, then you don't understand. Go back and scratch your head a little bit and figure out what's really going on. I'm sorry, around what year was this? I was there from 1979 till 1983 at MIT, and I was very fortunate to have two wonderful advisors, David Marr and Whitman Richards. So both of them had their foot"
},
{
"end_time": 871.749,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 842.056,
"text": " in the AI lab and in the brain and cognitive science department. Cool. Cool. You know, I, I see a few different strands to your theories in this, just for the people listening or watching, this is going to be extremely technical or much more so than most of the other interviews that you have online and which I think stay on a, at a cursory level, particularly, particularly because you're conversing with people who don't have a mathematical background or a physics background. So as far as I can delineate, you have the consciousness, the conscious agent model,"
},
{
"end_time": 895.418,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 872.193,
"text": " Interface theory of perception. That's number two. Bayesian decision theory, which I believe you mended to computational evolutionary perception. I could be wrong about that. And then number four, you have some new papers on eigenforms, which I haven't studied much because I don't know much about modular forms and heck algebras. So I didn't get a chance to read them. But are those"
},
{
"end_time": 926.015,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 896.186,
"text": " Is that a fair summary of your work or are there more? Yeah, so evolutionary game theory I work on, yeah, Bayesian models of perception, Markovian models of the dynamics of consciousness, yeah. Out of curiosity, this is getting somewhat out of left field. Why did you choose G to represent the the Braille space for decisions? Because when I was, for those listening, there's this"
},
{
"end_time": 955.896,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 926.852,
"text": " There's a relatively simple structure, though, non-trivial, called sigma-algebras, and then there's Markov kernels, and then you have W, which is the world state, and then you have X, which is experience. I imagine you chose X because of experience. World, W. Okay, great. But G, what does that have to do with decisions? Why did you choose that? Did you just run out of letters? Yeah, we were running out of letters, and we already had A for the kernel for actions. In some sense, G is a set of actions that you're going to take, and we already used action A for the action kernel. So I used G for the group,"
},
{
"end_time": 974.309,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 956.305,
"text": " of actions that you could take. I was thinking about it at the time that it might have a group structure as well as a measurable structure. That's why I use G, because I already take an A for the kernel itself. But the easiest way to think about the definition of a conscious agent is that it's just three kernels. There's a perception kernel,"
},
{
"end_time": 994.104,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 974.838,
"text": " So you get the world that influences you through a perception kernel. In other words, whatever the state of the world is, it probabilistically affects what your experiences are. That's what a kernel P does. So whatever the state of the world is, you get a probabilistic effect on your experiences. Then the D kernel is whatever my experiences are, they probabilistically affect the actions that I choose."
},
{
"end_time": 1023.968,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 994.991,
"text": " And then my action kernel is whatever actions I choose, they probabilistically affect the state of the world. Very, very simple triangle. The state of the world affects my experiences. My experiences affect the choices I make. The choices I make affect the state of the world. Right. Okay. Now, please forgive me if I jump around. I have 90 questions here. And what you're saying right now brings me to question number 80, let's say. So it's going to go all over the place."
},
{
"end_time": 1053.183,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1024.531,
"text": " Why did you have X when you could just go from W to G directly by composing D after P? So that is to say for the people, you can explain what I'm saying to the people. Right. So the idea when I was working on this model of perception, decision and action, the idea is first I'm trying to model"
},
{
"end_time": 1063.319,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1053.507,
"text": " The process of observation."
},
{
"end_time": 1092.91,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1063.797,
"text": " It turns out when you look at all the specific mathematical models that we have, they all have a similar structure. I was trying to capture that similar structure, sort of a Bayesian inference kind of structure, but I wanted to actually capture the fact that we do have these conscious experiences, like I'm perceiving a three-dimensional object, like an apple, and I'm seeing its three-dimensional shape, its colors, its textures and so forth. So I needed to space X of experiences to capture what it was that I was perceiving. But then, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1116.442,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1093.575,
"text": " Perception doesn't occur in a void. There's a perception action loop, right? There's this point that sort of an activist approaches highlight, and that is that perception and action sort of work together. And so I want a model in which I have experiences, but those are tied to my actions, and those actions affect the world and my experiences in a loop."
},
{
"end_time": 1136.988,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1116.92,
"text": " And so that's why there's this loop structure to it. And to leave out the experiences would actually be to leave out the whole point, which is to understand my perceptions. Okay. When I watch your interviews with people who most of the time aren't physicists, they seem to be resistant on that space-time is emergent."
},
{
"end_time": 1166.135,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1137.142,
"text": " like Michael Schermer, and he was saying, well, you probably talk to the minority of physicists that think that space-time is emergent. That's not, in fact, true. Most physicists, as far as I know, actually believe that space-time is emergent. Nima is one of them, Lee Smolin. So why do you think that there's this aversion to monist, that is, monoism, theories predicated on the primacy of consciousness rather than the primacy being material? Why is it that that's the sticking point?"
},
{
"end_time": 1194.462,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1167.142,
"text": " Right. Well, and even among physicists who recognize that space-time isn't fundamental, you won't find very many of them arguing that therefore consciousness is a good candidate for what is fundamental. I've been to an FQXI meeting of physicists where they were looking at the role of the observer in physics at Banff a few years ago. And"
},
{
"end_time": 1218.166,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1195.469,
"text": " Even in that context where they were looking at the role of the observer in physics, I didn't see any of the physicists there interested in taking consciousness as fundamental. I think the attitude is, why take such a huge leap? Letting go of space-time is one thing."
},
{
"end_time": 1245.162,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1218.541,
"text": " But jumping into consciousness, I mean, that for, I think most physicists would say that's a much bigger leap than we need to take. Let's try to find just some deeper structure beyond space time. For example, this is, I think the brilliant work that Nima or Connie Hamed is doing where he's saying, look, we can look at these so-called positive geometries behind space time, the amplitude hedron, associate hedron,"
},
{
"end_time": 1273.046,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1245.606,
"text": " and other things that he's finding, positive Grassmannians, the bigger structure that includes many of these. And he doesn't know what that realm is about, which is fine, but he's finding the mathematical structure. So he's finding that there are these symmetries, like in the amplitude hedron, that can't be captured in space-time. They also have found that the mathematical description of the scattering amplitudes, the computations of the scattering amplitudes"
},
{
"end_time": 1299.735,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1273.37,
"text": " become much more simpler when you let go of space-time. If you use Feynman diagrams and have virtual particles in space-time, then you could have hundreds or thousands of pages, but in this deeper space that he's finding, this pure math, it collapses to a few terms that you can compute by hand. And so I think that the physicists are saying, let's not jump further than we have to."
},
{
"end_time": 1325.555,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1300.128,
"text": " If we have to let go of space time, let's just find some, let's let the mathematics guide us first. And we can try things like, well, let's just try like quantum bits and quantum gates. Seth Lloyd, I think at MIT took an approach. Quantum bits and quantum what? Quantum bits and quantum gates. Gates, right. Okay. Right. So your space time isn't fundamental. Let's posit something that's not conscious, just quantum bits and quantum gates."
},
{
"end_time": 1355.401,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1325.862,
"text": " And what Seth Lloyd was able to show is that you could, in some sense, get little patches of space-time, general relativistic space-time, where the curvature of this little patch was proportional to the action of the gate. And so, instead of starting with space-time as fundamental, you start with quantum bits and quantum gates. Where those bits and gates come from, again, that's your new assumption. It's not space-time, it's just bits and gates. And you could ask, you know, who ordered that? Why should the universe be fundamentally that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1380.23,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1356.135,
"text": " Now, so the reason why I go there, even though I think most physicists don't, is that as a cognitive neuroscientist, I'm very interested in the problem, what's called the heart problem of consciousness. We have lots of correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences. I like to use the example of area V4,"
},
{
"end_time": 1410.879,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1380.981,
"text": " of cortex, you know, left hemisphere is back over here somewhere. If you take a magnet and just touch it to your skull there, a transcranial magnetic stimulator, and inhibit before, you will lose all color experiences in the right visual field. Everything to the right of where you're looking, you will lose color experiences. You turn off the magnet, color experiences come back. And we have dozens, maybe hundreds of correlations like that between specific kinds of neural activity and specific conscious experiences. But we have no scientific theories that can explain"
},
{
"end_time": 1440.862,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1411.271,
"text": " that correlation. There are none. There's not a scientific theory that can explain even one specific conscious experience, like the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic, that says, for example, this pattern of brain activity or this functional aspect of brain activity must be the taste of chocolate. It couldn't be the smell of a rose. And these are the precise reasons why. There's just nothing on the table. And so I'm trying to"
},
{
"end_time": 1464.48,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1441.766,
"text": " solve two problems. I'm trying to say the reason why space-time is not fundamental is because something else is, consciousness. And if I start with consciousness, I can perhaps get a theory that explains this correlation between conscious experiences and brain states, but I don't start with something in space-time, namely brain states. I don't start with brain states"
},
{
"end_time": 1488.541,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1464.753,
"text": " and figure out how they cause consciousness, I go the other way around. I start with consciousness and show how it creates space-time as a data structure and brains and neurons as particular objects within that data structure. So the idea, the big picture idea is if space-time isn't fundamental, as the physicists are now recognizing, then"
},
{
"end_time": 1517.381,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1489.48,
"text": " And just so people are clear, this is not new that space-time isn't fundamental. It's not like a kooky theory. This has been going around since the 80s, just so that they don't think you're glomming onto some fad. That's right. And I think, as you said, most physicists now, first-rank theoretical physicists just recognize that it's sort of just, of course, space-time isn't fundamental. And of course, our job is to try to figure out what's the next step."
},
{
"end_time": 1541.237,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1517.773,
"text": " It's not such a crazy idea either. When you were speaking with Michael Schirmer, he was just blown away. There's no way that space-time can't be fundamental. There's a cup in front of me. I see the cup. That's beside the point. There's been many times where we have an effective theory and then we find one that's more fundamental that produces that. There's no reason to think that our current theories aren't effective."
},
{
"end_time": 1571.152,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1541.613,
"text": " My colleagues in the cognitive neurosciences can be forgiven if they don't understand the state of the play in physics, right? They were taught some physics in their backgrounds and they have just absorbed the idea that space-time is fundamental and that's perfectly fine in a Newtonian universe and even in special relativity and in general relativity. When you put Einstein's theory of gravity together with quantum theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 1601.101,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1571.766,
"text": " that you get the problem. And that's sort of beyond what you could expect a normal cognitive neuroscientist to really have studied. And so, you know, I don't blame my colleagues there for not understanding this. But for any real professional physicist, it's just obvious. The general logic of quantum field theory don't play well. I see there's two problems. One, if you encounter the general public, and when I say general public, I mean the rationally minded skeptics like Michael Shermer or maybe even Sam Harris."
},
{
"end_time": 1626.561,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1601.493,
"text": " and their sticking point might be the space-time fundamental aspect, but then when you speak to a physicist, their sticking point would be consciousness. You're saying consciousness is fundamental. I agree with you, space-time is emergent, but then consciousness is complicated. That's an emergent phenomenon for a neuroscientist to figure out, or some people like Penrose, there's a quantum mechanical aspect to it, but it's still somewhat complicated. It's not simple. Why would you start with consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 1653.456,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1627.09,
"text": " Right, okay. I have a question about... Sure. Can I just respond to why I started? The idea is very, very simple. If space-time isn't fundamental, then objects in space-time aren't fundamental either. And if they're not fundamental, then they aren't the true source of causal power in the universe. Physical objects have no causal powers. It's useful fiction to think that the eight ball being hit by the cue ball"
},
{
"end_time": 1673.951,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1654.053,
"text": " There's a causal interaction or that neurons have causal effects, but it's just a fiction and so that's why I tie the two together. Neurons being objects in space-time have no causal powers. My brain causes none of my behavior, it causes none of my experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 1695.623,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1674.838,
"text": " That means that therefore any attempt to show how we solve the hard problem of consciousness, starting with brain activity and trying to boot up consciousness, will fail. So my idea is simple. Let's start with the theory of consciousness and show how space-time is not fundamental. It's just a data structure within consciousness. That's why space-time isn't fundamental. It's merely a data structure."
},
{
"end_time": 1725.094,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1695.623,
"text": " a visualization tool that consciousness uses to interact with other consciousnesses. So this is all tied together. The space-time being not fundamental and the move to make consciousness fundamental is all part of one big move, recognizing that brain activity could not possibly cause our conscious experiences. So why don't we try the other way? Let's start with conscious experiences and show how they cause space-time and objects"
},
{
"end_time": 1730.299,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1725.333,
"text": " hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 1757.346,
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"start_time": 1731.203,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 1785.845,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1757.346,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,"
},
{
"end_time": 1814.872,
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"start_time": 1785.845,
"text": " powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in."
},
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"end_time": 1838.063,
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
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"end_time": 1866.527,
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"start_time": 1838.063,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
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"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 1910.879,
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"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Okay, getting to the neuro correlates aspect, you mentioned that it would be to say that, hey, because our brain is correlated with certain conscious experiences, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1932.79,
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"text": " That's one thing, but then to say that the brain causes it is another, it would be akin to saying there's a train track, there's a subway station and people form right before the train comes. But it doesn't mean that the people themselves caused the train to come. However, you just mentioned that there's transcranial magnetic stimulation, where we can, in fact, perturb neurons."
},
{
"end_time": 1948.968,
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"start_time": 1932.978,
"text": " And then seeing it would be one thing if we saw conscious experience, then looked at the neurons and then saw that there's an association that's correlation. But then if we can perturb the neurons to elicit a conscious experience, why is that not evidence for the causal power going from neurons to conscious experience?"
},
{
"end_time": 1973.251,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1949.343,
"text": " Great question. And that's what my colleagues would all point to is that, look, they'd say, look, we can intervene. I can literally manipulate the brain and get a change in conscious experience. The fact that I can intervene means I'm showing you the true causal structure of what's going on there. And that's a logical error. And it's very easy to see the logical error. Imagine you're playing a virtual reality game and you're driving a car. You're driving a Mustang in a virtual reality game, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 1993.592,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1973.507,
"text": " And you have a steering wheel. And it turns out you can intervene in that. If I turn the steering wheel to the left, my car actually turns left in the game. If I turn the steering wheel to the right, the car turns right. Therefore, there must be a real steering wheel and it must have real causal powers. No, there's no real steering wheel. That's not the claim. Well, that might be their claim, my claim."
},
{
"end_time": 2021.357,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1994.019,
"text": " or my question is, it is correct to say that the turning of the steering wheel causes turning in the game. Now it might not be that the turning of the steering wheel is akin in causal power to the way that we would think the turning of the steering wheel in a real car changes the wheels and the axis. But all that we need for causation to be shown is A implies B. It doesn't matter that they're intermediate steps."
},
{
"end_time": 2052.398,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2022.807,
"text": " Do you understand what I'm saying or am I not explaining it correctly? The thing about the steering wheel that you see in the virtual reality game is that if you turn your headset to the side, the steering wheel ceases to exist. There is no steering wheel because I'm not looking at it anymore. When I look back over to where the steering wheel should be, I see a steering wheel. The steering wheel is something that I create and destroy as I need. It's gone, now it's back. It has no causal powers."
},
{
"end_time": 2079.309,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2052.654,
"text": " The steering wheel literally has no causal powers. It informs me as the player about actions that I can take to interact with the game. And the way I see myself, the way I visualize what I'm doing is I visualize myself turning the steering wheel. But that's all just a useful fiction. And the steering wheel itself literally has no causal powers. It's literally only in my head."
},
{
"end_time": 2109.241,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2079.701,
"text": " There is no external steering wheel with causal powers. And I'm saying that that's true not just in virtual reality but in everyday life because space-time is not fundamental, it's just your headset. When you go around in everyday life, think virtual reality. I create the moon when I look up in the sky. I delete it when I look away. There is no moon just in the same way that there is no steering wheel in the virtual reality game. So when Einstein asked"
},
{
"end_time": 2138.473,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2110.094,
"text": " someone that was with him, do you really believe the Moon is only there when you look and it's not there when no one looks? My answer is, yeah, it's not there when no one looks. There is no Moon because there is no space-time. And see, that's the part that Einstein wouldn't like, right? Because his theory was the theory of space-time. Space-time is not fundamental. When we really understand what that means, nothing inside space-time is fundamental. Nothing. And therefore nothing inside space-time"
},
{
"end_time": 2165.606,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2138.695,
"text": " has genuine causal powers. It emerges from something deeper. It's a useful fiction that our species has to think that physical objects have causal powers. I throw a rock, it hits a window, the rock caused the window to break. That's a useful fiction. I inhibit area V4, color disappears. Aha, therefore V4 causes color. It's a useful fiction, but it's just a fiction, just like the steering wheel in the virtual reality game."
