Top Psychologist & Scientist (Donald Hoffman): Science Has the Answer to Why Seeing True Reality Would Kill You!
Guests: Donald Hoffman
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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The world that you're seeing isn't the true world. All of this that I'm seeing right now is just a virtual reality. It's like you're born with a headset on playing a video game. That's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code for the game, you know that there's an entire world outside of it and as the programmer, you can do miracles.
And do you think we're getting closer to being able to edit the code?
That's exactly what I'm working on right now. And we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are far more powerful than anything we've seen before, like time travel. And nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers. Will people suffer? So, it's like Pandora's box. There are all sorts of nasty surprises, but they also could be miraculous. But either way, just in the last few months, it's started to crack open.
So let's talk about that. Okay. So, Professor Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist pushing the boundaries of how we perceive reality and how we can unlock our full potential as human beings.
According to Darwin's theory, our sensory systems—eyes, ears, smell, touch—are not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully because seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. And so whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive.
Well, what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life?
Well, if you're stuck in a boring world, that's a world of your own creation, that's not the real world. And my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain creates. And so we feel inadequate, and we feel like we need to compete with other people. But you're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove, and there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on ourselves. So if you really knew who you are, you would see no need to compare or compete.
And is there a way for me to understand who I am?
If you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to...
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Professor Donald Hoffman. Do you think that the listeners of this show, the people listening right now, understand the nature of reality and the world that they're looking at and see?
I think that no one, even the most advanced professionals, really understands the nature of reality. It's one of the big open problems and questions in science today. We all might have ideas, we might think we know something. Our best science suggests that our imagination is not yet big enough. We need to explore further.
What is it that you believe is the big misconception about how we perceive reality?
Well, most of us think of reality as whatever is inside space and time. We actually know that space-time cannot be the fundamental nature of reality.
And what is space-time?
So, everything that you see around us, the space between you and me, there's maybe one or two meters of space between you and me. That's what space-time is. All the stuff that we can see in our telescope, put it that way. Anything you can see in your telescope is part of space-time.
But we know our best theories of space-time—Einstein's theory together with quantum theory—tell us that space-time cannot be the fundamental nature of reality. There's a small... if you go small, so I can talk about a meter. Then I can go to centimeters, and then millimeters, and then micrometers, and you can go smaller and smaller. At some point, you go so small that space disappears. It no longer even makes sense mathematically. It's 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.
So it's actually not that small. It's not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters, it's just 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, and all of a sudden our equations tell us space-time doesn't have any effective meaning. It's trivial or artificial.
Is space-time a proxy for the word reality in some respects?
Well, for most people I think it is. For most people, they think that space-time is the reality. And what I'm saying is, it's the reality that most of us have assumed is the final reality, and science is now telling us it can't be. It actually tells us precisely at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, the very notion of space-time makes no sense.
Is that the same as saying that reality as I perceive it makes no sense?
I'm suggesting, now as a cognitive scientist, not a physicist, we should think of space-time as just a virtual reality headset. That's the way we perceive in our game of life.
And when you say space-time, you mean the thing that I'm perceiving with my eyes and ears and senses right now?
That's right. Even this hard table is just a VR object. And the whole setting that we're in here right now is just a virtual reality, and there is a reality entirely outside this headset that is open to science to explore, and we're finding stuff which you might call obelisks, geometric objects outside of space-time. So this is all brand new in the last since like 2010 or something like that, roughly.
So do you believe that? Do you believe that everything I'm experiencing and seeing now is basically equivalent to me wearing a virtual reality headset and that there's something beyond the virtual reality headset?
Completely. Because I believe the science. And the predictions of our theories about space-time are so good. Now, I have to always be careful about what I'm saying versus... and I don't want to put words in the physicists' mouth. So what I say, I think it's a virtual reality. That's Hoffman, that's not physics, right?
Are you able to swap out the phrase space-time for reality? Or is that inaccurate?
I think that whatever reality is, space-time is a trivial aspect of it. There's much more to reality than space-time. Space-time is all the reality... it's like a player in Grand Theft Auto.
If all you've done is play in Grand Theft Auto—and that's you were born with a headset on and that's all you've—that's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code and you know the supercomputer that's running Grand Theft Auto, you know that Grand Theft Auto is a nice self-contained world, but there's an entire world outside of it that's utterly unlike Grand Theft Auto.
It's this supercomputer with diodes and resistors and voltages that are being toggled, and when some dude is turning his wheel to drive the car, what's really happening when he turns the wheel is that millions of voltages are being toggled in a specific order in some computer, and it has to be exactly that right sequence for the thing to work properly. And the guy that's turning the wheel has no idea what's going on. There's this other whole realm utterly outside your imagination in Grand Theft Auto.
And so if you're in Grand Theft Auto, you might not even know about computers and toggling voltages and so forth. All you know is I've got a steering wheel and a gas pedal and streets and people to race and so forth and things to steal or whatever.
But you don't realize there's a puppet master effectively controlling you?
Behind the scenes. And so I think that space-time is just a very effective headset. For anyone that doesn't know, Grand Theft Auto is a video game where you run around a virtual world, basically.
Driving nice fancy cars in this world, that's right.
