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Donald Hoffman Λ John Vervaeke on Infinity, Non-Dualism, Ego, and Reality
November 26, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region.
I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and 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.
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So the bigger question for me is if I am and you are this unlimited intelligence that transcends concepts
Why does that unlimited intelligence engage in using concepts? For me, that's the big question. First of all, you're in good company. This is an ancient problem. Why does the one become mini?
If you're intrigued by the nature of consciousness, its origins, and how it may relate to physics, meaning, and purpose, then this conversation is a dream team. John Vervecky is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto and a professor of cognitive science, Buddhism, and psychology, with wide-reaching research, advancing an argument that explains the mindfulness revolution as well as the current meaning crisis. His lecture series, The Meaning Crisis, is on YouTube and is exquisite. I highly recommend it if you'd like to see one of the
brilliant minds of our generation sharing his process of universal interpretation links as usual to every reference in this podcast or in the description. Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine and is the author of the case against reality. Don argues that reality is not what you see instead it's an interface of icons.
Hoffman has appeared on Ted, co-authored over a hundred scientific articles, and is back along with John Vervecki. Don's previous appearance on Theories of Everything, this podcast where we go over the mathematical details of his conscious agent theory, is in the description as well as the other podcasts with him, with Don Hoffman and Joscha Bach, and also John Vervecki has appeared with Joscha Bach. John has also appeared with Bernardo Kastrup as well as Solo. Every episode is linked in the description.
Note that around the 30-35 minute mark, you'll hear two sponsors, Shopify and Masterworks. They're brief, and I request that you don't skip as watching them directly contributes to this channel having more quality, in-depth, technical podcasts, and we select sponsors that we believe in. And right now, there's a 60-second message from our first sponsor, Brilliant. If you're familiar with Toe, you're familiar with Brilliant, but for those who don't know, Brilliant is a place where you go to learn math, science, and engineering
Through these bite sized interactive learning experiences, for example, and I keep saying this, I would like to do a podcast on information theory, particularly Chiara Marletto, which is David Deutsch's student has a theory of everything that she puts forward called constructor theory, which is heavily contingent on information theory. So I took their course on random variable distributions and knowledge and uncertainty.
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It would be unnatural to define it in any other manner. Visit brilliant.org slash TOE, that is T-O-E, to get 20% off the annual subscription, and I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons. I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects you previously had a difficult time grokking. At some point, I'll also go through the courses and give a recommendation in order. Enjoy today's Theolucution with John Vervecky and Donald Hoffman. We'll start off with something new, something new that you've both learned in the past
So, John, why don't you start off?
What have I learned? I've been reading. I've learned a lot. I'm trying to think of something that might be relevant. I don't know how this conversation is going to go. So preemptive judgments of relevance are extremely tricky. If someone knows relevance, it's you. The fact that I study it doesn't mean... It's like I love wisdom. That doesn't mean I'm wise.
I've been reading an essay, well first an essay on Nishida's essay and then Nishida's essay on intelligibility and it's been very interesting to me because I'm seeing a rather profound convergence between Zen philosophical notions of intelligibility and the neoplatonic ones and I'm finding that
I'm finding that very powerful because that kind of convergence says something across cultures and time you're getting that kind of convergence lends plausibility to this examination of intelligibility. And as you know, I do a lot of work around what is intelligibility, etc. So I think that will turn out to be relevant to our discussion.
But I'm also really happy to see where this discussion is going to go. I'm really sort of excited to be here talking with Donald and I know he has an extremely flexible mind. So I'm just but I think intelligibility might come up as a relevant topic. Great. I want to make a note for later. You said that you love wisdom, but you're not sure if you're wise. I don't know. Does the love of wisdom imply that you're wise, though, in the same way that loving what's good implies that you're good?
No, no, that was exactly my point. The fact that I study relevance and I love it doesn't mean I'm necessarily an expert at enacting it. In fact, people often go into psychology to study what they most lack. So I may actually be somebody who's initially very, I know within social circumstances, I've generally been poor at picking up what's relevant. It's been something that I've been learning over time very slowly. Such is the curse of academics. Okay, Don,
Well, I've been working on a paper on relationship of consciousness to physics. And so I've been thinking a lot about that. We're about to submit it to this week and trying to show how we boot up space, time and particle physics from a theory of consciousness. And so one thing just as I was driving yesterday that I learned just by putting some pieces together, the physicists have this notion about the vacuum.
and relationship to certain mathematical structures called permutations and they they relate them the vacuum to the trivial permutation and then particle interactions to these non-trivial permutations called decorative permutation and i realized in our friend yesterday so what i learned was as i was reviewing the mathematics of our mathematical framework of consciousness i realized the dynamical aspect of conscious agents that corresponds to the vacuum and it corresponds to agents
whose dynamics is completely transient. They don't talk to anybody else and they don't even talk to themselves. So their Markovian dynamics is completely transient and that was what corresponds to what the physicists call the vacuum state.
And so, but all of a sudden, when I realized that the whole thing begins to make sense. And so, so for me, what was a big aha yesterday was, okay, I'm getting starting with consciousness, trying to understand particle scattering in physics as a result of consciousness. And I understand what the vacuum means that it actually makes sense in the mathematical framework we're dealing with. So, so I guess it's relevant, because if we end up talking about consciousness and space, time and physics and physicalism, these kinds of concepts will be very
Are you trying to study scattering because you're inspired by Nima's work? I'm trying to study scattering because ultimately if we want to have a mathematically precise scientific theory of consciousness that's going to be taken seriously by the scientific world, you've got to make predictions that are testable.
A lot of my colleagues are thinking we need to make predictions at the neuroscience level and of course we eventually do. But brains are really complicated and particles are very simple. So my goal is to make predictions about two gluons in four gluons out scattering first because not because that's harder because it's easier than neuroscience and the physicists have already given us a way into that. So they've said
If you want to do particle scattering, there are these structures beyond space-time, like the amplitude hydron, and then the deeper structure is the decorator permutations. And so they say if you can give us a decorator permutation,
we can give you a scattering amplitude for some kind of particle dynamics and so what i've been working on is is that starting with the theory of consciousness that's dynamical show how the decorative permutations come out and from then i can just then use all the wonderful work by the physicists like nema and his collaborators that start with these decorative permutations and give you scattering amplitudes
The big goal is to start with consciousness and make predictions at colliders that are testable and hopefully new predictions that their current models can't make, right? I would like to, for example, explain why supersymmetry doesn't work based on this dynamics of consciousness. So not just, of course, we need to get all the stuff that they've already done and we need to be able to capture their predictions that they've already tested, but we need to make new predictions as well. So that's why I was really working on the scattering amplitudes because
One, they're a way to empirically test the theory. Number two, we know this really well. We have the data, we know what the right answers are, and we know what the outstanding problems are. And then the fourth thing is, I would rather start there than neuroscience because it may seem counterintuitive, but the scattering is going to be much, much easier than making connections with neuroscience that are absolutely rigorous and testable to, you know, 10 decibel places or something like that.
Okay, so the last broad question and then I'm going to leave the floor open to you both to riff off of one another is what is it that you find impactful about one another's work and we'll start Don with you toward John and then John, you'll respond and then I'll interject fairly seldomly.
John, what's beautiful is he's one of those rare truly renaissance individuals who knows ancient philosophy and modern philosophy, he knows modern neuroscience, he knows evolutionary psychology, he knows the scientific method backwards and forwards, but he also knows mystical traditions and he knows how to pick and choose from all of these in an intelligent way to get a synthesis that is then, I think,
I'm potentially life changing for many many people to get meaning in our lives to understand our current political situation and so is one of those rare individuals who really knows. This broad variety of topics he knows how to integrate them is not just a dilettante but he actually knows how to integrate them in.
Thank you, Donald. That was very kind, and I
That speaks to what I like about you. I think you and I belong to the school of what I like to call big picture cognitive science, which is not this or that. I mean, you do specialist work and I do specialist work, but we don't think that's the core of good science, that integrating into a broad framework is important and frameworks like you that try to bridge between
I think you asked big questions. I think you you somebody who talks about
consciousness and ultimate reality, and yet wants to talk about it in a scientifically rigorous, even mathematical, formalized mathematical way. You can see why I deeply resonate with that. I may not agree with all of your particular conclusions, and that's to be said. I mean, do any two academics? But the point is, I think, if I can put it this way, in many important ways, we're on the same side of the tracks. We think we should be doing these broad
integrations that are not facile but are pertinent, precise, well argued for, well evidenced, and that they have important existential, sapiential, and therefore spiritual in that sense, consequences that should be respected. We should not limit the pool from which we're drawing our analyses to just sort of current philosophy or current science.
but much more broad, cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-disciplinary. So, I mean, like I say, I'm sure we'll get into disagreement, but I want to say this upfront, which is, I often say this, and I mean it, and people can see that I mean it, and how I
How I carry myself in discussions, the manner in which you're doing these things, I think is really, really right in a profound and important way. And I think you present it in a way that's often very challenging to people who have a much more, I want to be kind here, much more specialized, I was going to say blinkered, but a much more specialized epistemology. And I think that is really needed now. I think all
I'll speak for psychology. We both are in psychology, at least we both have a point. I have one in psychology and cognitive science. You have one in psychology and other things too, philosophy, cognitive science. But one of the things that bothers me about psychology is this emphasis on innovation as opposed to integration. I would argue that's one of the things driving the replication crisis. And I think the resistance to creating
Broad philosophically astute frameworks within psychology is something that needs to be challenged. And I see that you and I are both doing that. And I think that's very, very important. You know what, let me ask a question. So I'll start this off with the perhaps the most basic question. We say that conscious or some people say that consciousness is fundamental. And then there's various questions like, well, what is consciousness? So here's
Another question what is fundamental so what's fundamental if one doesn't assume reductionism and if one does have to assume reductionism for something to be fundamental then does that mean that. Conceptually reductionism is more fundamental than the x that you're saying is fundamental so anyway what is fundamental. I'll be happy to start sure sure so i think that.
There's two important and different concepts going on here. One is reductionism, which has to do with an assumption about space time being fundamental. And with reductionism, the idea is that as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space time, you get to more and more fundamental objects and more and more fundamental laws. So that's a particular idea. And by the way, reductionism is assuming
that space-time itself is fundamental, because it's taking smaller scales of space as being associated with more and more fundamental objects and laws. But fundamental for me is a much broader concept than, say, space-time. Fundamental is a property of scientific theories. So every scientific theory has assumptions. No theory in science is free of any assumptions.
These assumptions are the foundation of that scientific theory. And so what's fundamental is with respect to a particular theory. What does that take as the fundamental concepts for building that theory? So I think the notion of fundamental is a theory
relative concept. You should ask, what's fundamental in this particular scientific theory? In Einstein's theory of gravity, space-time is fundamental. In evolution by natural selection, we have the notion of physical objects in space-time and things like genes and competition and replication. Those are fundamental concepts in that theory.
But you can have different scientific theories with different fundamental concepts. Most of modern science does take space-time as fundamental, but then they'll also add other
Other concepts as well to be fundamental like in evolution, you'll also add organisms and DNA and replication and so forth. So most scientific theories also inherit the assumption that reductionism is a good method. Most of them do.
I'll just turn it over to John, but I'll just say that physicists now are saying that space-time is not fundamental, like Neymar, Connie, Ahmed, and others, and therefore reductionism is doomed. Not just space-time, but reductionism is doomed. But I'll stop there.
So I agree with, I think I'm agreeing with Donald, that I would want to distinguish reductionism from claims of fundamentals. I think reductionism is very problematic.
It gets you into certain performative contradictions if you try to make an absolute complete reductionism because it gets you into saying things like only the bottom level is real and I know that from this level up here which isn't real and you get all kinds of performative contradictions going on there. You have measurement problems. Wolfgang Smith has brought this out. The ruler can't be a quantum thing to measure the quantum things where you get into
Briefly, why do you say performative contradiction and not contradiction? Performative contradiction means that there isn't a contradiction between propositions, there's contradictions between the activity and the proposition stated. Here's one, I'm asleep right now.
Okay, that doesn't make any sense. It's a performative contradiction because the action requires the falsity of the proposition. Can you explain why suggesting that there's some ground that's more real than a higher level is a performative contradiction?
Ah, what I was saying is if you say that the bottom level is the only level that's at real, that is clearly not the level at which the science is being done. The science is being done by scientists using gauges and writing things down and using computers and using language and making theories and going to conferences. And if all of that is not real, because it's somehow epiphenomenal or illusory, then how is it that that level is giving you epistemic access
to the real bottom level. You're saying like it's be like saying I'm in the middle of a dream and in that dream I dreamt that Santa Claus was real, therefore Santa Claus is real. Like if the level at which you're doing the science is illusory, it undermines all the claims you're making from that level. You have to be able to give an ontological reality to science if any of its conclusions are going to be taken to be real.
That's beautiful. Thank you. So that's, and there's a host of other arguments, and I want to put reductionism aside for that. Now, fundamental, and I agree with Donald completely, fundamental is theoretic. But one thing you can be connoting, not denoting, is what you think is the ontological referent
Which is what some people sometimes mean by fundamental and I think instead of using fundamental, which is a theoretic property, we might want to use an ontological property like real and then you might be asking what is it to say that something is real or to say that one thing is more real than another and I think that is an important question.
And I think that question can't be decided by just looking within any particular theory for its particular fundamentals. Because what we're asking, I think I would argue when we're asking questions about reality is what makes possible any and all such intelligibility? What makes possible any possible theory that might turn out to be true? There has to be some aspect because we take it, I think that reality in some sense corresponds to
ability to make our claim to find our claims true or our skills applying our perspectives present etc. So I'm waving over with that with my hand because that's a big thorny knot but I'm trying to pull apart. I think there's reductionism which we put aside, there's fundamentals and I agree with Donald what he just said about that.
and but i think we have an extra theoretic notion which is the notion of realness which is something like that which can make you know various theories true how do they do it and then the question might be are you a pluralist or modest about that for example that might be a starting point do you think there are many different realities that make theories true you could be some kind of relativist in that way or do you think that there is a ultimate reality in some important unified fashion etc so
There's three different questions we could be asking. Reductionism, which I'd largely put aside. What's the fundamental of any theory? But you might ask what's reality, and you might ask it in saying, what is it that could possibly integrate non-reductively all these fundamentals together so that we would have an overall integrated coherent account? Those are the kinds of moves you can make. Does that make sense? Sure. So, Don,
Do you have anything to say in response? I think that, you know, the notion of reality is an extra notion beyond just what's fundamental to a particular theory. And this whole area is very, very tricky, you know, for the very kinds of performative contradiction reasons that John just mentioned. Very, very easy to step on landmines everywhere here. But it seems to me that Gernel's incompleteness theorem,
tells us that in some sense there is no theory of everything right any formal system that is rich enough to model the axioms of arithmetic is is either inconsistent or incomplete and we call it girdle's incompleteness theorem because we don't take the inconsistency thing too seriously so that means no matter what scientific theory we have it's
Not the final word, there will always be, if the theory is rich enough to do arithmetic, and most scientific theories are, they wouldn't be taken seriously. So they're rich enough to do arithmetic, so they're rich enough to have a girdle statement that is outside their scope and yet is true, but not provable within that theory. And no matter how much you add those new statements to your scientific theory, there'll always be new statements. So that means that there is no scientific theory of everything.
And the notion of truth, and I think the related notion of reality, and that's why I'm bringing this up, the notion of truth and the notion of reality, in some sense, I think, will forever transcend scientific theory. And of course, I'm a scientist, so I'm not saying, oh, throw up our hands, and there's something very deep going on here that
Theories turn out to be empirically quite valuable, right? I'm alive today because of scientific theories that led to medicine that has saved my life. So the stuff works even though Gödel tells me that the theory is trivial compared to the truth that the theories can't prove, right? So the fact that you can't have a theory of everything and you can't ultimately
know that the truth with a capital T and therefore, and this is where John may want to disagree, I don't know, therefore we can't know what's reality with a capital R. We can only say these are the best theories we have so far, but we need to modestly and humbly say that's our theory, that's not the truth, and I would be fooled to say that that's the reality.
I just want to thank Donald for being, I hope I follow his example and continually make space for him as well. Yeah, okay, great, great. So apologies for me not making space here for taking some space. So with Gödel's incompleteness theorem, you said that we may never know truth with the capital T. And then you said that a toe may not exist. However, there's the difference between a toe existing and us knowing the toe.
And when you said that we don't know truth with a capital T, to me that truth with a capital T is the same as the toe. That's a statement, then I'll get you to respond to that. And then second is that there are certain assumptions in Gödel's theorem. So for instance, that the laws would have to be based in first order logic or that the laws are consistent because consistency is actually an implicit requirement. And it'd be strange to say that the world is inconsistent, though there are some people who I'm sure on the more mystic end who may say that.
realities of contradiction paradoxes are at the bottom and the top and there's no bottom and top but there is well those are some ways of getting around it and that's why when i hear people like myself maybe even two years ago would say girdle's incompleteness theorem says there is no toe that's a bit dubious to me so i want to hear what are your responses to that and then john so please then comment i'd like to hear donald's response to that first
Right. Well, so I would say your point is well taken, Kurt. The way I would think about it is to say the fact that we can't have a theory of everything doesn't mean that there isn't a truth out there. A real true reality.
And from spiritual traditions we learn that perhaps that's what you are. You're not divorced from that reality. You are that reality and you can't know that reality through intellectual and conceptual knowing, but you can know it firsthand by being that reality. And so there could be this notion of truth and reality that transcends the notion of a theory of everything. See, a theory of everything starts off with a finite set of concepts.
and says, here's how far I can go with this set of concepts. And so my argument would be, you know, along the lines of Gödel's kinds of argument that if you start with any finite axiomatization or any finite set of concepts, you can come up with an infinite number of theorems. Absolutely, you can come up with an infinite number of theorems, but there will be probability zero compared to all the truths that are out there.
And so that's why I would, I mean, but again, there's this meta notion that John was bringing up. So here I am talking about truth, using words, but saying the concepts themselves have very limited meaning. The only escape out of it for me is this issue that the spiritual traditions bring up, which is you can't talk about the truth, but you are it. Your very being is it.
And so when you speak, that being itself is projecting down into a finite set of concepts to talk with other avatars of the being. And so I think that there's a way not to be self-refuting in that. But again, I would love to have John contradict me. I don't know if I'm going to contradict you or not. Yeah.
I think the Godel argument still has value with respect to formal systems.
Whether or not theories are formal systems, I think it's a genuine philosophical question. I think, you know, we clearly had theories before there was math, and they're bona fide theories, Plato has a theory of the psyche, and whether or not you could call that a formal system, I think is questionable, and yet there was a lot of, I would say there's a lot of truth in Plato's theory. It turned out to be, you know, it's been got quite a bit of an empirical confirmation recently, so
So I'm a little bit hesitant about that, but I take your point to be correct. Donald, in fact, I take it very deeply, and I actually think this is a platonic point, and this is something that comes out in Plania's work as well. I take one of the ways in which we determine that something's real is precisely it's inexhaustibleness.
But it's not cacophonous inexhaustibility, and this is the thing, this is what I think Plato meant by the good, we get it's, everything is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. We can learn more and more. So I do not think there is a limited number of truths about anything. I think the number of true, even the number of two descriptions of this very plain stone
is indefinitely large, it's inexhaustible, etc. And this is what I talk about multi-spectrality and things like that. So I don't think I'm disagreeing with you because I think that being an inexhaustible fountain of intelligibility is precisely one of the ways in which we determine that something is real. And I think that for phenomenological reasons and for cognitive reasons.
I also think that truth is a retrospective notion, like real it's a comparative notion. So when I say something's real or something's an illusion, I'm always making a comparison. When I say this is true, what I'm really saying
is this is more true than that, because here's the limitations that that have that I can see from here. But I'm a fallibilist. That doesn't mean that I then conclude, oh, this theory, I can stop here, because no theory has ever done that, and there's no good reason to believe. So I'll have another transformative moment where I'll say, oh, but that theory turns out to be limited because of this.
What do I point to that the entire history of science, the entire history of science shows that to be the case again and again and again. And I think that's the notion. I think the notion of truth we're using is a retrospective comparative notion. I don't think that that means it's an illusion. I think
We should give up the Cartesian notion that truth points to some complete absolute formalized grasp of something and that the criterion of knowledge is certainty. And because we've tried that and it collapses, it certainly doesn't underwrite science. Because, you know, it's very plausibly the case that many of our current best theories will turn out to be rejected in the future, right? This is Lawton's, you know, pessimistic argument. I think it has to be taken
very seriously. Now the last thing that Donald said, and what I think with him is convergent with everything I just said, sends shivers up my spine because, you know, I've been arguing that there are kinds of knowing other than propositional inferential. There's procedural, there's perspectival, and there's participatory, which is knowing by being. And I agree that many of these mystical traditions say, you know, the way to come in most contact with reality is not through your conceptual propositional knowing,
but it's for your perspectival and ultimately your participatory knowing. And I agree that that is always the case. Give me a moment here. What I mean by that is something like what Marla Ponty or Forty Cogs I would say, right, is
even my propositional things are ultimately dependent on skills, my skills are dependent on perspectives, my perspectives are always dependent on participatory identity, and so the spiritual traditions are not
just explicating something that is always the case. They're not proposing something that's over there that only the great gifted ones can realize. I mean, that's part of, I think, a little bit wrong with the way some of these spiritual traditions have been taken up, right? But I think what the spiritual traditions are pointing to is exactly that fact that there's an asymmetric dependence relation
The propositional is dependent on the procedural, the procedural is dependent on the perspectival, and the perspectival is dependent on the participatory. And so for me, I try to understand realness in terms of what best integrates those four together when we're making claims about how things are. Oh, very good. Very, very good.
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I agree. I like the idea that the truth is related to some kind of inexhaustible
arena that where you can keep learning and also in the case of scientific theories and the relationship to that notion of truth. For me, what's impressive about a scientific theory is when it predicts its own demise.
Yes, sorry for interrupting. For me a scientific theory is one that when you really understand the theory it tells you the limits of its concepts and it tells you where it stops and it tells you that at this point you will need not just a tweak, you will need a new framework. You will need a new set of foundational concepts
and but the the nice thing about science in this regard is that the constraint is whatever new framework that you if this current theory is is one that we take seriously like like einstein's theory of gravity or quantum field theory right and it tells you its limits or evolution by natural selection and this theory that we say okay right now this is one of the best theories humanity has ever had and and we look for its limits when we get the new deeper theory with new
Conceptual framework, perhaps. We don't just pick that willy-nilly and however we want. There is a constraint. Our old theories can't tell us what's beyond. They can tell us that there's something beyond, but they can't tell us what is beyond. But they can veto our bad ideas. So what we have to do is build our new framework with new concepts, and then we need to show
That there is some kind of projection a simplified sub model of our new more general model gives us back evolution by natural selection or gives us back quantum field theory and space time.