},
{
"end_time": 2195.913,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2166.323,
"text": " Okay, let's remove the virtual reality. Let's just pretend it's a regular game with a TV screen and you have a controller in front of you. Right. And then you move your analog stick to the left and the character moves to the left. Then would you say that the move that you moving the analog stick to the left causes the character to move to the left? Yeah, in that metaphor, now you within that metaphor, you would say that the the the icon on the screen wasn't the thing that caused things to move, right? So if I see myself right, I would go paddle hit the thing like in Pong, I hit hit a ball with the"
},
{
"end_time": 2220.811,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2196.493,
"text": " In that metaphor, it would be the joystick that was the real thing. Once you get that, recognize that the world around you is just the screen. Even the joystick in your hand is in your head itself. That's the real point about what physics has discovered. Space-time is not fundamental. It's hard for us to really grasp that."
},
{
"end_time": 2251.067,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2221.647,
"text": " It's really, we so deeply believe that of course, space-time is fundamental. Of course, the moon is there when no one looks. But when you really grasp space-time is not fundamental, and it's actually our construction, then physical objects don't even exist when they're not perceived. They don't have causal powers. They don't even exist. You can think of this, of what I'm doing right now as, as partly"
},
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"index": 88,
"start_time": 2251.459,
"text": " to convince because I already have a predilection towards your ideas I already like you and I like your ideas so you don't need to convince me too much although I do have some objections but I'm demarcating where I feel people like Michael Shermer and so on have problems because they take that virtual reality metaphor and there's some there are some problems with it because well like I said forget the virtual reality just imagine a screen and then you have an analog stick and then those two get conflated"
},
{
"end_time": 2288.575,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2279.906,
"text": " Okay, there's another problem that I see with the virtual reality metaphor. When you take off the headset"
},
{
"end_time": 2318.797,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2288.968,
"text": " There is still the computer rendering it to the LCD. Now, there are some monitors, there are some virtual reality headsets that detect when your forehead is there and then just shut it off. But let's imagine that's not there. Then they're like, well, it still persists. Even if when I look to the left, it renders what's on the left or look to the right, it renders. But I can even simulate someone going through a game without a conscious perceiver. And then I can set my video camera up to record that. And that person, that character is moving through the game."
},
{
"end_time": 2343.695,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2318.797,
"text": " There is no perceiver right then and there. That's why I see this virtual reality metaphor as having some limitations. But what would you say to that? That, look, even without a perceiver, I put the headset down, it's still rendering. Well, that now in terms of physics is the question of"
},
{
"end_time": 2374.974,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2345.316,
"text": " Do physical objects literally exist and have definite values of their properties when they're not perceived? So that's the question of local realism, right? So this is a technical question of physics, and this is what we're really addressing here is the question of local realism. Do physical objects really exist and have definite values of physical properties like position, momentum, and spin when they're not observed? And is it true that those properties have effects that propagate no faster than the speed of light?"
},
{
"end_time": 2403.507,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2375.725,
"text": " And you might intuitively think, well, of course, the Moon has a position, it has a momentum, an electron has a position, a momentum, a spin value, a spin axis, when it's not observed, of course. But when we do the experiments, first, when this was first raised, Einstein was one of the ones who asked this question back in the EPR paper back in 1935, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2430.469,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2403.763,
"text": " A number of physicists, including Wolfgang Pauli, thought that this was ludicrous, that Einstein was asking a question that was no more interesting than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. How could you possibly answer Einstein's question, does an electron have a position, a definite value of position or momentum, when it's not observed? That seems silly by definition. If you're not observing, how could you tell whether it has a position or momentum or not?"
},
{
"end_time": 2458.933,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2431.561,
"text": " It turned out in 1963 or so, the physicist John Bell discovered that we can answer that question. There is a series of experiments that you can do, measurements that you can do, that will give you certain statistics that can allow you to decide whether or not local realism is true. And that was a real stunning achievement, one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history, John Bell's inequalities."
},
{
"end_time": 2488.217,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2459.326,
"text": " And then a year later, John Bell and Koken and Specker, apparently independently, also came up with a way to test non-contextual realism. Non-contextual realism is the claim that objects exist and have definite values of their properties when they're not observed. That's the realism. And the values of those properties don't depend on the way you measure them. That's the non-contextual part."
},
{
"end_time": 2517.688,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2489.718,
"text": " And once again quantum theory entails that non-contextual realism is false. It also entails that local realism is false. And it's been tested and it's true. Local realism is false and therefore either realism is false, that is the electron has a position when it's not observed, or locality is false, the influences propagate no faster than the speed of light, or both."
},
{
"end_time": 2530.077,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2518.029,
"text": " And I think that both, both are false. Local realism is just plain false. Non-contextual realism is false. And once we understand that, that means that there are— Did you say that non-local realism is also false?"
},
{
"end_time": 2557.756,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2531.476,
"text": " Yeah, because space-time is not fundamental. The big take-home is space-time is not fundamental and therefore particles and their properties inside space-time are not fundamental. For a physicist, this is obvious because as soon as you say space-time is not fundamental, it's emergent from something else, well that takes particles with them because particles are nothing but"
},
{
"end_time": 2588.012,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2558.558,
"text": " Irreducible representations of the symmetries of space-time, the Poincare group. So particles are irreducible representations of the Poincare group, which are just the symmetries of space-time. The space-time is not fundamental, neither are particles. So my colleagues in cognitive neurosciences, we're still back thinking that, oh, we have this reductionist view. Space-time is fundamental. You start off with protons and neutrons, or if you're more sophisticated, quarks and leptons and gluons and gravitons."
},
{
"end_time": 2617.568,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2588.422,
"text": " And those are the elementary particles. The laws that govern them are the fundamental laws of all of reality. And we can, in a reductive fashion, build up everything from that. Well, that whole foundation is gone. Space-time is not fundamental. Those particles are not fundamental. Reductionism is dead. Space-time reductionism is dead. We need a completely new framework. Now, brilliant physicists like Neymar, Kani, Hamad, going after the amplitude hydron and so forth, are looking for new"
},
{
"end_time": 2647.415,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2618.626,
"text": " Does Nima say that consciousness is fundamental or are you just saying well Nima has a theory that simplifies space and time down to something else and maybe with your theory the cognitive the conscious agent theory you can imply the amplitude of hedron and therefore you can imply whatever Nima's implying or does Nima think that consciousness is fundamental?"
},
{
"end_time": 2676.101,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2647.858,
"text": " I have no idea what Nima thinks about consciousness. I haven't seen him talk about it myself in any of his writings or lectures. I mean, I would be surprised if it turned out he thinks consciousness is fundamental. I would be very, very surprised. But the right answer is I don't know what he thinks about that. I would bet good odds that he doesn't think consciousness is fundamental, but I don't know. I certainly would not want to ascribe that point of view to him."
},
{
"end_time": 2705.486,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2676.613,
"text": " I've seen from his lectures and writing is that there are these beautiful mathematical structures, these positive geometries, amplituhedra, sociahedra, that are more fundamental than space-time and that in magical ways seem to give rise to the scattering amplitudes. They're like two glow-ons hitting each other, four gluons go spraying out. Those scattering amplitudes turn out to be volumes of these geometric objects he's finding, these positive geometries."
},
{
"end_time": 2723.217,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2706.049,
"text": " But what this new, deeper realm is about, I haven't seen him speculate about, you know, what is this telling us is the realm behind space time? What is that realm about? I haven't seen him speculate that. He might have some speculations, but I haven't seen him. He just goes with the math."
},
{
"end_time": 2750.503,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2724.172,
"text": " As for Bell's inequality, I'm sure you're aware that there are some ways around it. So for example, super determinism, as well as a couple others that I can't recall right now, Edwin James, he didn't particularly think Bell's inequalities or the experiments that validate Bell's inequalities demonstrate that non realism is the way to go. What do you say to those objections? Well, I would say that the deeper"
},
{
"end_time": 2776.442,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2751.493,
"text": " problems between general relativity and quantum field theory that force us to recognize that space-time isn't fundamental are the ones that clinch it for me against realism. Because realism about entities that are merely representations of space-time, when space-time itself is not fundamental, is now beside the point. What made you choose NEMA's amplitude-ahedron as opposed to the other"
},
{
"end_time": 2806.067,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2777.449,
"text": " perhaps simpler models that demonstrate that space-time is emergent. We mentioned a few others before this call, like causal dynamic triangulation. There's also spin foam networks. Right. I've been intrigued and I'm studying Nima's work because he explains in ways that I really understand why we can't really"
},
{
"end_time": 2836.391,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2807.227,
"text": " even have a vestige of space-time as being fundamental, right? So we can't take one part of a time or one part of a space and try to boot up the other. And Nima recognizes that we also can't expect that quantum theory is fundamental. He's saying, look, it's deeper than just space-time. We're going to have to have a deeper framework in which space-time and quantum theory"
},
{
"end_time": 2861.578,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2836.647,
"text": " together arise joined at the hip. And so many of the techniques are saying, look, general relativity is not a quantum theory. It's a classical theory. It's a continuous space and so forth. So maybe what we need to do is let quantum be fundamental, and then we'll try to somehow quantize space-time."
},
{
"end_time": 2884.616,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2861.834,
"text": " And Nima is going far more deep. He's saying we need a new framework in which locality in space-time and unitarity of quantum theory arise together from something that's neither local in space-time and non-unitary. And that's, I think, so I'm going after Nima"
},
{
"end_time": 2911.783,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2885.06,
"text": " Um, partly because I think that he makes a good case that that space time and quantum theory both have to emerge from something deeper and that we really need them. We need to bite the bullet and recognize we can't go halfway. We need to go really a radical new foundation. The constraint on the new foundation, of course, is that it has to give rise to space, time and quantum theory in ways that we know and love. And in particular, it has to give"
},
{
"end_time": 2943.865,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2914.224,
"text": " The only observable of quantum gravity in our space, in an asymptotically flat space-time like ours, the only observable that there is, is scattering amplitude, the scattering amplitude. That's the only observable. There are no local observables, and Neema explains that. So when we look at how to get the only observable in asymptotically flat space-time,"
},
{
"end_time": 2958.729,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2946.152,
"text": " What I'm asking is that there are several contenders to fundamental theories of everything, which they have to be fundamental theory of everything. But there are several."
},
{
"end_time": 2983.882,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2959.121,
"text": " And I'm glad that you're pursuing Nima's amplitude of hedron, because I'm also interested in how consciousness can give rise to some of those other potential theories of everything, and I only have a finite amount of time. So I'm glad that you're doing it. But I'm curious to why you chose that one, though criteria you just said, which is QFT and general relativity have to come from something else. And you would prefer that that not be embedded within space time, but in fact have some other structure that gives rise to space time."
},
{
"end_time": 3012.193,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2984.155,
"text": " But there are quite a few. For example, I just have a list here. And I'm just curious why you chose the amplitude of Hedron other than you have to start somewhere. So for example, Wolfram's theory of everything, which starts with computation, which seems so similar to yours, actually. We can get to that later. And there's Pati Salam. There's SL10. There is E8 as well. Right. Right. Right. And there's Strand model from Christopher Schiller. There's also one more, Fridens. Fridens"
},
{
"end_time": 3042.329,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3012.807,
"text": " There's a couple of reasons. One is I'm convinced by Nima's argument that scattering amplitudes are the only observable and his is the only theory that"
},
{
"end_time": 3071.169,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3042.978,
"text": " predicts from first principles the exact scattering amplitudes and shows deep symmetries behind those scattering amplitudes. And that also explains why when we look at these deeper symmetries outside of space-time, hundreds or thousands of pages of computation that you get from Feynman diagrams on the scattering amplitudes turns into two or three terms. So he's got the beef. He starts with something outside of space-time,"
},
{
"end_time": 3101.271,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3071.476,
"text": " He gives rise to quantum theory, unitarity, and locality, and the precise Phi-Cube theory, Phi to the fourth theory, Yang-Mills, super Yang-Mills, gravity. He's getting one after another. He's getting these scattering amplitudes. He's got the beef. These other theories are, you know, saying we can do this, we can do this. He's doing it. I see. In other words, he's the closest so far. Yeah, he's the closest. And then there's one other thing that also"
},
{
"end_time": 3127.381,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3101.664,
"text": " is making me pursue this and that is I'm starting with this theory of Markovian kernels, this dynamical system of conscious agents. Now Markovian kernels in general are not associated with positive geometries, right? And Nima is saying this deeper structure is positive geometries. But, and this is what I'm working with my mathematician colleague Chetan Prakash and others on"
},
{
"end_time": 3157.278,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3128.677,
"text": " I claim, and we'll see if I'm right, I claim that the asymptotic and invariant behavior of Markovian systems is identified with positive geometries. So even though the step-by-step dynamics of… Repeat that one more time, repeat that one more time. So when you have a Markovian system, right, you have the step-by-step dynamics, but you can also ask what happens"
},
{
"end_time": 3185.043,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3157.79,
"text": " long term. If you look at the broad view, technically, I have a Markovian kernel P. I'm looking at P to the end, which is P composed with P, composed with P ten times, as N goes to infinity. Those kernels, I claim, are invariably associated with positive geometries. Without adding more structure? That's all you need. P to the N,"
},
{
"end_time": 3209.718,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3185.998,
"text": " If you take kernel P, P to the n will be associated with positive geometry as n goes to infinity. Okay, that's interesting. I gotta think about that. One of your papers with your friend, I love this guy, Prakash Chetan, right? Yeah. I haven't had a chance to look at any of his papers that weren't co-authored with you though. Either way, one of the papers, a recent one, was showing that the payoff functions"
},
{
"end_time": 3228.114,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3211.544,
"text": " that are homomorphic to totally ordered sets, as well as permutation groups, cyclic groups, and one other. If you take their number and you divide it by the total amount that's admissible, that it tends to zero. And for the people listening, what I've"
},
{
"end_time": 3248.183,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3228.575,
"text": " What I hear from you is saying that therefore the probability that we see reality as it is is zero. But I don't know if that was but but I see that as a leap, so I must be missing a step because the leap is that there's a hidden claim. You can go from the total size of the set of admissible functions."
},
{
"end_time": 3275.094,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3249.77,
"text": " over the sorry under as the denominator of the total functions that are homomorphic to certain groups and certain structures that's fine you can say that that goes to zero but then you have to say that there's an even probability distribution that we could have gotten any one of them for you to say that the probability then as n goes to infinity of us seeing truth or reality as it is or homomorphic to the structure is also zero"
},
{
"end_time": 3305.811,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3276.237,
"text": " Excellent point. So this is a very technical point, but it's an important one. So in evolutionary theory, the fitness payoff functions depend on the state of the world. Whatever objective reality might be, it depends on that. But it also depends on the organism, its state, its action, and the competitors, and so forth. So it's a complicated function with a very complicated domain, including the state of the world. And the range of the function are the payoff values. You may like from 1 to n, if they're n payoff values."
},
{
"end_time": 3334.309,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3306.493,
"text": " And of course, evolutionary theory, evolutionary game theory is saying that our senses will be tuned to the payoffs, right? In other words, organisms that better perceive how to get high payoffs are the ones that survive. So our senses will be tuned to the payoffs. So the question then, the technical question is, what is the probability that the payoff functions preserve"
},
{
"end_time": 3364.787,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3335.503,
"text": " information about the structure of the world. Say the world has a group structure or total order, and I ask what is the probability that a payoff function will preserve that structure? We looked at two kinds of symmetry groups and total orders and also measurable structures. What we did is we assumed a discrete set of states on the world, a finite set of states, and a finite set of payoff values."
},
{
"end_time": 3390.725,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3365.742,
"text": " N states in the world, M states of the payoff values and then what we can do is literally using combinatorial arguments count the number of payoff functions that preserve the structure like the group structure and divide as you say by the total number which is a finite number. This is a finite number of total payoff functions."