So everything I see right now is a projection that I've made on the world, my world, in order to help me to survive. And my brain is not showing me things that it doesn't think I need to see because they won't be conducive with survival because they are cognitively—in terms of like how much fuel and energy they would require to process and think about—they are cognitively inconsequential, or like it would be inefficient for me to spend my cognitive power to see those things.
That's exactly right. And for a lot of people, I think that's counterintuitive because they would say, look, evolution is about making you fit so that you can live and survive long enough to reproduce successfully. And surely evolution should do that by making you see the truth. I mean, if you see the truth, then you're going to compete in the game of life much more successfully than if you don't see the truth. So what are you talking about this headset nonsense for? This isn't a headset, this is the truth. Evolution should shape us to see the truth.
Now, I think that's what most people would assume. In fact, very intelligent experts in the field assume that. And I suggest otherwise. In fact, we have mathematical proofs otherwise. If you look at evolution, Darwin said, look, we need to think about a gradual evolution over time of these species, maybe from very, very simple ones to more complex ones. And what is going to drive that dynamics?
Darwin suggested it was what we would call reproductive fitness. That those organisms that have physical properties, sensory systems, motor systems—like movement systems—that make them more likely to have offspring and to raise offspring to maturity. Whatever properties those might be, that's what we're going to call fitness. So the more fit you are is really saying how likely are you to have and successfully raise offspring.
So Darwin suggested that. And I don't think that he necessarily had to say that there was no God, it was just that if there is a God, it's not like God put it down perfect and he did an evolutionary process.
Well, organisms adapt to their environment—well, they're not adapting, but the offspring that survive are those best adapted to the environment.
That's right. So that was Darwin's idea. The gradual evolution from presumably simpler organisms to more and more complicated organisms, and then multiple evolutions of things like eyes. Like cephalopod eyes evolved differently from the human eye. And the cephalopod eye got certain things right that the human eye got wrong.
Is that because the cephalopod eye was in a different environment, so it had different requirements?
That would be one possible reason. I actually don't know in the case of the cephalopods why, but that kind of idea is absolutely one of the reasons that that could have happened. Another one is it could be just an accident, right? There's probability involved and so at some point you have the right accident and the humans got the thing reversed.
So are you saying Darwin was wrong in some respect or that there was something missing from his theory?
Oh no, I think Darwin... in terms of biology, I think that there is no serious competitor to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in terms of a scientific theory of the origin of species and so forth. And it's Darwin's theory and the mathematical formulation of it that I think also says that what we're perceiving is not the truth.
That our sensory systems, on Darwin's theory, were not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully. Period. That's all Darwin's theory actually says. Most of us think the way this evolutionary process does it is to make sure that your senses are telling you the truth about the external reality.
I've published some papers with colleagues where we show mathematically that Darwin's theory does not entail that at all. In fact, Darwin's theory says the probability is zero that any sensory system like eyes, ears, smell, touch, taste has ever been shaped to see any aspect of objective reality truly. So the probability is zero that you see any aspect of the truth. Period. On Darwin's theory.
What you do experience is sensory systems that guide adaptive behavior. Guide adaptive behavior means they let you act—
So your eyes, your nose—
They guide you so that you act in ways that you don't die too quickly and you can have kids that don't die too quickly. That's all it's about.
I was just playing out the scenario then that you removed my eyes, and you removed my ears and nose, and my ability to sense temperature and things like that, all of my senses. And I thought, if I was the only person on earth and you removed all of my senses, what would reality be? Because if you remove my senses, reality no longer exists as far as I'm aware of it. But that doesn't mean nothing exists.
And I'm wondering what that nothing would be. Like if you just imagine wiping off everyone on the earth and it's just you, and we remove all of your senses, what is in that space? Because you're right, my senses, my eyes, my ears, my ability to understand temperature is a byproduct and consequence of me surviving. So I was playing out the scenario, I was like, well, if we think about ghosts and the afterlife, maybe there was no reason from a survival perspective that I even needed to be able to see or acknowledge them. Maybe it just didn't help.
Maybe it actually would have hurt me because it would have been too cognitively demanding to process all of that information. So anybody that could process all that information wouldn't have been good at reproducing, therefore they wouldn't survive, therefore they wouldn't be here. So maybe those of us that are here were just really good at ignoring the other dimensions.
That's what our mathematics says. I think that your intuitions on that are quite right. That if you pay attention to anything other than what allows you to have kids, you're wasting your time from an evolutionary point of view. Perception is expensive. It takes a lot of calories. You have to eat a lot of food to run your brain, to power your eyes and your ears.
So you need to do shortcuts. You need to make your sensory systems not chew up so much of your energy. The more expensive your perceptual systems are, the more you've got to eat to power those. So that means you have to go out there and forage and put yourself at harm's way.
So there's a tradeoff. We try to do things cheaply in evolution. And going for the truth, you don't need to actually go for the truth because that's very, very expensive. So for example, there are some flying insects that need to lay their eggs on water. And they use a trick of just looking at the polarization of the light coming off the water. So what you see happening in evolution is we have tricks and hacks. And even in humans, we have tricks and hacks. For example, trying to find out if someone is reproductively fit, right? You can't... I can't actually look at your DNA and go, well okay, he's got an A, C, G, and T, but he's got a C here where it's supposed to be a T or... I can't look at your DNA. So what do I look at? I have to look at what I can see of your body and your voice and so forth.