That's the constraint. If we can't do that, or when we project it back, we get something that includes evolution and a little bit more, for example. It could be an augmented theory of evolution. It doesn't have to be exactly, but it better not lose anything that we know and love from evolutionary theory, or better tell us in convincing ways why we were mistaken about that aspect of it, right? So that's the constraint. So I see truth and the real as, you know,
You know, these absolute things that our concepts will never, they will scratch the surface, but they will never probe the depths. And what science is, and of course, even, you know, pre-scientific theories like Plato's, for example, as you mentioned. What these theories are doing is using concepts to explore truth. And with science, what we get that's new is
precise mathematical precise statements of the limit of the theory and and what a wonderful cure for dogmatism because when your own theory tells you its limits if you buy the theory you have to buy the limits and so you have to buy that you don't have the final answer and that's that's really so that's the cure for dogmatism so so theories that i love a theory where the theory itself is humble enough to tell you where it stops
but also smart enough to be able to veto any bad ideas you have for what's next. On that note, where do you both see your own theories indicating their limits? Well, first of all, I want to reply to what Donald said because I think he just put his finger on something that I've been arguing and I think there's a point of convergence here.
We put a lot of emphasis on coherence and other features for our understanding of rationality. But I think this capacity to do what Donald has just argued, which is a genuine capacity to afford principled self-correction, vetoing things out and then pointing beyond. I think this is a hallmark of rationality that is not emphasized enough. And this is, I often tell my students, even at a heuristic level,
If you want to assess somebody's rationality, look how much they are willing to criticize their own work at some point or correct their previous work. Don't expect it in like in the moment they're talking because that's but like, can they look at something they did a year or two ago and go, oh, here's all the mistakes in there. Right. And that I think is really, really important. Now, I think
I think what I would say is that, and then I'll ask you to re-ask your question, Kurt, if you want to change it, modify it. But for me, therefore, truth is like notions like orientation and navigation. You're properly oriented, and the orientation rules a lot of things out. We're not going that way, we're not going that way, we're not going that. And then navigation is constantly telling you how you have to adjust and reformulate how you're doing. And you might find from the navigation that you need to reorient.
That's always a possibility, but that's not the same as wandering around willy-nilly.
Right? There's a very big difference. And so that's what I meant when I think truth is always retrospective. You can always look back and say, hey, look at how far we have, we're closer. We may have to change our direction, but we made genuine, you know, I'm using the spatial metaphor here, progress. And so that's what I think is really crucial. This may sound like I'm splitting a hair.
But I want to argue that I'm not because this notion of truth as orientational and navigational rather than as a completed grasp of something I think is really, really important right now. And I think we really have to pause. And for example, let me just say one thing and then I'll shut up unless you let you re-ask your question. But I just wanted to
pick up on this point, because Donald was saying something about theories, and I think it directly also corresponds to how we should understand rationality. And so, if what he said is true, and I agree that it is, and what I'm saying is true, that means that there are a lot of, and this ties back again to what the spiritual traditions can hold out for us, there are a lot of truths that are not accessible to us unless we're willing to undergo significant transformation.
right once you give up oh no i can just grasp this thing with this universal method Leibniz calculus once you give that up and you say no no no there's going to be this constantly going on that
The pre-supposition that you can sort of remain epistemically, the grammar of your epistemic machinery can remain unaltered in order to get access to truth. I think that is deeply challenged, if not outright falsified. But that pre-supposition of a universal method that does not require personal transformation is fundamental to the whole Cartesian framework.
And see, I think the spiritual traditions are there reminding us that no, no, no, your methods can do a lot, but there's a lot of truths that are only disclosable to you after you go through profound self-correction, which is profound self-transcendence, which is profound transformation. I just wanted to make that point very clear.
I like your question that is pending, so I want to get to it about the limits for our own theories, but it is transformative. You can't just be a brain in a vat. It's the whole person that's involved in this process. For example, letting go of physicalism. The idea that space-time is doomed, for example. Just in the last 20, 30 years, physicists are saying space-time is doomed.
And that's not a trivial thing to say. When you say space-time is doomed, what goes along with that is amazing, both mathematically, scientifically, but also personally. And it hurts because most of us as physicalists then think of ourselves as our bodies. I am my body.
That is what I am and my conscious experiences just are, for example, what my brain produces and that's what I am. And that's part of that whole, I mean, that's a clean implication of the physicalist framework. You are your body and when your brain dissolves, whatever consciousness you may have, you may think consciousness is an illusion. I'm good friends of mine. For example, Keith Frankish thinks that the consciousness is an illusion or Dan Dennett.
That consciousness, whether it's real or illusory, is gone when your body dies. But if you let go of physicalism, it's not just, okay, I just changed a few assumptions. No, who I am is now up for grabs. I was just a body in space-time. Now I cannot be a body in space-time because space-time is not fundamental.
so what am i so now it's not just this intellectual dispassionate it's who i am as an individual that's up for grabs and so that becomes very emotional too you you people get afraid sometimes when i talk about
We don't see reality as it is, and space-time isn't fundamental. People throw out a few key counterpoints, and when I answer them, all of a sudden I see fear. And that's this personal aspect of this thing. This is not just an intellectual brain-in-the-mat thing. It becomes very personal. And so your whole, not only intellectual, but emotional assessment of who I am and all that that means is also at stake here. So I agree with John that it's very transformative. It's not just
writing theories down and dispassionately looking at them. Okay, well, let's speak about a mental health aspect here, because when we're referring to changing one's identity, then it sounds like that's all some process of enlightenment and salutary if you were only to push through the fear. But then there's also psychosis and derealization and depersonalization. And generally in these more spiritual discussions, I don't hear much about the negative aspects of
these transformative experiences or of contending with ideas. I know for myself, I haven't looked this up, but people told me it was like a dark night of the soul. So I still have to look that up.
And the reason I haven't looked it up is because at the time it was too close to me. I couldn't even look up. I was afraid that I had every mental illness. Like I thought, do I have schizophrenia? Do I have? I don't even know what that is. I still don't know what that is. So I had to talk to psychiatrists and therapists and find out. And they said, no, you have anxiety. Like you have extreme anxiety. You got to quiet down. And also then they said, Hey Kurt, in these comments, like I read the comments and people say that what you had was an awakening experience.
where I felt like everything was in my head it was like solipsism and frequently my grasp of reality was so tenuous and my identification with my body was so loose and it wasn't pleasant in the least but then in the comment section I hear people saying and I imagine that they're well intentioned they would say like you need to push through that the hero encounters and the hero doesn't run away and then it's making me feel like a coward like I'm this person that this recreant craven gutless and invertebrate so I was speaking to a therapist and she said you know
Firstly, this idea of the hero that encounters that's a bit dangerous because it can give you this hero complex. And secondly, you are encountering it by coming by voluntarily coming to therapy and doing exposure therapy. So she's like, hey, read those comments, read them, realize that they're just words on a page, go closer to them, like various exercises. So I do that and like, geez, Louise, like,
Looking at my fingers and feeling like I have fingers that's salutary for myself for some other people They could say that well suffering comes from an identification with the ego or the body for me all my pleasure like everything
The beautifulness of life is finally back and it's like back at a more deep, rich level than it ever was. It reminds me of this quote about T.S. Eliot, like you come back to the place and you know it for the first time. I don't feel as if I've completely transformed like I know it for the first time. I certainly am seeing it differently and experiencing it differently. Maybe that's what he meant. Anyway, so the more nefarious aspects of the meditation or whatever we think of as meditation in the West,
So our misinterpretations of Eastern or just adoptions of certain practices without the whole community around it, and these lessons of enlightenment and so on, they can be extremely propitious for many people, but then also dire for many others. And I don't hear much of that negative aspect. And then recently happened upon the work of Anna Letkajtis. So forgive me, Anna, if I'm mispronouncing your name. She's a PhD candidate from
Sydney, and her work was brought to me by Shoshana Jones Square, who's a professor at the University of Bishop, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, Anna studies the dark side of Dharma, and so I want to interview her. I guess an overarching question is what terrifies you about your work? I want to answer that, right? First of all, if you look in these traditions, and when I teach meditation, I do the same thing, they warn about all kinds of things that can happen to you.
It's only when you get the Western importation of these and the commodification that says there's a panacea practice, there's a single practice you can do that will bring you bliss or something. And I think this is pernicious bullshit. I do not think, from my understanding of how cognition works, that there is anything like
a panacea practice, and I've had enough experience with many traditions that there are stuff that really challenges you in ways you said. By the way, it's from St. John of the Cross, Dark Knight of the Soul, right? And he wrote it for good reason. I think what you need
And I've argued for this elsewhere, Kurt, so I won't repeat all the arguments, but you need an ecology of practices that sits within a community of people so that when the dark shit happens, you have people there with you. You have other practices that can prevent you from spinning off. That's why you went to therapy. Therapy was a compensatory practice that brought you into realignment with the anomalous experiences. So you were able to integrate it.
So I think we have to be really careful. I take the criticism well, and by the way, people have been doing this for a while. Look at the work of Willow Barton. She's done work on some of the dark stuff that comes out in mindfulness practices. And this is telling. So I was at a conference and she was doing this and I hope this does not come off as self-promotional because that's not the intent.
She was saying this and I put out my hand and I said, but I always warn my students that they're going to get these weird things when they're meditating, they're going to get really cold or really hot. They're going to feel that they're floating or sinking and they might feel disconnected. Like I warned them about all of that and that, you know, and how to incorporate it in. And then, and then she sort of looked at me strangely and I said, well, don't most instructors in the West warn people about all of this? She said, no, they don't. Right.
Now that to me is the most empirically relevant fact, not the traditions, is that there's something going on in Western culture with its commodification and its comfort zoning that precludes people doing this on a regular and reliable basis when we have clear historical evidence that in situ these traditions did this on a regular and reliable basis. And so I'm not saying that there aren't dark nights of the soul,
But you don't have to be isolated alone, feel that you're going insane, like you can have an ecology of practices and a community and a tradition that allows you to properly, and I don't say push through, because for every hero myth, there's a hubris myth. You don't push through this. You have to listen to other people really deeply at that point. You have to listen to your therapist.
That's what it's really indicating. But this individualistic, commodified comfort zone way in which we've appropriated spirituality, I think that is where I would point the critical finger. I think this is one of the symptoms of the meeting crisis. You know, 40% of the population have these anomalous, visionary, mystical experiences, and they have nothing that allows them to incorporate it into their lives.
But that's not a generalized feature of all human civilization or culture. That is specific to ours in a way, I think, that really reflects the meeting crisis. So I think we speak to it, but I think we speak to it while making this criticism that I just made. I agree, and I would just add that in meditation, what you're doing is we all have a model of who we are.
I have my beliefs about what I am. And most of those beliefs are false. So I am my body. What makes me important is I am a professor or I am an artist. My significance comes from how many people have seen my work or what people are saying about my work. So I identify who I am with some thing, some body, some piece of work, some reputation and so forth.
And the spiritual practice is, I think, a practice of letting you know, no, that's not what you are. Now, that is going to be extremely painful because effectively, if I am that thing and I'm having to let that go, I'm dying. I am experiencing a death because I thought I was that. And the spiritual birth,
comes at the price of the death of the old thing i thought i was and i believed it very very deeply so i'm emotionally attached to that view of myself i'm emotionally attached to the idea that it's important for me to be famous or to be the best musician or whatever my whatever my thing might be i'm attached to all those things and the fear that i that you experience
And for me, I just expect this on a daily basis. I expect to experience fear because I'm in the process of letting go of deeply held false identifications of who I am that have, you know, and I don't blame myself. We're born with them. And I was trained in them. And now it's time to to grow up and let them go. And so I just expect on a daily basis to to face pain. And in fact, it's when the pain comes up that I go, OK,
Here's my chance to really grow. So I look at the pain. Okay, what identification was some false belief about who I am? Do I need to face now? Oh, oh, I really believe that it's really important. So someone cuts me off on the road. I'm driving. Why do I get upset? Okay, so there's all the holes. Okay, I believe I'm a separate person from that other person. For example, that's one of my first beliefs. Is that true? Or is it true that there's only one of us?
So there's all sorts of beliefs that I have to to to face and in the Christian tradition, I mean it's Mostly you see this in the East where you're doing this kind of thing But I think G even Jesus spoke to this one when he said if anyone will come after me they have to take up the cross daily You know and die basically, you know Every day so it's and that's what the way I view it. I'm dying to my old model of myself and
And it hurts because I really believed it. And I'm having to let go of all these old beliefs that I have had for decades, perhaps. And so they're not just intellectual, they're limbic. There's emotions attached to them. And so it's a very visceral kind of thing. And so anxiety comes up out of it. And so as I face them and really face them and Kurt, being in your body is important because that's where you so I get in my body and really, really feel it.
Don't turn away from it. And then often, you know, it doesn't need to be intellectual, but it just needs to be present. But eventually I will often see, aha,
There was that same old belief, okay, the reason I'm in pain is because I believe I'm that and that's false. And I don't want to let go of it. It hurts to let go of that. And it's scary because I'm going from what I thought I knew into something that I don't know. So it's also the fear of death and the fear of the unknown wrapped up into one wonderful ball. And that's what we have to do is to face the fear of the death of what we know and the move into the unknown.
that we don't know and so there's two fears and it's and it really is um so my feeling is that that's not a side that's part of the whole practice and and you should be told up front that that's what it is to grow spiritually it's to face that fear those two fears and to face them head-on and to get help when it's too too painful right for most of us
It's really helpful to have someone else who's maybe let go of that particular fear and gone into that particular part of the unknown that can sort of help us and take us by the hand and move us along. It's at this point that I recommend you watch The Toe Podcast with Lillian Dindo and Carl Friston Part 2 for more help with dealing with derealization and depersonalization, that is, for help when subsumed by the dark side of the spiritual journey. Links in the description.
I just also thank you, Donald. I don't have any disagreement with that. I just wanted now to go back to your question about what and I mean, I I'll point to if you go in my series, I criticized earlier models of wisdom that I had published. If you want to see me doing that. I recently came in the summer to
of interacting. I was at Maple with the Respond Retreat and there was interacting with the Buddhist monks there and I came to sort of an insight that made me realize that there was something, there was an important dimension of my thinking that had been wrong or at least incomplete and there's Godel again. So as you know, I'll assume people know because they've been here and
I have this idea about relevance realization as a central feature of cognition and intelligence and even consciousness. And I'd always assumed that there was a sense in which it was always, always being presupposed. But I realized that relevance realization can come to a state, if that's even the right word,
at least where it realizes its own irrelevance.
And we have to take it that relevance realization has some recursive ability because that's what we see in an insight. We realize that a previous pattern of relevance realization is actually wrong or irrelevant. So the recursivity is built into relevance realization, but it can come to realize that not just this or that, but that it itself is irrelevant. And that would be when it is no longer trying to work with beings, but with being itself, capital B.
because then relevance realization is actually irrelevant because it make it right because all you do is start to do this is like the Dow right you start to
parse it out and then you get the combinatorial explosion that relevance realization has to deal with but relevance realization can come to a moment where it realizes that it's irrelevant and can't fall away and that is when you are trying to enter ratio religio right relationship with being with the ground of being per se and i and for me that was a way
Taking something that I had been experiencing and talking a lot about within the mindfulness practices, which is experiences of non duality and the work I've always done on relevance realization. I couldn't put them together.
And so what I had to do was I had to, like Donald's just saying, is I had to give up a kind of, it's always relevance realization kind of idea, but that actually there's a possibility for it to functionally find itself irrelevant and then open us up phenomenologically to
Terror.
I'm afraid that my work, especially the stuff I've recently just published a few months ago, integrating relevance realization and predictive processing, is going to make AI, like autonomous AI, more, really more possible. And that terrifies me. And not just sort of egocentric terror, like moral terror, like
a sense of moral responsibility. Are those ever the same? Some people would say that anytime we think of morality, it comes from a sense of ego and that as soon as you dissolve the ego, you dissolve morality. There is no good, there is no bad. So when you say that it's not an egocentric manner,
But a moral manner? I am very hesitant to say that morality is egocentric to core. Are there theories of morality that are? Yes, but I think there are theories that are ontocentric rather than egocentric. But can we do that later? Because I first want to finish this point, which is, right,
I'm wrestling with this, and the way I'm wrestling with it is, first of all, I'm hoping that the work I'm doing, especially with a lot of other people, to integrate these kinds of theoretical discoveries with ideas about the deep connections between predictive processing, relevance realization, meaning in life, wisdom, overcoming self-deception,
All the sapiential stuff we've been talking about. I'm hoping that because I've been arguing for the connection that those two things will stay wedded together. And I don't know if I'm right about that. Sometimes I get like,
Right? I don't know if I'm right about it. But right now I can't see I can't go back. And also, I think there's so many there was so much value. I mean, we published the paper, and we gave what we thought was the first explanation of the autism, psychosis continuum, rather than just description. Think of the the the the
the psychotherapeutic and pedagogical benefits that could have. But I do hesitate about this, about whether or not my attempts to keep the science and the spirituality wedded together, there's no teleology for that to me. I could
Okay, so Don, just to repeat, the question was about the limitations of one's own theories, and then also, I saw your eyes light up on the mention of morality and ego, so you can comment on that as an aside after it. Sure, sure.
I'll talk about my theory in just a second, but I'll just mention a classic case, which is Einstein's general relativity with quantum field theory. Those theories assume space-time is fundamental in their fundamental concepts. Quantum fields are defined over space-time. Einstein's theory of gravity is the theory in which space-time is fundamental and its curves are what we experience as gravity.
So so space is the fundamental concept that's going on there. So you might say, well, how can that theory then say or entail that space time is doomed without contradicting itself? Right. I mean, how do we avoid shooting ourselves in the foot? Well, that's the glory of science, because when you put those theories together, they tell you precisely they say at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds, this theory stops.
It no longer makes sense. There are no operational meanings for space and time at those levels. So that's the beauty of those theories. Even though Einstein didn't expect that to come out, he didn't even expect black holes to come out. I mean, Schwarzschild found that solution to his equations. So when you take your ideas, even if you're a genius like Einstein,
And you put them in mathematics, you're going to have your own theory come back and slap you in the face and tell you things that you might not like. Einstein did not like black holes. And I think that he was unhappy with the idea that space time ceased to have operational meaning at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. My view is that's what we want from a theory. I love a theory that tells you precisely at like a 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, I stop and you need something new. You need a new tool.
So in our Theory of Conscious Agents, so we have a Theory of Consciousness, it's a mathematically precise theory, and those who are interested, if you just Google Objects of Consciousness, that's the title of our paper, and my name, Objects of Consciousness and Hoffman, you'll find the paper, it's free online, so no problem to get it. So that's a mathematical Theory of Consciousness, it's just a
I don't view it as the final theory of everything. As I said, it's just a next baby step in science. That's my view of the theory. Here's our next baby step, but it's mathematically precise. And so the question is, does it tell me its precise limits? And it does. And that's one thing that I love about the theory. So one theorem of the theory in this current formulation is that anytime you have multiple agents, multiple conscious agents, that collection, even if they're not interacting,
That collection satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. So it's a conscious agent. That's just a theorem. And what that theorem entails ultimately is that there is one conscious agent because all of the agents that you could possibly have combined and they create a single new agent. So there is ultimately one agent. But here's the problem. Here's the limit of our theory. Suppose I start with a countable infinity of conscious agents. So agent one, two, three, four, all the way up to infinity.
Well, so I have this this countable infinity of agents, ALF zero, infinity. But now our theorem says that every possible combination of agents, so agent one and one plus two, that's an agent one plus, so it's the power set. So there's a power set of new agents. Well, we know that the power set has cardinality ALF one, that's a new bigger infinity.
So now let's look at those agents and we take all their combinations. Well, that's a new power set. That's ALIF-2. So we're going to have to go to get to a description of the one ultimate conscious agent. That's the, and it's a theorem of our theory that there is one conscious agent. We're going, but to get to it, to actually describe it, we're going to have to climb up all of Cantor's hierarchy. Now there's an infinite number of steps in Cantor's hierarchy, which means we cannot get there.
So in 20,000 years, if we're still using this framework, and we've gotten to level five billion of Cantor's Hierarchy, it's time to break out the champagne. We went through 500 billion levels, where A left 500 billion, and we learned a lot at every level. So we learned something new about consciousness every time we transcended and went to a new level. Time to break out the champagne. How much further do we have to go? Infinity. You're not
Literally, you're not any closer than when you started and yet you learned a lot. And so what I love about this theory is it says there is the one conscious agent and number two, using this theory, you'll never be able to describe it. But number three, you'll know precisely how far you've gotten and precisely how infinitely far you have to go at every step of the theory. So the theory itself predicts its own failure to actually describe
An entity that it's a theorem exists from the theory. So for me, that's one thing I love about the theory is that it tells me immediately how far I've gotten. And right now we're just at Aleph zero. We haven't even gotten to Aleph one yet. So we have a long way to go. John, do you have any comments quickly? Yeah. I want to know more about what is meant by conscious agents and what is meant by
the rejection of space time. But before I do that, I mean, the arguments aren't identical, but they converge. I mean, these are very, in that sense, convergent with neoplatonic arguments, that the one lies beyond all possible conceptualization. And because if
because if you try to understand it you have to understand it in terms of its structure or its cause and therefore you haven't actually achieved the one because you still would then have to get some system of intelligibility that explains the relationship between the structures and so you always are pointing towards an ultimate reality that can't
ever be grasped. The source of intelligibility, the arguments go like the source of intelligibility can't itself be intelligible. And what was interesting is, it sounded to me, Donald, and maybe I'm getting it wrong, it sounded to me like you got the sort of fractal wanting going all the way up, which means even your notion of the one is in some sense inadequate, and it points beyond itself. And then the whole trajectory of all these ones
points towards a one that is never graspable. That's what I heard you saying. And that sounds like neoplatonism through to me profoundly. The part about the conscious agents I want to talk to you more about, but the structure of sort of, you know, I should do it this way, the fractal of wanting like this or something like that. I don't know what gesture to make with my hands, which is quite adequate, but that that is something disclosed when you reflect deeply upon
intelligibility it sounds and by the way donald i hope you know that i mean this is a compliment not an insult i consider myself a post nominalist neoplatonist so hearing what sounds like a very neoplatonic structure to reality that really resonated with me now i wonder what you would say though
maybe this goes to what you mean by consciousness. So Platinus argues that the top thing, right, consciousness is he takes intentionality to be a feature of consciousness and that therefore consciousness always implies a duality and that you need a one beyond that duality to explain the duality and that therefore you pass beyond
Consciousness and thought you pass both the unconsciousness and and intelligence when you get to the when you get to the one Below it he has you know, you probably know this the new the noose which is like all of these ones all of the forms that and they're like this They're infinitely mirroring each other like indras net
So I wonder what you think about that kind of argument, but I know that's an unfair question to just ask first because it depends on, you know, what you're meaning by conscious and what you're meaning by agent. Right. So, and by the way, I'll describe it, but of course the paper Objects of Consciousness has the math all laid out in it. But intuitively,
When you're trying to boot up a theory, you want the smallest set of assumptions that you can possibly use that would boot up a general theory. And there's dozens and dozens of things you could think about. You want a theory of consciousness to deal with, you know, the self. Is there a self? Learning, memory, problem-solving, intelligence, and there's a bunch of things. Qualia,
Possibility of free will there's tons and tons of things so but we can't throw in the kitchen sink So what we do is we try to find the minimal Aspects of consciousness that we will take as the miracles as the as the fundamental assumptions of our theory and so we took two we took that there are conscious experiences and that conscious experiences probabilistically affect the other conscious experiences occurring and
Those are the, and I just read in the last few weeks of looking at the motivology, it turns out Leibniz says the same thing. He beat us by 300 years by saying that those were the two, if he was going to boot up a theory of consciousness, he would use those two things, experiences and probabilistic relationships among them. So what we do is we take that idea that Leibniz beat me at 300 years ago and we turn it into mathematics. I say a conscious agent basically is a probability space of possible experiences.