},
{
"end_time": 3419.821,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3391.015,
"text": " There, of course, counting measure, literally counting the number of functions, is the canonical measure. And then we take the limit as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff values goes to infinity. Now, someone could argue, raise the question that you just raised, why is counting measure the measure that we used? Why should there be some other measure? And the answer is that evolutionary theory gives us no argument for any other measure. So if someone"
},
{
"end_time": 3441.561,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3420.179,
"text": " Well what if the"
},
{
"end_time": 3469.309,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3443.2,
"text": " The extra condition doesn't come from evolutionary theory, but instead classical physics, like people like NEMA or even Michael Shermer might think, which is saying that, okay, there is a probability distribution that favors certain structure preservedness for whatever reason, much like we don't know why the fundamental laws are the way they are. Now, of course you're saying, well, I can derive the fundamental laws. Forget that because I'm going to another model. Them saying that the fundamental laws are fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 3499.445,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3469.735,
"text": " And one of them is that the probability distribution of your perceptions will tend, not necessarily tend to, but they're not uniform. Absolutely. And if someone can do that, fabulous, that would destroy our theorem. So that's the challenge. You could think of our theorem as putting out that challenge. Come up with some new principle that explains why there's a bias toward payoff functions that are homomorphic to the structure of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 3525.811,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3499.735,
"text": " What is the conspiracy in nature that makes that happen? Evolution by natural selection is currently formulated, and physics is currently formulated, gives us no belief that there's a conspiracy going on to make the homomorphic functions more probable. But if someone can come up with a theory that explains why nature conspires that way, I'll be the first to listen very intently."
},
{
"end_time": 3556.118,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3526.442,
"text": " By the way, do you also have a measure of structure preservativeness that isn't a strict homomorphism? Because if, okay, just for people listening in the way that it's written that I saw from the paper that you published recently is it's like you have one, two, three, four, five. Imagine that's a totally or set one, two, three, four, five. And that's how the world is. But if someone sees the world as one, two, three, four, five, four, I'd be like, Nope, no, you're not seeing the world as it is, but yet it's still similar."
},
{
"end_time": 3580.401,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3556.937,
"text": " Right, so you can use things like the L2 norm or the L infinity norm to look at how many so for you could say suppose that here's a payoff function that's purely homomorphic. We can ask how many payoff functions are within a certain distance like an L2 distance or an L infinity distance of that payoff function and we can for each distance that we look at we can ask how many"
},
{
"end_time": 3609.821,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3580.845,
"text": " payoff functions, even if they're not exactly homomorphic, are that close to homomorphism, and then we can look at the ratio of those to all payoff and see again if they go to zero or not. And so in the case of total orders, it turns out that if you allow a very, very generous width of 20% variation, the set of payoff functions that were within 20% variation of any"
},
{
"end_time": 3628.695,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3610.265,
"text": " homomorphic function still went to zero. In the case of symmetric groups that was not true, if you allowed just a small window around the homomorphic functions, then most of them"
},
{
"end_time": 3657.961,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3629.377,
"text": " Then they would have full weight. Most payoff functions were very close to a function which was homomorphism of the symmetry. Same thing for measurable structures. In measurable structures, almost every function was close to a payoff function that is homomorphic. But notice that that won't buy you anything."
},
{
"end_time": 3687.056,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3659.002,
"text": " because there are countless structures that nature might have, countless. The fact that a random function, a randomly chosen payoff function is close to a symmetric, something that's homomorphism, a symmetry preserving function, also a measurable function, you could now give me thousands of different kinds of homomorphisms that it's close to."
},
{
"end_time": 3714.138,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3687.329,
"text": " Well, which one is natural selection choosing to shape you to? A random function is close to all of these. Where is the selection pressure to push you toward one or the other? In other words, all you get is that, yeah, a randomly chosen payoff function, you could show it's close to lots of different things that are homomorphic to all else. But where's the selection pressure there? There's no selection pressure there at all."
},
{
"end_time": 3738.029,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3714.701,
"text": " Now, one more critique is that gravity is not a cyclic group, it's not a totally ordered set, it's not a permutation group, it's not a measurable maybe, but either way the structure of the fundamental physics coming from a different frame, that is where consciousness is not fundamental. It doesn't follow what"
},
{
"end_time": 3766.493,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3738.268,
"text": " I've seen so far, I think you've done totally ordered permutations, cyclic and measurable spaces, but it's not as if the fundamental laws or the fundamental space of being from the materialist point of view are those. So what you're counting isn't necessarily reality per se, it could be, it could be, but it's not as if as far as we know, and the Lagrangian is a condition on that, and it's not as if the Lagrangian is a cyclical group. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 3794.138,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3768.063,
"text": " Fair point. Okay, so why does that, does what you've studied demonstrate anything about reality? Right, so yeah, so I think a good argument against our paper is we've looked at four different structures and we showed in each case that the probability is zero, that a randomly chosen payoff function would be a homomorphism. And what we want is a paper that proves that"
},
{
"end_time": 3822.278,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3794.957,
"text": " for any possible structure, right? Not just the four structures that we looked at. We don't have that theorem yet. So someone could come along and say, look, we have independent evidence that this is the structure of the world and we can prove that for that structure of the world payoff, almost every payoff function is a homomorphism of that structure. So we're throwing down that gun that we're saying for you, for someone to argue that natural selection will of course,"
},
{
"end_time": 3850.913,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3822.961,
"text": " favor vertical perceptions, seeing the truth, the true structure of the world, then what you have to do, it's not obvious that that's the case. Here's four counter examples. We give four counter examples, right? Total orders. So here are four counter examples. So it's not just obviously true that that's going to happen for the structure of the world. So you now, to convince me that natural selection favors vertical perceptions, you have to tell me exactly the structure of the world and prove"
},
{
"end_time": 3878.66,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3851.271,
"text": " that in fact the homomorphisms have full measure. So we've thrown the gauntlet down. All of my colleagues, almost all of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience who study perception have just assumed that of course natural selection favors vertical perception. We gave four counter examples and we're basically throwing down the gauntlet to our field and saying, if you believe that, you need to come up with a beef. Where is the beef? What is the structure of the world that would have full measure for the homomorphisms?"
},
{
"end_time": 3906.374,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3879.019,
"text": " If you can't do that, then what is the conspiracy in the laws of nature? So in other words, what we've done is thrown down the gauntlet. In some sense, we're saying, hey, the burden of proof is now on the person who claims that evolution is going to shape vertical perceptions. Here are four counter examples. Give us an example of where it possibly could. And good luck trying. Because here's why they're not going to succeed."
},
{
"end_time": 3917.551,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3907.79,
"text": " To be a homomorphism, a function has to satisfy some strict equations. Most functions don't satisfy them. End of proof."
},
{
"end_time": 3944.531,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3917.91,
"text": " It's just that simple. Good luck. So we've thrown down the gauntlet. The argument I just gave you is going to be the heart of a deeper theory, a deeper paper that we hope to get, in which we just proved that no matter what… Yeah, I'm excited about that. Have you pursued category theory? That's the most abstract of all the mathematical theories. That's where we're headed. Exactly right. Category theory. Okay, cool."
},
{
"end_time": 3972.295,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3945.265,
"text": " What about partially ordered sets? Not as if, even if you proved it in the partially ordered set case, it's like, okay, that's... Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'd like to do partial orders and also topologies, right? So those are some obvious big ones. So if we can't get the full category, I mean, we'd like to get the full category theory proof that just basically says, you got a structure in the world, your payoff functions won't preserve it, almost surely. End of story. That's what we want. We've got only four examples."
},
{
"end_time": 3995.623,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3972.773,
"text": " Or perhaps you find the one structure, maybe there's even one or two structures, a finite amount, that satisfy that"
},
{
"end_time": 4006.186,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3996.101,
"text": " the vertical perception and then from that you're like okay that's interesting that's uniqueness among all the structures and therefore there's something special maybe we can imply the laws of physics from that either way it'd be interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 4036.152,
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"start_time": 4006.425,
"text": " Oh, absolutely. I don't care how it comes out. I just want to pursue and see what does come out, right? But what I'm saying is it's way too fast. My colleagues are thinking, oh, of course natural selection favors true perception. Oh, that's way, way too fast. Why do they think that if they come from an evolutionary background? Because evolution just is all about what works. And what works, who cares about what's true? True in the materialist sense. And I should say, there are"
},
{
"end_time": 4057.449,
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"start_time": 4036.749,
"text": " Many of my colleagues and friends like Steve Pinker, a good colleague and longtime friend, who clearly understands that natural selection does not in general favor true beliefs, right? And he's got a brilliant paper published called"
},
{
"end_time": 4084.94,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4057.91,
"text": " So how does the mind work? It's a wonderful paper. So if you look up Steve Pinker, so how does the mind work? He gives in that paper five good reasons for why evolution will not lead us to have true beliefs in general. And also real Robert Trevers has argued brilliantly on evolutionary grounds that there are reasons why we should be deeply self-deceived. The best liar"
},
{
"end_time": 4114.48,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4085.384,
"text": " The best, the most convincing liar in social situations is the one who believes his own lie. And so there are selection pressures for us to be deeply deceived. Now in Trivers case, however, he then, even though he understands that aspect of evolution and leading to false beliefs, when it came to perception, Trivers still believed and wrote that seeing the structure of reality as it is would make you more fit. And that's the argument that most people believe."
},
{
"end_time": 4132.381,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4115.401,
"text": " The argument goes like this, those of our ancestors who saw reality more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw the world less accurately."
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"start_time": 4133.387,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
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"end_time": 4208.933,
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"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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{
"end_time": 4234.531,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4208.933,
"text": " The basic activities of life, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. Therefore, those who saw more accurately were more likely to pass on their genes that code for the more accurate perceptions."
},
{
"end_time": 4264.172,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4235.401,
"text": " And therefore we can be quite confident that we may not see all of the truth, but we see those aspects of the truth that we need to survive. And that kind of argument completely persuades most of my colleagues. It apparently persuaded Trivers, because he wrote that it's more fit to see reality as it is. It didn't persuade Pinker, although Pinker in that brilliant paper that I mentioned, so how does the mind work, he does"
},
{
"end_time": 4292.142,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4264.735,
"text": " At the end of his discussion of the five reasons why evolution wouldn't lead to true beliefs, he does make an exception for everyday middle-sized objects and for the quotidian beliefs of our friends, the everyday quotidian beliefs. So he doesn't explain why he makes those exceptions, but he does make those two exceptions. And so I'm really focusing on that exception about everyday middle-sized objects, not saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 4314.241,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4292.551,
"text": " Our perception of everyday middle-sized objects is also not an example of a true belief. It's just an example of something, as you said, that's fit enough to keep you alive. Okay, well this is a question more about evolutionary modeling in general. And please forgive me as I verbally fumble through this because my thoughts on this aren't fully developed."
},
{
"end_time": 4335.794,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4315.247,
"text": " Our fitness payoff is as simple as just a one-dimensional case. So for example, an issue that I have with utilitarians is that they will project pleasure and pain down to the one-dimensional axis, which to me neglects that there are different kinds of pleasures or that you can combine pleasure and pain or that there are different kinds of pain."
},
{
"end_time": 4367.585,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4338.865,
"text": " This means to me that projecting onto the real line is either not possible or it's not trivial or it's not useful. And I've always wondered the same about fitness payoffs. I see something similar happening. So perhaps fitness is a complex multi-dimensional space and the choice between any given two points in order for you to make it, you need to employ a metric or norm and then that would need to be justified. In other words, do you have, do you see any problems with fitness payoffs being real R1 to R1?"
},
{
"end_time": 4397.176,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4368.404,
"text": " Well, yes, I do. And the reason is that the domain need not be R1. The domain could be as high, high dimensional as you want, or the very notion of dimension may not even apply. So but but sticking with, you know, the domain having it could be, you know, a 50 dimensional image going into R1. Yeah. So going down to R1. Now, fitness in terms of evolution is very, very simple."
},
{
"end_time": 4428.404,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4399.377,
"text": " Do you have more kids in the competition? End of story. That's our one. So the, but what you were talking about though, the pain and pleasure and so forth, the, the kinds of emotions that we may evolve to guide our behaviors in an evolutionary theory could be as complicated as you want. Right? So, so the payoff is reproductive success. That's it. That's the only payoff that there is."
},
{
"end_time": 4458.285,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4429.309,
"text": " We will talk about payoff functions as like points in the game, but ultimately the idea is that the number of points you get in playing the game is really translated into how many kids do you have? How many genes do you pass on? So that's why in evolutionary theory, the domain can be as complicated as you want. The ranges are what? Kids. It's not the absolute number of kids. All that matters is that you have more than the competition."
},
{
"end_time": 4478.524,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4458.797,
"text": " Right? So it's not like you have to be perfect or anything like that. It's just a satisfying solution. So we have to distinguish the payoff value, which is reproductive success, versus all the complicated emotions that will guide our behaviors to get"
},
{
"end_time": 4491.817,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4479.224,
"text": " enough payoff value, right? So we don't want to conflate those two things. So evolutionary theory allows you to have as complicated a set of emotions and motivations as you want. Very, very complicated. The payoff value is R1."
},
{
"end_time": 4520.043,
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"start_time": 4493.763,
"text": " I got it. All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. We're gonna have to schedule another call if you don't mind. No, you're asking. It's fun for me because this is far more technical than most questions. So and it's enjoyable. I just hope that your audience will be able to follow. This is probably some of them won't be able to but that's fine. I feel like most people one of the reasons why I've been successful to the degree that I have is that people are watching more because"
},
{
"end_time": 4544.94,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4520.776,
"text": " I as an interviewer I'm engaged like I'm asking you questions that I want to know the answer to rather than what I think the audience cares about and there's a bit of a facade there of manufacturing. Good well I think for a certain audience then these are the right questions absolutely for any I mean you're asking the right questions for anybody that really knows their math and science and you must be hard knows about you're asking exactly the right questions."
},
{
"end_time": 4574.616,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4545.009,
"text": " Thanks, man. I appreciate that. It gets a little bit more technical. Why are you choosing the geometric algebra with the signature 1, 3, and then saying that implies spacetime? Because that's going to be putting extra structure on. OK, well, we can get to that later. I don't recall exactly where we left off, but it's all right. I'll put intermission and people will understand if there isn't a change in topic."
},
{
"end_time": 4604.411,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4575.213,
"text": " Sure. Okay, how's it going Donald? I'm doing great. How about you Kurt? Good man. Okay, you were just mentioning that some of your practices of meditation are intense and they usually are. Today was particularly intense or average intensity? Just average, but it's always pretty intense. Okay, what do you see? What happens during it? Well, it's going into the unknown, letting go of all thoughts."
},
{
"end_time": 4633.814,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4605.64,
"text": " and there's an innate fear of the unknown and so facing that fear and letting it go can be can be very very intense just so if you you know try just sitting for 10 minutes with absolutely no thoughts just being in the moment you'll find that thoughts just come up and they invade"
},
{
"end_time": 4662.995,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4634.377,
"text": " And if you let them go and go back into quiet, you'll see the thoughts just keep coming back up. But when you actually go into a space where you do let go of thoughts, and it's utter silence, then it starts to appear that those thoughts are part of a defense mechanism, that they're hiding behind them a good deal of"
},
{
"end_time": 4691.118,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4664.292,
"text": " fear of the unknown. And we're always, you know, one thing about our species is that we build models of our environment and we rely on our models to protect us, right? We predict, you know, some, some creatures don't build models or don't build very sophisticated models of their environment. And their strategy is like, you know, with some bacteria, you just multiply and multiply and multiply."
},
{
"end_time": 4720.998,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4691.63,
"text": " And that's how you survive, you know, just vast multiplication. Our species is different. We have very few kids and we have a big cerebral cortex, a frontal lobe that's building models of our environment and we're simulating what will happen. And so that we, you know, in the simulation, something goes wrong, we see, oh, I shouldn't do that. Instead of sacrificing our bodies, we sacrifice our virtual body in the simulation, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 4751.049,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4721.63,
"text": " And we learn. So when you start letting go of all of your thoughts, you're letting go of this very deeply ingrained protective mechanism that we have of building models and analyzing things and looking into the future and running through scenarios and so forth. It's one of the great strengths of our species. It's all a big defense. Do you feel like all our thoughts are defense mechanisms? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 4777.261,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4751.476,
"text": " No. But it's pretty much like this. It's like, if we look at eating, we all have to eat. And so it's a necessary part of life to eat. But if you decide that you've had lunch and you're just going to do something else, but you find that you can't stop thinking about food, and you keep walking over to the refrigerator,"
},
{
"end_time": 4805.265,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4777.705,
"text": " And you get, well, that's different. That's now something healthy that's turned into an obsession. It's a problem, right? And it's the same thing with thoughts. Thoughts are great. We use them to go to the moon. We use them to build all this technology. We use them to cure disease. They're wonderful. But if you find that when you say, okay, thought is a great tool, but for the next 10 minutes, I would just like to relax without any thoughts. And then you find you can't do it."