One of the most compelling arguments for the fact that we aren't seeing reality as it is, and we're actually only seeing what we need to see in order to survive, is when you look at, as you were saying, as how different animals see the world. And can you just give me some more examples of different animals that see the world completely differently? I always think about bats. How do bats see the world? Because do they see colors like we see them and objects like we see them?
No, bats use echolocation. They'll send out little bursts of sound at very, very high frequencies, and then they have these big ears that capture the returns.
I was just looking at their sensory system and it says most insect-eating bats use echolocation, as you said. They emit high-frequency sound waves and see by listening to the echoes bouncing off other objects. And this gives them some kind of sonic map of their surroundings, helping them to navigate and effectively see in total darkness. So you imagine a bat. Like then, they if a bat is sat there thinking that they understand the nature of reality, when it's actually just a map of how the sound waves bounce back. They, I imagine, don't have the same... they have a completely different perception of what reality is to us. And it therefore would be quite ignorant to assume that we as humans are seeing reality as it is when, just like the bat, we've probably adapted to our environment and built senses—eyes, ears, touch—that helped us to survive.
I would agree with you, but some of my colleagues would disagree. And they would say humans are much more complicated. And surely bats and so forth, they have to have all these shortcuts and they don't see reality as it is, but we've evolved further and we're closer to the truth. From my point of view, what I see, this table and this cup and so forth, is just a convenient fiction. Whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive. Utterly.
In a TED talk that you did in the 2000s, you talked about simulations that you ran to prove that, I guess in part, that I'm only seeing things that will help me to survive as a creature, as an organism. Can you explain to me simply what those simulations were and what they proved?
Yes. In our simulations, and this was before we had theorems, so we did simulations just to see if the ideas were working. And we would have artificial organisms in a computer. So it was like a game that we put together. And we would have a world, and we would let some organisms actually see the true state of that world. So they were the "truth organisms."
And then we'd have other ones that only had like a headset, an interface, that only could see not the truth, but just some little bit of information that could guide adaptive behavior.
That would help them to survive and reproduce.
That's right. What we found was, over a wide range of conditions of the algorithm, the organisms that saw the truth went extinct. They weren't able to compete with the ones that didn't. And one of the things that came out of it was: seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. It's complicated to see the truth. And if you have a simple trick that lets you do the same thing without having to have a deeper insight, then you can get the same benefit. You get the benefit without having to put all the effort out.
And I can give you a concrete example of an organism that does this that's pretty funny. There's the jewel beetle. It lives in the outback of Australia. It's dimpled, glossy, and brown. The males fly, the females are flightless. So the males are flying around, of course, looking for an eligible female.
It turns out that men in the outback tended for a while to drink beer with these bottles that were also dimpled, glossy, and brown. They throw them out into the outback, and they turned out to be dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to grab the attention of the male jewel beetles. They're actually on the bottle! They're full-body contact! They're crawling all over it, and they still think it's a female.
So how much do they know about their women? Very, very little they know about their women. A female is something dimpled, glossy, and brown, apparently the bigger the better, and that's what a female is. So you can see evolution didn't give these male beetles much insight into their females. They gave them just enough information to successfully reproduce. Period. And that's sort of what evolution does. It gives you just enough information to reproduce before you die.
So they're all making love to this beer bottle because they can't tell, they can't see reality. They can't see that this isn't a woman, this is a beer bottle.
That's right. That's one of the more humorous examples of what evolution has done. It does things on the cheap. And that includes human sensory systems. So it's very humbling. We're not the epitome, and what we think is human appreciation of the deep truth of reality is just our little headset. What we experience and know is trivial compared to whatever reality is. Absolutely trivial. We know 0% of reality.
And by the way, our scientific theories will always and forever explain 0% of reality because they have to make assumptions. Every scientific theory has to make assumptions, and so we're going to have... we'll have in principle an infinite sequence of theories with ever deeper assumptions and we'll never get to the bottom. And since it's an infinite sequence, that means everything that we've got so far is 0%. So I'm a scientist, I'm all for science, I encourage young men and women to go into science. I think it's a great thing to do. But just know that all of our theories will comprehend 0% of reality.
People talk a lot about how their pets or other animals are able to see another dimension. Sometimes people say things like my dog started barking at this, or I had cancer and there's dogs or animals that have been able to... they believe spot certain diseases inside the human body. And when you look at the sensory faculties of these dogs, dogs can hear frequencies up to 65,000 Hertz whereas humans can only go to 20,000 Hertz. Dogs have up to 300 million olfactory receptors, humans just have 5 million. And some animals like cats can see different frequencies of light. So it does beg a question. If it's possible for an animal, an organism, to see the world in a different depth and width than us, what happens if you go further?
Right, absolutely. There are some that can detect electric fields, some fish can detect electric fields. Some birds, I believe, can see the polarization of light. And some insects, of course, use polarization of light to find where to lay their eggs. And we can't do that. So, yeah, when we start to study other animals, we see these remarkable abilities.
Interesting. And what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life? Because I guess the way that we perceive the world causes us so much suffering or joy depending on how we perceive it. Is there anything from all of the work you've done and the books you've written that people can bring into their lives to help them live better lives with this understanding of the world?