This could be an infinite probability space. These are all the possible experiences of this conscious agent. So I'll write down a probability space.
And then I use Markovian kernels, which is a very, very general formulation of some probabilistic relationships. So basically, we have what we call perception decision and action kernels, but they're all Markovian kernels. And you can take their composition and just have one Markovian kernel if you want. But we have then basically a social network of these probability spaces related by Markovian kernels.
So it's a big social network, and it's a Markovian dynamics. And so when you look at that dynamics, that's what we mean by a conscious agent. And it is a theorem of that, that when you have two conscious agents, you can take just their tensor product, and you will get a tensor product of spaces and kernels and so forth. And then it satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. But in terms of
Consciousness and some deep thing about consciousness and experience. I realized after we wrote it down that I was forced by the mathematics to write down a probability space on which the experiences took place. So it's just sitting there like a platonic structure just sitting there. What does that? So I once later look back and say, OK, well, what does that mean about consciousness? Well, that's clearly consciousness.
prior to experience. So we're forced to write down in mathematics a structure that corresponds to a being without any particular experience that is happening. But then the Markovian dynamics is really modeling the play of forms of experiences that pop up and down on this fundamental being that is timeless and requires no experience. It is the
field of potential for all experiences. I realized later on that mathematics nicely intertwines with interpretations that we see from various spiritual traditions. I didn't try to model these spiritual traditions. I was forced by mathematics. You can't talk about probability until you write down the probability space. You just can't do it. You're forced to do this and I realized, well,
The natural interpretation of that is being prior to experience and then Markovian dynamics is the full set of experiences. And now the issue about mapping to space time and space time is doomed. What's going on there? Now I'm just going to tell you what the physicists are saying. They will say the reason why space time is doomed is this. If you try to make
More and more precise measurements at smaller and smaller scales of space, like the position of this electron or whatever it might be. You need to use radiation, say light, with smaller and smaller wavelengths. That's fine. Quantum theory says that as you use smaller and smaller wavelengths, you're going to have more and more, you're using more and more energy. You're concentrating energy into a smaller and smaller space. E equals h nu is the formula.
And in a world without gravity, that's fine. As long as you can get more and more energy, bigger and bigger power station, you can resolve smaller and smaller and smaller things. No problem. So space and time are fine. Gravity messes everything up. It crashes the party. Because what happens is Einstein tells us that energy and mass are the same thing. So effectively, as you're making finer and finer measurements, you're concentrating more and more mass into a smaller region. So you're getting higher mass density.
And then gravity says at some point when you get when the mass density reaches a certain threshold, space time collapses into a black hole and the very object that you're trying to measure disappears. And that happens at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and then 10 to the minus 43 seconds, which is the amount of time it takes to move 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. And so so what happened and
So it's not like that there are pixels of space time. So a wrong concept is, oh, well, space time is still fundamental, but there are pixels at that level. No, no, no. It means that space time ceases to be coherent. It has no operational meaning at that level. So it just it's gone. It's doomed.
And another argument that the physicist will give that's even deeper than the one I just gave is to say that in quantum theory, the measuring device itself is a physical device. Therefore, it's subject to quantum uncertainty. To get more and more precise measurements, you need to add more and more degrees of freedom to the device, which means it's getting more and more
Massive. If you're in the lab, you've got this device in your lab, at some point, as you get more and more precise, the mass is going to be so great that the whole lab collapses into a black hole, and again, you destroy the experiment. So there's no operational meaning to space-time. And when the physicists then say, OK, space-time has been good, it's been really a great framework for centuries, space and time, and then in the last century, space-time.
but it's time to find something new. And the young physicists are moving beyond and they found these new structures, the Amplituhedron and then also the Decorative Permutations. And these structures are beyond space-time and they're beyond quantum theory. And when I say they're beyond quantum theory, the Amplituhedron has no Hilbert spaces. But its phase structure encodes both locality and unitarity, the properties of space-time and quantum theory.
So this is a structure that could have trillions or more dimensions, not just four or 11. It has trillions of dimensions. It doesn't care about space. It doesn't care about time. It doesn't care about quantum theory. It couldn't care less about them. But its volumes actually are the scattering amplitudes. If you want the two gluons in, four gluons out, the amplitude heat associated to it, its volume is the scattering amplitude. And its base structure encodes
Locality and Unitarity. And so this is a structure beyond space-time. And here's the beautiful thing. When you try to compute these scattering amplitudes, like two gluons hitting each other, four gluons go spring up, if you do it in space-time, well, to do it in space-time you have to enforce
things, the properties of space and time. Things, you know, have locality and unitarity. And so we have to use what are called Feynman diagrams to talk about all these virtual particles that we need in space-time to actually do this math. It turns out two gluons to four gluons, hundreds of pages of algebra, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of terms to do one event, just one event. When you go outside of space-time with the amplitude hydron,
that computation reduces to three terms that you can compute by hand so hundreds of pages reduced to three terms so and then all of a sudden the physicists say by the way we also when we let go of space time we see these new symmetries like something called the infinite yangian symmetry and the infinite yangian symmetry is true of the scattering data and you cannot see it in space time so space time is doomed
Space time forces you to do all this nasty, nasty computation that's unnecessary. The computations are actually simple and it hides the symmetries that are really true of the data. So space time has three strikes against it. It proves its own limits.
It makes the math unnecessarily complicated and it hides the genuine symmetries that are there. So that's why the physicists are moving with both feet beyond space-time and they're finding this wonderful stuff. And that's why I, as a theorist, trying to get a theory of consciousness that can lead to testable results, which are only in space-time, right? The only place where we can get measurable experiments is in space-time. That's where we get our measurements. So it's no longer
i want a theory of consciousness that somehow you know emerging from things in space time like brains and so forth that that means space time is doomed so that whole that can't work so booting up consciousness from stuff inside space time the physicists are telling us that will not work so i'm not going to try to do that consciousness is beyond space time and they've given us this
Interface that we have to plug into they've said we've gone beyond space-time and the deepest thing we found is a decorator permutation and so a few months ago I Was sitting there and saying okay? That's what the physicists want they want a decorator permutation if I give them a decorator permutation They can actually take me all the way into space-time and give me a scattering amplitude something I can test something that you see at the Large Hadron Collider So can I get from my Markovian dynamics of conscious agents to a decorator permutation?
I looked online just to say, well, surely the mathematicians have done this. For any Markovian kernel, what's the decorated permutation? I looked and there wasn't anything.
And so I work with my mathematician colleague Chetan, and it didn't take us very long. So it's a new piece of mathematics. We now have a canonical way of assigning every Markovian kernel, a decorative permutation, also any arbitrary graph. We can assign arbitrary graphs, decorative permutations. And what this does is that now the physicists have pushed beyond space-time to decorative permutations, but it's just a platonic solid sitting there. It's motionless. It's just sitting there.
We now offer a dynamics, a Markovian dynamics, that projects so that dynamics is much more complicated. So if we have, for example, 50 interacting conscious agents, the structure that we get, the Markovian structure we get is a Markov polytope with 50 to the 50th power, that's probably more than the number of atoms in the universe,
That's the number of vertices in this polytope that's describing just 50 conscious agents interacting. So this is an incredibly complicated structure, very, very rich dynamical structure that projects down that structure, which has more vertices than all the atoms in the measurable universe projects down into a decorator permutation, which is only 50 numbers.
And that then gives rise to the scattering. So you can see that the conscious thing is really complicated. It's a really complicated dynamic. We're collapsing it down to something trivial when we get to decorative permutations and then even more trivial when we get into space-time.
Consciousness is fundamental, but we have this map all the way from consciousness into space-time. We're submitting a paper this week. We finished writing the paper on this, which is why I'm pretty excited about it. We'll submit it probably just before Thanksgiving, Wednesday. We have this pontoon bridge from consciousness into space-time, and now what we're doing is trying to move all the heavy equipment across. What
What aspect of conscious agent dynamics corresponds to energy and momentum or to wavelengths or to spin or to helicity and so forth? In our paper we start to propose specific
correspondences between features of consciousness and its dynamics in our model and specific things that you can measure in space-time because my goal is to show that the space-time is doomed, yes, but there is this dynamics of consciousness beyond space-time and we can actually predict specific scattering amplitudes and actually show you where spin, momentum, helicity and all these variables come from and
I think we can even explain why supersymmetry is false. I think that in our dynamical model, we can actually show why, you know, for certain models, something called n equals four supersymmetric theories, the decorative permutation gives you everything there is to say about the scattering amplitude, everything. But if you don't have supersymmetry, you have to bring in spin and mass, for example.
and we can explain from our dynamics of conscious agents why that is the case that it turns out that the different versions of spin are asymmetric and you can't see it using the standard physics models but when you go through the Markovian model you actually see that spin the various kinds of spins have subtle differences so that they're not perfectly symmetric and that then blows out supersymmetry so so we're hoping not just to
model what the physicists already know, but to have the model actually go well beyond. These Markov polytopes have a richness of structure. In our paper, we're only going to go after M3, the three-agent interaction, which has 27. It turned out my colleague Chetan, who's the mathematician,
work very very hard as a beautiful beautiful structure very very complicated for just three agents interacting and it grows exponentially with five agents there's three thousand nodes three thousand more than three thousand vertices was it just grows exponentially and and the dynamics is very very rich so so that's a little bit about why space time is doomed and why i think consciousness is is more fundamental and why i'm sort of excited about it i have some thoughts i'd like to respond to some of the technical
The structure itself is not unitary and local. It's just a
geometric structure like a polytope but not exactly a polytope but it turns out that you can read off from the the sort of like the lattice of like facets and edges and faces and vertices from from that arrangement it turns out the physicists can actually show that that corresponds to what looks in space-time like unitarity and locality. Have you heard of the Coleman-Mendula theorem?
maybe, but I don't remember the name. Sure, so it's a no-go theorem about internal symmetries. Colloquially, they can't be combined in anything but a trivial manner. So if you have a point-correct group, the internal symmetries have to be a direct product of them plus the point-correct group for whatever reason. This is one of the reasons why supersymmetry either must exist, or conformal symmetry must exist, or you need to be in a lower dimensional space. And so
I'm not a fan of supersymmetry, but I'm not a fan of any particular theory. So I'm agnostic when it comes to many of these physical theories, which is why I have a small bone to pick when you say the physicists
Sure. Want a decorated permutation. I want to say the physicists, I would say some physicists. So anyway, then I would be curious, like, well, how do you overcome the Coleman medulla theorem, if you're doing away with supersymmetry, but you can look into that at some point. And then I also would like to take a look at that article, if you can send it to me prior. I can send you both the article graph, which is almost complete. Yeah. Yeah.
I'll look at the Coleman-Modulo theory. Does that theorem apply only to Poincare spaces or a general theory about geometric objects in general? It's any theory that has an S-matrix. See, if it only applies to Poincare group, then it's not a problem, right? Because we're not stuck in space-time. What we have to do is show that the Poincare group comes out as a trivial projection of a much deeper and richer structure. I mean, our amplitude hydra with, say, a thousand agents
is going to be a polytope with a thousand to the thousandth power vertices. This is not the Poincare group. This is something truly mind-boggling. This is a very, very interesting polytope structure. It includes, by the way, the Birkhoff polytope is a sub polytope within it. So the Birkhoff polytope is a very famous polytope of all the
All of its vertices are permutation matrices, zeros and ones only in the matrices. But that is a sub polytope of this Markov polytope. I have to stop you because Don, me and you have to have a solo podcast about this as a part two to our previous one about the details because right now I know John, your eyes may be glazing over so you were champing at the bit. Continue please.
Me? Yes, yes, yes. I think I followed a large part of that although I don't know if I have the physics background to say I grasped all of it adequately and I don't want to say anything out of ignorance so I'll try and first of all just ask some questions. Are some of the physicists, Kurt's point, are they
is not real or that it's emergent from this more fundamental ontology? Those are two different claims. To claim that everything above a fundamental level is not real is a kind of reductionism that I've already argued is I find very problematic.
My take on it is that,
I think that, you know, we could talk to the physicists like Neymar, Connie, and so forth. But my take is that when he says space-time is doomed, he's saying that it's not fundamental. He may not want to worry about deeper existential notions. He's saying if you're a physicist and that was the framework in which you're doing all your work,
That's no longer the framework. You've got to go, you have to show that there's a deeper framework and that space-time comes out as a projection of a much richer and deeper framework. Whether he says that that means the space-time is not real, I don't know if you'd even be interested in that question. I'm just not sure. Right. Because for me, I mean, the idea that space-time might be projected from something that is not space-timey, I mean, that's
Well, you know, and this is not dismissive, that's a perennial idea. I mean, it's, when you mentioned it, it's a, it's a classic platonic idea that and you know, that even to make inferences that generalize, we need non spatial temporal relations, we need eternal relations. I mean, Berman makes this argument, this is why nominalism is doomed. So and
Pardon me, because it sounds like these things, you're describing them geometrically. So given that, given that geometrophagals are spatial, does that mean that there is some sense in which the language is ultimately conceived as being imaginal or metaphorical about this? Because, you know, you're talking about faces and
You're using space-time language, and I'm not trying to pin you down like a jiu-jitsu move, but I'm wanting to get people's attitude here. Given that they're using geometry as a fundamental thing and Plato ran into a similar kind of thing, that's why I'm asking this question. What do they take their theoretical representations to be?
Right, so space-time itself is just another piece of geometry, right? So you have the mathematics of polytopes or geometries more generally, and space-time and the Poincaré group, symmetries on space-time and so forth,
It's just one out of countless different kinds of geometries. Most of us, our imaginations are so tied to space-time, it's hard for us to think outside of it. But the amplitude hadron, for example, itself could have trillions of dimensions. So these are geometric objects. They're not objects in a physical sense of some object in space-time. They're mathematical objects.
And in the same sense that physicists view space-time itself as being described by mathematical objects, say, you know, the symmetries of the point gray group and so forth.
So it's that sense that these are geometric objects. But I've had this question before because people have asked me, you know, I gave a talk at Stanford a few weeks ago on this and someone said, well, so where are these objects? Are they like at the Planck scale or are they stuck inside space time somewhere? Where are they? Because if there's a geometric object, we think it has to be somewhere in space. And this is the leap you have to make. No, space time itself is just one fairly trivial geometric object.
And these objects are beyond, they transcend space-time and they project it to space-time. My own view is that space-time, from an evolutionary point of view, and I'd love to have a chance to talk about evolution with John, but from an evolutionary view, I think that space-time is just a virtual reality headset that we've evolved and it's not a very good one.
We have a cheap model. It only has four, maybe 11 dimensions on the suit and it stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. It's very shallow. It was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters. I might be impressed, but 10 to the minus 33. So I feel like we got cheated. We got a really cheap user interface and it's shallow and I can't even imagine, you know, a five dimensional object.
And for a lot of work I want to do, I would be very, very helpful to imagine a five-dimensional object. My little interface doesn't let me do that, so I have to actually then painfully scratch down mathematics and
you know
Space and time isn't a fundamental reality, it's a fairly low level and cheap and shallow interface that we're stuck with and I hope to transcend it. So what is it you think about us that gives us access, epistemic access to a non-phenomenological reality? Right and this then gets to the question about evolution and natural selection too and so forth.
Because I've argued on evolutionary grounds that we've been shaped not just that our perceptions of space and time are fundamentally not correct, right? That there is not the truth, it's just a user interface. And that's what the physicists, at least these physicists are now saying as well, space and time is not the fundamental reality, it's there's something much deeper.
So I argue for that in the following way. Evolution by natural selection is a precise mathematical theory. We have evolutionary game theory, evolutionary graph theory, and so forth. So it's a mathematical model, and we can ask clean technical questions with that theory. We can ask the question, for example, what is the probability, assuming evolution by natural selection, assuming evolutionary game theory, what is the probability that any sensory system would be shaped by natural selection to perceive any
True Structures of Objective Reality. Turns out that's a clean technical question, not a hand wave. You can actually ask that question using evolutionary game theory. And when you ask that question, it turns out it's a theorem of the theory. And the paper that we have on this is called Fact, Fiction, and Fitness. It was published a couple years ago. So if you just Google my name and Fact, Fiction, and Fitness, the paper is free. You can read the proof.
The probability is precisely zero. Let me prove it for three or four specific structures, but when you look at it, you see the reason why, and it's going to be true for any structure. The probability is zero that any structure that you might say the world, the objective reality might have, the probability is zero that any fitness payoff function will actually preserve the information of that structure, will be a homomorphism of that structure. So the probability that the
payoff function that is shaping the evolution of a sensory system actually has any information about the structure of the world is precisely zero. So that payoff function couldn't shape the sensory system to see that structure in the world. So that's just a theorem of evolution by natural selection. Now, do I believe evolution by natural selection? I don't believe any theory. I don't believe my own theories. I think belief is the wrong attitude to have towards scientific theories.
So I don't believe evolution by natural selection. What I do believe is it's the best story we have so far. And so that's why I took it seriously with my team and we proved this theorem. But I'm happy to now find a deeper theory and then show that evolution by natural selection arises as a trivial projection. And it turns out I think we might be able to do that. So the theory of Markov chains that we're using for conscious agents, that dynamics does not need to have
Increasing entropy You can write down this easier write down dynamics of conscious agents in which the entropy doesn't increase and therefore there's no entropic arrow of time but it's a trivial theorem that if you take this dynamics which has no arrow of time and Projected onto a dynamics You know projection dynamics via say conditional probability. It's a theorem that when you do that the projected dynamics will have increasing entropy and
It will have an arrow of time. So all of a sudden, by the way, that arrow of time is not an insight about the original dynamics. It's not an insight. It's an artifact of the information loss due to projection. So what I would like to show is that evolution of a natural selection, all the limited resources, time is the fundamental limited resource.
That is just an artifact of projection. I want to show that all of the appearance of limited resources is an artifact of projection. The appearance of competition, fighting for limited resources, nature, red and truth and cloth, is perhaps an artifact of a projection of a deeper dynamics of consciousness in which there is no competition, there are no limited resources, and there is no arrow of time.
If we can prove that, then this is how science moves. We would then take the next baby step beyond evolution by natural selection. So here's the logic. I use, because we are where we are, I have to use the tools of evolution by natural selection to see its limits. So I use them. And I find out it says to me very, very clearly, space and time and physical objects are not the truth. I cannot tell you what the truth is, but I can tell you this. Space and time and objects are not the truth.
That's a theorem of that theory. Now I'm making the next leap. I'm saying, okay, I'm going to propose the theory of consciousness beyond space and time and in which there is no arrow of time. Now I want to show is that when I project that by conditional probability, in special cases, I get evolution by natural selection as a trivial projection of that. And that's how science progresses. So that's how I can
use the tools of evolution by natural selection to say that things like genes and organisms and DNA are not fundamental without contradicting myself, right? That's the logic that allows me to use the theory to point to its own limits and then transcend the theory, like to have a theory that in which there is no arrow of time,
whose projection leads to evolution, natural selection, or a generalization of it. So that's that logic that allows me to look like I'm contradicting myself. I'm using evolution to prove evolution doesn't work. You're shooting yourself in the foot. No, that's the way science pulls itself up by the bootstraps. Each theory shows you its limits.
If it's a good theory, if it's not a good theory, it doesn't show you its limits. If it's a good theory, it shows you its limits. You transcend the limits and then you get your new theory to project down. But now your question, John, which is how, what, what, what allows me to do all this? What, what, what is the deeper? My feeling is that I, the, the, the entity that's doing all the science,
He is not a physical object. It's not a brain. It's not neurons. It is this unlimited intelligence. There is. So I am not an object in space and time. I am not neurons. I am not any of that. I am that which comes up with theories about space and time which comes up with theories about neurons. I am that which can evaluate those theories and find their limits and then transcend them and get a new theory. That's what I am. I am that unlimited intelligence.
And that unlimited intelligence does transcend any theory. So that's the framework in which I'm thinking about it. Okay, so let me ask you a couple questions then. That was very helpful. So given that you agree that all formal systems are either inconsistent or incomplete, you can't place an ultimate
I don't know what to call it, faith in even a mathematical model because the degree to which it has to limit and be incomplete in order to avoid computational intractability and all kinds of other issues is the degree to which it's falling prey to the very arguments you're making. Is that not the case? That's right. So that's why there's no theory of everything. Exactly. But what I'm asking is why the special privileging
And I'm asking this question honestly because I do the same thing, so I'm asking it of myself as well. Why the special, you know, this is the question posed to Kant, right? Why the special privileging of mathematical reasoning as that which gives you access to reality?
Very, very good. I'll answer it at two levels. One is at the evolutionary theorem level. So because people have said, well, if you use evolution to show that we don't know the truth and you've shown that reason is nonsense and therefore you've shot yourself on the foot. Alvin Plantinga, for example, a Christian philosopher has tried to take that argument to say that evolution shows that all of our cognitive capacities are not reliable.
And therefore our theory building capacity is not reliable and therefore the theory of evolution is not reliable and so I was thinking of Plantinga and I was thinking of Fodor's response because Plantinga is in this really weird place that he has to say most of our beliefs are false, yet there's some property of the false beliefs that makes them adaptive.
or makes them functional and what would be that other than truth? You need to propose something other than truth to say it's false but highly functional and that's the missing property P of the propositions that Fodor basically launches against Plantinga.
He says, well, tell me what it is that the false beliefs have, because many of my false beliefs will kill me readily. So there has to be some property that distinguishes false beliefs that are non-adaptive from false beliefs that are adaptive. And what is that property? That's the kind of question I'm trying to get at. Right. So I'll give two answers. One, I think if I were Plantinga, what I would try to say is, look, I never believed in the theory of evolution to begin with.
I'm just trying to use the tools of evolution to show that it's nonsense. So I'm not subject to that kind of... So if I were Plantinga, I would make that move, right? I never said that evolution is true, and I just wanted to use it to show that it shoots itself from the foot. So that's how I would make that move. But beyond that, again, I don't think that we can ever
Any language, so there are limits of mathematics. I will say within the theory of evolution, so I'm going to just go back to the theory of evolution itself. Our theorem that says that evolution entails that none of our percepts are veridical. It turns out that that theorem is only for percepts, you know, it is not for logic and reason, right? And on evolutionary grounds, you could actually have, against Plantinga now,
arguments for why you should have some facility with logic and reason. For example, an organism that can notice that two bites of an apple give you more fitness payoffs than one bite of an apple is better off. That's about not about truth, about objective values, about fitness payoffs, something that's, you know,
Not about the nature of objective reality. So there would be some selection pressures, you could argue, for some modest facility with mathematics because you need to reason about fitness payoffs. And every once in a while the genes will come together and you'll get a David Hilbert or von Neumann and you get a mathematical genius.