},
{
"end_time": 4827.927,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4805.964,
"text": " You find that these thoughts invade and that when you let go of the thoughts and you just go into pure silence, that you're afraid and you retreat back into the thoughts. Well, that suggests that just like in the case of the food, right, there's a useful usage of food."
},
{
"end_time": 4857.449,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4828.951,
"text": " And it's very, very necessary, but there's a case where it becomes an obsession and there's a problem. Same thing with thought. It's a great tool, but when you can't let go of thought for 10 minutes and the thoughts invade and you find that going into the silence triggers an innate fear, then you know that there's something else that's going on. And so in the meditation, it's a matter of, for me, facing the silence,"
},
{
"end_time": 4884.428,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4857.978,
"text": " and the fears that come up without judgment, without condemnation, without trying, just being with that and just watching that whole amazing process is sort of finding out, wow, I didn't know that this was part of me. I just was living in my thoughts. I had no idea that it would be so hard to let go of thoughts. So it's nothing wrong about thoughts, but when they're obsessive, then that's a different thing."
},
{
"end_time": 4909.701,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4885.486,
"text": " And in the case, the analogy with the fridge and the food, it's an obsession when it becomes maladaptive. Is that what you're defining as obsession? Right, yeah. So your thoughts are always about the refrigerator and getting the next food and you find yourself gaining tons and tons of weight and to the point where you have heart disease and things like that, right? At some point you realize, okay, well, maybe I've got"
},
{
"end_time": 4936.527,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4910.247,
"text": " Food is necessary, but too much food and too much thinking about food is a sign of something maladaptive. You also mentioned in the case against reality that illusions are a failure to guide adaptive behavior. I don't know if you mentioned that quoting someone else or if you mentioned that because you believe it. Either way, do you agree with that statement or disagree? Yeah, I do agree with that."
},
{
"end_time": 4966.135,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4937.585,
"text": " And it was sort of a statement that I was making, in contrast to what most of my colleagues in perception science would say. Most of my colleagues would say that an illusion is a perception that fails to match reality. So I see a stick in the water, it looks bent, but the stick isn't bent, so my perception fails to match the reality. I see something that looks bent, but the stick isn't bent. That kind of thing."
},
{
"end_time": 4994.923,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4967.637,
"text": " I'm suggesting on evolutionary grounds, well, I'm claiming that the theory of evolution entails mathematically that the probability that any of our perceptions in any way match the structure of reality is zero. In other words, none of our perceptions tell us truths about the structure of objective reality according to evolutionary theory."
},
{
"end_time": 5024.445,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4995.811,
"text": " Are you aware of the various notions of truth such as correspondence and deflationary and pragmatic? Sure, absolutely. So most of my colleagues are taking a correspondence notion, right? They're saying that I see a red apple, that's because in fact in objective reality there is something with that shape and that color that would continue to exist even if no one were there to perceive it. And so there's"
},
{
"end_time": 5052.005,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5024.838,
"text": " a correspondence. No one thinks it's perfect correspondence. We don't see all of the structure of objective reality. But the idea of truth that I'm talking about is reality, whatever it is, has certain structures to it. Topologies perhaps, group structures, metrics, whatever it might be, whatever the structures of reality are. And our perceptions then tell us"
},
{
"end_time": 5082.654,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5052.841,
"text": " Now, are you taking more of a pragmatic stance on the definition of truth? I'm not."
},
{
"end_time": 5110.418,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5085.009,
"text": " So what's interesting is when I talk about... If you don't mind, just for the audience, do you mind defining the difference between correspondence and then pragmatic and then where you differ from pragmatic? As far as I can tell, it sounds like yours is pragmatic because it's about adaptive behavior. So I'm curious to know where the difference is. Right. So in the correspondence theory of truth, the idea is that"
},
{
"end_time": 5140.265,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5111.493,
"text": " There is an objective reality that has a definite state, a definite structure. And to see truly, to perceive truly, is to have the structures of your perception be homomorphic to at least some of the structures in objective reality, so to preserve those structures. A pragmatist would say, that's not possible."
},
{
"end_time": 5170.23,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5141.152,
"text": " There are no true perceptions of that kind. All we can ask of our perceptions is, do they work? So do our concepts work? Do our perceptions work? And what I'm saying is that from an evolutionary point of view, the theory of evolution gives us no reason to believe that our cognitive or perceptual systems were shaped"
},
{
"end_time": 5197.995,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5170.674,
"text": " to give us the correspondence kinds of truths. No reason. Now that doesn't mean that evolutionary theory is true. My attitude about scientific theories is very, very pragmatic in the following sense. I don't think that any of our scientific theories are true, including mine, but they're the best tools that we have so far. And so what we do as scientists is to very carefully study these tools. We study"
},
{
"end_time": 5226.647,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5198.422,
"text": " evolution by natural selection. We study general relativity, we study quantum field theory, and we see what these theories entail. Not because they're the final answer, they're not. I don't think any good scientist thinks they're the final answer. They're the answers we've got so far, the tools that we have so far. So I'm saying that evolution by natural selection absolutely entails that none of our perceptions correspond"
},
{
"end_time": 5255.947,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5227.381,
"text": " to a true structure of an objective reality. Now, does that mean that I'm a pragmatist? No, I'm just telling you what evolutionary theory entails. That's all. So I'm just being very, very hard-nosed. This is what the theory entails. We've got theorems about it. If someone wants to argue, I can show my theorem and we can argue about the theorems. But now, once I've said that about evolutionary theory, I can step back and say, is there a deeper point of view that I would like to take, in which I'd still argue for a correspondence theory of truth?"
},
{
"end_time": 5285.316,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5257.193,
"text": " And I'm absolutely open to a deeper point of view in which there is a correspondence theory of truth. Whatever that deeper point of view is though, and this is the interesting and tricky part about it, whatever deeper point of view I take, it better be the case that I can explain why within space and time and evolution by natural selection, that those theories"
},
{
"end_time": 5314.343,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5287.637,
"text": " entail only a pragmatic view of perceptions, not a truth view. So if I'm going to take a deeper point of view in which I say there is a correspondence theory of truth, then for that to work I have to be able to explain why such a successful theory is evolution of a natural selection and is spectacularly successful. Why that theory entails a pragmatic view of our perceptions and our cognitive"
},
{
"end_time": 5342.995,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5315.162,
"text": " abilities. They're all pragmatic, not about truth. And so that's sort of the subtlety of this point of view. A lot of people will contradict or critique what I'm saying on two counts. They'll say first, how in the world can you say that we don't see the truth about the world? Do you know what the truth about reality is? If you don't know what the truth about reality is, then how could you ever know that we don't see it? Okay?"
},
{
"end_time": 5372.841,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5343.643,
"text": " That's the first argument and the reply is, and this is the power of mathematical models like evolution by natural selection, that mathematical model entails that whatever the structure of objective reality is, we don't need to propose that we know what the structure of objective reality is. Whatever it is, the probability is zero that natural selection would shape us to see it. So the nice thing about that answer is"
},
{
"end_time": 5401.8,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5373.234,
"text": " I don't need to guess or know what objective reality is. To know that evolution by natural selection entails that whatever the reality is, we don't see it. We don't perceive it. So the first objection is a very natural objection, by the way. How could you know that we don't see reality? Because you don't know what reality is. Well, the answer is the mathematics is so sophisticated, it's allowing you to say that whatever reality is, you don't see it."
},
{
"end_time": 5431.647,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5402.654,
"text": " claiming to know what reality is. The second point then is that, you know, often people will say, well, you know, so you've just said that none of our perceptions, none of our cognitive capacities are about the truth. And then you try to come up with a model of objective reality, right? This theory of conscious agents and so forth. Well, and indeed I am. And that's because I don't take evolution by natural selection as the final word. It's just a tool."
},
{
"end_time": 5461.084,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5432.227,
"text": " That tool entails a pragmatic view. Great! That's what that tool entails. I would like to get a deeper view in which consciousness is fundamental and from that deeper view show how space-time emerges as an interface representation of this deeper reality and show within that interface why the dynamics of this deeper realm looks, at least in certain cases, like evolution by natural selection and why it looks like"
},
{
"end_time": 5488.251,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5461.681,
"text": " the kind of structure that we see in evolutionary theory. So, evolution of a natural selection will be a constraint on any deeper theory of reality that I propose. Any deeper theory, when it projects into space-time, it better look like general relativity, quantum field theory, evolution of a natural selection when you project it into space-time, or improvements on those theories."
},
{
"end_time": 5515.811,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5488.712,
"text": " but not less than those theories. It has to explain everything those theories explain and more within space-time. This is maybe subtle for those who aren't scientists, but this is just standard. What I'm saying here is just the standard view of scientists. We take our theories not as the truth, just the best accounts that we have so far, the best tools that we have so far."
},
{
"end_time": 5545.759,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5517.312,
"text": " A good theory will tell you where it stops, where it fails. And by the way, general relativity and quantum field theory very, very clearly tell us that they fail, that space-time itself is only an emergent concept, it cannot be fundamental. And so the very foundations of quantum field theory, which is fields on space-time, and the very nature of general relativity, which is the dynamics of space-time,"
},
{
"end_time": 5574.838,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5548.234,
"text": " can't be fundamental. So those theories are good enough to tell us that despite their successes, they're not the final answer. There's something deeper, but they can't tell us what that deeper thing is. And that's where the creativity of the scientific endeavor kicks in. It's up to the scientist to take a leap of imagination. What deeper notion"
},
{
"end_time": 5599.189,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5575.623,
"text": " of reality. What deeper theoretical structures could we come up with that would project down into what we call space-time? And in that projection, they would look like general relativity. They would look like quantum field theory and evolution by natural selection. What's the deeper dynamics in this deeper realm that would project into that? And so there"
},
{
"end_time": 5626.578,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5600.367,
"text": " Our current theories can only give us very, very loose guidance. There's a lot of creative imagination that then is required to go into this deeper realm. And that's where the most creative scientists, of course, want to go. It's great fun when we find a hole in our current theories and get the chance to discover something new. And so that's the fun part of it."
},
{
"end_time": 5657.005,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5627.346,
"text": " When it comes to space and time, I've heard you describe it as a data compression tool for us conscious agents. Why do we need as conscious agents data compression? Why is there a limit to how much we can process? Well, that's going to be a very interesting thing for this deeper theory to try to explain. Why is there this limit? It may be that all conscious systems are necessarily finite."
},
{
"end_time": 5689.309,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5659.889,
"text": " And that's one theory that I'm playing with, that the realm of conscious agents may be such that there is no bound to the complexity that a conscious agent can have, but it's always finite. So it's as big as you wish, but always finite. And in which case, no matter how complex you are, compared to all the possible complexity, your measure is zero, your probability is zero, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5719.07,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5690.128,
"text": " So in that sense if, but there may be a really really deep point of view in which consciousness may be taking these, dividing itself into sort of sub-consciousnesses which are sort of different perspectives that are looking at the whole and these different perspectives would necessarily then have limited"
},
{
"end_time": 5746.22,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5719.65,
"text": " information about the whole. They'll only be able to see through an interface, but necessarily. It's sort of the kind of thing like in the Twitterverse, there's tens of millions of users, billions of tweets. I could talk with one or two Twitter users extensively and follow all of their tweets. Maybe, if I'm really into it, maybe a hundred of them and follow all their tweets. But there's"
},
{
"end_time": 5775.742,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5747.125,
"text": " 10 million or more Twitter users. So there's no way, there's absolutely no way. So if I want to get a feel for what's happening in general in the Twitterverse, I'm going to need to have some kind of data compression tool, some visualization tool. Right. We see this all the time. Whenever there's big social media data, we use visualization tools to see what's going on. And that's what I think space time is. Space time"
},
{
"end_time": 5803.507,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5777.466,
"text": " is our headset. We've mistaken the headset for reality. We've assumed that space and time are fundamental or space time is fundamental. We've assumed that that's the objective reality. And it's just a rookie mistake. It's our headset. It's our visualization tool. And what's behind it is this vast network of other conscious agents. Now, it's one thing for me to say this, it sounds, you know, interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 5831.135,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5804.053,
"text": " But where's the beef? And where the beef is going to have to come from is a precise mathematical description of the dynamics of conscious agents. So it's, for those interested in math, it's dynamics on networks. So it's network theory. So the kind of stuff that you use when you're studying like the internet and the dynamics of information flow on the internet and so forth. It's that kind of mathematics. So it's"
},
{
"end_time": 5842.637,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5831.852,
"text": " proposing a specific mathematical dynamics on a network of conscious agents. Then the way I think it'll go is that the asymptotic behavior of that dynamics"
},
{
"end_time": 5872.005,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5843.404,
"text": " That just means you can't see every single tweet, you can't interact with every single user, but you can see the long-term trends. What are the things that are trending long-term? What are the big picture kinds of things? That's what I mean by the asymptotics. What happens if you look at it over a long period of time? What are the patterns over a long period of time? And I think that that is what is behind space-time and modern physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5901.63,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5872.517,
"text": " What they're seeing, what the physicists right now, when they try to get structures beyond space-time, you know, they're trying to take the next step beyond space-time, they are seeing some interesting structures called positive geometries, amplitude hydra, sociohedra, and so forth, these positive geometries. I want, the direction I'm going is to show that those positive geometry structures that they're coming up with are representations of the asymptotic behavior"
},
{
"end_time": 5929.753,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5902.824,
"text": " of this dynamics of conscious agents. And if I can do that, then I will be able to use their work and pull the thread all the way from a theory of conscious agents and their dynamics through the asymptotics of that into these positive geometries that they found. And then they tell you how to go from that to the actual prediction of scattering events like at the Large Hadron Collider. So that's my goal. The beef will be if I can start with a theory of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 5954.838,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5930.111,
"text": " Look at its asymptotics and show that the asymptotics of that theory of consciousness, through this route that the physicists have found already, leads to the scattering amplitudes that we can then test at the Large Hadron Collider. That's where we have the beef. Space and time aren't fundamental in your theory. Is causality fundamental? Certainly not causality in space and time, right? So when we think about causality,"
},
{
"end_time": 5979.684,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5955.52,
"text": " We think about, for example, the cue ball hitting the eight ball and making a crane into the corner pocket. Or we think about neurons in the brain causing our behaviors and causing our experiences. And so I flat out deny that anything in space-time has any causal powers."
},
{
"end_time": 6008.66,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5980.469,
"text": " Can you help me? Something I'm working on is a definition of causality. It turns out it's extremely elusive, even though it seems like it's intuitive. The closer you look, the more slippery it gets. How are you defining causality in your theory? So you're absolutely right. In fact, there's a handbook of causality, a bunch of philosophers and others talking about causality, the Oxford handbook of causality or something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 6036.459,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6009.684,
"text": " If you read through it, there are many, many different views on causality, and there is no agreed upon universal definition of causality. Mathematically, in computer science, when we talk about causality, some of the best work there is based on the notion of directed acyclic graphs."
},
{
"end_time": 6061.476,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6036.937,
"text": " So Judea Pearl, professor at UCLA, and his students and many collaborators have been modeling causality, whatever it is, as directed acyclic graphs. But I think that even Judea Pearl doesn't hazard definition of causality, right? It's much like how do you define, if you're in geometry, how do you define a point?"
},
{
"end_time": 6090.367,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6062.5,
"text": " Well, it's sort of a primitive concept. But two of them make a line, right? Two of them define a line. And so for many scientific theories, the notion of causality is a primitive. It's a place where explanation stops. And that's not a unique problem to the notion of causality. Every scientific theory"
},
{
"end_time": 6111.032,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6092.824,
"text": " must stop at some point it can't explain everything there will be some primitive notions and this is unavoidable so there are no scientific theories that explain everything every scientific theory will have some handful hopefully as small as possible of primitive notions"
},
{
"end_time": 6141.323,
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"start_time": 6111.374,
"text": " that where you just say you know like if you have a little kid that says but what why is that and you tell them and say but but how come that and then so at some point you just say it just is right your theory just stops and says that's just the way it is and so so for causality you know we tend to think of causality well if i can intervene in some system and then change things change as a result of my intervention that's a proof of causality"
},
{
"end_time": 6161.971,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6142.329,
"text": " But that turns out not to work. You can get counter examples to that. What about causes always precede their effects? Well, you can have you can set up thought experiments where that where the effects hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 6189.019,
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"start_time": 6162.927,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 6207.978,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6189.019,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the"
},
{
"end_time": 6233.848,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6207.978,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story?"