First thing to note is that the world is far more interesting and varied than you can imagine. So if you think the world is a boring place, it's not. Your imagination isn't big enough. Whatever reality is, it transcends anything that you could possibly imagine.
Spiritual traditions basically often say there's more to life than what you see inside space and time. There's something beyond. And I've been sort of pointing to that myself in my own way. I'm saying that scientific theories always have assumptions, so there's an infinite number of scientific theories that you're going to have, and you're never going to get a scientific theory of everything. What am I saying? That there's something beyond science. As good as science is, I'm saying there's not only not a theory of everything, the best theory we'll ever come up with is 0% of reality. So that leaves all this room for what the spiritual traditions are talking about—that there's something that transcends science.
There is a way of thinking about this that I think is very illuminating, and it's about the intersection of science and spirituality. I'm a scientist. Who am I? I am someone and I'm one of many someones, other scientists, who can create theories and in principle ever deeper theories and there's an infinite sequence. So who is the "I" that can do this? No theory that I can come up with is the final description of that "I." In other words, the "I" that is doing all this theory building is the "I" that is real, that is making these theories, and that utterly transcends all these theories. And that's a spiritual point of view.
So what does that mean? You're God?
It means that whatever you are transcends any description. And that's what a lot of people say God is. Suppose I give you something you've never tasted before, like a piece of mint. And actually, I don't know what mint tastes like to you. I assume that it's like what mint tastes like for me, but I don't know. This is called learning by ostensive definition.
And so we have this game where your experiences are your experiences, and you actually didn't need anybody else for those experiences. All you needed me for, or your parents for, is to give you a name for what you already knew. And you create this world, and all we do is tell you how to talk with me about what you've created. And I don't know that your world in any way resembles my experience. It's quite possible.
And do you think those ways that we cause ourselves a lot of anguish and pain and mental health issues because of how we perceive the nature of reality to be, that we could potentially give up or rewire ourselves to have a more fulfilling, more grateful experience of life?
Completely. I think that's very, very important. And it's a natural consequence of what we've just been talking about. Almost all of us think of ourselves as an object in space and time, only here for a short amount of time and will soon die. When I say you transcend any scientific theory, that means the theory that I am just a 160-pound object in space and time is just a theory and it's not the truth. That's not the truth about who I am.
That's just a theory that I have. Because space-time itself is just a theory. Nothing inside space-time is anything but my headset interpretation of a reality that infinitely transcends anything I can experience. There is another way that you can appreciate that that transcends science, and that is—and many meditative traditions talk about this—they recognize that you are infinitely beyond any scientific or any other description.
So what do you do in that case to know who you are? You drop all descriptions. You sit in absolute silence and ignore any thoughts, because you recognize thoughts are useful in this headset and to play the game of life. Yeah, we need thoughts to do our science. But if you want to understand who I am, again, I do psychology, I do all this... I'll do the scientific... so I'm not putting science down, I'm a scientist. But at some point, if you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to lay aside all concepts. Period. And just know yourself by being yourself. Not by putting a concept between you and yourself.
A story.
A story, an identity. That's right. No story, no identity. Nothing between you and yourself. You know yourself by sitting in utter silence and being yourself, no concepts. Because then you've let go of all theory and now it's reality facing reality. No barrier in between.
And that requires you to realize that your identity, the stories you believe, the labels you've given yourself—as CEO or social media manager or manager, a director or head of department—all of these things are just in fact labels you've given yourself.
That's right. Those are all just labels that you give. And what's interesting about this now is: if I think I'm just this little body, and I'm nothing but this body, and my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain does—so that's my theory, and that's all I am—I don't feel very big. I don't feel very important. And so I'm going to probably need to do something to make myself feel a little bit better. I'm going to need to compete with you. I'm going to need to show how I'm better than you in certain ways. So I'm a better tennis player than you, or I'm smarter than you, or whatever.
So we're going to get this competition going on among people, and we're going to get even competition among religions and countries and so forth, because we don't know who we are and we feel inadequate. And if we actually understood that all of this that I'm seeing right now, I'm making it up on the fly. This cup that I'm seeing, it only exists when I create it. This table exists when I create it.
Like in a virtual reality. If in a virtual reality I'm in Grand Theft Auto, I look over here and now I see a red Mustang. I look away, I don't see the red Mustang, and now there is no red Mustang. The red Mustang only existed when I looked, because it's a VR game. I only need it when I render it. I'm now rendering a cup. That cup that I rendered is no longer there. You might render your cup. You might say, well no, Don, you're wrong. The cup is still there, I can see it. No, you're rendering your cup! And so you're not rendering my cup. I rendered my cup.
And the same thing with Grand Theft Auto. You might say, well, I see the red Mustang even if you're not looking, Don. Well, that's because in your headset you're looking and you're rendering the red Mustang, but I'm not. And there is no red Mustang. If you look inside the supercomputer, there's no red Mustang there. The supercomputer that's running the game has no red Mustang.
So what I'm saying is: we compete, we feel inadequate, and we feel like we need to compete with other people and be better than them and we have egos, all the egoic stuff that we do that causes all the problems in the world, because you don't know who you are. You're creating this whole thing. You're not a little player, you're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove. And you don't need to be better than anybody else. They are also master creators. They're creating entire universes that they perceive as well.