So you could use that kind of logic against Plantinga, but you can see that I don't even want to go there because I'm saying that evolution by itself, I also just use the tools of evolution because it's our current best theory, but I want to completely transcend the theory with something else that projects down to evolution. But ultimately, any word or concept that we use, and including the most precise ones in mathematics,
But I think that it's not just mathematics. Any concept that we use, I think, will always, as the spiritual traditions say, always just be a pointer and not the thing. The boozas say, the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. And that will be true of mathematics. It'll be true of non-mathematical concepts. So the bigger question for me is, if I am and you are this unlimited intelligence that transcends concepts,
Why does that unlimited intelligence engage in using concepts? For me, that's the big question. First of all, you're in good company. This is an ancient problem. This is why does the one become many? Yes, right, right. This is why does the one become many and how could the one become many if the one is one? You're in that
I don't want to saddle you with that and say you have to solve that because that's unfair. But what I'm trying to get at is really I'm trying to get clear of your model. So we have some epistemic access.
uh fallible as it is but that's not that's not i'm not claiming infallibility i'm hearing though that there's still preferential the conceptual access gives us prefer our conceptual abilities give us preferential access to reality over our perceptual abilities i thought i heard you say something like that so if i have to choose between a percept and a conceptual analysis i should give priority to the conceptual analysis or did i mishear you well
is close. What I said is within the logical framework of evolutionary theory, that's the case. Right. I'm not saying that I believe, I'm just saying that using, so when Plantinga says, let's assume for sake of argument, evolution with natural selection, then you'll get that all cognitive capacities are not reliable. And I'm just saying, no, no, you don't. You get that perceptual capacities are not reliable, but you do not get the mathematical content. So that's just an argument about the specifics of evolution.
But I think I take your question as a broader one than that. Right. So I want to distinguish my argument on evolution from the broader question. Evolution, if you just take, if you ask what evolution says, it says clearly our perceptions are not true. It doesn't say clearly that our logic and math are not true. It doesn't say that clearly at all. Okay. But I take it that
From this broader point of view, evolution by natural selection aside, and now going beyond even my own conscious agent mathematics framework, my own view is that here I am talking using concepts, and I know that every concept that I'm speaking right now and every mathematical thought that I'm having is not it, and it's not even scratching the surface of the reality.
All I can do is point to that fact and yet I do find myself, because I'm talking with you and also talking to myself and trying to understand things, sort of forced to take this unlimited intelligence and compress it down to this almost zero bandwidth thing that we call thought and logic and concepts.
The question comes down to why is there something other than just presence without any content? Why is there content?
There's that, and that goes back to a question about what experience means in your model, because what does experience mean given the way you're talking? But I want to slow down and zero in on this.
I worry, and I'm pretty sure I must be wrong, I worry that there's an implicit thing that unless you have all knowledge, you have no knowledge, or unless you have all truth, you have no truth here. The idea, like I agree with you, like and I've made this argument multiple times, I made it to, you know, to Kurt that, you know, the vast amount of information, we have to subtend it, that's what relevance realization is, etc. I couldn't solve any of my problems if I had to try and trace out all the probabilistic relationships to all the other entities in the universe.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. I won't repeat all those arguments. I agree with that. But I mean, I'm worried about things like Mino's paradox and Soraydi's argument, right, which says no, no, there has to be partial knowledge that nevertheless grasps the truth. So why couldn't somebody say to you, yeah, my perceptual knowledge is very partial, but that doesn't equate
Logically, with it being false, it's just partial, because partial truth has to be a thing, or you're caught in Mio's paradox, you're caught in Soraydi's arguments, and then you end up with absolute skepticism. And I can tell you're not an absolute skeptic, so I'm not going to foist that on you. But you see the point I'm making? Partial knowledge doesn't mean false, just because it's partial, that there has to be something more. Did that make sense as a point? Oh, absolutely. And I think that partial knowledge is a perfectly good concept.
The question is, why would the one plunge itself into partial knowledge? Here's one view of what we are. There is the one consciousness, and it's putting on
is putting yourself into different VR avatars. There's a John Vervecki avatar, there's a Don Hoffman, and there's also a Kurt and so forth. These are all just avatars. Really, there's only one of us, and it's the one looking at itself through different headsets.
And as I said, I think this is a cheap headset that is used. This is only four dimensional. It poops out at 10 to the minus 33. So this is the one looking at itself through a fairly cheap, low-grade headset. I'm sure it uses much higher ones as well. There are countless other headsets that it uses, presumably, to look at itself and explore. So somehow the one is
And the way we experience it, by the way, is most of us don't think of ourselves as the one. We think of ourselves as this. We identify with the avatar in the VR. I am the avatar. That's what I am. And it's a very painful process of waking up and realizing, oh, no, I'm not the avatar. I'm the consciousness in which the avatar exists. I create the avatar. I thought I was the avatar. I am something deeper that creates that avatar.
And if that's what consciousness is doing, the issue is why does consciousness plunge itself into the ignorance? Why does it take a perspective, put on a headset? I asked a friend of mine, Perry Pissarro, this question. He said, you know, maybe it has to do with love.
Right? How can you love if there's only one of you? So what you do is you put on, you disunify yourself, you put on a bunch of headsets and now I can learn how to love John and Kurt and so forth. I can learn how to be courteous and treat them properly and so forth. And in so doing, that's what, so in other words,
If the one is love, it's in some sense in the meaning of love to diversify, to have the chance to learn to love in practice. I'm not saying that that's right, but it's the kind of deep kind of question that you have to ask and kind of deep conceptual answer you have to try to give to answer this kind of question. It sounds very similar to Vedanta and Neoplatonism. Back when you introduced love and love
Love both differentiates and integrates so you get the procession and the return and you get the whole neoplatonic drama and then you see cognition working fundamentally that way. But here's where I guess we're maybe and I'll speak neoplatonically because I can't really play in your physicist mathematics framework because you have me at a tremendous disadvantage. I'm trying my best from where I'm at and I'm trying to be respectful of the fact that I'm ignorant about some of this.
but most neoplatonists would say you ultimately have to say that the emanation and the return are as real as the one or you get into a really deep profound kind of duality which undermines this fundamental presupposition of the whole system so that you know the the thing to use your language the projection right and what it projects are as real as what is projected from because
If there is nothing projected then what it is projected from wouldn't be intelligible to us, we wouldn't have access to it.
Surely some of my precepts have to be possible because have to be right because I'm reading the gauges on the machines when I'm finding out all of what the physicists are finding and I'm taking measurements and I'm correctly hearing somebody when they're saying to me no no look the implication of this is right that's what I mean about you don't want to get it into saying all of these things that are going on within science are somehow
not real, but you didn't hold a reductionism. So what I'm saying is if you don't hold a reductionism, which you're nodding to, and you know, why not say that the procession and the return are as real as the one? I mean, this is where many Neoplatonists ended up, like Regina, right?
I like that approach and I would love to see it work out in the mathematics of our theory, actually, as we start to look with bigger and bigger systems and look at the one system and we look at this dynamic, we may find that even though these agents are one,
In fact, when you look at the one isn't just static, it's a dynamical system. And when you look, you'll find that it automatically has, quote unquote, these parts, these projections that are looking at it from from different perspectives. And so it may end up being just and it may also be a consequence of again, Gödel's incompleteness theorem that says that the end, the exploration of mathematical structure is completely unbounded.
Yes. And that may also force the one to always only be seeing itself through perspectives, because there may be something very, very deep there that forces this as well, the fact that mathematics is unbounded. But I feel like now I'm way over my pay grade on this one. Well, we both are, but that's fine. I mean, first of all, I want to say something.
Your view is much more
Well, thank you very much. No problem. The next thing is, it sounds like
Like you, I'm a phallobus, but I've come to the conclusion, and I don't use certainty, I use plausibility, and I have a formal model of what plausibility means, and I've articulated that. I think the idea that the fundamental grammar of intelligibility and the fundamental grammar of reality have to be in some sense the same,
or you cannot you you will be driven into kind of an absolute solipsism and absolute skepticism and it sounds to me like you're saying something similar like that like you're pushing the the machinery of intelligibility to its fundamental grammar sort of in the math and the logic and then you're saying this is somehow disclosing the fundamental structure of reality if i can use that term now is that a fair thing to say about how you're proceeding yeah yeah i would
I would say so with this very humbling proviso, and that is that, yeah, it is saying something about reality. And what it's saying is it may be measure zero about the reality, right? In other words, it's a probability zero subset of the whole reality. And that we will, in other words, there's infinite job security in science.
It's infinite job security, because we will always have essentially a measure zero grasp of the whole. But that measure zero may be real. I mean, it may be genuine, but it'll be measure zero.
I don't think I'm objecting to that, but I also want there to be some important continuity between whatever judgments I'm making about ultimate reality and judgments when I say this is more real to me than the dream I had last night.
If you do that, you're sneaking in a magic epistemic engine somewhere. And that, I think, we can't allow. It's like, no, no, I'm using the same epistemic engine. There has to be important continuity between when I make those judgments about, you know, this is more real than the dream I had last night. I'm using that same thing in some way when I'm making the judgments that you're making about the one. I agree.
I agree and maybe part of that coherence is the recognition explicitly that everything that I deal with conceptually is a limited thing. That may be one of the key things to make that coherence is the explicit recognition of the limit of any statement or any theory. Your epistemic humility
I just want to acknowledge it. Don't misunderstand me, Donald. The content of what you're saying is rich and rigorous, but I think your epistemic humility was something I had not got.
I sort of in an implicit way asked Donald the question and I don't want to try and answer it now because I think it would take us into more but I'd be happy to talk to him again about this use of the word experience and I'm also what's the relationship between experience
Absolutely.
I'm enjoying talking to you, Donald, because you're very open. I hope you're finding the same with me. You're very responding. The arguments are going back and forth. So I'd like to explore that aspect of your thinking with you, if possible. I would love to do that. I'd love to get back together, all three of us, and jump into that with both feet. That'd be a lot of fun. Absolutely. And I really appreciate John and Kurt, the open-mindedness.
By the way, do you know Smulyan's theorem that we're all either arrogant or inconsistent?
It's actually extremely simple. Your brain is finite, we can agree on that. And this works even if it's infinite, but it makes it much more simple. So you believe in proposition A, you believe in proposition B, dot, dot, dot, dot, down to proposition N.
not n as in the 14th letter but you understand so you either then believe that every one of your beliefs is true in which case you're arrogant or you believe that one of these propositions is incorrect you just don't know which one which means that somewhere you have a belief that you believe it to be true and you believe it to be false which means you're inconsistent so you either are arrogant or you're inconsistent well i don't know how old this theorem is but in the 80s in minimal rationality he argued
You can't even, given the time it is to move one valence shell on the rest of the history universe, you can't even calculate if 138 propositions are logically consistent with each other because of all possible implications, blah, blah, blah. It just, right, so the finitary predicament, I think, is one of the things I like about the platonic framework
is it is this continual profound not just talking but profound realization that we are simultaneously finite infinitude capable of transcendence and if we lose the first we can give into hubris and if we lose the transcendence we will give into despair and servitude and trying to keep the two together at all times. So I look for people that
in addition to what
And I mean this as a compliment, Donald. I was surprised. Don't take this as the wrong way. I was surprised to get that sense from you. I kept hearing you going between, you know, this is how we can transcend our experience and then back to we're finite, we're fallible. And you kept toggling back between them every time you were giving an answer and you were trying to do it. And as you said, not sloppily or right. But you were trying to do it very carefully. And I appreciated that.
Thank you all for coming. I appreciate it and we'll do it again next time. Excellent. What a pleasure. Thank you.
What follows is an excerpt of a conversation between John and myself that was partially recorded regarding truth, framing, and what's salutary. That is, truth isn't an object to be picked, but it's also the act of picking. These arguments from oneness actually are a left-brain phenomenon that we tend to think of that it is spiritual and creative, but it's more from Ian McGilchrist. Ian McGilchrist would say that that our left brain likes to categorize and see sameness and that
The right brain likes to see distinctness and uniqueness because I have this huge solipsistic moment and it's extremely frightening and terrifying to me. I'm still recovering from that. I'm like the best I've been. Ian told me something helpful, which is that, hey, you share an element with God and you share an element with other people and that
doesn't mean you are and the fact that you share implies you're different because you can't share with yourself. Well, that's what I want. I want to talk to Donald about what he means by experience. And Leibniz had the problem that the monads are self-enclosed, but yet somehow they have windows, which is trying to make this work. But he was there. I mean, like he said, no, you know, but the procession and the return are just as real as the one. And I think that's an important thing to him for him to acknowledge.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I also get that when people say that so-and-so is an illusion
Yeah, but in another sense, it's real. But he admitted that too, when all the scientific observations have to be real and partial knowledge is real. His notion of it being illusion is not that notion. It's not the solipsistic notion. Yeah. Well, like I said, here very deeply, the conclusion that Donald was in agreement with, which is the procession and the return are just as real as the one.
Right. Right. And so the idea that this is all an illusion behind or in front of the man, that's not this is as much the one as the one is the one. Right. Or it's not the one. Right. And so it's
Amy, I would challenge you, whenever that idea is giving you a profound sense of separation or disconnect, you have mis-framed the idea or people have mis-framed it to you. What's salutary and what's nourishing, what's true isn't always just the static proposition to be grasped and that somehow this is this compass of either trying to direct yourself someplace or even caring that you're directed properly, that there's a truth in the process
And so when people say, hey, if you find a toll, won't you be bored? Well, maybe the toll, the true toll is like something like live, like live in a certain manner or love. If you think that there's non propositional knowing, which I think deeply there is, and it's more primordial and important to your cognitive agency than propositional knowing, you're not going to capture it. If you by theory, you mean
You know your set of propositions. I did say I don't think of theories just as formal systems. That doesn't make any sense to me. I think theories are better understood as interpretations and bridges of our formal propositions into the other kind of knowings. That's what I think theories actually do for us.
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, etc.
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 culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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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": " So the bigger question for me is if I am and you are this unlimited intelligence that transcends concepts"
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"text": " Why does that unlimited intelligence engage in using concepts? For me, that's the big question. First of all, you're in good company. This is an ancient problem. Why does the one become mini?"
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"text": " If you're intrigued by the nature of consciousness, its origins, and how it may relate to physics, meaning, and purpose, then this conversation is a dream team. John Vervecky is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto and a professor of cognitive science, Buddhism, and psychology, with wide-reaching research, advancing an argument that explains the mindfulness revolution as well as the current meaning crisis. His lecture series, The Meaning Crisis, is on YouTube and is exquisite. I highly recommend it if you'd like to see one of the"
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"text": " brilliant minds of our generation sharing his process of universal interpretation links as usual to every reference in this podcast or in the description. Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine and is the author of the case against reality. Don argues that reality is not what you see instead it's an interface of icons."
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"text": " Hoffman has appeared on Ted, co-authored over a hundred scientific articles, and is back along with John Vervecki. Don's previous appearance on Theories of Everything, this podcast where we go over the mathematical details of his conscious agent theory, is in the description as well as the other podcasts with him, with Don Hoffman and Joscha Bach, and also John Vervecki has appeared with Joscha Bach. John has also appeared with Bernardo Kastrup as well as Solo. Every episode is linked in the description."
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"text": " Through these bite sized interactive learning experiences, for example, and I keep saying this, I would like to do a podcast on information theory, particularly Chiara Marletto, which is David Deutsch's student has a theory of everything that she puts forward called constructor theory, which is heavily contingent on information theory. So I took their course on random variable distributions and knowledge and uncertainty."
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"text": " So, John, why don't you start off?"
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"text": " What have I learned? I've been reading. I've learned a lot. I'm trying to think of something that might be relevant. I don't know how this conversation is going to go. So preemptive judgments of relevance are extremely tricky. If someone knows relevance, it's you. The fact that I study it doesn't mean... It's like I love wisdom. That doesn't mean I'm wise."
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"text": " I've been reading an essay, well first an essay on Nishida's essay and then Nishida's essay on intelligibility and it's been very interesting to me because I'm seeing a rather profound convergence between Zen philosophical notions of intelligibility and the neoplatonic ones and I'm finding that"
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"text": " I'm finding that very powerful because that kind of convergence says something across cultures and time you're getting that kind of convergence lends plausibility to this examination of intelligibility. And as you know, I do a lot of work around what is intelligibility, etc. So I think that will turn out to be relevant to our discussion."
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"text": " But I'm also really happy to see where this discussion is going to go. I'm really sort of excited to be here talking with Donald and I know he has an extremely flexible mind. So I'm just but I think intelligibility might come up as a relevant topic. Great. I want to make a note for later. You said that you love wisdom, but you're not sure if you're wise. I don't know. Does the love of wisdom imply that you're wise, though, in the same way that loving what's good implies that you're good?"
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"text": " No, no, that was exactly my point. The fact that I study relevance and I love it doesn't mean I'm necessarily an expert at enacting it. In fact, people often go into psychology to study what they most lack. So I may actually be somebody who's initially very, I know within social circumstances, I've generally been poor at picking up what's relevant. It's been something that I've been learning over time very slowly. Such is the curse of academics. Okay, Don,"
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"text": " Well, I've been working on a paper on relationship of consciousness to physics. And so I've been thinking a lot about that. We're about to submit it to this week and trying to show how we boot up space, time and particle physics from a theory of consciousness. And so one thing just as I was driving yesterday that I learned just by putting some pieces together, the physicists have this notion about the vacuum."
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"text": " and relationship to certain mathematical structures called permutations and they they relate them the vacuum to the trivial permutation and then particle interactions to these non-trivial permutations called decorative permutation and i realized in our friend yesterday so what i learned was as i was reviewing the mathematics of our mathematical framework of consciousness i realized the dynamical aspect of conscious agents that corresponds to the vacuum and it corresponds to agents"
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"text": " And so, but all of a sudden, when I realized that the whole thing begins to make sense. And so, so for me, what was a big aha yesterday was, okay, I'm getting starting with consciousness, trying to understand particle scattering in physics as a result of consciousness. And I understand what the vacuum means that it actually makes sense in the mathematical framework we're dealing with. So, so I guess it's relevant, because if we end up talking about consciousness and space, time and physics and physicalism, these kinds of concepts will be very"
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"text": " Are you trying to study scattering because you're inspired by Nima's work? I'm trying to study scattering because ultimately if we want to have a mathematically precise scientific theory of consciousness that's going to be taken seriously by the scientific world, you've got to make predictions that are testable."
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"text": " A lot of my colleagues are thinking we need to make predictions at the neuroscience level and of course we eventually do. But brains are really complicated and particles are very simple. So my goal is to make predictions about two gluons in four gluons out scattering first because not because that's harder because it's easier than neuroscience and the physicists have already given us a way into that. So they've said"
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"text": " If you want to do particle scattering, there are these structures beyond space-time, like the amplitude hydron, and then the deeper structure is the decorator permutations. And so they say if you can give us a decorator permutation,"
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"text": " we can give you a scattering amplitude for some kind of particle dynamics and so what i've been working on is is that starting with the theory of consciousness that's dynamical show how the decorative permutations come out and from then i can just then use all the wonderful work by the physicists like nema and his collaborators that start with these decorative permutations and give you scattering amplitudes"
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"text": " The big goal is to start with consciousness and make predictions at colliders that are testable and hopefully new predictions that their current models can't make, right? I would like to, for example, explain why supersymmetry doesn't work based on this dynamics of consciousness. So not just, of course, we need to get all the stuff that they've already done and we need to be able to capture their predictions that they've already tested, but we need to make new predictions as well. So that's why I was really working on the scattering amplitudes because"
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"text": " One, they're a way to empirically test the theory. Number two, we know this really well. We have the data, we know what the right answers are, and we know what the outstanding problems are. And then the fourth thing is, I would rather start there than neuroscience because it may seem counterintuitive, but the scattering is going to be much, much easier than making connections with neuroscience that are absolutely rigorous and testable to, you know, 10 decibel places or something like that."
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"text": " Okay, so the last broad question and then I'm going to leave the floor open to you both to riff off of one another is what is it that you find impactful about one another's work and we'll start Don with you toward John and then John, you'll respond and then I'll interject fairly seldomly."
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"text": " John, what's beautiful is he's one of those rare truly renaissance individuals who knows ancient philosophy and modern philosophy, he knows modern neuroscience, he knows evolutionary psychology, he knows the scientific method backwards and forwards, but he also knows mystical traditions and he knows how to pick and choose from all of these in an intelligent way to get a synthesis that is then, I think,"
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"text": " I'm potentially life changing for many many people to get meaning in our lives to understand our current political situation and so is one of those rare individuals who really knows. This broad variety of topics he knows how to integrate them is not just a dilettante but he actually knows how to integrate them in."
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"text": " Thank you, Donald. That was very kind, and I"
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"text": " That speaks to what I like about you. I think you and I belong to the school of what I like to call big picture cognitive science, which is not this or that. I mean, you do specialist work and I do specialist work, but we don't think that's the core of good science, that integrating into a broad framework is important and frameworks like you that try to bridge between"
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"text": " I think you asked big questions. I think you you somebody who talks about"
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"text": " consciousness and ultimate reality, and yet wants to talk about it in a scientifically rigorous, even mathematical, formalized mathematical way. You can see why I deeply resonate with that. I may not agree with all of your particular conclusions, and that's to be said. I mean, do any two academics? But the point is, I think, if I can put it this way, in many important ways, we're on the same side of the tracks. We think we should be doing these broad"
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"text": " integrations that are not facile but are pertinent, precise, well argued for, well evidenced, and that they have important existential, sapiential, and therefore spiritual in that sense, consequences that should be respected. We should not limit the pool from which we're drawing our analyses to just sort of current philosophy or current science."
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"text": " but much more broad, cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-disciplinary. So, I mean, like I say, I'm sure we'll get into disagreement, but I want to say this upfront, which is, I often say this, and I mean it, and people can see that I mean it, and how I"
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"text": " How I carry myself in discussions, the manner in which you're doing these things, I think is really, really right in a profound and important way. And I think you present it in a way that's often very challenging to people who have a much more, I want to be kind here, much more specialized, I was going to say blinkered, but a much more specialized epistemology. And I think that is really needed now. I think all"
},
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"text": " I'll speak for psychology. We both are in psychology, at least we both have a point. I have one in psychology and cognitive science. You have one in psychology and other things too, philosophy, cognitive science. But one of the things that bothers me about psychology is this emphasis on innovation as opposed to integration. I would argue that's one of the things driving the replication crisis. And I think the resistance to creating"
},
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"text": " Broad philosophically astute frameworks within psychology is something that needs to be challenged. And I see that you and I are both doing that. And I think that's very, very important. You know what, let me ask a question. So I'll start this off with the perhaps the most basic question. We say that conscious or some people say that consciousness is fundamental. And then there's various questions like, well, what is consciousness? So here's"
},
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"text": " Another question what is fundamental so what's fundamental if one doesn't assume reductionism and if one does have to assume reductionism for something to be fundamental then does that mean that. Conceptually reductionism is more fundamental than the x that you're saying is fundamental so anyway what is fundamental. I'll be happy to start sure sure so i think that."