},
{
"end_time": 6262.654,
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"start_time": 6233.848,
"text": " Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories. Don't perceive the causes, but where there's yes, right. So that's the reason why I forget the person's name Pearl. You mentioned the April, right? That's why he said acyclic."
},
{
"end_time": 6288.524,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6263.063,
"text": " Because he doesn't want the causes to proceed effects, or because he doesn't want it to get to some place where you cause yourself. Right. Yeah, once you get cycles, it gets pretty complicated and the notion of causalities would start to slip through your fingers. Things where you were in everyday life, you see cycles, you can unwrap them as an ever extending directed acyclic graph."
},
{
"end_time": 6318.2,
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"start_time": 6289.411,
"text": " So you can just take the time parameter. Instead of cycling back, you go to new states downward. So ways to, to avoid cycles, even in what we in everyday life think of as, as cyclic behavior. So I would say that causality, you're, you're right to pick on it. It's the best and brightest. When I look at that, I think it's the Oxford handbook of causality, wonderful articles, brilliant thinkers, and they disagree."
},
{
"end_time": 6347.961,
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"text": " They don't know, so there's no received opinion about what causality is. Is there one that you feel like is getting close to the truth? I'll tell you why I ask. All the ones I saw there, I think that they all were touching different parts of the elephant in interesting ways, right?"
},
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"text": " But it may be that ultimately causality is one of these primitives, like points in geometry. Okay. When you say that reality is innately objective, so there's the W, the world state, X, G experience, so that's like the conscious agent, then I assume what you're saying is objective reality is the W, the world state? And the agents, right."
},
{
"end_time": 6400.691,
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"start_time": 6378.643,
"text": " Then later you do this, I love this, you then take, well, W could also be composed of different conscious agents. And then we can have a string of them. Why are you calling that objective to me? And this just might be semantics. I hear that as subjective given that it's a conscious agent. That is, it's a subject all the way through the chain."
},
{
"end_time": 6428.831,
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"start_time": 6401.254,
"text": " Right. If it was just, if you were like, hey, there's one world or there's a few, but W is not dependent on other causal, sorry, conscious agents, then I could see using the term objective, why is it that you still use the term objective when we can extend the graph to just conscious agents? Right. So, so the, the proposal is that what the universe is fundamentally,"
},
{
"end_time": 6457.927,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6429.292,
"text": " is a vast network of interacting conscious agents. So when I say that that's the objective truth, of course each agent is a subject, right? Each agent is a conscious entity. But what I'm saying is that even when I'm asleep, the network still exists. That's all. So even if I'm sound asleep and I'm not having any conscious experiences or anything like that, the eye that's talking to you right now"
},
{
"end_time": 6486.544,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6458.49,
"text": " That network of conscious agents is just like a Twitter user, right? Whether or not I happen to be reading tweets or sending tweets, the Twitterverse exists. It's out there. Even though really the Twitterverse is just a bunch of other subjects. So the intersubjectivity implies the objectivity? That's right. And specifically the fact that it's"
},
{
"end_time": 6516.8,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6487.415,
"text": " It still exists even if I don't perceive it. Okay, we're going to get philosophical. I was going to get to this later, but now that we're here, what's the I in this conscious agent model? Right. So in the conscious agent model, the notion of a self is not fundamental. So conscious agents are just these mathematical structures that have experiences, make decisions,"
},
{
"end_time": 6547.039,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6517.756,
"text": " Okay, I might stop you every once in a while to clarify just for myself. You're saying that a self is a conglomeration of conscious agents? It's a data structure that they build. Does that mean that right now I'm talking to Donald,"
},
{
"end_time": 6577.056,
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"start_time": 6547.91,
"text": " You're not one conscious agent. I'm speaking to quite a few. Probably a countless collection of conscious. Uncountable. Well, I don't know if it's uncountable, but I certainly couldn't count them. But as you know, uncountable is a technical term in mathematics. So I just want to make sure people who know that, I'm not saying that it's uncountable in that sense. It may be, but I'm not claiming that. But it's certainly not countable by me. So the idea is that, for example, we know"
},
{
"end_time": 6606.732,
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"start_time": 6577.773,
"text": " that there are at least two different subjects in me. We can see that if I take a knife and cut the corpus callosum, which I have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. You do too. There's a band of fibers called the corpus. Hopefully I do. Sometimes I wonder. 225 million fibers. And if you cut those fibers, it turns out you can actually get clear evidence in a few people that this has been done with."
},
{
"end_time": 6632.841,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6607.415,
"text": " that there's a different personality in the left hemisphere than the right hemisphere. In one case, the left hemisphere believed in God, the right hemisphere was an atheist. The left hemisphere wanted to have a desk job, the right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver. And they can even fight. The left hemisphere controls the right hand, the right hemisphere controls the left hand, and they can fight. The left hand can be fighting what the right hand is doing."
},
{
"end_time": 6660.401,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6633.183,
"text": " You know, trying to cook, the left hand might destroy an omelet that you're making. You've tried to put on some clothes, the left hand might be taking off the clothes, the right hand is trying to put on. So it's two different consciousnesses. And I'm saying the tip of an iceberg, there's this whole lattice of conscious agents that together cooperate to create the conscious agent, that's me, but the self,"
},
{
"end_time": 6689.735,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6661.288,
"text": " that I have. The sense of myself with my personal history and so forth is a data structure that I create. Okay. I, you know, I, I feel like I'm slipping up because I don't know. And this is another one, by the way, causality is elusive. Identity is also one of those where the closer you look, the more liquid, liquid it gets. Are you using self and identity synonymously? Well, so no."
},
{
"end_time": 6719.735,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6690.213,
"text": " So I'm thinking about self in the colloquial sense that we most think about, you know, I am so-and-so, here's my name, this is my personal history, this is what's important to me, this is my goals. That kind of self that we experience ourselves, the thing that we're afraid of losing in death and so forth, right? That is a data structure."
},
{
"end_time": 6741.357,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6720.077,
"text": " That's interesting. You're saying that the self is also a data structure. Yes, that's right. Sorry, continue. At least in this theory that I'm working on, that I can explain why we're going that direction if you want. But the notion of a self, right, so there's certain views of the self that it's"
},
{
"end_time": 6769.531,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6741.596,
"text": " There's no such thing as a persisting self, but this is called the pearl view. It's like the number of pearls on a string. So there's a pearl, a different instantiation of the self at each moment along the string. So there are certain Eastern mystical traditions, but also certain Western philosophers who take this point of view. You don't have one persisting self, but you have a sequence of selves. And something, William James point of view,"
},
{
"end_time": 6794.155,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6770.145,
"text": " But the Pearl analogy would imply that there's a continuum, there's a string. There's a string, and for James, James said the thought itself is the thinker, which is interesting. I don't know exactly what James means by that, but he was saying that there's no thinker, no self beyond the occurring thought right now."
},
{
"end_time": 6824.48,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6795.247,
"text": " But the thought itself is creating the illusion of a persisting thinker, of a persisting self. Now many Western religions, on the other hand, will take just the opposite point of view. They'll say there is, of course, a self and it's eternal. And what you do here determines whether that self will go to heaven or to hell or something like that. So you can see there's a lot riding on this notion of self and they're widely differing points of view."
},
{
"end_time": 6850.23,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6825.145,
"text": " And the reason in my theory that I've been working, by the way, by my theory, of course, I'm not alone. I've got a bunch of wonderful collaborators, Chetan Prakash, Bruce Bennett, Manish Singh, Chris Fields, Robert Prentner, Patrick Lefeugin, a bunch of really brilliant people. So when I say my theory, you know, that's in quotes. And also when you say my, that you're implying self, but you're questioning at the same time."
},
{
"end_time": 6877.005,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6850.469,
"text": " Sorry, continue. It's so tricky to talk about this, but anyway. That's right, but it's fun when our everyday assumptions that we have never questioned in many cases, or just assumed, I find it really refreshing to have everything that I thought I knew blown away. I mean, it's really quite fun. It's maybe an acquired taste."
},
{
"end_time": 6903.66,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6877.568,
"text": " But it's an interesting thing to be surprised. What I thought I knew, I don't know. But in the case of the Self, when I was trying to come up with the theory of consciousness, as a scientist, what you try to do when you're creating a theory is you're trying to put as few assumptions as possible up front, right? Because every assumption you build in is something you're not explaining, it's something you're assuming."
},
{
"end_time": 6933.712,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6904.206,
"text": " So you want to assume as little as possible. So in the theory of conscious agents, I don't, I mean, of course I could have said, okay, they also have a self and they have an I and so forth. But, but I decided not to do that because it turned out if I just said there are these entities, I'll just call them formal structural entities called conscious agents, they may not at all be aware of themselves as entities. So they may not have any self-awareness at all. They just have"
},
{
"end_time": 6962.363,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6934.189,
"text": " conscious experiences that's all they have they make decisions and they take actions but those actions all they do is affect the conscious experience of the other entities that's it there's no self there's nothing like that there's no memory by the way there's no intelligence nothing it's just experiences leading to decisions at the fundamental atomic level that's right the very foundational level so that i do this on purpose"
},
{
"end_time": 6990.947,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6962.619,
"text": " The goal is to make the foundations of your theory as sparse as possible. That's just, we do as scientists, as few assumptions as possible. Sure, I could have thrown in a self. I could throw in the kitchen sink. Let me throw in intelligence. Let me throw in just, well, there's nothing left to explain. I've just assumed it all, right? There we go. Well, there's no theory there. So the reason I stopped where I stopped was"
},
{
"end_time": 7020.401,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6992.449,
"text": " Very nice theorem. By writing down a set of experiences, conscious experiences, and a so-called Markovian kernel, which is a way of talking about the probabilities of the different decisions that you could take. The Markovian kernels are provably computationally universal. That means that with that little foundation, experiences and"
},
{
"end_time": 7050.452,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7020.794,
"text": " decisions to act that are modeled by Markovian kernels. I am computationally universal. Anything that can be simulated by any computer, quantum or otherwise, but I believe can be simulated by this network of conscious agents. So even though my foundations are incredibly sparse, there are, there are agents which have experiences and make choices based on those experiences. That's it."
},
{
"end_time": 7078.251,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7051.647,
"text": " networks of agents can provably compute anything that's computable at all, period. So, because I know in cognitive neuroscience, for example, that we have mathematical models that are very, very good at problem solving, intelligence, creating all sorts of structures, I can build networks of conscious agents that can do anything that cognitive neuroscience can do right now. So that's why I stopped. I don't need anything more."
},
{
"end_time": 7100.691,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7078.66,
"text": " I can build models of the self out of networks of conscious agents. So there's no reason for me to assume them. I should force myself to build them from networks of conscious agents. That's the fun part of this. What we've got is essentially the tinker toys of consciousness. Now we can build up any structure that we want, provably."
},
{
"end_time": 7129.343,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7102.688,
"text": " Going back to this D and A and P model, let's forget about the P, because it's just conscious agents. The decisions and the actions are stochastic, so they're Markov kernels. Where's the free will there? Right, so all the, of course, this raises a deep question about the relationship between mathematics and the thing that you're modeling with the mathematics, right? So all I've got are"
},
{
"end_time": 7158.114,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7130.179,
"text": " measurable structures that I say are conscious experiences, spaces of conscious experiences, right? And then I've got these Markovian kernels, which I say are modeling the choices. And you can say, well, you know, I just see, I see probabilities there, but I don't see any free will. And so it's a matter of how I interpret those probabilities. One could interpret those probabilities as pure objective chance. And I think many of my physicalist colleagues would"
},
{
"end_time": 7183.268,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7158.626,
"text": " would say, you know, if you see probabilities somewhere, then if it's not due to ignorance, if the probabilities are not due to my ignorance, then it's due to an objective chance in nature. But I want to be a monist in my theory. I don't want to be a dualist. If I'm going to say that consciousness is fundamental, then I"
},
{
"end_time": 7210.026,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7184.155,
"text": " don't also want to propose as a dualist that there are other sources of novelty outside of consciousness into the universe. I want consciousness to be the only source of novelty in this universe. Objective chance, what do we mean when we say objective chance as a physicalist? Suppose I'm a physicalist, I believe space-time is fundamental,"
},
{
"end_time": 7239.326,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7210.384,
"text": " And I believe that there are things called objective chance that are not just due to my ignorance. This is something that we call objective chance. What I'm saying is these probabilities, objective chance, I'm saying there is a source of novelty coming into my universe that I cannot explain. There is where a miracle is happening. So I'll be very, very clear. Objective chance is a miracle."
},
{
"end_time": 7267.244,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7240.265,
"text": " It's in the following sense. You're saying my theory has no resources to explain those outcomes. I cannot predict those outcomes. That's why I'm calling it objective chance. Well, that reinterpreted, re-explained is in the language of your theory, you have no resources to explain what's happening. So in terms of your theory, that's a miracle. It's unexplainable."
},
{
"end_time": 7298.114,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7268.387,
"text": " Now, so every theory, and this is not a put down, every theory has its miracles. We just have to own that. Every scientific theory. Right, right. And you're using miracles as a synonym for axioms? That's right. It's where, it's a miracle for your theory. If your theory has to assume it, it can't explain it. Okay. Right? Okay. Now, when you have probabilities, there are two kinds of miracles that you can imagine."
},
{
"end_time": 7328.183,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7298.541,
"text": " If it's not just due to lack of knowledge, right? So sometimes you have probabilities because there's a true state of affairs, but you don't have enough knowledge. That's a different kind of thing. But when it's a fundamental probability, you can either ascribe it to the miracle of objective chance or free will. They're both equally miracles. But since I'm trying to have a monist theory, I interpret probability not as objective chance, but as free will choices."
},
{
"end_time": 7358.353,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7328.677,
"text": " And then it's up to me then in the mathematics to unpack what does that free will choice idea amount to. And it's really quite interesting because this is a network dynamics. Each agent at each level of the dynamics is making its own contributions to free will choices. And there are bottom up influences. The free will choices of lower level agents influence higher agents and vice versa. And the whole system of conscious agents also"
},
{
"end_time": 7388.541,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7358.797,
"text": " itself is an agent by the mathematics. The mathematics says collections of agents also form an agent. And so what you get is this really interesting analysis and synthesis approach where I can get a dynamical model of free will bottom up and top down at the same time. And that would be my model of the free will choice of the one single agent. And so it's going to be, it's again forcing me to do the work."
},
{
"end_time": 7417.875,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7389.002,
"text": " is forcing me to do the work of what ultimately do I mean by free will by assigning it only to local agents and then saying what do you mean by free will when you have agents interact? What does it mean? Right, right. So a question I have for you, let's imagine we have this graph and it's extended and they're all conscious agents. Okay, we pick one of them and there's free will associated and they influence one another. Does that mean from sheer will can one"
},
{
"end_time": 7446.749,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7418.643,
"text": " drastically change the game for the rest? There may be cases where that can happen, but it looks like every agent makes its contribution. And it's almost like a symphony, right? Every member of the symphony makes their contribution to the whole. There may be a conductor, but"
},
{
"end_time": 7462.039,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7447.602,
"text": " It's an organic whole. Where would the conductor be in this model? Well, that's the thing. There would only be relative conductors that the agents above would have sort of top-down influence."
},
{
"end_time": 7492.773,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7462.807,
"text": " But the agents below have really strong bottom up influence on the free will decision. So it's hard for me to say at this point that one is more important than the other. Yeah. And I'm having a difficult time when you say that one is above another, because as far as I know from just from reading the papers, and it could be mistaken, it's not as if one is privileged. One node is privileged over another. Right. So that's right. When I say above, it's like my two hemispheres in my brain, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 7522.654,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7493.37,
"text": " When the corpus callosum is intact, there seems to be a unified me that I call Don, right? But if you come on the corpus callosum, you could easily, it turns out, and this is how strange you can get. They were able to get these split-brain patients to play 20 questions with themselves. The right hemisphere has a word in mind. The left hemisphere doesn't know what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 7550.64,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7523.507,
"text": " And then the left hemisphere, which can talk, can start asking questions. Is it animal? Is it vegetable? Is it mineral? Things like that. And the right hemisphere, which can't talk, but can understand language, can use, say, the left hand to thumbs up for yes, thumbs down for no. And so these, a split brain patient has two separate spheres of consciousness so separate that they can play 20 questions and the left hemisphere doesn't know the answer."