And my own take on this is that you and I are really the same one reality, just looking at itself through two different headsets, two different avatars, and having a conversation. And maybe that's what is required for this one infinite intelligence to sort of know itself. If you transcend any description, how do you know yourself? Maybe what you do is you say, well, let me try this headset on. Let me take that seriously for a while. Maybe even let myself get lost. Let me completely believe I'm just a Don Hoffman in this space-time. And let me believe that for many decades and then slowly sort of wake up. But at least then I will have seen myself from this perspective. Then I'll take off that headset—we call that death—I'll just take off the headset and then I'll try... there's an infinite number of headsets to try on.
So from that point of view, any person you speak to is transcendent. Any animal is just an avatar of this transcendent unspeakably incredible reality that transcends science so that science will only get 0% of it. And again, I'll always say I'm not putting down science, I'm a scientist. We need to do science and I recommend that people do science. But my guess is this is one of the more trivial headsets. It's only four dimensions. Why not 20 billion? Why not a quintillion? This is just a fairly trivial... so we may be in one of the most uninteresting perspectives on who we are. But the reason we have fighting, the reason we have egos, is because we don't know who we are.
And is there a way for me to understand who I am? Or is the closest you've found meditation—I know you've meditated for 20 years or something.
I should be a little careful. I think it really is important for me as a scientist to have done the science that I've done. But I think for someone else who doesn't do science, maybe they do music. Or you do some sports or something like that. That is a concrete way of knowing yourself through a perspective, and that's really important. And since we have billions of people and then there's untold other kinds of animals and insects and so forth, this one infinite intelligence, whatever it is, has decided I want to look at myself through the lens of a mosquito. And now of the bumblebee. And now of the jewel beetle that can't even tell a bottle from a female. I'm going to look at myself from this panoply of perspectives.
So you're almost implying there that there's this one consciousness and it's just using different organisms potentially as vehicles to understand itself and the nature of reality. So that would mean that me and you are the same consciousness, but you were born as a scientist in America and I was born as an entrepreneur in Botswana with different perspectives in order to understand the reality. Which means that we're basically the same consciousness, the same super-intelligence or whatever, just manifesting as different eyeballs in different places.
That's my view, and certain religious traditions do sort of hint, almost say that exactly. Like Jesus in Christianity, in like Matthew 25, says, I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a foreigner and you invited me in. I was sick and you helped me. I was in prison and you visited me. And people, he says, asked him, "When did we do that?" And he said, "Whenever you did it to the least person, you did it to me."
So Jesus is sort of hinting at this—there is no difference. The reason to love your neighbor as yourself is because your neighbor is yourself, just with a different headset. And the only reason we have problems is we don't realize how incredible you are. So you are that which is creating this VR simulation with all of its beauty, all of its complexity. All the complexity is you, and you're doing it effortlessly.
Now, for my neuroscience colleagues, they will say, "Don, it's not effortless. You've got 86 billion neurons in your brain. The visual system has billions of neurons that are doing all this computation, and we have the simple cells, the complex cells, the hyper-complex cells." We think of the brain as a physical object that's generating our consciousness. I'm saying space-time itself is something that you create. And so you create everything inside space-time and you create the brain.
Excuse me? And nor do I?
Because I don't have a brain and you don't have a brain until we actually look inside and render a brain. Just like in VR, the Mustang doesn't exist until you look at it and render it. So if... I can predict that if we do the right scans, we will see a brain. But that only exists when we do the rendering. So I don't have a brain. All these correlations—we know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So the fact that there are correlations—and I don't deny them, in fact I'm all for studying these correlations between brain activity and conscious experience—they exist, they're undeniable, and they don't in any way remotely entail that the brain causes our conscious experiences. Somehow we're—
So I'm not the brain, I'm the thing that's simulating the presence of a brain.
That's right. And in your simulation, your simulation is so good that it simulates also how all this reality that transcends space-time is being funneled down into this tiny little space-time headset. And that's what we call the brain. So of course there are going to be these correlations between brain activity and what we see. But the correlation goes the other way. It's not because the brain creates your conscious experiences, it's because consciousness has created the brain as an icon to describe how it's creating this headset.
Do you think much about simulation theory? I've had lots of dinner parties recently and conversations over dinner about simulation theory and it always gets very, very interesting. What are your thoughts on simulation theory? And for my listeners who might not understand the concept of simulation theory, are you able to explain it?
Yes. So the standard Nick Bostrom, for example, is a very big figure in simulation theory. And in those kinds of simulation theories, the idea is that the world that you're seeing right now isn't the true world. This is just a simulation. And there's some programmer, say with some really nice computer, that's programmed this world. And so you're just characters in a simulated world of some programmer.
And that programmer and their laptop that's doing this, as it turns out, isn't the final thing either, because that programmer and their laptop is also just a simulation from a deeper level programmer and their laptop. There could be a very, very large nesting of all these simulated worlds and people with their computers. And that does jibe pretty well with what I'm saying up to a point. I'm saying this is not the reality, this is just a headset. But there's a big, big disagreement.
Do you think there's going to come a point where with everything that's going on with AI and robotics that we could make a robot, program it with a certain AI that gives it the sort of same thinking as a human being, and then when I put some chocolate into its mouth, it's going to say to me, "Mmm, I love that chocolate, Steven. That's my favorite flavor"?