},
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"start_time": 997.398,
"text": " There's two important and different concepts going on here. One is reductionism, which has to do with an assumption about space time being fundamental. And with reductionism, the idea is that as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space time, you get to more and more fundamental objects and more and more fundamental laws. So that's a particular idea. And by the way, reductionism is assuming"
},
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"start_time": 1023.882,
"text": " that space-time itself is fundamental, because it's taking smaller scales of space as being associated with more and more fundamental objects and laws. But fundamental for me is a much broader concept than, say, space-time. Fundamental is a property of scientific theories. So every scientific theory has assumptions. No theory in science is free of any assumptions."
},
{
"end_time": 1071.015,
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"text": " These assumptions are the foundation of that scientific theory. And so what's fundamental is with respect to a particular theory. What does that take as the fundamental concepts for building that theory? So I think the notion of fundamental is a theory"
},
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"end_time": 1096.886,
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"text": " relative concept. You should ask, what's fundamental in this particular scientific theory? In Einstein's theory of gravity, space-time is fundamental. In evolution by natural selection, we have the notion of physical objects in space-time and things like genes and competition and replication. Those are fundamental concepts in that theory."
},
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"end_time": 1110.691,
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"text": " But you can have different scientific theories with different fundamental concepts. Most of modern science does take space-time as fundamental, but then they'll also add other"
},
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"text": " Other concepts as well to be fundamental like in evolution, you'll also add organisms and DNA and replication and so forth. So most scientific theories also inherit the assumption that reductionism is a good method. Most of them do."
},
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"end_time": 1146.698,
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"text": " I'll just turn it over to John, but I'll just say that physicists now are saying that space-time is not fundamental, like Neymar, Connie, Ahmed, and others, and therefore reductionism is doomed. Not just space-time, but reductionism is doomed. But I'll stop there."
},
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"text": " So I agree with, I think I'm agreeing with Donald, that I would want to distinguish reductionism from claims of fundamentals. I think reductionism is very problematic."
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"text": " It gets you into certain performative contradictions if you try to make an absolute complete reductionism because it gets you into saying things like only the bottom level is real and I know that from this level up here which isn't real and you get all kinds of performative contradictions going on there. You have measurement problems. Wolfgang Smith has brought this out. The ruler can't be a quantum thing to measure the quantum things where you get into"
},
{
"end_time": 1210.401,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1187.483,
"text": " Briefly, why do you say performative contradiction and not contradiction? Performative contradiction means that there isn't a contradiction between propositions, there's contradictions between the activity and the proposition stated. Here's one, I'm asleep right now."
},
{
"end_time": 1226.049,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1211.903,
"text": " Okay, that doesn't make any sense. It's a performative contradiction because the action requires the falsity of the proposition. Can you explain why suggesting that there's some ground that's more real than a higher level is a performative contradiction?"
},
{
"end_time": 1254.804,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1226.852,
"text": " Ah, what I was saying is if you say that the bottom level is the only level that's at real, that is clearly not the level at which the science is being done. The science is being done by scientists using gauges and writing things down and using computers and using language and making theories and going to conferences. And if all of that is not real, because it's somehow epiphenomenal or illusory, then how is it that that level is giving you epistemic access"
},
{
"end_time": 1278.268,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1254.804,
"text": " to the real bottom level. You're saying like it's be like saying I'm in the middle of a dream and in that dream I dreamt that Santa Claus was real, therefore Santa Claus is real. Like if the level at which you're doing the science is illusory, it undermines all the claims you're making from that level. You have to be able to give an ontological reality to science if any of its conclusions are going to be taken to be real."
},
{
"end_time": 1300.316,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1278.541,
"text": " That's beautiful. Thank you. So that's, and there's a host of other arguments, and I want to put reductionism aside for that. Now, fundamental, and I agree with Donald completely, fundamental is theoretic. But one thing you can be connoting, not denoting, is what you think is the ontological referent"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.138,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1300.776,
"text": " Which is what some people sometimes mean by fundamental and I think instead of using fundamental, which is a theoretic property, we might want to use an ontological property like real and then you might be asking what is it to say that something is real or to say that one thing is more real than another and I think that is an important question."
},
{
"end_time": 1347.756,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1319.957,
"text": " And I think that question can't be decided by just looking within any particular theory for its particular fundamentals. Because what we're asking, I think I would argue when we're asking questions about reality is what makes possible any and all such intelligibility? What makes possible any possible theory that might turn out to be true? There has to be some aspect because we take it, I think that reality in some sense corresponds to"
},
{
"end_time": 1370.179,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1348.643,
"text": " ability to make our claim to find our claims true or our skills applying our perspectives present etc. So I'm waving over with that with my hand because that's a big thorny knot but I'm trying to pull apart. I think there's reductionism which we put aside, there's fundamentals and I agree with Donald what he just said about that."
},
{
"end_time": 1399.036,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1370.179,
"text": " and but i think we have an extra theoretic notion which is the notion of realness which is something like that which can make you know various theories true how do they do it and then the question might be are you a pluralist or modest about that for example that might be a starting point do you think there are many different realities that make theories true you could be some kind of relativist in that way or do you think that there is a ultimate reality in some important unified fashion etc so"
},
{
"end_time": 1427.637,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1399.036,
"text": " There's three different questions we could be asking. Reductionism, which I'd largely put aside. What's the fundamental of any theory? But you might ask what's reality, and you might ask it in saying, what is it that could possibly integrate non-reductively all these fundamentals together so that we would have an overall integrated coherent account? Those are the kinds of moves you can make. Does that make sense? Sure. So, Don,"
},
{
"end_time": 1457.807,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1428.268,
"text": " Do you have anything to say in response? I think that, you know, the notion of reality is an extra notion beyond just what's fundamental to a particular theory. And this whole area is very, very tricky, you know, for the very kinds of performative contradiction reasons that John just mentioned. Very, very easy to step on landmines everywhere here. But it seems to me that Gernel's incompleteness theorem,"
},
{
"end_time": 1488.626,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1458.848,
"text": " tells us that in some sense there is no theory of everything right any formal system that is rich enough to model the axioms of arithmetic is is either inconsistent or incomplete and we call it girdle's incompleteness theorem because we don't take the inconsistency thing too seriously so that means no matter what scientific theory we have it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1519.019,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1489.121,
"text": " Not the final word, there will always be, if the theory is rich enough to do arithmetic, and most scientific theories are, they wouldn't be taken seriously. So they're rich enough to do arithmetic, so they're rich enough to have a girdle statement that is outside their scope and yet is true, but not provable within that theory. And no matter how much you add those new statements to your scientific theory, there'll always be new statements. So that means that there is no scientific theory of everything."
},
{
"end_time": 1544.65,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1520.452,
"text": " And the notion of truth, and I think the related notion of reality, and that's why I'm bringing this up, the notion of truth and the notion of reality, in some sense, I think, will forever transcend scientific theory. And of course, I'm a scientist, so I'm not saying, oh, throw up our hands, and there's something very deep going on here that"
},
{
"end_time": 1572.142,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1545.196,
"text": " Theories turn out to be empirically quite valuable, right? I'm alive today because of scientific theories that led to medicine that has saved my life. So the stuff works even though Gödel tells me that the theory is trivial compared to the truth that the theories can't prove, right? So the fact that you can't have a theory of everything and you can't ultimately"
},
{
"end_time": 1594.906,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1572.637,
"text": " know that the truth with a capital T and therefore, and this is where John may want to disagree, I don't know, therefore we can't know what's reality with a capital R. We can only say these are the best theories we have so far, but we need to modestly and humbly say that's our theory, that's not the truth, and I would be fooled to say that that's the reality."
},
{
"end_time": 1622.619,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1595.282,
"text": " I just want to thank Donald for being, I hope I follow his example and continually make space for him as well. Yeah, okay, great, great. So apologies for me not making space here for taking some space. So with Gödel's incompleteness theorem, you said that we may never know truth with the capital T. And then you said that a toe may not exist. However, there's the difference between a toe existing and us knowing the toe."
},
{
"end_time": 1649.923,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1623.217,
"text": " And when you said that we don't know truth with a capital T, to me that truth with a capital T is the same as the toe. That's a statement, then I'll get you to respond to that. And then second is that there are certain assumptions in Gödel's theorem. So for instance, that the laws would have to be based in first order logic or that the laws are consistent because consistency is actually an implicit requirement. And it'd be strange to say that the world is inconsistent, though there are some people who I'm sure on the more mystic end who may say that."
},
{
"end_time": 1676.288,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1650.196,
"text": " realities of contradiction paradoxes are at the bottom and the top and there's no bottom and top but there is well those are some ways of getting around it and that's why when i hear people like myself maybe even two years ago would say girdle's incompleteness theorem says there is no toe that's a bit dubious to me so i want to hear what are your responses to that and then john so please then comment i'd like to hear donald's response to that first"
},
{
"end_time": 1694.514,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1677.346,
"text": " Right. Well, so I would say your point is well taken, Kurt. The way I would think about it is to say the fact that we can't have a theory of everything doesn't mean that there isn't a truth out there. A real true reality."
},
{
"end_time": 1724.104,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1695.094,
"text": " And from spiritual traditions we learn that perhaps that's what you are. You're not divorced from that reality. You are that reality and you can't know that reality through intellectual and conceptual knowing, but you can know it firsthand by being that reality. And so there could be this notion of truth and reality that transcends the notion of a theory of everything. See, a theory of everything starts off with a finite set of concepts."
},
{
"end_time": 1752.568,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1724.701,
"text": " and says, here's how far I can go with this set of concepts. And so my argument would be, you know, along the lines of Gödel's kinds of argument that if you start with any finite axiomatization or any finite set of concepts, you can come up with an infinite number of theorems. Absolutely, you can come up with an infinite number of theorems, but there will be probability zero compared to all the truths that are out there."
},
{
"end_time": 1781.817,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1753.029,
"text": " And so that's why I would, I mean, but again, there's this meta notion that John was bringing up. So here I am talking about truth, using words, but saying the concepts themselves have very limited meaning. The only escape out of it for me is this issue that the spiritual traditions bring up, which is you can't talk about the truth, but you are it. Your very being is it."
},
{
"end_time": 1806.34,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1781.954,
"text": " And so when you speak, that being itself is projecting down into a finite set of concepts to talk with other avatars of the being. And so I think that there's a way not to be self-refuting in that. But again, I would love to have John contradict me. I don't know if I'm going to contradict you or not. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1812.227,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1807.585,
"text": " I think the Godel argument still has value with respect to formal systems."
},
{
"end_time": 1842.602,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1812.671,
"text": " Whether or not theories are formal systems, I think it's a genuine philosophical question. I think, you know, we clearly had theories before there was math, and they're bona fide theories, Plato has a theory of the psyche, and whether or not you could call that a formal system, I think is questionable, and yet there was a lot of, I would say there's a lot of truth in Plato's theory. It turned out to be, you know, it's been got quite a bit of an empirical confirmation recently, so"
},
{
"end_time": 1864.377,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1842.602,
"text": " So I'm a little bit hesitant about that, but I take your point to be correct. Donald, in fact, I take it very deeply, and I actually think this is a platonic point, and this is something that comes out in Plania's work as well. I take one of the ways in which we determine that something's real is precisely it's inexhaustibleness."
},
{
"end_time": 1888.131,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1865.009,
"text": " But it's not cacophonous inexhaustibility, and this is the thing, this is what I think Plato meant by the good, we get it's, everything is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. We can learn more and more. So I do not think there is a limited number of truths about anything. I think the number of true, even the number of two descriptions of this very plain stone"
},
{
"end_time": 1917.5,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1888.131,
"text": " is indefinitely large, it's inexhaustible, etc. And this is what I talk about multi-spectrality and things like that. So I don't think I'm disagreeing with you because I think that being an inexhaustible fountain of intelligibility is precisely one of the ways in which we determine that something is real. And I think that for phenomenological reasons and for cognitive reasons."
},
{
"end_time": 1935.862,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1918.319,
"text": " I also think that truth is a retrospective notion, like real it's a comparative notion. So when I say something's real or something's an illusion, I'm always making a comparison. When I say this is true, what I'm really saying"
},
{
"end_time": 1962.875,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1935.862,
"text": " is this is more true than that, because here's the limitations that that have that I can see from here. But I'm a fallibilist. That doesn't mean that I then conclude, oh, this theory, I can stop here, because no theory has ever done that, and there's no good reason to believe. So I'll have another transformative moment where I'll say, oh, but that theory turns out to be limited because of this."
},
{
"end_time": 1982.619,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1963.251,
"text": " What do I point to that the entire history of science, the entire history of science shows that to be the case again and again and again. And I think that's the notion. I think the notion of truth we're using is a retrospective comparative notion. I don't think that that means it's an illusion. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2011.544,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1982.619,
"text": " We should give up the Cartesian notion that truth points to some complete absolute formalized grasp of something and that the criterion of knowledge is certainty. And because we've tried that and it collapses, it certainly doesn't underwrite science. Because, you know, it's very plausibly the case that many of our current best theories will turn out to be rejected in the future, right? This is Lawton's, you know, pessimistic argument. I think it has to be taken"
},
{
"end_time": 2039.172,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2011.544,
"text": " very seriously. Now the last thing that Donald said, and what I think with him is convergent with everything I just said, sends shivers up my spine because, you know, I've been arguing that there are kinds of knowing other than propositional inferential. There's procedural, there's perspectival, and there's participatory, which is knowing by being. And I agree that many of these mystical traditions say, you know, the way to come in most contact with reality is not through your conceptual propositional knowing,"
},
{
"end_time": 2055.759,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2039.172,
"text": " but it's for your perspectival and ultimately your participatory knowing. And I agree that that is always the case. Give me a moment here. What I mean by that is something like what Marla Ponty or Forty Cogs I would say, right, is"
},
{
"end_time": 2069.462,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2056.527,
"text": " even my propositional things are ultimately dependent on skills, my skills are dependent on perspectives, my perspectives are always dependent on participatory identity, and so the spiritual traditions are not"
},
{
"end_time": 2097.261,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2069.923,
"text": " just explicating something that is always the case. They're not proposing something that's over there that only the great gifted ones can realize. I mean, that's part of, I think, a little bit wrong with the way some of these spiritual traditions have been taken up, right? But I think what the spiritual traditions are pointing to is exactly that fact that there's an asymmetric dependence relation"
},
{
"end_time": 2120.845,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2097.261,
"text": " The propositional is dependent on the procedural, the procedural is dependent on the perspectival, and the perspectival is dependent on the participatory. And so for me, I try to understand realness in terms of what best integrates those four together when we're making claims about how things are. Oh, very good. Very, very good."
},
{
"end_time": 2150.998,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2121.681,
"text": " Now, just a brief note from two sponsors. Many of you are more than passive listeners with variegated interests from science to engineering to video games to virtual reality. You may even have your own business or wish to start one. Well, it's the 21st century where you can create a website in under an hour and start selling products to virtually every country on the planet. Businesses like Shopify make that process intuitive, simple and comprehensive with libraries of tutorials, 24-7 support. And to be frank, it's one of the most pleasing to the eye e-commerce sites out there."
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{
"end_time": 2169.36,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2150.998,
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{
"end_time": 2184.104,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2169.36,
"text": " I invite you to explore Shopify and welcome them as a sponsor of Toe. Sign up for a free trial at Shopify.com slash theories. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash theories to start selling online today. That's Shopify.com slash theories."
},
{
"end_time": 2210.026,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2185.401,
"text": " As the Toe Project grows, we get plenty of sponsors coming. And I thought, you know, this one is a fascinating company. Our new sponsor is Masterworks. Masterworks is the only platform that allows you to invest in multi-million dollar works of art by Picasso, Bansky, and more. Masterworks has given you access to invest in fine art, which is usually only accessible to multi-millionaires or billionaires. The art that you see hanging in museums can now be partially owned by you."
},
{
"end_time": 2228.387,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2210.026,
"text": " The inventive part is that you don't need to know the details of art or investing. Masterworks makes the whole process straightforward with a clean interface and exceptional customer service. They're innovating as more traditional investments suffer. Last month, we verified a cell which had a 21.5% return. So for instance, if you were to put $10,000 in, you would now have $12,000."
},
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"end_time": 2254.07,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2228.387,
"text": " I agree. I like the idea that the truth is related to some kind of inexhaustible"
},
{
"end_time": 2271.408,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2254.65,
"text": " arena that where you can keep learning and also in the case of scientific theories and the relationship to that notion of truth. For me, what's impressive about a scientific theory is when it predicts its own demise."
},
{
"end_time": 2298.575,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2271.954,
"text": " Yes, sorry for interrupting. For me a scientific theory is one that when you really understand the theory it tells you the limits of its concepts and it tells you where it stops and it tells you that at this point you will need not just a tweak, you will need a new framework. You will need a new set of foundational concepts"
},
{
"end_time": 2327.961,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2299.087,
"text": " and but the the nice thing about science in this regard is that the constraint is whatever new framework that you if this current theory is is one that we take seriously like like einstein's theory of gravity or quantum field theory right and it tells you its limits or evolution by natural selection and this theory that we say okay right now this is one of the best theories humanity has ever had and and we look for its limits when we get the new deeper theory with new"
},
{
"end_time": 2351.271,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2328.49,
"text": " Conceptual framework, perhaps. We don't just pick that willy-nilly and however we want. There is a constraint. Our old theories can't tell us what's beyond. They can tell us that there's something beyond, but they can't tell us what is beyond. But they can veto our bad ideas. So what we have to do is build our new framework with new concepts, and then we need to show"
},
{
"end_time": 2362.927,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2351.971,
"text": " That there is some kind of projection a simplified sub model of our new more general model gives us back evolution by natural selection or gives us back quantum field theory and space time."
},
{
"end_time": 2392.5,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2363.217,
"text": " That's the constraint. If we can't do that, or when we project it back, we get something that includes evolution and a little bit more, for example. It could be an augmented theory of evolution. It doesn't have to be exactly, but it better not lose anything that we know and love from evolutionary theory, or better tell us in convincing ways why we were mistaken about that aspect of it, right? So that's the constraint. So I see truth and the real as, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 2423.063,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2393.763,
"text": " You know, these absolute things that our concepts will never, they will scratch the surface, but they will never probe the depths. And what science is, and of course, even, you know, pre-scientific theories like Plato's, for example, as you mentioned. What these theories are doing is using concepts to explore truth. And with science, what we get that's new is"
},
{
"end_time": 2452.756,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2423.951,
"text": " precise mathematical precise statements of the limit of the theory and and what a wonderful cure for dogmatism because when your own theory tells you its limits if you buy the theory you have to buy the limits and so you have to buy that you don't have the final answer and that's that's really so that's the cure for dogmatism so so theories that i love a theory where the theory itself is humble enough to tell you where it stops"
},
{
"end_time": 2475.606,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2453.08,
"text": " but also smart enough to be able to veto any bad ideas you have for what's next. On that note, where do you both see your own theories indicating their limits? Well, first of all, I want to reply to what Donald said because I think he just put his finger on something that I've been arguing and I think there's a point of convergence here."
},
{
"end_time": 2503.217,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2476.613,
"text": " We put a lot of emphasis on coherence and other features for our understanding of rationality. But I think this capacity to do what Donald has just argued, which is a genuine capacity to afford principled self-correction, vetoing things out and then pointing beyond. I think this is a hallmark of rationality that is not emphasized enough. And this is, I often tell my students, even at a heuristic level,"
},
{
"end_time": 2529.394,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2503.729,
"text": " If you want to assess somebody's rationality, look how much they are willing to criticize their own work at some point or correct their previous work. Don't expect it in like in the moment they're talking because that's but like, can they look at something they did a year or two ago and go, oh, here's all the mistakes in there. Right. And that I think is really, really important. Now, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2560.64,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2532.5,
"text": " I think what I would say is that, and then I'll ask you to re-ask your question, Kurt, if you want to change it, modify it. But for me, therefore, truth is like notions like orientation and navigation. You're properly oriented, and the orientation rules a lot of things out. We're not going that way, we're not going that way, we're not going that. And then navigation is constantly telling you how you have to adjust and reformulate how you're doing. And you might find from the navigation that you need to reorient."
},
{
"end_time": 2566.323,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2561.305,
"text": " That's always a possibility, but that's not the same as wandering around willy-nilly."
},
{
"end_time": 2592.602,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2566.886,
"text": " Right? There's a very big difference. And so that's what I meant when I think truth is always retrospective. You can always look back and say, hey, look at how far we have, we're closer. We may have to change our direction, but we made genuine, you know, I'm using the spatial metaphor here, progress. And so that's what I think is really crucial. This may sound like I'm splitting a hair."
},
{
"end_time": 2618.183,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2592.995,
"text": " But I want to argue that I'm not because this notion of truth as orientational and navigational rather than as a completed grasp of something I think is really, really important right now. And I think we really have to pause. And for example, let me just say one thing and then I'll shut up unless you let you re-ask your question. But I just wanted to"
},
{
"end_time": 2645.93,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2618.183,
"text": " pick up on this point, because Donald was saying something about theories, and I think it directly also corresponds to how we should understand rationality. And so, if what he said is true, and I agree that it is, and what I'm saying is true, that means that there are a lot of, and this ties back again to what the spiritual traditions can hold out for us, there are a lot of truths that are not accessible to us unless we're willing to undergo significant transformation."
},
{
"end_time": 2658.951,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2648.131,
"text": " right once you give up oh no i can just grasp this thing with this universal method Leibniz calculus once you give that up and you say no no no there's going to be this constantly going on that"
},
{
"end_time": 2684.172,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2659.36,
"text": " The pre-supposition that you can sort of remain epistemically, the grammar of your epistemic machinery can remain unaltered in order to get access to truth. I think that is deeply challenged, if not outright falsified. But that pre-supposition of a universal method that does not require personal transformation is fundamental to the whole Cartesian framework."
},
{
"end_time": 2702.09,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2684.548,
"text": " And see, I think the spiritual traditions are there reminding us that no, no, no, your methods can do a lot, but there's a lot of truths that are only disclosable to you after you go through profound self-correction, which is profound self-transcendence, which is profound transformation. I just wanted to make that point very clear."
},
{
"end_time": 2731.118,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2702.534,
"text": " I like your question that is pending, so I want to get to it about the limits for our own theories, but it is transformative. You can't just be a brain in a vat. It's the whole person that's involved in this process. For example, letting go of physicalism. The idea that space-time is doomed, for example. Just in the last 20, 30 years, physicists are saying space-time is doomed."
},
{
"end_time": 2754.787,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2731.425,
"text": " And that's not a trivial thing to say. When you say space-time is doomed, what goes along with that is amazing, both mathematically, scientifically, but also personally. And it hurts because most of us as physicalists then think of ourselves as our bodies. I am my body."
},
{
"end_time": 2785.367,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2755.589,
"text": " That is what I am and my conscious experiences just are, for example, what my brain produces and that's what I am. And that's part of that whole, I mean, that's a clean implication of the physicalist framework. You are your body and when your brain dissolves, whatever consciousness you may have, you may think consciousness is an illusion. I'm good friends of mine. For example, Keith Frankish thinks that the consciousness is an illusion or Dan Dennett."