},
{
"end_time": 7580.657,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7551.049,
"text": " The left hemisphere does not know and sometimes will fail to guess in 20 questions what's in the mind of the right hemisphere. Some people argue that there's no separate personalities, no separate consciousnesses. Good luck making that point when the left hemisphere can fail to win a 20 questions game with the right hemisphere, even giving its level best. I'm saying that's just the tip of an iceberg, but it goes all the way down to what I call these one bit agents."
},
{
"end_time": 7610.811,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7581.254,
"text": " basically two conscious experiences, say red or nothing or something like that. And so it's in that sense when I talk about agents being above and whatever agent is me that's talking to you seems to be a combination of my left hemisphere and my right hemisphere agents. If we split my corpus callosum, that higher level agent apparently would be gone and there would be two different agents that could now play 20 questions with each other and lose, lose the game of 20 questions with each other."
},
{
"end_time": 7630.094,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7611.101,
"text": " Are you familiar with Douglas Hofstadter's work?"
},
{
"end_time": 7659.582,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7631.271,
"text": " What do you think of his theory of consciousness? It sounds similar to what you're describing in the sense of a strange loop that, well, you can do a much better job at describing it than I can. So there's a fundamental difference in the approach that we're taking. Hofstadter is brilliant. He's a world-class genius. He's"
},
{
"end_time": 7684.309,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7660.452,
"text": " going after the notion of self-referential systems, and those have really interesting properties. If I have a sentence of the form, this sentence is false, the sentence is referring to itself by saying this sentence is false, the sentence has got a strange loop, it's got a self-referential loop in it."
},
{
"end_time": 7710.009,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7684.735,
"text": " and then you get all sorts of weird things that happen because is that sentence true? I mean the sentence says the sentence is false. Well if it's true, then it's false. But if it's false, then it's true. And you get caught in this weird thing. And so Hofstadter has a lot of brilliant ideas and I don't want to claim that I'm doing justice to them, but the key is that"
},
{
"end_time": 7740.247,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7711.8,
"text": " there's an essential role to this self-referential kind of structure that we see in that kind of sentence, this sentence is false, and that you get in the work of Kurt Gödel when he proves his incompleteness theorems and so forth, there's this really clever use of mathematics to refer to itself and get self-referential kinds of loops. And his idea is that these kinds of self-referential loops are somehow critical perhaps"
},
{
"end_time": 7769.275,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7740.555,
"text": " to booting up consciousness, to booting up what we call a self, and so forth. And there's a fundamental difference in philosophy in the following sense. You mean between you and Hofstadter? That's right. And my colleagues who, and many of my colleagues who are taking a similar kind of thing that's saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 7797.568,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7770.009,
"text": " Consciousness is the result of some property of computational systems, like this ability to have self-reference and so forth. But it could be other properties. It could be some kind of other computational properties of systems. This is called the computational theory of mind and so forth. But the idea is that you start with systems that are not conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 7825.759,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7798.524,
"text": " But if they have certain interesting properties like self-reference or other computational properties, for example, certain kind of integrated information that Tanoni and Koch are looking at, so they have certain kinds of computational properties like that they call high integrated information, then these unconscious systems give rise to consciousness. Now, I"
},
{
"end_time": 7849.155,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7826.476,
"text": " That's a fundamentally different point of view than the one I'm taking. I'm saying, look, I'm not starting with a universe that's unconscious. I'm proposing, at the foundation, that conscious experiences are fundamental. That's where explanation stops. I'm not explaining how conscious experiences arise. I'm saying that they are what exists."
},
{
"end_time": 7878.524,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7849.514,
"text": " Just like a physicalist who believes in space-time and takes it as fundamental says, I don't know where space-time comes from, I'm assuming it. I'm assuming that space-time and fundamental particles except, right? Every theory is going to make its own assumptions. So we're all equal footing in that regard. We all have miracles at the start. The question is, what miracles do you pick? And the reason I don't go with a physicalist starting point, like a computational system that"
},
{
"end_time": 7904.206,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7878.882,
"text": " that most of the time is going to be unconscious, but if it has the right integrated information or it has the right kind of self-reference, then the magic of consciousness somehow emerges. The reason I don't go after that is a couple of reasons. One, no one has been able to use that approach to predict exactly even how one specific conscious experience could arise, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 7933.268,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7904.428,
"text": " How could self-reference or integrated information or orchestrated collapses of microtubule states in certain neurons be or cause my experience of the taste of vanilla? What specific patterns of activity of the brain or computational system must be or must cause the taste of vanilla and why is it that it could not be the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic?"
},
{
"end_time": 7963.217,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7934.019,
"text": " Those theories have utterly failed to explain even one specific conscious experience. In other words, there's not one success for even one specific conscious experience on the table. That is to say, why does this brain state or this computational model correspond to this qualia and not another? And does your theory deal with that? So I choose a different miracle. So their miracle is, grant me computational systems in space and time."
},
{
"end_time": 7991.049,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7963.899,
"text": " I will predict qualia. Well, they can't predict qualia. So I've granted them what they want and they can't give me what they've promised. They can't give me even one specific qualia. It's a failure. And by the way, these are my friends. They're brilliant. They're doing great work. But I think that they've given themselves an impossible task. You can't start with unconscious ingredients and Buddha of consciousness can't be done."
},
{
"end_time": 8021.596,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7991.834,
"text": " So what I'm doing is I'm saying, look, they can't explain qualia. No one's been able to explain conscious experiences. I'm going to start with qualia. I'm going to start with conscious experiences, the taste of garlic, the smell of chocolate, all of these things. Those are the things I'm going to start with. So those are my miracles. I'm not explaining them, I'm assuming them. Now, my goal is to say, grant me this model of that, my conscious agent model."
},
{
"end_time": 8051.34,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8022.637,
"text": " Then I will show you how space-time and quantum mechanics and general relativity and evolution by natural selection come out as interface representations of the dynamics of consciousness. So instead of starting with space-time as my miracle and booting up consciousness, I'm going the other way. Start with conscious experiences of my miracle. I will show you how to boot up space-time. Now the"
},
{
"end_time": 8082.159,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8052.858,
"text": " The winner will be whoever can explain the most with the least assumptions. Right now, my colleagues, my good friends who are physicalists are assuming space-time and computational systems, and they have yet failed to explain even one conscious experience. I'm starting with conscious experiences that no one can explain. I can't explain them either. I'm assuming them. But if I can explain how space-time and quantum mechanics and general relativity come out, then I have fewer miracles than them."
},
{
"end_time": 8108.404,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8082.858,
"text": " So that wins. Whichever theory has the fewer miracles is the one we should prefer. That's sort of Occam's razor. In your theory, why is it that we would, let's say, taste vanilla, why is it that we would have one experience, taste of vanilla versus the sight of Tickle Myelmo, which is another conscious experience? Well, I don't have an answer to that right now."
},
{
"end_time": 8138.524,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8110.077,
"text": " And the very existence of conscious experiences is something that I don't explain. It's something I assume, right? So my colleagues and my physicalist colleagues would like to say just the opposite of what I'm saying. They would like to say, we don't assume that conscious experiences are fundamental. In fact, at the big bang, there were no conscious experiences. There was just space, time and matter and energy. And so we will tell you how conscious experiences emerge from that."
},
{
"end_time": 8167.517,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8138.985,
"text": " but they failed to do so. I'm saying you guys assume space time and matter and energy. I'm going to assume conscious experiences. What I'm asking for is I understand that you're assuming the various qualia, but why is it that one is chosen versus another? It sounds to me like a similar problem that the physicalists have, which is to explain why one qualia over another."
},
{
"end_time": 8198.814,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8169.514,
"text": " And I don't have an answer to that. That's a very, very good question. And to really make that question intense, we can look at people with synesthesia, right? So there was a synesthesia, about 4% of the population has synesthesia, a human population has synesthesia. And to be… 100% if you take LSD. I want to talk about psychedelics, by the way. Sorry, continue."
},
{
"end_time": 8229.309,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8199.343,
"text": " So there's this one guy like Michael Watson, his synesthesia was that everything he tasted with his tongue, he felt as a three-dimensional shape in space. That's your friend? He wasn't a friend of mine, but he was studied extensively by a neurologist. He died, he's dead now, but he was a great cook. Everything that he tasted... That's interesting, that's interesting. ...felt with his hands. So mint,"
},
{
"end_time": 8256.578,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8229.667,
"text": " was a tall, cold, smooth column of glass. He could feel it. He could feel the weight of it. He could feel the coldness of the surface. He could feel the smoothness of the surface with his hand. Angostura bitters, which is something you put in drinks, felt like a basket of ivy. He could feel the leaves, the sponginess, the texture, the warmth. So it was a very rich sensory experience that he had. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 8282.602,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8256.92,
"text": " You and I don't have, most of us don't have those experiences when we cook. He did, and it allowed him to be an exceptional cook. He had this other way of dealing with complex tastes when he was putting foods together. So that raises your question really, really sharply. Why is it that we experience, when we put something on our tongue, why do we experience it as what we call taste?"
},
{
"end_time": 8307.978,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8282.995,
"text": " saltiness, sweetness, and so forth. Why don't we all experience it like Michael Watson did, as shapes that we feel with our hands in space? Now, what's interesting is that there, mathematically, there was probably some kind of homomorphism that you could write down mathematically between the shapes and the textures and the weights and so forth he felt with his hands, and the"
},
{
"end_time": 8334.821,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8308.473,
"text": " experiences of taste that we all feel. So there's probably some homomorphism, some mapping, some dictionary between what he felt with his hand and what we experience with our taste. And that's why your question is so difficult. In many cases, from a functional point of view, the details of exactly why you have that experience don't matter"
},
{
"end_time": 8357.551,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8335.435,
"text": " Lots of other kinds of qualitative experiences could have the same functional structure as those experiences. In fact, you count them in one of your papers. You count the amount of homomorphism. That's right. Which makes me wonder, like you raised, why this and not another, given that there are so many homomorphisms."
},
{
"end_time": 8387.892,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8358.763,
"text": " The only idea I've got right now that I think is interesting enough is based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem."
},
{
"end_time": 8418.66,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8388.729,
"text": " Yeah, I'm going to ask you about that later. Right, so Gödel's incompleteness theorem intuitively basically says that there's no end to the exploration of mathematical structure. If we take consciousness as fundamental, as I'm proposing, then there's only one thing that mathematical structure could be about."
},
{
"end_time": 8449.394,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8419.548,
"text": " which is consciousness, conscious experiences. And so in that context, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, I would interpret as saying that there's an infinite variety of kinds of conscious experience that are out there, of possible structures of conscious experience. And for each kind of structure that there is, there's an infinite variety of conscious experiences that all share that structure. Right? So I would call this Gödel's candy store,"
},
{
"end_time": 8479.189,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8450.435,
"text": " infinite variety of possible structures of conscious experiences, and for each structure, probably an infinite variety of conscious experiences that share that structure. So it's very, very rich. And the goal of consciousness then on this theory would be to explore Gödel's candy store. That's what consciousness is up to. Gödel basically, his incompleteness theorem is saying, no matter how much mathematics you have,"
},
{
"end_time": 8507.125,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8480.316,
"text": " you haven't even begun. No matter how much structure you've explored, you've not even begun, because there's endless, endless exploration. In some sense, God could never know it all. So God has endless, whatever you think about God, there's an endless structure for even God to explore, right? And so that endless exploration of all the rich varieties, and it's"
},
{
"end_time": 8536.51,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8508.063,
"text": " Here I don't know, here I don't know how to think about it yet. Is it an exploration of a pre-existing candy store or is it an invention of all the new candies in this endless store? My feeling right now is it's an invention that Gödel is telling us, Gödel's incompleteness theorem is saying there's an infinite variety of structures to be invented. And then in the context of consciousness, I interpreted as saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 8566.63,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8537.056,
"text": " an infinite variety of conscious experiences to be invented. I think it's invented, not explored in terms of pre-existing conscious experiences. But there, I must say, my intuitions at this point fail me. I don't know. Okay, let's go even further off the deep end. You're completely allowed to speculate. I'm not Michael Shermer. I'm not going to throw skepticism to you straight out the gate."
},
{
"end_time": 8593.916,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8567.892,
"text": " Where in your model does God lie? Well, the word God is something that's been used in various forms for thousands of years by human beings, and it's never been precisely defined, right? Never been precisely defined. There's quite a few of those words, causality, free will, identity, God, slippery, slippery. They all might be related."
},
{
"end_time": 8620.384,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8594.36,
"text": " But we don't kill each other over our differences about the word causality. We do kill each other over our differences about the word God. And so that's a particularly troublesome problem that we have that we think that's a very, very important word, and in many cases in human history we've proven that we're willing to kill millions of people who disagree with us about what we mean by that word. And the remarkable thing is that's"
},
{
"end_time": 8648.729,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8620.674,
"text": " When there's no precise definition. So I would like to propose a precise definition of God. And of course I'm wrong. Of course I'm wrong. But the idea is to have something on the table so that we can now begin to figure out why it's wrong. So I have this definition of a conscious agent. I'll just propose that God is any conscious agent that has an infinite set of"
},
{
"end_time": 8674.531,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8649.616,
"text": " That to me sounds like there could be multiple gods because you could have multiple agents with infinite sets. That's exactly right. So now, by the way, with that definition, it may end up being a theorem that polytheism is true, not monotheism."
},
{
"end_time": 8698.951,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8674.787,
"text": " But notice all of a sudden that we get this thing where now I gave you a definition of God and you immediately saw an implication. Try that with most other religious views of God. They're not precise enough to have these kinds of inferential implications where we can actually… What if someone said, okay, I can save monotheism by saying that God is the amalgam of all the conscious agents?"
},
{
"end_time": 8721.169,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8699.565,
"text": " And that would be another way to go at it. And that might be the critique that you give of my first definition of God. It would be my critique of my first definition of God would be to say, well, no, let God be the top conscious agent, the one that's the unit, the combination of all the other agents that exist."
},
{
"end_time": 8743.456,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8721.715,
"text": " But then it may turn out as we look at the dynamics of conscious agents and the combination, we may find that at any moment there may not be a single maximum. So it may not be a lattice where there's one peak to the whole network. There may be multiple and no single maximal at any one moment in the dynamics. So again, it would be a matter of"
},
{
"end_time": 8765.776,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8744.019,
"text": " And it may turn out to be a property of the kind of dynamics of conscious agents that you propose, that in these kinds of dynamics it's a polytheism and this one there's a monotheism. So that's what's so fun about this, is now all of a sudden we're already engaging, by the way, like this on"
},
{
"end_time": 8788.592,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8765.981,
"text": " the word God in a way that we could never before engage. This is now a technical term. And again, of course, everything that we've said so far is almost surely deeply wrong, but it's precise. And so we can find out precisely where it's wrong. And by the way, notice now we're in a very different space. I'm not tempted to kill you"
},
{
"end_time": 8818.08,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8788.951,
"text": " or hurt you because you disagree with me. I'm rather tempted to listen to your ideas and go, oh well, that's really cool. I hadn't thought about that. Let me rethink my position. It's a very, very different kind of thing. And so can we, I mean, it seems that the word God is very, very important to us. Instead of having it be an ambiguous term that we fight to the death over and hate each other over, why not have it be, since we think it's so important,"
},
{
"end_time": 8846.101,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8819.735,
"text": " It's important enough to be precise. If it's that important to us, then it's important enough that we should be precise about what we mean. And if we're precise about what we mean, then we can start to have a dialogue and try to refine it and come to some kind of mutual understanding. So that's sort of the scientific attitude of be precise so that we"
},
{
"end_time": 8875.674,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8846.766,
"text": " Don't get stuck in the same thoughts that we've had for thousands of years. We don't end up being dogmatic defenders of something that's not even well defined. Rather, it's a sense of humility. These are the best ideas that I, in my tradition, have had so far about God. There's probably a lot of insight in those ideas, and there's probably some mistakes. Let me listen to your ideas. Let's"
},
{
"end_time": 8905.708,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8876.254,
"text": " Have you listened to my ideas? And can we then get to a new and deeper and more precise notion of God, since we agree that this seems to be an important concept for us, can we together work in humility and both admit upfront that maybe we don't have it quite right? That's sort of the scientific attitude about this thing. Being precise is an ultimate act of humility on the one hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 8935.111,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8906.084,
"text": " because you're making yourself vulnerable to being shown wrong. But it's also the ultimate act of true inquisitiveness. It's saying, this is precisely the best idea I've got so far, but I really want to understand. So I'm stating it precisely so I can figure out why I'm wrong and then we can move on into a deeper inquiry. So that's what I would like to see in the discussion of God. I would love to see in this sense a"
},
{
"end_time": 8964.411,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8936.032,
"text": " scientific spirituality, which doesn't mean a dry, desiccated, you know, academic kind of discipline. It's rather taking these very important notions and giving them the respect that they deserve, a precise definition and a precise inquiry into what we mean, that could eventually then lead to a deeper understanding of right and wrong, of morals, what is a good life, what is the meaning of life and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 8968.08,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8964.889,
"text": " But if we can't even define our basic terms, how will we ever?"