I could certainly program such a robot. But the question will always be, just because I have this particular circuit in the computer and some structure on the tongue that I've given it and some pattern of electrical activity, what is my scientific theory that explains why that pattern had to be the taste of chocolate? That's what we need as scientists.
Could we go back to your adaptive learning thing where it's just learned through all of the data through someone telling it, programming it to think that particular set of chemicals... send that up to the software and then respond like this? Which might just be how me and you are responding to life. We might not be conscious at all.
Right, and what you're suggesting is probably how we'd actually do it, right? We'd probably sort of train it and have it give us the right responses in that kind of context. So we'd probably do something like that. But then as scientists, we want to understand... so we're claiming as scientists that an experience is a certain causal structure or certain functional architecture. That's what we're saying it is. Because these are physicalist theories and they're saying we're not going to start with consciousness. Consciousness is not fundamental. Space and time and physical objects are fundamental, and so we need to show how those physical objects and their properties give rise to these conscious experiences. So if that's the science you want to propose, then I have to be hard-nosed as a scientist now and say: give me your theory of mint.
So do you think this is a simulation?
It's not a simulation in Bostrom's sense. In Bostrom's sense, it's a simulation in that it's a physical substrate that's giving rise to this whole world of conscious experiences that I'm having. And that I deny.
Like a game programmer sat at a computer making it.
And that somehow the physical system itself gave rise to the magic of the conscious experiences I'm having of red and green and love and so forth. Those conscious experiences... so for that simulation theory... so this is my bone of contention with the simulation theory. It's very similar to my theory in all other respects, but this is a pretty serious bone of contention. For their theory to work, they have to show explicitly, scientifically, how a specific conscious experience arises from a specific program. Until you do that, there is no beef on the table. All they have to do to give me some beef is to say, like in Integrated Information Theory, they say, "Here's the matrix for mint. This is the matrix." Of course then we'll ask, why? Why is that matrix—that causal structure—the taste of mint? What is your scientific theory for why that's the case? And what you'll see is, I think... I think it's going to take the field a while to see it, but we will find that these approaches are vacuous. There's no beef.
When you ask people what the meaning of their life is, they'll often say things like it is maybe to raise children, maybe they'll say they want to improve humanity, they want to cure disease, they want to help society in some way. But through the lens of reality that you see the world and that you believe the world is, what becomes the meaning of life, Donald?
That's a great question. I do think that the best description I can give is that there is this one transcendent infinite consciousness, and you and I are just avatars, and so is a mosquito, and so is a bacterium. And all are equally interesting and important, and all are different perspectives, just different headsets. There's the mosquito headset, there's the jewel beetle headset. There's all these different headsets.
And I'm in the Hoffman headset. I happen to do science. I'm not good at art, I'm not good at music and so forth. I have my own particular talents and inabilities in my headset. So I'm here to experience the Don Hoffman perspective on things.
Why?
Because that's perhaps the only way the infinite can know itself is through an infinite number of perspectives. It transcends any particular perspective, so why not get lost in the Hoffman perspective and a jewel beetle perspective and all these different perspectives? And that's the only way to know yourself. But it's always the one consciousness that's knowing itself through an infinite number of varieties of experiences, of headsets.
And did someone or something create that one consciousness?
Now I'm above my pay grade. That's the right question and it asks for an explanation. And the only explanations we have are either mathematical or scientific or both. But even informal explanations make assumptions. And so I'll have to say that you're asking a question about an entity that transcends any description. Namely, who you really are and who I really am.
And I think you can know the answer to your question in one way, and that is dropping all concepts and just being with your being. You are that. You are that. You don't need to attain anything, you don't need to achieve anything. You're that right now. So there's no effort, there's no need to get better at anything, it's just to recognize what you already are.
You've let yourself be under an illusion that I'm just this little guy that needs to do these things and be a professor and whatever it might be. I've been under that illusion and I got to see myself through that lens. And then I began to wake up and see that I completely transcend that. It was an interesting perspective, I'm glad I took it seriously. I'm going to throw off that headset—we call it death—but I'm going to take off that headset pretty soon because that's not who I am. I transcend that. So the answer is you can know it, but you know it when you let go of all concepts and you don't try. If you're trying to get there, then you don't see what you already are. That's the best answer I can give at this point because it does transcend science.
So in terms of a God, as we believe in gods in the religious context, the best answer that you have would say that effectively we are God. The God that we refer to, we are the transcendent power that goes beyond description.
I would say that, and I can put that in a sort of Christian language because many listeners will be Christian. A child of a human is a human. The Bible calls us children of God. Well, if a child of a human is a human, a child of God is God. That's what it points to. And Jesus is fairly explicit about this.
When some religious leaders were about to stone Jesus for saying that he was the Son of God, Jesus quotes a scripture and says—from I think the Psalms or something like that—he says, "In the Psalms it says, I have said you are gods and all of you are sons of the Most High." And Jesus said, "If he calls them gods to whom the word of God came, why are you trying to stone me to death for just saying I'm the Son of God?" What the Bible is basically saying is: love God with all your heart—that's loving yourself. You are God. And love your neighbor as yourself is just recognizing that your neighbor is yourself under a different avatar.
Do you think Jesus was really divine in any—presuming you think this was a real individual—and do you think he was divine beyond me and you in some respect?