},
{
"end_time": 2809.906,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2787.176,
"text": " That consciousness, whether it's real or illusory, is gone when your body dies. But if you let go of physicalism, it's not just, okay, I just changed a few assumptions. No, who I am is now up for grabs. I was just a body in space-time. Now I cannot be a body in space-time because space-time is not fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 2824.65,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2810.162,
"text": " so what am i so now it's not just this intellectual dispassionate it's who i am as an individual that's up for grabs and so that becomes very emotional too you you people get afraid sometimes when i talk about"
},
{
"end_time": 2854.445,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2825.179,
"text": " We don't see reality as it is, and space-time isn't fundamental. People throw out a few key counterpoints, and when I answer them, all of a sudden I see fear. And that's this personal aspect of this thing. This is not just an intellectual brain-in-the-mat thing. It becomes very personal. And so your whole, not only intellectual, but emotional assessment of who I am and all that that means is also at stake here. So I agree with John that it's very transformative. It's not just"
},
{
"end_time": 2883.763,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2854.991,
"text": " writing theories down and dispassionately looking at them. Okay, well, let's speak about a mental health aspect here, because when we're referring to changing one's identity, then it sounds like that's all some process of enlightenment and salutary if you were only to push through the fear. But then there's also psychosis and derealization and depersonalization. And generally in these more spiritual discussions, I don't hear much about the negative aspects of"
},
{
"end_time": 2893.933,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2883.951,
"text": " these transformative experiences or of contending with ideas. I know for myself, I haven't looked this up, but people told me it was like a dark night of the soul. So I still have to look that up."
},
{
"end_time": 2921.459,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2894.582,
"text": " And the reason I haven't looked it up is because at the time it was too close to me. I couldn't even look up. I was afraid that I had every mental illness. Like I thought, do I have schizophrenia? Do I have? I don't even know what that is. I still don't know what that is. So I had to talk to psychiatrists and therapists and find out. And they said, no, you have anxiety. Like you have extreme anxiety. You got to quiet down. And also then they said, Hey Kurt, in these comments, like I read the comments and people say that what you had was an awakening experience."
},
{
"end_time": 2950.862,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2921.459,
"text": " where I felt like everything was in my head it was like solipsism and frequently my grasp of reality was so tenuous and my identification with my body was so loose and it wasn't pleasant in the least but then in the comment section I hear people saying and I imagine that they're well intentioned they would say like you need to push through that the hero encounters and the hero doesn't run away and then it's making me feel like a coward like I'm this person that this recreant craven gutless and invertebrate so I was speaking to a therapist and she said you know"
},
{
"end_time": 2971.937,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2951.664,
"text": " Firstly, this idea of the hero that encounters that's a bit dangerous because it can give you this hero complex. And secondly, you are encountering it by coming by voluntarily coming to therapy and doing exposure therapy. So she's like, hey, read those comments, read them, realize that they're just words on a page, go closer to them, like various exercises. So I do that and like, geez, Louise, like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2984.667,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2971.937,
"text": " Looking at my fingers and feeling like I have fingers that's salutary for myself for some other people They could say that well suffering comes from an identification with the ego or the body for me all my pleasure like everything"
},
{
"end_time": 3010.947,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2985.435,
"text": " The beautifulness of life is finally back and it's like back at a more deep, rich level than it ever was. It reminds me of this quote about T.S. Eliot, like you come back to the place and you know it for the first time. I don't feel as if I've completely transformed like I know it for the first time. I certainly am seeing it differently and experiencing it differently. Maybe that's what he meant. Anyway, so the more nefarious aspects of the meditation or whatever we think of as meditation in the West,"
},
{
"end_time": 3035.623,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3010.947,
"text": " So our misinterpretations of Eastern or just adoptions of certain practices without the whole community around it, and these lessons of enlightenment and so on, they can be extremely propitious for many people, but then also dire for many others. And I don't hear much of that negative aspect. And then recently happened upon the work of Anna Letkajtis. So forgive me, Anna, if I'm mispronouncing your name. She's a PhD candidate from"
},
{
"end_time": 3065.401,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3036.135,
"text": " Sydney, and her work was brought to me by Shoshana Jones Square, who's a professor at the University of Bishop, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, Anna studies the dark side of Dharma, and so I want to interview her. I guess an overarching question is what terrifies you about your work? I want to answer that, right? First of all, if you look in these traditions, and when I teach meditation, I do the same thing, they warn about all kinds of things that can happen to you."
},
{
"end_time": 3088.558,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3066.067,
"text": " It's only when you get the Western importation of these and the commodification that says there's a panacea practice, there's a single practice you can do that will bring you bliss or something. And I think this is pernicious bullshit. I do not think, from my understanding of how cognition works, that there is anything like"
},
{
"end_time": 3113.302,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3088.899,
"text": " a panacea practice, and I've had enough experience with many traditions that there are stuff that really challenges you in ways you said. By the way, it's from St. John of the Cross, Dark Knight of the Soul, right? And he wrote it for good reason. I think what you need"
},
{
"end_time": 3141.954,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3113.882,
"text": " And I've argued for this elsewhere, Kurt, so I won't repeat all the arguments, but you need an ecology of practices that sits within a community of people so that when the dark shit happens, you have people there with you. You have other practices that can prevent you from spinning off. That's why you went to therapy. Therapy was a compensatory practice that brought you into realignment with the anomalous experiences. So you were able to integrate it."
},
{
"end_time": 3165.896,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3142.346,
"text": " So I think we have to be really careful. I take the criticism well, and by the way, people have been doing this for a while. Look at the work of Willow Barton. She's done work on some of the dark stuff that comes out in mindfulness practices. And this is telling. So I was at a conference and she was doing this and I hope this does not come off as self-promotional because that's not the intent."
},
{
"end_time": 3192.875,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3166.596,
"text": " She was saying this and I put out my hand and I said, but I always warn my students that they're going to get these weird things when they're meditating, they're going to get really cold or really hot. They're going to feel that they're floating or sinking and they might feel disconnected. Like I warned them about all of that and that, you know, and how to incorporate it in. And then, and then she sort of looked at me strangely and I said, well, don't most instructors in the West warn people about all of this? She said, no, they don't. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 3219.07,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3193.524,
"text": " Now that to me is the most empirically relevant fact, not the traditions, is that there's something going on in Western culture with its commodification and its comfort zoning that precludes people doing this on a regular and reliable basis when we have clear historical evidence that in situ these traditions did this on a regular and reliable basis. And so I'm not saying that there aren't dark nights of the soul,"
},
{
"end_time": 3243.831,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3219.07,
"text": " But you don't have to be isolated alone, feel that you're going insane, like you can have an ecology of practices and a community and a tradition that allows you to properly, and I don't say push through, because for every hero myth, there's a hubris myth. You don't push through this. You have to listen to other people really deeply at that point. You have to listen to your therapist."
},
{
"end_time": 3271.152,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3244.155,
"text": " That's what it's really indicating. But this individualistic, commodified comfort zone way in which we've appropriated spirituality, I think that is where I would point the critical finger. I think this is one of the symptoms of the meeting crisis. You know, 40% of the population have these anomalous, visionary, mystical experiences, and they have nothing that allows them to incorporate it into their lives."
},
{
"end_time": 3300.247,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3271.596,
"text": " But that's not a generalized feature of all human civilization or culture. That is specific to ours in a way, I think, that really reflects the meeting crisis. So I think we speak to it, but I think we speak to it while making this criticism that I just made. I agree, and I would just add that in meditation, what you're doing is we all have a model of who we are."
},
{
"end_time": 3329.804,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3300.794,
"text": " I have my beliefs about what I am. And most of those beliefs are false. So I am my body. What makes me important is I am a professor or I am an artist. My significance comes from how many people have seen my work or what people are saying about my work. So I identify who I am with some thing, some body, some piece of work, some reputation and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 3359.138,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3330.162,
"text": " And the spiritual practice is, I think, a practice of letting you know, no, that's not what you are. Now, that is going to be extremely painful because effectively, if I am that thing and I'm having to let that go, I'm dying. I am experiencing a death because I thought I was that. And the spiritual birth,"
},
{
"end_time": 3381.527,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3359.616,
"text": " comes at the price of the death of the old thing i thought i was and i believed it very very deeply so i'm emotionally attached to that view of myself i'm emotionally attached to the idea that it's important for me to be famous or to be the best musician or whatever my whatever my thing might be i'm attached to all those things and the fear that i that you experience"
},
{
"end_time": 3411.988,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3381.988,
"text": " And for me, I just expect this on a daily basis. I expect to experience fear because I'm in the process of letting go of deeply held false identifications of who I am that have, you know, and I don't blame myself. We're born with them. And I was trained in them. And now it's time to to grow up and let them go. And so I just expect on a daily basis to to face pain. And in fact, it's when the pain comes up that I go, OK,"
},
{
"end_time": 3439.07,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3411.988,
"text": " Here's my chance to really grow. So I look at the pain. Okay, what identification was some false belief about who I am? Do I need to face now? Oh, oh, I really believe that it's really important. So someone cuts me off on the road. I'm driving. Why do I get upset? Okay, so there's all the holes. Okay, I believe I'm a separate person from that other person. For example, that's one of my first beliefs. Is that true? Or is it true that there's only one of us?"
},
{
"end_time": 3466.135,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3440.247,
"text": " So there's all sorts of beliefs that I have to to to face and in the Christian tradition, I mean it's Mostly you see this in the East where you're doing this kind of thing But I think G even Jesus spoke to this one when he said if anyone will come after me they have to take up the cross daily You know and die basically, you know Every day so it's and that's what the way I view it. I'm dying to my old model of myself and"
},
{
"end_time": 3495.589,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3466.732,
"text": " And it hurts because I really believed it. And I'm having to let go of all these old beliefs that I have had for decades, perhaps. And so they're not just intellectual, they're limbic. There's emotions attached to them. And so it's a very visceral kind of thing. And so anxiety comes up out of it. And so as I face them and really face them and Kurt, being in your body is important because that's where you so I get in my body and really, really feel it."
},
{
"end_time": 3508.2,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3496.135,
"text": " Don't turn away from it. And then often, you know, it doesn't need to be intellectual, but it just needs to be present. But eventually I will often see, aha,"
},
{
"end_time": 3537.551,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3508.677,
"text": " There was that same old belief, okay, the reason I'm in pain is because I believe I'm that and that's false. And I don't want to let go of it. It hurts to let go of that. And it's scary because I'm going from what I thought I knew into something that I don't know. So it's also the fear of death and the fear of the unknown wrapped up into one wonderful ball. And that's what we have to do is to face the fear of the death of what we know and the move into the unknown."
},
{
"end_time": 3562.312,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3538.541,
"text": " that we don't know and so there's two fears and it's and it really is um so my feeling is that that's not a side that's part of the whole practice and and you should be told up front that that's what it is to grow spiritually it's to face that fear those two fears and to face them head-on and to get help when it's too too painful right for most of us"
},
{
"end_time": 3589.838,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3562.705,
"text": " It's really helpful to have someone else who's maybe let go of that particular fear and gone into that particular part of the unknown that can sort of help us and take us by the hand and move us along. It's at this point that I recommend you watch The Toe Podcast with Lillian Dindo and Carl Friston Part 2 for more help with dealing with derealization and depersonalization, that is, for help when subsumed by the dark side of the spiritual journey. Links in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 3616.357,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3590.828,
"text": " I just also thank you, Donald. I don't have any disagreement with that. I just wanted now to go back to your question about what and I mean, I I'll point to if you go in my series, I criticized earlier models of wisdom that I had published. If you want to see me doing that. I recently came in the summer to"
},
{
"end_time": 3645.316,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3617.056,
"text": " of interacting. I was at Maple with the Respond Retreat and there was interacting with the Buddhist monks there and I came to sort of an insight that made me realize that there was something, there was an important dimension of my thinking that had been wrong or at least incomplete and there's Godel again. So as you know, I'll assume people know because they've been here and"
},
{
"end_time": 3675.418,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3645.538,
"text": " I have this idea about relevance realization as a central feature of cognition and intelligence and even consciousness. And I'd always assumed that there was a sense in which it was always, always being presupposed. But I realized that relevance realization can come to a state, if that's even the right word,"
},
{
"end_time": 3679.258,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3675.947,
"text": " at least where it realizes its own irrelevance."
},
{
"end_time": 3707.346,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3680.964,
"text": " And we have to take it that relevance realization has some recursive ability because that's what we see in an insight. We realize that a previous pattern of relevance realization is actually wrong or irrelevant. So the recursivity is built into relevance realization, but it can come to realize that not just this or that, but that it itself is irrelevant. And that would be when it is no longer trying to work with beings, but with being itself, capital B."
},
{
"end_time": 3716.732,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3707.688,
"text": " because then relevance realization is actually irrelevant because it make it right because all you do is start to do this is like the Dow right you start to"
},
{
"end_time": 3743.131,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3717.363,
"text": " parse it out and then you get the combinatorial explosion that relevance realization has to deal with but relevance realization can come to a moment where it realizes that it's irrelevant and can't fall away and that is when you are trying to enter ratio religio right relationship with being with the ground of being per se and i and for me that was a way"
},
{
"end_time": 3756.937,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3743.814,
"text": " Taking something that I had been experiencing and talking a lot about within the mindfulness practices, which is experiences of non duality and the work I've always done on relevance realization. I couldn't put them together."
},
{
"end_time": 3780.145,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3757.381,
"text": " And so what I had to do was I had to, like Donald's just saying, is I had to give up a kind of, it's always relevance realization kind of idea, but that actually there's a possibility for it to functionally find itself irrelevant and then open us up phenomenologically to"
},
{
"end_time": 3801.118,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3780.742,
"text": " Terror."
},
{
"end_time": 3828.643,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3801.561,
"text": " I'm afraid that my work, especially the stuff I've recently just published a few months ago, integrating relevance realization and predictive processing, is going to make AI, like autonomous AI, more, really more possible. And that terrifies me. And not just sort of egocentric terror, like moral terror, like"
},
{
"end_time": 3848.797,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3829.309,
"text": " a sense of moral responsibility. Are those ever the same? Some people would say that anytime we think of morality, it comes from a sense of ego and that as soon as you dissolve the ego, you dissolve morality. There is no good, there is no bad. So when you say that it's not an egocentric manner,"
},
{
"end_time": 3876.237,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3849.462,
"text": " But a moral manner? I am very hesitant to say that morality is egocentric to core. Are there theories of morality that are? Yes, but I think there are theories that are ontocentric rather than egocentric. But can we do that later? Because I first want to finish this point, which is, right,"
},
{
"end_time": 3907.875,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3879.292,
"text": " I'm wrestling with this, and the way I'm wrestling with it is, first of all, I'm hoping that the work I'm doing, especially with a lot of other people, to integrate these kinds of theoretical discoveries with ideas about the deep connections between predictive processing, relevance realization, meaning in life, wisdom, overcoming self-deception,"
},
{
"end_time": 3931.749,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3908.507,
"text": " All the sapiential stuff we've been talking about. I'm hoping that because I've been arguing for the connection that those two things will stay wedded together. And I don't know if I'm right about that. Sometimes I get like,"
},
{
"end_time": 3956.476,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3931.886,
"text": " Right? I don't know if I'm right about it. But right now I can't see I can't go back. And also, I think there's so many there was so much value. I mean, we published the paper, and we gave what we thought was the first explanation of the autism, psychosis continuum, rather than just description. Think of the the the the"
},
{
"end_time": 3982.961,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3956.92,
"text": " the psychotherapeutic and pedagogical benefits that could have. But I do hesitate about this, about whether or not my attempts to keep the science and the spirituality wedded together, there's no teleology for that to me. I could"
},
{
"end_time": 4008.626,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3983.524,
"text": " Okay, so Don, just to repeat, the question was about the limitations of one's own theories, and then also, I saw your eyes light up on the mention of morality and ego, so you can comment on that as an aside after it. Sure, sure."
},
{
"end_time": 4031.681,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4010.401,
"text": " I'll talk about my theory in just a second, but I'll just mention a classic case, which is Einstein's general relativity with quantum field theory. Those theories assume space-time is fundamental in their fundamental concepts. Quantum fields are defined over space-time. Einstein's theory of gravity is the theory in which space-time is fundamental and its curves are what we experience as gravity."
},
{
"end_time": 4061.186,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4032.176,
"text": " So so space is the fundamental concept that's going on there. So you might say, well, how can that theory then say or entail that space time is doomed without contradicting itself? Right. I mean, how do we avoid shooting ourselves in the foot? Well, that's the glory of science, because when you put those theories together, they tell you precisely they say at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds, this theory stops."
},
{
"end_time": 4084.292,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4061.681,
"text": " It no longer makes sense. There are no operational meanings for space and time at those levels. So that's the beauty of those theories. Even though Einstein didn't expect that to come out, he didn't even expect black holes to come out. I mean, Schwarzschild found that solution to his equations. So when you take your ideas, even if you're a genius like Einstein,"
},
{
"end_time": 4114.377,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4084.735,
"text": " And you put them in mathematics, you're going to have your own theory come back and slap you in the face and tell you things that you might not like. Einstein did not like black holes. And I think that he was unhappy with the idea that space time ceased to have operational meaning at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. My view is that's what we want from a theory. I love a theory that tells you precisely at like a 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, I stop and you need something new. You need a new tool."
},
{
"end_time": 4137.278,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4114.667,
"text": " So in our Theory of Conscious Agents, so we have a Theory of Consciousness, it's a mathematically precise theory, and those who are interested, if you just Google Objects of Consciousness, that's the title of our paper, and my name, Objects of Consciousness and Hoffman, you'll find the paper, it's free online, so no problem to get it. So that's a mathematical Theory of Consciousness, it's just a"
},
{
"end_time": 4166.852,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4137.602,
"text": " I don't view it as the final theory of everything. As I said, it's just a next baby step in science. That's my view of the theory. Here's our next baby step, but it's mathematically precise. And so the question is, does it tell me its precise limits? And it does. And that's one thing that I love about the theory. So one theorem of the theory in this current formulation is that anytime you have multiple agents, multiple conscious agents, that collection, even if they're not interacting,"
},
{
"end_time": 4196.8,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4167.329,
"text": " That collection satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. So it's a conscious agent. That's just a theorem. And what that theorem entails ultimately is that there is one conscious agent because all of the agents that you could possibly have combined and they create a single new agent. So there is ultimately one agent. But here's the problem. Here's the limit of our theory. Suppose I start with a countable infinity of conscious agents. So agent one, two, three, four, all the way up to infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 4222.824,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4198.012,
"text": " Well, so I have this this countable infinity of agents, ALF zero, infinity. But now our theorem says that every possible combination of agents, so agent one and one plus two, that's an agent one plus, so it's the power set. So there's a power set of new agents. Well, we know that the power set has cardinality ALF one, that's a new bigger infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 4249.77,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4223.387,
"text": " So now let's look at those agents and we take all their combinations. Well, that's a new power set. That's ALIF-2. So we're going to have to go to get to a description of the one ultimate conscious agent. That's the, and it's a theorem of our theory that there is one conscious agent. We're going, but to get to it, to actually describe it, we're going to have to climb up all of Cantor's hierarchy. Now there's an infinite number of steps in Cantor's hierarchy, which means we cannot get there."
},
{
"end_time": 4274.189,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4250.282,
"text": " So in 20,000 years, if we're still using this framework, and we've gotten to level five billion of Cantor's Hierarchy, it's time to break out the champagne. We went through 500 billion levels, where A left 500 billion, and we learned a lot at every level. So we learned something new about consciousness every time we transcended and went to a new level. Time to break out the champagne. How much further do we have to go? Infinity. You're not"
},
{
"end_time": 4301.664,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4274.735,
"text": " Literally, you're not any closer than when you started and yet you learned a lot. And so what I love about this theory is it says there is the one conscious agent and number two, using this theory, you'll never be able to describe it. But number three, you'll know precisely how far you've gotten and precisely how infinitely far you have to go at every step of the theory. So the theory itself predicts its own failure to actually describe"
},
{
"end_time": 4331.527,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4301.988,
"text": " An entity that it's a theorem exists from the theory. So for me, that's one thing I love about the theory is that it tells me immediately how far I've gotten. And right now we're just at Aleph zero. We haven't even gotten to Aleph one yet. So we have a long way to go. John, do you have any comments quickly? Yeah. I want to know more about what is meant by conscious agents and what is meant by"
},
{
"end_time": 4358.097,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4332.022,
"text": " the rejection of space time. But before I do that, I mean, the arguments aren't identical, but they converge. I mean, these are very, in that sense, convergent with neoplatonic arguments, that the one lies beyond all possible conceptualization. And because if"
},
{
"end_time": 4386.425,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4359.377,
"text": " because if you try to understand it you have to understand it in terms of its structure or its cause and therefore you haven't actually achieved the one because you still would then have to get some system of intelligibility that explains the relationship between the structures and so you always are pointing towards an ultimate reality that can't"
},
{
"end_time": 4411.493,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4387.073,
"text": " ever be grasped. The source of intelligibility, the arguments go like the source of intelligibility can't itself be intelligible. And what was interesting is, it sounded to me, Donald, and maybe I'm getting it wrong, it sounded to me like you got the sort of fractal wanting going all the way up, which means even your notion of the one is in some sense inadequate, and it points beyond itself. And then the whole trajectory of all these ones"
},
{
"end_time": 4440.691,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4411.493,
"text": " points towards a one that is never graspable. That's what I heard you saying. And that sounds like neoplatonism through to me profoundly. The part about the conscious agents I want to talk to you more about, but the structure of sort of, you know, I should do it this way, the fractal of wanting like this or something like that. I don't know what gesture to make with my hands, which is quite adequate, but that that is something disclosed when you reflect deeply upon"
},
{
"end_time": 4460.776,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4441.578,
"text": " intelligibility it sounds and by the way donald i hope you know that i mean this is a compliment not an insult i consider myself a post nominalist neoplatonist so hearing what sounds like a very neoplatonic structure to reality that really resonated with me now i wonder what you would say though"
},
{
"end_time": 4482.773,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4461.408,
"text": " maybe this goes to what you mean by consciousness. So Platinus argues that the top thing, right, consciousness is he takes intentionality to be a feature of consciousness and that therefore consciousness always implies a duality and that you need a one beyond that duality to explain the duality and that therefore you pass beyond"
},
{
"end_time": 4503.49,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4482.995,
"text": " Consciousness and thought you pass both the unconsciousness and and intelligence when you get to the when you get to the one Below it he has you know, you probably know this the new the noose which is like all of these ones all of the forms that and they're like this They're infinitely mirroring each other like indras net"
},
{
"end_time": 4527.483,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4504.514,
"text": " So I wonder what you think about that kind of argument, but I know that's an unfair question to just ask first because it depends on, you know, what you're meaning by conscious and what you're meaning by agent. Right. So, and by the way, I'll describe it, but of course the paper Objects of Consciousness has the math all laid out in it. But intuitively,"
},
{
"end_time": 4548.166,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4527.773,
"text": " When you're trying to boot up a theory, you want the smallest set of assumptions that you can possibly use that would boot up a general theory. And there's dozens and dozens of things you could think about. You want a theory of consciousness to deal with, you know, the self. Is there a self? Learning, memory, problem-solving, intelligence, and there's a bunch of things. Qualia,"
},
{
"end_time": 4573.422,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4548.746,
"text": " Possibility of free will there's tons and tons of things so but we can't throw in the kitchen sink So what we do is we try to find the minimal Aspects of consciousness that we will take as the miracles as the as the fundamental assumptions of our theory and so we took two we took that there are conscious experiences and that conscious experiences probabilistically affect the other conscious experiences occurring and"
},
{
"end_time": 4603.66,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4573.78,
"text": " Those are the, and I just read in the last few weeks of looking at the motivology, it turns out Leibniz says the same thing. He beat us by 300 years by saying that those were the two, if he was going to boot up a theory of consciousness, he would use those two things, experiences and probabilistic relationships among them. So what we do is we take that idea that Leibniz beat me at 300 years ago and we turn it into mathematics. I say a conscious agent basically is a probability space of possible experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 4612.415,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4604.838,
"text": " This could be an infinite probability space. These are all the possible experiences of this conscious agent. So I'll write down a probability space."