},
{
"end_time": 8995.52,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8968.473,
"text": " Make progress on the deeper questions. BJ's Wholesale Club makes holiday hosting so easy, we called in Thanksgiving's original host to talk about it. Pilgrim here. We could have used BJ's back in the day. Imagine stepping off a boat then foraging for your first Thanksgiving. It's a whole new world now. BJ's brings Thanksgiving right to your door with free same day delivery on your first order of $100 or more. We're talking turkey, squash, pies, all at prices so good they'll knock the buckle right off your hat."
},
{
"end_time": 9025.026,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8997.398,
"text": " Okay, we're in the deep end already. Let's go to the Mariana Trench. What happens when you die? Well, if you're a physicalist, it's quite clear, right? Your consciousness is entirely the product of your brain or your embodied"
},
{
"end_time": 9055.828,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9026.203,
"text": " I mean, some of my colleagues will emphasize the cycle between sort of an inactive point of view that it's not just the brain, it's the brain and the body in the environment in that loop, that loop. Fine. But when you die, that loop stops. And therefore your consciousness stops. And so from that point of view, the prediction is quite clear. There's nothing that survives death. From the view that I'm proposing here, space-time itself is not fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 9086.886,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9057.773,
"text": " The brain does not cause anything, including our conscious experiences. Instead, space-time is like our headset. It's a virtual reality headset. So, consciousness does not have to die when the body dies. But, as I said, the Self is not fundamental in the theory that I'm developing."
},
{
"end_time": 9115.93,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9087.927,
"text": " The self is just a data structure, like space time is a data structure. So from the point of view that I'm working on right now, my death does not mean that my consciousness disappears, but myself may. I don't know yet. I mean, that's going to be something I want to work on in this theory. The self just being a data structure, maybe that data structure dissolves. Or maybe it's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 9142.841,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9117.261,
"text": " What happens in metamorphosis? A caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In some sense, there's not much recognizable left of the caterpillar when the butterfly emerges. There is a continuity, but the butterfly has only six legs."
},
{
"end_time": 9167.705,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9143.422,
"text": " The caterpillar had quite a few more. The caterpillar eats leaves. The butterfly can't eat leaves. The butterfly drinks nectar. The caterpillar never drank nectar. The butterfly has wings. The caterpillar has no concept of wings. They're the same creature at different stages, but they're utterly alien and maybe the thing that survives death is as different for me as a butterfly is from a caterpillar."
},
{
"end_time": 9190.384,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9168.097,
"text": " I'll give you an analogy that may be helpful here. Suppose you go to a virtual reality arcade with some friends to play say virtual volleyball."
},
{
"end_time": 9219.616,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9190.913,
"text": " You put on your headset and body suit and you see yourself immersed in a beach volleyball scene. You see palm trees and the net and sand and the avatars of your friends across the net. And so you serve the virtual volleyball and you guys play for a while. And then one of your friends, Bob, says, excuse me, I'm thirsty, I'm going to go get a drink. And he takes off his headset and his body suit to go get a drink. And his avatar collapses on the sand. Well, within"
},
{
"end_time": 9247.312,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9219.872,
"text": " that virtual reality, he's effectively dead. But of course Bob isn't dead, he just stepped out of the interface. And so there's this sense in the theory that I'm developing, that your body is just an avatar. The death of your body, just like the death of Bob in the virtual reality game, is not the death of Bob, Bob just was out getting a drink. So death may just be stepping out of the interface, but"
},
{
"end_time": 9276.118,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9248.387,
"text": " Even if consciousness survives, the consciousness that survives may be as different from the consciousness that you now have as you could imagine a butterfly being different from a caterpillar, even more. In the analogy of Bob going to get a drink, there's a retainment of memory in your model. I recall you saying earlier in the conversation that you don't have a theory for memory or there is no memory. I could be wrong, you might, but regardless does"
},
{
"end_time": 9303.712,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9276.869,
"text": " Memories are data structures as well. So those data structures may or may not be preserved. So that will be another aspect of this whole thing. But right now I have no reason to say upfront that I would claim that they necessarily are preserved. So I can't claim that your current notion of self would be preserved or your current memories would be preserved."
},
{
"end_time": 9330.811,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9304.087,
"text": " and the issue would then be could I build models of conscious agents in which I first model what the death process is as in terms of stepping out of a particular interface and can I find models so but but notice what I'm saying here now I'm actually trying to model the death process with a mathematical model in terms of conscious agents and then I'm asking a technical question could certain data structures"
},
{
"end_time": 9360.742,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9331.698,
"text": " the self data structure memory my own personal episodic memory data structures be retained in this other process that that is leading to the extraction of a conscious agent out of a particular interface that I don't know the answer to it but for me it's a technical question and a really interesting one and and one that I don't think is beyond our scope I think it's one that we can address we can try to find what I like about"
},
{
"end_time": 9390.265,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9361.374,
"text": " What I like about your approach is it reminds me of Newtonian approximation, where you just guess at what one of the roots are, and you know full well that it's likely to be wrong. But because of that guess, you can get closer and closer to the truth. That's how science works, right? You guess at the foundations. You guess at what the right assumptions are. Newton did a brilliant job. He's probably one of the smartest men that ever lived, maybe the smartest."
},
{
"end_time": 9418.609,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9390.555,
"text": " incredible brilliance. And where he was wrong, the new theories give Newton as an approximation. Like Einstein gives Newton as a limiting case, as the speed of light goes to infinity. Newton is wrong, but he's deeply right too. He had his hands on something. So we would like to have assumptions in this area of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 9448.029,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9419.155,
"text": " as minimal as possible but that then lead that turn all the kinds of questions you're asking into technical problems that we can in principle solve and all the questions you're asking so far are ones I think that we can pose as technical questions and try to solve them. Let's get back to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. People like Penrose and Lucas would say that any system that's computational in nature"
},
{
"end_time": 9477.961,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9448.387,
"text": " which yours sounds like, or at least is algorithmic or rule-based, would necessarily fail at a model of consciousness because within that system there are truths that that system cannot see as being true, but we can. How do you deal with that? What do you think of that? Well, so there are non-computable functions."
},
{
"end_time": 9504.838,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9478.985,
"text": " Right? And this is something that Penrose knows quite well and is focused on in some of his work. So, in fact, it's quite remarkable. If you just look at the integers, or even just the natural numbers, let's say the integers, no. And you ask, look at all the functions from the integers to the integers. Right? Well, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 9535.111,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9505.555,
"text": " Mathematicians can show that there's an uncountable set of functions from the integers to the integers, because the number of functions is the power set of the integers, so it's higher cardinality than the integers. So it's an uncountable set. But Turing proved that the set of all computable functions is countable. Therefore, when we look at just"
},
{
"end_time": 9565.23,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9536.118,
"text": " the collection of functions from the integers to the integers, which is uncountable. What that means is that almost no function is computable. When you look at the set of all functions, the set of computable functions is probability zero for some interesting measure. So the reason we focus on computable functions is partly because of our lack of imagination. It's hard for us to imagine"
},
{
"end_time": 9594.804,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9565.879,
"text": " un-computable functions, right? If you've taken a class in computer science where you actually have to, like, deal with un-computable functions, you can get there. You can study a non-computable function, but boy is it hard. It really strips all the gears in your head. It's just so hard for us. So most functions are not computable. Our brains have a hard time even understanding one of them. So it's a real limitation of our brains."
},
{
"end_time": 9615.23,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9597.466,
"text": " In my field, cognitive neuroscience, we're giving computational theories of mind. There is a way to look at this, what my field is doing, and say, what are you guys up to? You're trying to give computational theories of cognition."
},
{
"end_time": 9643.643,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9616.408,
"text": " If you're saying that cognition is only based on computation, you're claiming that of all the functions that are available, there's this probability zero subset of functions that are only responsible for our minds and for consciousness, right? Like, you know, the Tononi and Koch approach of, you know, integrated information. It's a computational function. So why should we assume that cognition in general and consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 9672.892,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9644.701,
"text": " is restricted to this probability zero subset of functions. What's the principled reason for that? And most of my colleagues don't even understand that this is an issue and certainly don't have an answer for it, but of course Penrose is an exception. Penrose is saying he understands all this. But I still don't agree with where Penrose goes on this, right? Penrose is saying he still wants to start with a physicalist framework"
},
{
"end_time": 9699.121,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9673.422,
"text": " and get consciousness to emerge by some kind of objective reduction of… Forget about that. I'd say it's more fundamental. The conscious agent model looks to me to be algorithmic or rule-based, and the statement from Penrose, independent of whether or not consciousness emerges from physicality, just forget about that, is that a rule-based system"
},
{
"end_time": 9728.302,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9699.548,
"text": " can't account for our conscious behavior, given that we have an understanding of what's true, but not provable within that rule based system, any rule based system. And because we have that quality, our consciousness can't be relegated to an algorithm, which yours seems like now, it could just be this is rudimentary form like I'm at step one, or there might be another counter and I'm just curious to know what you think. Well, so"
},
{
"end_time": 9752.329,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9728.729,
"text": " Again, the framework of what I'm doing is different from what he's trying to do. I'm not trying to explain how consciousness arises. I'm assuming it. So consciousness is given. Now there's a question, do consciousnesses interact only by rules? Right now I'm studying rules, but I'm completely open to non-computational"
},
{
"end_time": 9767.398,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9753.234,
"text": " I see, I see."
},
{
"end_time": 9797.21,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9768.148,
"text": " Surely if there, I don't want to exclude rule-based interactions, but I may find that I don't want to restrict to rule-based interaction. So I'm starting with the rule-based ones, partly because of my background and my limitations, but eventually I'd love to go beyond. So I would say point well taken. Non-computational approaches may be very, very interesting in this. Absolutely. There's a cognitive scientist named Jonathan Vervecky or John Vervecky, and he says that there are four"
},
{
"end_time": 9824.514,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9799.002,
"text": " I don't know if they're orthogonal, they're definitely related, but there's four different modes of knowledge, and one is propositional, and that's what, since the development of the scientific method, we've relegated our knowledge to, the propositions are what are true. But he says while there are others, there's participatory knowing, there's procedural knowledge, obviously, like that one anyone can get, and then there's perspectival. And I'm curious, it's like, how would one even"
},
{
"end_time": 9853.439,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9824.838,
"text": " If your theory would incorporate, then how the heck can you even write down, because this notion of writing down is a proposition, how would one model the other three fundamentally? Well, so in current neural network models, the way that the network learns is not by acquiring new propositions, it's by updating connection weights in the network."
},
{
"end_time": 9882.312,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9854.377,
"text": " That's a procedural knowledge. So the history of AI, I was in the artificial intelligence lab at MIT. I did my PhD there and in the brain and cognitive science department at MIT from 79 to 83. At the time, AI was mostly about propositional. It was good old-fashioned AI. So it was explicit algorithms with specific things that you could write down as propositions and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 9908.609,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9882.892,
"text": " But with neural networks, you have this kind of thing where the system learns, but it's not learning propositions. You're just updating weights and you're getting behaviors. And that turns out to be very, very effective for modeling procedural memories, like motor memories and so forth. And in fact, at Boston Dynamics, I believe they've made great progress by having"
},
{
"end_time": 9939.258,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9909.48,
"text": " robots that fall down and try things and they walk, fall down, but their neural networks are just updating and updating and updating. They don't get any list of propositions, do this actuator, then do that actuator. No, it's just this procedural memory. There's been this big debate between propositional and procedural that's gone on between the neural network modelers and the good old-fashioned AI kinds of modelers and so forth. It's a profitable"
},
{
"end_time": 9965.452,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9940.009,
"text": " debate and then there's the inactive or embodied cognition kind of thing that comes into it as well. I'm taking a perspectival thing as well, right, so I'm saying that in some sense conscious experiences and perspectives therefore are fundamental but I see within the network of conscious agents being able to get both procedural and explicit propositional kinds of representations coming out."
},
{
"end_time": 9995.435,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9965.794,
"text": " But I think also, as you said, I should be looking at non-computational approaches to this. And I've got some mathematician friends working with me who are expert in category theory. So category theory is a great way to explode this into a very, very general mathematical framework. And we intend to go there. I know you got to go soon. I'm going to just get to the best of questions, or the ones that I answered, which might be more technical. At some point, you use Landau's limit."
},
{
"end_time": 10010.299,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9996.732,
"text": " You know what I'm, you recall what I'm referring to. Okay. Why do you use that when LANDR's limit presupposes space and time? Why do you use that as a limit for the amount of ticks or the energy that goes into a tick?"
},
{
"end_time": 10039.445,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 10011.425,
"text": " We've used that and this is largely the brilliance of my friend Chris Fields who's a physicist who's been working on that. So he likes to look at the information theoretic things using Landauer's principle and to look, so most of his analyses are in terms of quantum theory and what are the limits of information transfer in quantum systems. So that's usually the context in which we bring that up. Ultimately if we"
},
{
"end_time": 10052.858,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 10040.094,
"text": " get a theory"
},
{
"end_time": 10081.817,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 10053.626,
"text": " is capturing features of the information dynamics of conscious agents. So it will come there as a property of the interface, but not as a fundamental limit of consciousness. Okay. Okay. And does that give a bound for the amount of time for each click? So just so people are aware, there was that model that I'll show on the screen. There's the WXG. I was simplifying it. There's a T that's in the middle that counts the amount of revolutions in the system."
},
{
"end_time": 10111.715,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 10082.585,
"text": " I could be wrong. Just correct me. But either way, that to me seems akin to time. And then in the paper, it seemed like you were giving a lower limit to time saying that the amount that a conscious agent can experience is something like 100 femtoseconds. Please correct me if I'm incorrect here. And I thought that, well, that sounds like a theoretical prediction too. That if we can get a camera or conscious experience of a quicker time, then that would invalidate it. Or if we can't, then that would be evidence for it."
},
{
"end_time": 10138.097,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 10112.722,
"text": " Right, so I don't go that direction with it. And I don't think that Chris Fields goes that direction with it either, and for the following reason. There is no fundamental pixelation of space-time, right? So, space-time is doomed."
},
{
"end_time": 10165.009,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 10139.787,
"text": " not because we run into pixels at the Planck scale, but rather because space-time itself ceases to be well-defined. It's not an empirically observable construct at that level. The attempts to think about space-time as being pixelated at roughly the Planck scale run into a very serious problem"
},
{
"end_time": 10194.599,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 10165.282,
"text": " They're not Lorentz invariant. The pixels, what's tiny for you may not be tiny for someone else. So it's been, no one has a way to make the pixelation of space-time Lorentz invariant. And so I wouldn't want to go there, and I don't think Chris Fields would want to go there. Nevertheless, we may find, I mean, the Landauer limit does play a role in information transfers in space-time. So we will want to understand where that limit comes from, from our theory of consciousness,"
},
{
"end_time": 10218.882,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 10194.77,
"text": " and our theory of emergent space-time, but I don't see us getting any predictions about a pixelation of time or a pixelation of space because it would violate Lorentz invariance. On the interface theory, when I'm not looking at, let's say, the Moon, it doesn't necessarily exist, but you're saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 10247.927,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 10219.087,
"text": " What doesn't exist is our idea of the Moon, or that our idea is representing something and that something still persists. It's just our idea of the Moon doesn't exist. Right. So when I say the Moon doesn't exist, I'm saying it in the same way that if I look like at an image and see an illusory cube, and sometimes the cube I see one corner, one face in front, and sometimes it flips and I see another face in front."