Not beyond me and you. But you are as divine as could possibly be. Hoffman said it. You're as divine as I can possibly be.
Are there any... you must go through... if you understand reality through this lens that we're seeing so little and that much of it is created by ourselves and we are the transcendent. Are there any things that you do on a day-to-day basis that are atypical because of that, or thoughts you have or experiences you have that are atypical because of this perspective?
Certainly atypical from before in my own life. I now spend quite a bit of time in meditation. Because as much as I enjoy the life of the mind and I'm, you know, I'm a professor and I've taught lots of students over many, many years, and I highly recommend all that stuff, at some point I realize that all my knowledge, all possible scientific knowledge, is 0% of reality.
And do I really want to confine myself only to 0% of reality? I want to explore reality from this perspective, but it is 0%. So I do my homework, and I encourage my students to do more homework, take this perspective very seriously, study it rigorously. But then realize there's this 100% that you haven't seen, and you are it.
So are you doing lots of psychedelics and stuff like that?
I haven't done any psychedelics. I've never even smoked a cigarette. I haven't had a drink of alcohol in decades. And it's partly just because I'm frail. My physical body isn't that strong. I have limits to... well, I can't push my body too hard. So I've learned to operate within my own limits and I don't push it too hard. But the meditation I do—
Am I right in thinking that you now meditate three to four hours a day?
Probably, yeah. Any creativity that's ever come out in my scientific work, to whatever extent it's creative, it's come from the silence. So of course I've had to do my homework and do my studies and so forth, but the novel ideas come from the silence.
Personally, one thing I've seen is how identified I am with my avatar. I think I am this body. I'm really tied to this body. And the stuff that I'm saying, at the emotional level, there's an emotional part of me that doesn't believe it one bit. Emotionally, you put a gun to my head, I'm scared to death. Intellectually, I'll say to you, this is just an avatar, I'm the infinite that transcends, and when I die I just... and I believe that.
How deeply do I believe it? Put a gun to my head and you'll find out. I'll wet my pants. So it's very, very interesting for me to look at that and to see all the disjunctions, the things that are disjointed in my worldview. Well, it kind of makes sense based on your theory that our senses have evolved to help us to survive because someone not liking your thinking or your theories or rejecting you or harm to your body, it would go against your survival. So theoretically, if we are in the world that you've described and the reality you've described, which is basically designed for survival, then you would have developed senses that make you change behavior if there's a risk of someone not liking you.
That's right. There are social pressures and if we don't conform to them, you get feedback that can be very, very negative, and in some cases even death. If I go to a grocery store and don't happen to pay and just walk off with the stuff, I end up behind bars. There are rules of the game. There are rules of the headset. I transcend the headset, but I choose to allow myself to get lost in the game.
Starting in January 2020, you did have a proverbial gun held to your head in a way because you contracted COVID and went through and are still going through some pretty serious health complications because of long COVID. You developed heart issues within weeks requiring hundreds of hours of critical care in hospital. You told me before we started recording that you've had heart surgery twice. In 2021, at 66 years old, at one point you thought you might not survive because your heart had been at 190 beats per minute for 30 hours and you sent your wife a goodbye message because it looked like it was all over. I am wondering what that brush with death did to your perception of life, your perspective, and how that all ties into your beliefs about the nature of reality.
It certainly let me see how tied I am to my body and the fear that I experienced. It's one thing for me to sit here as a nice academic and talk about how you're the transcendent reality. It's another thing to have your heart fail and to know that this is probably the end and to face the raw emotion. So I had deep... and then I had to have another surgery.
The first one kept me for a year and a half or so. A great surgeon, it's not his fault, he did a great job, but COVID is persistent. And the week before my second surgery, I was in the ER three times where they had to restart my heart. Just didn't know if I was going to make it. I would have to go have my heart restarted and then two days later go back and have my heart restarted, and I was just hoping to make it to live to the surgery. And even now I wouldn't be surprised if the heart starts to go bad again.
So that takes us out of the abstract academic realm into something very, very concrete. Now how do you deal with the fact that you really don't know from one heartbeat to the next? It keeps you from just talking abstractly about this stuff and being real about it. What do I really feel about it? And when I look inside and see there's real fear, then I know, okay, this stuff about you're the infinite and everybody else is the infinite is still fairly just an abstract concept for you, Don. You haven't really gone deep enough. You need to go deeper and actually... if that's true—mean, maybe it's all BS, right? But if it's true that you are the infinite and everybody else is the infinite, then you need to go deeper into that.
And intellectually, I'm convinced. I mean, I've given you the reasons, intellectually I'm quite convinced. And it's really interesting to me that emotionally I'm far from convinced. And I agree with what you just said about the evolutionary arguments for it—there are good evolutionary reasons for me to be wired up to have automatic emotional responses that are going to protect this body to keep it. So no doubt about it. So there's no reason to judge myself that my body has a fear response and so forth when there are things that are about to kill me.
The issue is then, when I look at that fear response, can I look at it and accept it or do I identify with it? Do I identify with the fear response or can I step back and be the observer that watches the fear response? And in the meditation process, what I'm learning to do is in some sense what I was saying about the science. Science is great, but don't believe any theory. Theories are just tools, they're not the truth. No scientific theory, my theories included, are the truth. And so also is my theory about who I am not the truth. And so to really let go of any theory... if I can really let go of any theory of who I am, then I'll let go of any fear.