},
{
"end_time": 4636.664,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4612.841,
"text": " And then I use Markovian kernels, which is a very, very general formulation of some probabilistic relationships. So basically, we have what we call perception decision and action kernels, but they're all Markovian kernels. And you can take their composition and just have one Markovian kernel if you want. But we have then basically a social network of these probability spaces related by Markovian kernels."
},
{
"end_time": 4663.097,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4637.381,
"text": " So it's a big social network, and it's a Markovian dynamics. And so when you look at that dynamics, that's what we mean by a conscious agent. And it is a theorem of that, that when you have two conscious agents, you can take just their tensor product, and you will get a tensor product of spaces and kernels and so forth. And then it satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. But in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 4693.797,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4663.848,
"text": " Consciousness and some deep thing about consciousness and experience. I realized after we wrote it down that I was forced by the mathematics to write down a probability space on which the experiences took place. So it's just sitting there like a platonic structure just sitting there. What does that? So I once later look back and say, OK, well, what does that mean about consciousness? Well, that's clearly consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 4720.384,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4694.155,
"text": " prior to experience. So we're forced to write down in mathematics a structure that corresponds to a being without any particular experience that is happening. But then the Markovian dynamics is really modeling the play of forms of experiences that pop up and down on this fundamental being that is timeless and requires no experience. It is the"
},
{
"end_time": 4745.776,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4720.623,
"text": " field of potential for all experiences. I realized later on that mathematics nicely intertwines with interpretations that we see from various spiritual traditions. I didn't try to model these spiritual traditions. I was forced by mathematics. You can't talk about probability until you write down the probability space. You just can't do it. You're forced to do this and I realized, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 4772.329,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4745.776,
"text": " The natural interpretation of that is being prior to experience and then Markovian dynamics is the full set of experiences. And now the issue about mapping to space time and space time is doomed. What's going on there? Now I'm just going to tell you what the physicists are saying. They will say the reason why space time is doomed is this. If you try to make"
},
{
"end_time": 4797.056,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4773.763,
"text": " More and more precise measurements at smaller and smaller scales of space, like the position of this electron or whatever it might be. You need to use radiation, say light, with smaller and smaller wavelengths. That's fine. Quantum theory says that as you use smaller and smaller wavelengths, you're going to have more and more, you're using more and more energy. You're concentrating energy into a smaller and smaller space. E equals h nu is the formula."
},
{
"end_time": 4826.937,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4797.756,
"text": " And in a world without gravity, that's fine. As long as you can get more and more energy, bigger and bigger power station, you can resolve smaller and smaller and smaller things. No problem. So space and time are fine. Gravity messes everything up. It crashes the party. Because what happens is Einstein tells us that energy and mass are the same thing. So effectively, as you're making finer and finer measurements, you're concentrating more and more mass into a smaller region. So you're getting higher mass density."
},
{
"end_time": 4850.094,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4827.892,
"text": " And then gravity says at some point when you get when the mass density reaches a certain threshold, space time collapses into a black hole and the very object that you're trying to measure disappears. And that happens at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and then 10 to the minus 43 seconds, which is the amount of time it takes to move 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. And so so what happened and"
},
{
"end_time": 4868.473,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4850.384,
"text": " So it's not like that there are pixels of space time. So a wrong concept is, oh, well, space time is still fundamental, but there are pixels at that level. No, no, no. It means that space time ceases to be coherent. It has no operational meaning at that level. So it just it's gone. It's doomed."
},
{
"end_time": 4887.619,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4869.275,
"text": " And another argument that the physicist will give that's even deeper than the one I just gave is to say that in quantum theory, the measuring device itself is a physical device. Therefore, it's subject to quantum uncertainty. To get more and more precise measurements, you need to add more and more degrees of freedom to the device, which means it's getting more and more"
},
{
"end_time": 4915.708,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4888.148,
"text": " Massive. If you're in the lab, you've got this device in your lab, at some point, as you get more and more precise, the mass is going to be so great that the whole lab collapses into a black hole, and again, you destroy the experiment. So there's no operational meaning to space-time. And when the physicists then say, OK, space-time has been good, it's been really a great framework for centuries, space and time, and then in the last century, space-time."
},
{
"end_time": 4944.906,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4916.203,
"text": " but it's time to find something new. And the young physicists are moving beyond and they found these new structures, the Amplituhedron and then also the Decorative Permutations. And these structures are beyond space-time and they're beyond quantum theory. And when I say they're beyond quantum theory, the Amplituhedron has no Hilbert spaces. But its phase structure encodes both locality and unitarity, the properties of space-time and quantum theory."
},
{
"end_time": 4974.394,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4945.162,
"text": " So this is a structure that could have trillions or more dimensions, not just four or 11. It has trillions of dimensions. It doesn't care about space. It doesn't care about time. It doesn't care about quantum theory. It couldn't care less about them. But its volumes actually are the scattering amplitudes. If you want the two gluons in, four gluons out, the amplitude heat associated to it, its volume is the scattering amplitude. And its base structure encodes"
},
{
"end_time": 4995.879,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4974.906,
"text": " Locality and Unitarity. And so this is a structure beyond space-time. And here's the beautiful thing. When you try to compute these scattering amplitudes, like two gluons hitting each other, four gluons go spring up, if you do it in space-time, well, to do it in space-time you have to enforce"
},
{
"end_time": 5023.916,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4996.271,
"text": " things, the properties of space and time. Things, you know, have locality and unitarity. And so we have to use what are called Feynman diagrams to talk about all these virtual particles that we need in space-time to actually do this math. It turns out two gluons to four gluons, hundreds of pages of algebra, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of terms to do one event, just one event. When you go outside of space-time with the amplitude hydron,"
},
{
"end_time": 5050.606,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5024.77,
"text": " that computation reduces to three terms that you can compute by hand so hundreds of pages reduced to three terms so and then all of a sudden the physicists say by the way we also when we let go of space time we see these new symmetries like something called the infinite yangian symmetry and the infinite yangian symmetry is true of the scattering data and you cannot see it in space time so space time is doomed"
},
{
"end_time": 5068.558,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5051.357,
"text": " Space time forces you to do all this nasty, nasty computation that's unnecessary. The computations are actually simple and it hides the symmetries that are really true of the data. So space time has three strikes against it. It proves its own limits."
},
{
"end_time": 5098.66,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5068.78,
"text": " It makes the math unnecessarily complicated and it hides the genuine symmetries that are there. So that's why the physicists are moving with both feet beyond space-time and they're finding this wonderful stuff. And that's why I, as a theorist, trying to get a theory of consciousness that can lead to testable results, which are only in space-time, right? The only place where we can get measurable experiments is in space-time. That's where we get our measurements. So it's no longer"
},
{
"end_time": 5121.732,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5100.708,
"text": " i want a theory of consciousness that somehow you know emerging from things in space time like brains and so forth that that means space time is doomed so that whole that can't work so booting up consciousness from stuff inside space time the physicists are telling us that will not work so i'm not going to try to do that consciousness is beyond space time and they've given us this"
},
{
"end_time": 5152.5,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5122.688,
"text": " Interface that we have to plug into they've said we've gone beyond space-time and the deepest thing we found is a decorator permutation and so a few months ago I Was sitting there and saying okay? That's what the physicists want they want a decorator permutation if I give them a decorator permutation They can actually take me all the way into space-time and give me a scattering amplitude something I can test something that you see at the Large Hadron Collider So can I get from my Markovian dynamics of conscious agents to a decorator permutation?"
},
{
"end_time": 5165.009,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5153.473,
"text": " I looked online just to say, well, surely the mathematicians have done this. For any Markovian kernel, what's the decorated permutation? I looked and there wasn't anything."
},
{
"end_time": 5194.326,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5165.708,
"text": " And so I work with my mathematician colleague Chetan, and it didn't take us very long. So it's a new piece of mathematics. We now have a canonical way of assigning every Markovian kernel, a decorative permutation, also any arbitrary graph. We can assign arbitrary graphs, decorative permutations. And what this does is that now the physicists have pushed beyond space-time to decorative permutations, but it's just a platonic solid sitting there. It's motionless. It's just sitting there."
},
{
"end_time": 5221.288,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5195.486,
"text": " We now offer a dynamics, a Markovian dynamics, that projects so that dynamics is much more complicated. So if we have, for example, 50 interacting conscious agents, the structure that we get, the Markovian structure we get is a Markov polytope with 50 to the 50th power, that's probably more than the number of atoms in the universe,"
},
{
"end_time": 5249.462,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5221.852,
"text": " That's the number of vertices in this polytope that's describing just 50 conscious agents interacting. So this is an incredibly complicated structure, very, very rich dynamical structure that projects down that structure, which has more vertices than all the atoms in the measurable universe projects down into a decorator permutation, which is only 50 numbers."
},
{
"end_time": 5265.026,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5250.623,
"text": " And that then gives rise to the scattering. So you can see that the conscious thing is really complicated. It's a really complicated dynamic. We're collapsing it down to something trivial when we get to decorative permutations and then even more trivial when we get into space-time."
},
{
"end_time": 5295.179,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5265.708,
"text": " Consciousness is fundamental, but we have this map all the way from consciousness into space-time. We're submitting a paper this week. We finished writing the paper on this, which is why I'm pretty excited about it. We'll submit it probably just before Thanksgiving, Wednesday. We have this pontoon bridge from consciousness into space-time, and now what we're doing is trying to move all the heavy equipment across. What"
},
{
"end_time": 5311.22,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5296.8,
"text": " What aspect of conscious agent dynamics corresponds to energy and momentum or to wavelengths or to spin or to helicity and so forth? In our paper we start to propose specific"
},
{
"end_time": 5335.998,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5311.544,
"text": " correspondences between features of consciousness and its dynamics in our model and specific things that you can measure in space-time because my goal is to show that the space-time is doomed, yes, but there is this dynamics of consciousness beyond space-time and we can actually predict specific scattering amplitudes and actually show you where spin, momentum, helicity and all these variables come from and"
},
{
"end_time": 5363.575,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5336.613,
"text": " I think we can even explain why supersymmetry is false. I think that in our dynamical model, we can actually show why, you know, for certain models, something called n equals four supersymmetric theories, the decorative permutation gives you everything there is to say about the scattering amplitude, everything. But if you don't have supersymmetry, you have to bring in spin and mass, for example."
},
{
"end_time": 5387.295,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5364.121,
"text": " and we can explain from our dynamics of conscious agents why that is the case that it turns out that the different versions of spin are asymmetric and you can't see it using the standard physics models but when you go through the Markovian model you actually see that spin the various kinds of spins have subtle differences so that they're not perfectly symmetric and that then blows out supersymmetry so so we're hoping not just to"
},
{
"end_time": 5411.63,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5387.756,
"text": " model what the physicists already know, but to have the model actually go well beyond. These Markov polytopes have a richness of structure. In our paper, we're only going to go after M3, the three-agent interaction, which has 27. It turned out my colleague Chetan, who's the mathematician,"
},
{
"end_time": 5440.145,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5412.039,
"text": " work very very hard as a beautiful beautiful structure very very complicated for just three agents interacting and it grows exponentially with five agents there's three thousand nodes three thousand more than three thousand vertices was it just grows exponentially and and the dynamics is very very rich so so that's a little bit about why space time is doomed and why i think consciousness is is more fundamental and why i'm sort of excited about it i have some thoughts i'd like to respond to some of the technical"
},
{
"end_time": 5458.78,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5440.503,
"text": " The structure itself is not unitary and local. It's just a"
},
{
"end_time": 5483.797,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5459.07,
"text": " geometric structure like a polytope but not exactly a polytope but it turns out that you can read off from the the sort of like the lattice of like facets and edges and faces and vertices from from that arrangement it turns out the physicists can actually show that that corresponds to what looks in space-time like unitarity and locality. Have you heard of the Coleman-Mendula theorem?"
},
{
"end_time": 5510.725,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5484.582,
"text": " maybe, but I don't remember the name. Sure, so it's a no-go theorem about internal symmetries. Colloquially, they can't be combined in anything but a trivial manner. So if you have a point-correct group, the internal symmetries have to be a direct product of them plus the point-correct group for whatever reason. This is one of the reasons why supersymmetry either must exist, or conformal symmetry must exist, or you need to be in a lower dimensional space. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 5521.698,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5511.664,
"text": " I'm not a fan of supersymmetry, but I'm not a fan of any particular theory. So I'm agnostic when it comes to many of these physical theories, which is why I have a small bone to pick when you say the physicists"
},
{
"end_time": 5542.619,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5522.21,
"text": " Sure. Want a decorated permutation. I want to say the physicists, I would say some physicists. So anyway, then I would be curious, like, well, how do you overcome the Coleman medulla theorem, if you're doing away with supersymmetry, but you can look into that at some point. And then I also would like to take a look at that article, if you can send it to me prior. I can send you both the article graph, which is almost complete. Yeah. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5569.65,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5543.114,
"text": " I'll look at the Coleman-Modulo theory. Does that theorem apply only to Poincare spaces or a general theory about geometric objects in general? It's any theory that has an S-matrix. See, if it only applies to Poincare group, then it's not a problem, right? Because we're not stuck in space-time. What we have to do is show that the Poincare group comes out as a trivial projection of a much deeper and richer structure. I mean, our amplitude hydra with, say, a thousand agents"
},
{
"end_time": 5594.906,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5569.974,
"text": " is going to be a polytope with a thousand to the thousandth power vertices. This is not the Poincare group. This is something truly mind-boggling. This is a very, very interesting polytope structure. It includes, by the way, the Birkhoff polytope is a sub polytope within it. So the Birkhoff polytope is a very famous polytope of all the"
},
{
"end_time": 5622.21,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5596.118,
"text": " All of its vertices are permutation matrices, zeros and ones only in the matrices. But that is a sub polytope of this Markov polytope. I have to stop you because Don, me and you have to have a solo podcast about this as a part two to our previous one about the details because right now I know John, your eyes may be glazing over so you were champing at the bit. Continue please."
},
{
"end_time": 5650.845,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5622.79,
"text": " Me? Yes, yes, yes. I think I followed a large part of that although I don't know if I have the physics background to say I grasped all of it adequately and I don't want to say anything out of ignorance so I'll try and first of all just ask some questions. Are some of the physicists, Kurt's point, are they"
},
{
"end_time": 5668.933,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5651.237,
"text": " is not real or that it's emergent from this more fundamental ontology? Those are two different claims. To claim that everything above a fundamental level is not real is a kind of reductionism that I've already argued is I find very problematic."
},
{
"end_time": 5685.196,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5669.172,
"text": " My take on it is that,"
},
{
"end_time": 5706.937,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5686.203,
"text": " I think that, you know, we could talk to the physicists like Neymar, Connie, and so forth. But my take is that when he says space-time is doomed, he's saying that it's not fundamental. He may not want to worry about deeper existential notions. He's saying if you're a physicist and that was the framework in which you're doing all your work,"
},
{
"end_time": 5735.794,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5706.937,
"text": " That's no longer the framework. You've got to go, you have to show that there's a deeper framework and that space-time comes out as a projection of a much richer and deeper framework. Whether he says that that means the space-time is not real, I don't know if you'd even be interested in that question. I'm just not sure. Right. Because for me, I mean, the idea that space-time might be projected from something that is not space-timey, I mean, that's"
},
{
"end_time": 5756.476,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5736.203,
"text": " Well, you know, and this is not dismissive, that's a perennial idea. I mean, it's, when you mentioned it, it's a, it's a classic platonic idea that and you know, that even to make inferences that generalize, we need non spatial temporal relations, we need eternal relations. I mean, Berman makes this argument, this is why nominalism is doomed. So and"
},
{
"end_time": 5779.258,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5757.073,
"text": " Pardon me, because it sounds like these things, you're describing them geometrically. So given that, given that geometrophagals are spatial, does that mean that there is some sense in which the language is ultimately conceived as being imaginal or metaphorical about this? Because, you know, you're talking about faces and"
},
{
"end_time": 5805.759,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5779.258,
"text": " You're using space-time language, and I'm not trying to pin you down like a jiu-jitsu move, but I'm wanting to get people's attitude here. Given that they're using geometry as a fundamental thing and Plato ran into a similar kind of thing, that's why I'm asking this question. What do they take their theoretical representations to be?"
},
{
"end_time": 5822.295,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5807.159,
"text": " Right, so space-time itself is just another piece of geometry, right? So you have the mathematics of polytopes or geometries more generally, and space-time and the Poincaré group, symmetries on space-time and so forth,"
},
{
"end_time": 5847.483,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5822.295,
"text": " It's just one out of countless different kinds of geometries. Most of us, our imaginations are so tied to space-time, it's hard for us to think outside of it. But the amplitude hadron, for example, itself could have trillions of dimensions. So these are geometric objects. They're not objects in a physical sense of some object in space-time. They're mathematical objects."
},
{
"end_time": 5857.159,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5847.91,
"text": " And in the same sense that physicists view space-time itself as being described by mathematical objects, say, you know, the symmetries of the point gray group and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 5887.346,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5857.637,
"text": " So it's that sense that these are geometric objects. But I've had this question before because people have asked me, you know, I gave a talk at Stanford a few weeks ago on this and someone said, well, so where are these objects? Are they like at the Planck scale or are they stuck inside space time somewhere? Where are they? Because if there's a geometric object, we think it has to be somewhere in space. And this is the leap you have to make. No, space time itself is just one fairly trivial geometric object."
},
{
"end_time": 5912.739,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5887.346,
"text": " And these objects are beyond, they transcend space-time and they project it to space-time. My own view is that space-time, from an evolutionary point of view, and I'd love to have a chance to talk about evolution with John, but from an evolutionary view, I think that space-time is just a virtual reality headset that we've evolved and it's not a very good one."
},
{
"end_time": 5935.316,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5913.131,
"text": " We have a cheap model. It only has four, maybe 11 dimensions on the suit and it stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. It's very shallow. It was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters. I might be impressed, but 10 to the minus 33. So I feel like we got cheated. We got a really cheap user interface and it's shallow and I can't even imagine, you know, a five dimensional object."
},
{
"end_time": 5945.759,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5935.657,
"text": " And for a lot of work I want to do, I would be very, very helpful to imagine a five-dimensional object. My little interface doesn't let me do that, so I have to actually then painfully scratch down mathematics and"
},
{
"end_time": 5969.77,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5946.254,
"text": " you know"
},
{
"end_time": 6000.179,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5970.589,
"text": " Space and time isn't a fundamental reality, it's a fairly low level and cheap and shallow interface that we're stuck with and I hope to transcend it. So what is it you think about us that gives us access, epistemic access to a non-phenomenological reality? Right and this then gets to the question about evolution and natural selection too and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 6022.637,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6002.005,
"text": " Because I've argued on evolutionary grounds that we've been shaped not just that our perceptions of space and time are fundamentally not correct, right? That there is not the truth, it's just a user interface. And that's what the physicists, at least these physicists are now saying as well, space and time is not the fundamental reality, it's there's something much deeper."
},
{
"end_time": 6053.012,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6023.234,
"text": " So I argue for that in the following way. Evolution by natural selection is a precise mathematical theory. We have evolutionary game theory, evolutionary graph theory, and so forth. So it's a mathematical model, and we can ask clean technical questions with that theory. We can ask the question, for example, what is the probability, assuming evolution by natural selection, assuming evolutionary game theory, what is the probability that any sensory system would be shaped by natural selection to perceive any"
},
{
"end_time": 6078.353,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6053.285,
"text": " True Structures of Objective Reality. Turns out that's a clean technical question, not a hand wave. You can actually ask that question using evolutionary game theory. And when you ask that question, it turns out it's a theorem of the theory. And the paper that we have on this is called Fact, Fiction, and Fitness. It was published a couple years ago. So if you just Google my name and Fact, Fiction, and Fitness, the paper is free. You can read the proof."
},
{
"end_time": 6107.346,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6078.882,
"text": " The probability is precisely zero. Let me prove it for three or four specific structures, but when you look at it, you see the reason why, and it's going to be true for any structure. The probability is zero that any structure that you might say the world, the objective reality might have, the probability is zero that any fitness payoff function will actually preserve the information of that structure, will be a homomorphism of that structure. So the probability that the"
},
{
"end_time": 6134.565,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6108.114,
"text": " payoff function that is shaping the evolution of a sensory system actually has any information about the structure of the world is precisely zero. So that payoff function couldn't shape the sensory system to see that structure in the world. So that's just a theorem of evolution by natural selection. Now, do I believe evolution by natural selection? I don't believe any theory. I don't believe my own theories. I think belief is the wrong attitude to have towards scientific theories."
},
{
"end_time": 6164.974,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6135.128,
"text": " So I don't believe evolution by natural selection. What I do believe is it's the best story we have so far. And so that's why I took it seriously with my team and we proved this theorem. But I'm happy to now find a deeper theory and then show that evolution by natural selection arises as a trivial projection. And it turns out I think we might be able to do that. So the theory of Markov chains that we're using for conscious agents, that dynamics does not need to have"
},
{
"end_time": 6195.52,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6165.657,
"text": " Increasing entropy You can write down this easier write down dynamics of conscious agents in which the entropy doesn't increase and therefore there's no entropic arrow of time but it's a trivial theorem that if you take this dynamics which has no arrow of time and Projected onto a dynamics You know projection dynamics via say conditional probability. It's a theorem that when you do that the projected dynamics will have increasing entropy and"
},
{
"end_time": 6225.981,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6196.34,
"text": " It will have an arrow of time. So all of a sudden, by the way, that arrow of time is not an insight about the original dynamics. It's not an insight. It's an artifact of the information loss due to projection. So what I would like to show is that evolution of a natural selection, all the limited resources, time is the fundamental limited resource."
},
{
"end_time": 6252.517,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6226.834,
"text": " That is just an artifact of projection. I want to show that all of the appearance of limited resources is an artifact of projection. The appearance of competition, fighting for limited resources, nature, red and truth and cloth, is perhaps an artifact of a projection of a deeper dynamics of consciousness in which there is no competition, there are no limited resources, and there is no arrow of time."