},
{
"end_time": 10275.64,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 10249.189,
"text": " And then when I look away, I say that there is no such thing as the cube because the cube only exists when I look at it and then I see the cube and it's flipping. The same thing with the Moon. The Moon is like that cube. Now, there is some reality that I'm interacting with and it continues to exist whether or not I look. But that reality is not inside space and time at all, much less is it the Moon. Space and time themselves"
},
{
"end_time": 10306.152,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 10276.288,
"text": " are not a fundamental reality. They are data structures that we create. So anything that's in space-time is in some sense no more real than the illusory cube that I look and then destroy when I look away. Space-time itself is created and destroyed by us. So it only exists in the same way that that illusory cube exists. Which isn't to say that there isn't something that exists but is not even in space and time. Whatever it exists that's outside of space and time, it's outside of my headset."
},
{
"end_time": 10327.466,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 10306.988,
"text": " I see, I see. So let's imagine there's Tickle Me Elmo, and I see the Tickle Me Elmo, and you're like, okay, you look, it's gone, it's destroyed, it's not rendered anymore, but a camera that I just press record on can record the Tickle Me Elmo, then I can go and press play. How do you account for that? Well, notice you only see the Elmo on the camera when you look. You only see the camera when you look."
},
{
"end_time": 10346.578,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 10327.875,
"text": " So the camera itself is again just something that exists when you perceive it. It's pointing to another reality. There is a reality that exists independent of you but the reality is not the camera and it's not the digital recording on the camera. Those are just again your own icons. So the camera itself is just a symbol."
},
{
"end_time": 10376.834,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 10347.432,
"text": " I know you've covered this before, but just for the people who are listening, how does your theory account for intersubjective agreement? Now that is one of our current projects. So one of the papers we're working on right now is exactly that problem because it is critical to science. The way scientists typically talk about it"
},
{
"end_time": 10405.06,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 10377.398,
"text": " about what science is doing is that what makes science special in some sense is that one scientist can look at a physical system like this animal or this planet and another scientist can make their own independent measurements of that animal, that specific animal or that planet and then we can go and compare notes. In other words we have this notion of public physical objects, objects that are really there whether or not"
},
{
"end_time": 10431.22,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 10405.469,
"text": " We exist like dinosaur bones, right? The dinosaur bones have been there for 200 million years. They were there. If no one had ever been around, they would still be there. I can look at the dinosaur bones. You can look at the dinosaur bones. They're public physical objects. We can make our measurements, get the DNA and so forth. That's gone in my point of view. That whole point of view is gone because space-time itself is doomed. Space-time isn't fundamental. There are no public physical objects. So how do we rethink"
},
{
"end_time": 10460.384,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 10431.664,
"text": " what we mean by objectivity in science, where objectivity has to do with, again, having independent scientists do their own experiments and come to some agreement. So the framework that I'm working on right now poses that as a really serious question. And so we're writing a paper on that right now and we're going to be running simulations. But here's the kind of idea that I'm playing with. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 10487.824,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 10461.715,
"text": " that we have to take the possibility of synesthesia very seriously. We actually know synesthesia occurs. It could be easily in the cards that your visual experiences that you described with the words red and round and square and so forth. And I described, if I could get inside your head for all I know, I would go, Whoa,"
},
{
"end_time": 10516.425,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 10488.37,
"text": " That's not what I would call red and round. That's what I would call the smell of garlic and the taste of butter or a headache. Just like Michael Watson, he tastes mint, but he feels a tall, cold, smooth column of glass. I don't feel that. If all Michael Watson ever experienced were the feelings in his hand, he would have a perfectly good taste sensation. He could cook. He could figure out what foods"
},
{
"end_time": 10545.213,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 10516.783,
"text": " So in other words, you and I as scientists could absolutely agree, believe that we're talking the same language and yet your experiences could be synesthetically utterly different from mine and we would never know. And I think that that's going to turn out to be a fundamental and unbreachable limit to what we can know"
},
{
"end_time": 10572.21,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10545.657,
"text": " and to the degree of objectivity that we can have in science. The technical thing would be that we can only agree up to effectively a homomorphism, a homomorphism of your set of perceptual representations and experiences and mine. The homomorphism could be as radical as the difference between the taste of mint and a tall, cold, smooth column of glass. It could be that different and we would never know"
},
{
"end_time": 10600.452,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 10572.91,
"text": " The only reason we know in Michael Watson's case is because he had both and he could tell us about both. We could say, oh, I understand the one, but gee, I never thought about the other. That's incredible. So we're going to have to understand what is the most confirmation and what's the greatest level of agreement that scientists can have given this possibility of"
},
{
"end_time": 10625.435,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 10600.896,
"text": " synesthetic complete divergence between us. And I would love to, I was talking with my colleagues on this in the paper that we're writing, we may actually do this, not just as a thought experiment paper, we may actually do this. I would love to create this really interesting virtual reality game, two player game or multiplayer, but"
},
{
"end_time": 10648.575,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 10626.084,
"text": " For one player, they're immersed in what seems like, say, Grand Theft Auto. The other player is immersed in a completely different game, like Super Mario Bros. But I've arranged it, so they both think that they're playing the same game, and they are actually playing, and they win and lose, but they have no idea that the other person is in a completely different virtual world."
},
{
"end_time": 10677.91,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 10649.019,
"text": " and they but they're also they're they're using language there they seem to agree right you take them out of their heads to have them swap and blow their minds when they find out what the other person was doing i think we can do that and so we have to be if that's true if that's possible in category theory that would be the idea that you might have this one category for your representation that other scientists might have another category but if there's some functor if there's some functor that maps"
},
{
"end_time": 10700.333,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 10678.2,
"text": " the objects and relations that you have in your interface to the objects and relations that the other scientist has in their interface. If you have the right functor, then the scientists will have the appearance of agreement and they will never know that they're separated by this functor. And so I think that there's going to be"
},
{
"end_time": 10723.456,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 10701.954,
"text": " Category theoretic analysis ahead on this that are going to be really quite stunning. But I think that's going to be the future of the philosophy of science is this category theoretic fundamental limitation on the agreement that scientists can have. There are no public physical objects. So what does it mean for us to get"
},
{
"end_time": 10754.991,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 10725.674,
"text": " laboratory independent verification. My laboratory gets it, your laboratory gets it. What are we really doing in that case? It's going to be up to some functor. Right. It sounds to me, and I only have three, three more questions and they might be long, but I have three questions. It sounds to me like you're saying that there is some homomorphic functions between us and that's responsible for why we feel like we share a similar world. However, can we not use the same argument that you use to show that the"
},
{
"end_time": 10782.79,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 10755.435,
"text": " probability that we see the truth is zero, that is that the immiscible functions grow much larger than the homomorphic functions to the structure? Can we not use that to say that the probability that we share any interface is also zero, including homomorphic aspects? Not at least within the theory of conscious agents and the dynamics that I'm talking about now, because what we can do is we can ask, are there certain"
},
{
"end_time": 10810.879,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 10782.995,
"text": " strategies of interaction that conscious agents can have where they would converge in the limit to homomorphic things, right? So it's different evolutionary game theory where the rules have been spelled out. I mean, in that, I don't get to play with their constraints. So it's not just uniform probability. That's right. So I see. So in the case of conscious agents, the question is, can we find dynamics in which the agents can converge up to homomorphisms? And I think we can."
},
{
"end_time": 10840.776,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 10812.483,
"text": " Okay, here's one that's super philosophical. If what you're saying is that we're not tuned for truth, because truth is deleterious, at least compared to fitness, which is salubrious. However, let's imagine your theory is correct. Then we're starting to see the truth. Does that not mean that it's deleterious? We shouldn't do that. We're not designed for that. Absolutely not. And so here's where it's very, very careful to, to again, see the game that I'm playing. The game that I'm playing is"
},
{
"end_time": 10868.2,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 10841.067,
"text": " I take evolution on its own terms and I see what its implications are. I don't say I believe evolution. I'm just playing the game. This is what the math of evolution says. It says very clearly we don't see the truth. Okay, that's what evolution says. Probability is zero that we see the truth. That's not what Hoffman says. Hoffman doesn't care about that except to understand that that's what evolution says. But evolution says that doesn't mean I believe it. So I'm free on the one hand to prove"
},
{
"end_time": 10894.77,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 10868.609,
"text": " that evolution entails we don't see the truth. I'm free to prove that, and then to step back and say, I still believe we see the truth. Here's my theory in which we see the truth. But, the constraint will then be, okay then, if you have this theory in which we see the truth, you have to explain how it is, in that framework where you see the truth, that you end up arriving at the theory of evolution by natural selection which says otherwise. If you can't do that, then you're wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 10914.65,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 10895.162,
"text": " So this is a really, and by the way it's a great question because I get this question in emails quite a bit. So the key thing is this, Hoffman doesn't say we don't see the truth. Evolution by natural selection says we don't see the truth. I don't say that. Evolution by natural selection says that. I just"
},
{
"end_time": 10935.384,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 10914.991,
"text": " I'm just pointing out what one of our best theories entails. Now I'm stepping back and I'm going, I would like to see the truth. Of course, maybe I can't. I'm not saying I know that we can see the truth. I'm just saying, as a scientist, I would like to come up with a theory"
},
{
"end_time": 10965.947,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 10936.186,
"text": " which entails that we see the truth. That's why I'm looking at consciousness because I am conscious. So if I'm conscious and the reality is consciousness, there is some connection between me and reality. I might actually be able to understand that reality because I'm conscious. But then the burden is on me to then explain how my theory where I see the truth of these conscious agents leads to an interface of space-time and in that interface this theory of evolution and natural selection which says you don't see the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 10993.183,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 10966.664,
"text": " Well, that won't be so strikingly strange because evolution is telling you that what you see in the interface isn't the truth. Well, I'm also saying that from this bigger picture. I'm saying that there's this realm of conscious agents outside this FaceTime interface that's the truth, and you can't see it within the interface. Well, it's not going to be a surprise that evolution by natural selection says that inside the interface. So it'll all work out."
},
{
"end_time": 11023.012,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 10993.643,
"text": " So that's, I hope that gives, that's a great question. Okay. Let me quick, let me rephrase it so that I get it across because I don't think I portrayed it correctly. You're saying that, and I'm sorry, evolutionary theory is saying that we're not designed for the truth. We're designed for fitness. Right. And those are two completely separate phenomena. Okay. If we were designed for truth, if we were able to see the truth, that would be horrible for us. But at the same time, you're like, I want to look at the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 11050.299,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 11023.456,
"text": " Let's say you're actually uncovering the truth. Is that not harmful, given the presupposition that we should be pursuing fitness and not truth? No, it's not, because by stepping outside of the entire framework of evolution, I'm stepping outside of its assumptions. I'm saying there's a deeper framework in which the assumptions of evolution aren't true. I see, I see. Only true within the headset. The headset is just a headset. There's this deeper reality outside the headset."
},
{
"end_time": 11077.995,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 11050.486,
"text": " It's like if I see the Twitterverse only through my headset and there's certain rules about how I perceive in the headset and I assume that those rules of what I see in the headset must apply to all the Twitter users, well that's stupid. The Twitter users are doing their own thing. My headset is just smashing all this complexity into this trivial little headset and that's why evolution has to tell us that it's not seeing the truth because what's happened from this bigger framework is space-time and objects in space-time is this a"
},
{
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"text": " Incredible smashing down information losing map from the reality this vast social network into this trivial little space-time Interface so it's no surprise that evolution by natural selection is saying you know what? You're not going to see the truth. You're just going to see little interface symbols. That's what it's telling us and I say I agree We're only seeing interface symbols, but that's only in space-time We're not stuck in space-time you and I are not in space-time we create space-time"
},
{
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"start_time": 11108.251,
"text": " The rules of the game apply within the game, but you can step out of the game. That's right. Okay. Okay. The authors of the game. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. I'm going to, I'm going to, instead of asking you, I'm going to list the last questions and then you just choose one. Cause I know you got to go. Okay. So I was going to say, where does, where do people like Deepak Chopra take your message too far? So that's an option. You can answer that. Another one is when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the light."
},
{
"end_time": 11167.381,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 11137.944,
"text": " What truth do you think he was referring to? And then the other question, what determines the initial world state? Well, those are all tough. With Deepak, Deepak and I have been good friends for several years now. He's a spiritual teacher. I'm not. We respect each other. I respect him as"
},
{
"end_time": 11196.288,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 11167.619,
"text": " as a seeker and he's learning to be careful about how he throws around words like quantum mechanics and so forth. I mean he's been he's been I'm aware he's taken hits in the past and I think that that but I have really he and I and this is really important science and spirituality do need to have a dialogue and whenever there's a dialogue even within"
},
{
"end_time": 11224.855,
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"start_time": 11196.63,
"text": " members of two different scientific disciplines, you have to have a lot of patience with the other person. So, you know, someone who is not a cognitive scientist coming to talk to me say he's a chemist. Well, when I start talking chemistry with him, I'm going to feel like and be really stupid compared to him. When he talks cognitive science to me, he's going to be really pedestrian to me. It's going to be the same thing in science and spirituality. So if I want productive dialogue, of course, I'm going to be saying things that to someone who's spiritually"
},
{
"end_time": 11252.415,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 11225.674,
"text": " trained is going to sound, you know, scientific nonsense and immature and not very deep and vice versa. So, of course, I'll have said things that Deepak thinks are spiritually stupid and then he says things that, you know, in quantum mechanics and so forth that, you know, most scientists would say that's not what a really trained scientist would say. Fine."
},
{
"end_time": 11274.684,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 11253.882,
"text": " But if we want to have a dialogue that's really productive, we have to cut each other some slack. We have to listen past the barriers and understand. You know, it took me many, many years to understand what I know about cognitive science. I can't expect someone to just pop into my field and sound like they know what they're talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 11291.374,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 11275.282,
"text": " If I'm not willing to cut them some slack, we'll never get a dialogue. And I learned from my dialogue with Deepak, he learns in his dialogue with me, and we've learned to have this respect of what each other knows and trying to learn from the other. So that's what I hope"
},
{
"end_time": 11320.555,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 11292.108,
"text": " We mirror, and of course it's my job to gently correct him when I see things that he says that might be wrong, and it's his job to gently correct me when I misstate his tradition, for example. So that's perfectly fine. On Jesus, I don't know what to say about... I mean, I was raised... My father was a fundamentalist Christian minister, so I read the Bible cover to cover more than once."
},
{
"end_time": 11351.186,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 11322.466,
"text": " I know what the standard interpretation of the Bible is among Protestant fundamentalist Christians. What Jesus meant when he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, I don't know. I'll just say, I don't know. I will say that I think that there are many beautiful insights in the Bible."
},
{
"end_time": 11377.671,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 11352.705,
"text": " And I think there's also nonsense. And I think that just like in scientific theories there are many beautiful insights and then there are places where we know we're absolutely wrong. And my attitude for any scripture and for any scientific theory is the same. Let's treasure the insights and let's recognize humbly that we can be wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 11400.606,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 11378.677,
"text": " Any religious tradition, any scripture, any scientific theory, if we're not willing to be wrong, to open up to the possibility that something we deeply believe could be deeply wrong, we can't grow. That's the place where we stop growing. So it's a matter of humility"
},
{
"end_time": 11432.176,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 11402.227,
"text": " both to listen to other traditions, other points of view, to be open that they may have insights I've never had, I may have insights that they've never had, I may have nonsense that they can point out, they may have nonsense that I can point out. If we can do it in this respectful way, again like the kind of thing I'm trying to do with Deepak, I don't want to have him say something wrong about quantum mechanics and go, oh, you said that about quantum mechanics, forget it, I'm not going to talk to you anymore, you got that wrong. That's not the way to do it."
},
{
"end_time": 11461.101,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 11432.398,
"text": " to have a respectful dialogue if others are willing to humbly also put out their ideas and listen. That I think is the heart of true religion. When we talk about loving each other, what deeper love can you have than to respectfully and carefully listen to the thoughts and opinions of others and be willing to entertain the possibility that they may be right in some places and you may be wrong. That's a deep respectful and humble"
},
{
"end_time": 11489.599,
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"start_time": 11461.766,
"text": " Thank you. Don, where can the audience find out more about you? If you Google Donald Hoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-N, my homepage at the University of California comes up and I've got links to my papers and I have a book, The Case Against Reality, published by Norton. So The Case Against Reality is a great place to get"
},
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"start_time": 11490.162,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, et cetera,"
},
{
"end_time": 11543.746,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 11516.647,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.