},
{
"end_time": 6281.954,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6253.2,
"text": " If we can prove that, then this is how science moves. We would then take the next baby step beyond evolution by natural selection. So here's the logic. I use, because we are where we are, I have to use the tools of evolution by natural selection to see its limits. So I use them. And I find out it says to me very, very clearly, space and time and physical objects are not the truth. I cannot tell you what the truth is, but I can tell you this. Space and time and objects are not the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 6308.814,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6282.602,
"text": " That's a theorem of that theory. Now I'm making the next leap. I'm saying, okay, I'm going to propose the theory of consciousness beyond space and time and in which there is no arrow of time. Now I want to show is that when I project that by conditional probability, in special cases, I get evolution by natural selection as a trivial projection of that. And that's how science progresses. So that's how I can"
},
{
"end_time": 6331.186,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6309.923,
"text": " use the tools of evolution by natural selection to say that things like genes and organisms and DNA are not fundamental without contradicting myself, right? That's the logic that allows me to use the theory to point to its own limits and then transcend the theory, like to have a theory that in which there is no arrow of time,"
},
{
"end_time": 6352.875,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6331.186,
"text": " whose projection leads to evolution, natural selection, or a generalization of it. So that's that logic that allows me to look like I'm contradicting myself. I'm using evolution to prove evolution doesn't work. You're shooting yourself in the foot. No, that's the way science pulls itself up by the bootstraps. Each theory shows you its limits."
},
{
"end_time": 6381.988,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6353.848,
"text": " If it's a good theory, if it's not a good theory, it doesn't show you its limits. If it's a good theory, it shows you its limits. You transcend the limits and then you get your new theory to project down. But now your question, John, which is how, what, what, what allows me to do all this? What, what, what is the deeper? My feeling is that I, the, the, the entity that's doing all the science,"
},
{
"end_time": 6413.865,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6384.957,
"text": " He is not a physical object. It's not a brain. It's not neurons. It is this unlimited intelligence. There is. So I am not an object in space and time. I am not neurons. I am not any of that. I am that which comes up with theories about space and time which comes up with theories about neurons. I am that which can evaluate those theories and find their limits and then transcend them and get a new theory. That's what I am. I am that unlimited intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 6442.363,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6414.684,
"text": " And that unlimited intelligence does transcend any theory. So that's the framework in which I'm thinking about it. Okay, so let me ask you a couple questions then. That was very helpful. So given that you agree that all formal systems are either inconsistent or incomplete, you can't place an ultimate"
},
{
"end_time": 6469.65,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6443.268,
"text": " I don't know what to call it, faith in even a mathematical model because the degree to which it has to limit and be incomplete in order to avoid computational intractability and all kinds of other issues is the degree to which it's falling prey to the very arguments you're making. Is that not the case? That's right. So that's why there's no theory of everything. Exactly. But what I'm asking is why the special privileging"
},
{
"end_time": 6484.002,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6470.196,
"text": " And I'm asking this question honestly because I do the same thing, so I'm asking it of myself as well. Why the special, you know, this is the question posed to Kant, right? Why the special privileging of mathematical reasoning as that which gives you access to reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 6512.073,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6485.247,
"text": " Very, very good. I'll answer it at two levels. One is at the evolutionary theorem level. So because people have said, well, if you use evolution to show that we don't know the truth and you've shown that reason is nonsense and therefore you've shot yourself on the foot. Alvin Plantinga, for example, a Christian philosopher has tried to take that argument to say that evolution shows that all of our cognitive capacities are not reliable."
},
{
"end_time": 6530.196,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6512.432,
"text": " And therefore our theory building capacity is not reliable and therefore the theory of evolution is not reliable and so I was thinking of Plantinga and I was thinking of Fodor's response because Plantinga is in this really weird place that he has to say most of our beliefs are false, yet there's some property of the false beliefs that makes them adaptive."
},
{
"end_time": 6546.817,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6530.196,
"text": " or makes them functional and what would be that other than truth? You need to propose something other than truth to say it's false but highly functional and that's the missing property P of the propositions that Fodor basically launches against Plantinga."
},
{
"end_time": 6574.002,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6546.817,
"text": " He says, well, tell me what it is that the false beliefs have, because many of my false beliefs will kill me readily. So there has to be some property that distinguishes false beliefs that are non-adaptive from false beliefs that are adaptive. And what is that property? That's the kind of question I'm trying to get at. Right. So I'll give two answers. One, I think if I were Plantinga, what I would try to say is, look, I never believed in the theory of evolution to begin with."
},
{
"end_time": 6601.271,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6574.667,
"text": " I'm just trying to use the tools of evolution to show that it's nonsense. So I'm not subject to that kind of... So if I were Plantinga, I would make that move, right? I never said that evolution is true, and I just wanted to use it to show that it shoots itself from the foot. So that's how I would make that move. But beyond that, again, I don't think that we can ever"
},
{
"end_time": 6631.578,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6602.295,
"text": " Any language, so there are limits of mathematics. I will say within the theory of evolution, so I'm going to just go back to the theory of evolution itself. Our theorem that says that evolution entails that none of our percepts are veridical. It turns out that that theorem is only for percepts, you know, it is not for logic and reason, right? And on evolutionary grounds, you could actually have, against Plantinga now,"
},
{
"end_time": 6650.657,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6631.8,
"text": " arguments for why you should have some facility with logic and reason. For example, an organism that can notice that two bites of an apple give you more fitness payoffs than one bite of an apple is better off. That's about not about truth, about objective values, about fitness payoffs, something that's, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6668.302,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6651.135,
"text": " Not about the nature of objective reality. So there would be some selection pressures, you could argue, for some modest facility with mathematics because you need to reason about fitness payoffs. And every once in a while the genes will come together and you'll get a David Hilbert or von Neumann and you get a mathematical genius."
},
{
"end_time": 6695.64,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6668.797,
"text": " So you could use that kind of logic against Plantinga, but you can see that I don't even want to go there because I'm saying that evolution by itself, I also just use the tools of evolution because it's our current best theory, but I want to completely transcend the theory with something else that projects down to evolution. But ultimately, any word or concept that we use, and including the most precise ones in mathematics,"
},
{
"end_time": 6723.985,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6696.169,
"text": " But I think that it's not just mathematics. Any concept that we use, I think, will always, as the spiritual traditions say, always just be a pointer and not the thing. The boozas say, the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. And that will be true of mathematics. It'll be true of non-mathematical concepts. So the bigger question for me is, if I am and you are this unlimited intelligence that transcends concepts,"
},
{
"end_time": 6749.991,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6724.326,
"text": " Why does that unlimited intelligence engage in using concepts? For me, that's the big question. First of all, you're in good company. This is an ancient problem. This is why does the one become many? Yes, right, right. This is why does the one become many and how could the one become many if the one is one? You're in that"
},
{
"end_time": 6763.148,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6750.213,
"text": " I don't want to saddle you with that and say you have to solve that because that's unfair. But what I'm trying to get at is really I'm trying to get clear of your model. So we have some epistemic access."
},
{
"end_time": 6790.879,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6763.626,
"text": " uh fallible as it is but that's not that's not i'm not claiming infallibility i'm hearing though that there's still preferential the conceptual access gives us prefer our conceptual abilities give us preferential access to reality over our perceptual abilities i thought i heard you say something like that so if i have to choose between a percept and a conceptual analysis i should give priority to the conceptual analysis or did i mishear you well"
},
{
"end_time": 6818.558,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6791.186,
"text": " is close. What I said is within the logical framework of evolutionary theory, that's the case. Right. I'm not saying that I believe, I'm just saying that using, so when Plantinga says, let's assume for sake of argument, evolution with natural selection, then you'll get that all cognitive capacities are not reliable. And I'm just saying, no, no, you don't. You get that perceptual capacities are not reliable, but you do not get the mathematical content. So that's just an argument about the specifics of evolution."
},
{
"end_time": 6845.23,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6818.797,
"text": " But I think I take your question as a broader one than that. Right. So I want to distinguish my argument on evolution from the broader question. Evolution, if you just take, if you ask what evolution says, it says clearly our perceptions are not true. It doesn't say clearly that our logic and math are not true. It doesn't say that clearly at all. Okay. But I take it that"
},
{
"end_time": 6874.94,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6848.166,
"text": " From this broader point of view, evolution by natural selection aside, and now going beyond even my own conscious agent mathematics framework, my own view is that here I am talking using concepts, and I know that every concept that I'm speaking right now and every mathematical thought that I'm having is not it, and it's not even scratching the surface of the reality."
},
{
"end_time": 6898.797,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6875.742,
"text": " All I can do is point to that fact and yet I do find myself, because I'm talking with you and also talking to myself and trying to understand things, sort of forced to take this unlimited intelligence and compress it down to this almost zero bandwidth thing that we call thought and logic and concepts."
},
{
"end_time": 6919.889,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6899.616,
"text": " The question comes down to why is there something other than just presence without any content? Why is there content?"
},
{
"end_time": 6946.578,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6920.606,
"text": " There's that, and that goes back to a question about what experience means in your model, because what does experience mean given the way you're talking? But I want to slow down and zero in on this."
},
{
"end_time": 6977.858,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6948.217,
"text": " I worry, and I'm pretty sure I must be wrong, I worry that there's an implicit thing that unless you have all knowledge, you have no knowledge, or unless you have all truth, you have no truth here. The idea, like I agree with you, like and I've made this argument multiple times, I made it to, you know, to Kurt that, you know, the vast amount of information, we have to subtend it, that's what relevance realization is, etc. I couldn't solve any of my problems if I had to try and trace out all the probabilistic relationships to all the other entities in the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 6997.875,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6977.858,
"text": " Blah, blah, blah, blah. I won't repeat all those arguments. I agree with that. But I mean, I'm worried about things like Mino's paradox and Soraydi's argument, right, which says no, no, there has to be partial knowledge that nevertheless grasps the truth. So why couldn't somebody say to you, yeah, my perceptual knowledge is very partial, but that doesn't equate"
},
{
"end_time": 7026.954,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6998.49,
"text": " Logically, with it being false, it's just partial, because partial truth has to be a thing, or you're caught in Mio's paradox, you're caught in Soraydi's arguments, and then you end up with absolute skepticism. And I can tell you're not an absolute skeptic, so I'm not going to foist that on you. But you see the point I'm making? Partial knowledge doesn't mean false, just because it's partial, that there has to be something more. Did that make sense as a point? Oh, absolutely. And I think that partial knowledge is a perfectly good concept."
},
{
"end_time": 7046.988,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7027.295,
"text": " The question is, why would the one plunge itself into partial knowledge? Here's one view of what we are. There is the one consciousness, and it's putting on"
},
{
"end_time": 7063.353,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7047.432,
"text": " is putting yourself into different VR avatars. There's a John Vervecki avatar, there's a Don Hoffman, and there's also a Kurt and so forth. These are all just avatars. Really, there's only one of us, and it's the one looking at itself through different headsets."
},
{
"end_time": 7089.838,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7064.701,
"text": " And as I said, I think this is a cheap headset that is used. This is only four dimensional. It poops out at 10 to the minus 33. So this is the one looking at itself through a fairly cheap, low-grade headset. I'm sure it uses much higher ones as well. There are countless other headsets that it uses, presumably, to look at itself and explore. So somehow the one is"
},
{
"end_time": 7116.715,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7090.828,
"text": " And the way we experience it, by the way, is most of us don't think of ourselves as the one. We think of ourselves as this. We identify with the avatar in the VR. I am the avatar. That's what I am. And it's a very painful process of waking up and realizing, oh, no, I'm not the avatar. I'm the consciousness in which the avatar exists. I create the avatar. I thought I was the avatar. I am something deeper that creates that avatar."
},
{
"end_time": 7135.299,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7117.09,
"text": " And if that's what consciousness is doing, the issue is why does consciousness plunge itself into the ignorance? Why does it take a perspective, put on a headset? I asked a friend of mine, Perry Pissarro, this question. He said, you know, maybe it has to do with love."
},
{
"end_time": 7154.258,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7135.964,
"text": " Right? How can you love if there's only one of you? So what you do is you put on, you disunify yourself, you put on a bunch of headsets and now I can learn how to love John and Kurt and so forth. I can learn how to be courteous and treat them properly and so forth. And in so doing, that's what, so in other words,"
},
{
"end_time": 7182.244,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7154.258,
"text": " If the one is love, it's in some sense in the meaning of love to diversify, to have the chance to learn to love in practice. I'm not saying that that's right, but it's the kind of deep kind of question that you have to ask and kind of deep conceptual answer you have to try to give to answer this kind of question. It sounds very similar to Vedanta and Neoplatonism. Back when you introduced love and love"
},
{
"end_time": 7209.138,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7182.585,
"text": " Love both differentiates and integrates so you get the procession and the return and you get the whole neoplatonic drama and then you see cognition working fundamentally that way. But here's where I guess we're maybe and I'll speak neoplatonically because I can't really play in your physicist mathematics framework because you have me at a tremendous disadvantage. I'm trying my best from where I'm at and I'm trying to be respectful of the fact that I'm ignorant about some of this."
},
{
"end_time": 7233.097,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7209.138,
"text": " but most neoplatonists would say you ultimately have to say that the emanation and the return are as real as the one or you get into a really deep profound kind of duality which undermines this fundamental presupposition of the whole system so that you know the the thing to use your language the projection right and what it projects are as real as what is projected from because"
},
{
"end_time": 7243.831,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7233.097,
"text": " If there is nothing projected then what it is projected from wouldn't be intelligible to us, we wouldn't have access to it."
},
{
"end_time": 7267.739,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7244.343,
"text": " Surely some of my precepts have to be possible because have to be right because I'm reading the gauges on the machines when I'm finding out all of what the physicists are finding and I'm taking measurements and I'm correctly hearing somebody when they're saying to me no no look the implication of this is right that's what I mean about you don't want to get it into saying all of these things that are going on within science are somehow"
},
{
"end_time": 7288.217,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7268.166,
"text": " not real, but you didn't hold a reductionism. So what I'm saying is if you don't hold a reductionism, which you're nodding to, and you know, why not say that the procession and the return are as real as the one? I mean, this is where many Neoplatonists ended up, like Regina, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 7306.834,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7288.712,
"text": " I like that approach and I would love to see it work out in the mathematics of our theory, actually, as we start to look with bigger and bigger systems and look at the one system and we look at this dynamic, we may find that even though these agents are one,"
},
{
"end_time": 7335.572,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7307.176,
"text": " In fact, when you look at the one isn't just static, it's a dynamical system. And when you look, you'll find that it automatically has, quote unquote, these parts, these projections that are looking at it from from different perspectives. And so it may end up being just and it may also be a consequence of again, Gödel's incompleteness theorem that says that the end, the exploration of mathematical structure is completely unbounded."
},
{
"end_time": 7364.428,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7336.015,
"text": " Yes. And that may also force the one to always only be seeing itself through perspectives, because there may be something very, very deep there that forces this as well, the fact that mathematics is unbounded. But I feel like now I'm way over my pay grade on this one. Well, we both are, but that's fine. I mean, first of all, I want to say something."
},
{
"end_time": 7380.026,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7365.111,
"text": " Your view is much more"
},
{
"end_time": 7402.517,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7380.401,
"text": " Well, thank you very much. No problem. The next thing is, it sounds like"
},
{
"end_time": 7423.592,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7405.094,
"text": " Like you, I'm a phallobus, but I've come to the conclusion, and I don't use certainty, I use plausibility, and I have a formal model of what plausibility means, and I've articulated that. I think the idea that the fundamental grammar of intelligibility and the fundamental grammar of reality have to be in some sense the same,"
},
{
"end_time": 7453.422,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7423.899,
"text": " or you cannot you you will be driven into kind of an absolute solipsism and absolute skepticism and it sounds to me like you're saying something similar like that like you're pushing the the machinery of intelligibility to its fundamental grammar sort of in the math and the logic and then you're saying this is somehow disclosing the fundamental structure of reality if i can use that term now is that a fair thing to say about how you're proceeding yeah yeah i would"
},
{
"end_time": 7476.408,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7453.899,
"text": " I would say so with this very humbling proviso, and that is that, yeah, it is saying something about reality. And what it's saying is it may be measure zero about the reality, right? In other words, it's a probability zero subset of the whole reality. And that we will, in other words, there's infinite job security in science."
},
{
"end_time": 7502.978,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7477.91,
"text": " It's infinite job security, because we will always have essentially a measure zero grasp of the whole. But that measure zero may be real. I mean, it may be genuine, but it'll be measure zero."
},
{
"end_time": 7519.258,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7503.695,
"text": " I don't think I'm objecting to that, but I also want there to be some important continuity between whatever judgments I'm making about ultimate reality and judgments when I say this is more real to me than the dream I had last night."
},
{
"end_time": 7547.363,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7519.258,
"text": " If you do that, you're sneaking in a magic epistemic engine somewhere. And that, I think, we can't allow. It's like, no, no, I'm using the same epistemic engine. There has to be important continuity between when I make those judgments about, you know, this is more real than the dream I had last night. I'm using that same thing in some way when I'm making the judgments that you're making about the one. I agree."
},
{
"end_time": 7573.473,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7547.363,
"text": " I agree and maybe part of that coherence is the recognition explicitly that everything that I deal with conceptually is a limited thing. That may be one of the key things to make that coherence is the explicit recognition of the limit of any statement or any theory. Your epistemic humility"
},
{
"end_time": 7590.742,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7575.162,
"text": " I just want to acknowledge it. Don't misunderstand me, Donald. The content of what you're saying is rich and rigorous, but I think your epistemic humility was something I had not got."
},
{
"end_time": 7613.677,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7590.742,
"text": " I sort of in an implicit way asked Donald the question and I don't want to try and answer it now because I think it would take us into more but I'd be happy to talk to him again about this use of the word experience and I'm also what's the relationship between experience"
},
{
"end_time": 7626.391,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7613.677,
"text": " Absolutely."
},
{
"end_time": 7655.213,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7627.142,
"text": " I'm enjoying talking to you, Donald, because you're very open. I hope you're finding the same with me. You're very responding. The arguments are going back and forth. So I'd like to explore that aspect of your thinking with you, if possible. I would love to do that. I'd love to get back together, all three of us, and jump into that with both feet. That'd be a lot of fun. Absolutely. And I really appreciate John and Kurt, the open-mindedness."
},
{
"end_time": 7673.507,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7655.213,
"text": " By the way, do you know Smulyan's theorem that we're all either arrogant or inconsistent?"
},
{
"end_time": 7691.664,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7678.524,
"text": " It's actually extremely simple. Your brain is finite, we can agree on that. And this works even if it's infinite, but it makes it much more simple. So you believe in proposition A, you believe in proposition B, dot, dot, dot, dot, down to proposition N."
},
{
"end_time": 7715.623,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7692.09,
"text": " not n as in the 14th letter but you understand so you either then believe that every one of your beliefs is true in which case you're arrogant or you believe that one of these propositions is incorrect you just don't know which one which means that somewhere you have a belief that you believe it to be true and you believe it to be false which means you're inconsistent so you either are arrogant or you're inconsistent well i don't know how old this theorem is but in the 80s in minimal rationality he argued"
},
{
"end_time": 7737.927,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7715.623,
"text": " You can't even, given the time it is to move one valence shell on the rest of the history universe, you can't even calculate if 138 propositions are logically consistent with each other because of all possible implications, blah, blah, blah. It just, right, so the finitary predicament, I think, is one of the things I like about the platonic framework"
},
{
"end_time": 7765.657,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7738.78,
"text": " is it is this continual profound not just talking but profound realization that we are simultaneously finite infinitude capable of transcendence and if we lose the first we can give into hubris and if we lose the transcendence we will give into despair and servitude and trying to keep the two together at all times. So I look for people that"
},
{
"end_time": 7770.538,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7766.749,
"text": " in addition to what"
},
{
"end_time": 7799.838,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7771.34,
"text": " And I mean this as a compliment, Donald. I was surprised. Don't take this as the wrong way. I was surprised to get that sense from you. I kept hearing you going between, you know, this is how we can transcend our experience and then back to we're finite, we're fallible. And you kept toggling back between them every time you were giving an answer and you were trying to do it. And as you said, not sloppily or right. But you were trying to do it very carefully. And I appreciated that."
},
{
"end_time": 7819.377,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7799.838,
"text": " Thank you all for coming. I appreciate it and we'll do it again next time. Excellent. What a pleasure. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 7844.531,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7819.753,
"text": " What follows is an excerpt of a conversation between John and myself that was partially recorded regarding truth, framing, and what's salutary. That is, truth isn't an object to be picked, but it's also the act of picking. These arguments from oneness actually are a left-brain phenomenon that we tend to think of that it is spiritual and creative, but it's more from Ian McGilchrist. Ian McGilchrist would say that that our left brain likes to categorize and see sameness and that"
},
{
"end_time": 7864.087,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 7844.974,
"text": " The right brain likes to see distinctness and uniqueness because I have this huge solipsistic moment and it's extremely frightening and terrifying to me. I'm still recovering from that. I'm like the best I've been. Ian told me something helpful, which is that, hey, you share an element with God and you share an element with other people and that"
},
{
"end_time": 7891.135,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 7864.087,
"text": " doesn't mean you are and the fact that you share implies you're different because you can't share with yourself. Well, that's what I want. I want to talk to Donald about what he means by experience. And Leibniz had the problem that the monads are self-enclosed, but yet somehow they have windows, which is trying to make this work. But he was there. I mean, like he said, no, you know, but the procession and the return are just as real as the one. And I think that's an important thing to him for him to acknowledge."
},
{
"end_time": 7895.009,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 7891.425,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I also get that when people say that so-and-so is an illusion"
},
{
"end_time": 7923.37,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 7895.35,
"text": " Yeah, but in another sense, it's real. But he admitted that too, when all the scientific observations have to be real and partial knowledge is real. His notion of it being illusion is not that notion. It's not the solipsistic notion. Yeah. Well, like I said, here very deeply, the conclusion that Donald was in agreement with, which is the procession and the return are just as real as the one."
},
{
"end_time": 7941.544,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 7924.36,
"text": " Right. Right. And so the idea that this is all an illusion behind or in front of the man, that's not this is as much the one as the one is the one. Right. Or it's not the one. Right. And so it's"
},
{
"end_time": 7970.265,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 7942.039,
"text": " Amy, I would challenge you, whenever that idea is giving you a profound sense of separation or disconnect, you have mis-framed the idea or people have mis-framed it to you. What's salutary and what's nourishing, what's true isn't always just the static proposition to be grasped and that somehow this is this compass of either trying to direct yourself someplace or even caring that you're directed properly, that there's a truth in the process"
},
{
"end_time": 7994.531,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 7970.725,
"text": " And so when people say, hey, if you find a toll, won't you be bored? Well, maybe the toll, the true toll is like something like live, like live in a certain manner or love. If you think that there's non propositional knowing, which I think deeply there is, and it's more primordial and important to your cognitive agency than propositional knowing, you're not going to capture it. If you by theory, you mean"
},
{
"end_time": 8013.968,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 7994.531,
"text": " You know your set of propositions. I did say I don't think of theories just as formal systems. That doesn't make any sense to me. I think theories are better understood as interpretations and bridges of our formal propositions into the other kind of knowings. That's what I think theories actually do for us."
},
{
"end_time": 8035.828,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8014.974,
"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, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 8062.807,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8035.828,
"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.