So it's really... it really comes down to this, which is really quite interesting. We will each die. That's incontrovertible. So any attachments I have to this world will cease. There's no doubt. The question is, can I let go of the attachments now? Or will they only go from my cold dead hand? When will I let go of all these attachments? To the extent that I can let go, I see that there's more peace. There's more peace in letting... not being attached to things. So I see that, but I'm not there. So this is a very human, very human perspective on things, a very fallible perspective, and it's very, very interesting. So I'm claiming I'm the infinite and I'm the infinite having taken on this bodily form and in some sense I'm waking up to who I really am, but I'm only partly awake.
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So when we do die, in your perspective, is that equivalent to taking the headset off?
Entirely. The consciousness still remains, I assume. Of course, the answer is I don't know, but I'll speculate. I suspect that the closest I can get to that is what happens in meditation when I really do let go. When it's very, very quiet and my eyes are closed, then there is awareness and it's a very alert awareness, very, very conscious, and it has no content. There's no colors, no tastes, no smells, there's no content and no need. It's an awareness that can create all this in an instant and it can let it go. So it is the closest I can give to the answer to your question is really just to sit in silence. And it's hard because the thoughts will come and come and come, and letting go of all thoughts is the difficult one. But when you do that, then I think that's the closest I can give to the answer to your question.
We spend a lot of time debating whether this God is real, or whether this thing is real, or whether horoscopes are real, or whether this spiritual belief is real, or karma or dharma or reincarnation. In your perspective then, is it somewhat ignorant to set your stall up anywhere to say that something is or isn't true? Because people at different sides of the spectrum... some people are staunchly religious and then others are staunchly atheist.
I think that of course like in science, there are certain things that are just plain nonsense. Fact, most of the stuff that you just casually come up with and my theory of electricity or my theory of the atom, it's just plain nonsense and it goes nowhere, it's not worth any time. So I suspect the same thing is true in spiritual stuff where we have even fewer guardrails on our theories. But I think there are a few guiding stars. If it involves loving your neighbor as yourself, you're on the right track. If it involves putting a barrier between us and them and saying that they're bad and we're good, you're probably on the wrong track.
What does this mean for grief? So many people are losing loved ones as we speak or are contending with the reality that they are going to lose a loved one. What does it mean for the nature of love? Does it take anything away from love? Does it add to love? Does it strengthen love?
I think in some sense it comes down to: love is the central thing. In Christianity, Jesus... and I'm talking about that because my dad was a pastor and I was raised... that's the one I know the most about. So I'm speaking only because that's where I had some background. And when Jesus was asked what's the most important thing, he basically said love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself. So love is like number one. And my guess is that's really all you need. If your religion is love, and that's it, and that's how you act, you don't really need to add anything more to that. That's all that you need. Love your neighbor as yourself, you're done. That's all that you need.
And anything beyond that is just not necessary. And anything that contradicts that, I would go back and try to figure out where I went wrong in my religion. My girlfriend Melanie, in her bio on Instagram, it said "God is love." Now, she's not religious. She doesn't believe in a particular book or whatever, but she believes that. When I asked her, actually funnily enough, we had this conversation last night, I said to her, "What do you think God is?" and she said, "I think God is just love."
I completely agree. Love is the closest word that we can have to a pointer. Again, it's just a pointer. Whatever love is, just like the word mint only points to the mint, the word love only points, but I think it's the best pointer that we have.
And what is that definition of the word love? Because people use "I love Manchester United," but the love that you're describing seems to be much more about a oneness.
It's basically really recognizing that that person, even though they have a different color, a different race, a different creed, a different idea, that's just me. That's me in a different headset. And when I really then I ask, "Well, how would I want to treat me?" I get the right answer. That's love. If that's me, how should I want to treat me if that were me? Well, when you do that, you're acting in love. You're not going to beat yourself up, you're not going to call yourself names, you're not going to... whatever. You're going to treat yourself the way you want to treat yourself, then treat others the same way, and that's what love is. But all ultimately, I think again, these are all just pointers. Whatever love is, ultimately transcends any description.
Do you believe—and I did kind of ask you this earlier, but I was just looking at some of the research around how many people talk about these near-death experiences, specifically when they have a cardiac issue. People seem to say that they had perceptions of hearing or seeing things or passing into some kind of tunnel or seeing some kind of light, or a really positive emotion. I wondered if you, you know, you were at one point in your life thought that you weren't going to make it, and if with what you know, you... it's increased your belief in these near-death experience accounts. That someone was sort of transitioning from this reality through taking the headset off. Like it's almost like they took a little bit of the headset off but not all of it and then they came back to the headset.
So, yeah, these very common experiences about near death: a light and a tunnel and a life review and then a choice to come back and things like that. Quite common. And I'm not going to dismiss them one bit. It's hard to get scientific evidence on that. It would be very interesting to have a study in which people did have their heart stop, for example, were resuscitated, and ask how many don't have that experience. That would be a systematic study that did that.
So we don't want to be tricked by paying attention to only certain parts of the data. So you can see, even though I've talked about letting go of concepts and going into the unknown, when it comes to things where we should do science, then I'm very, very hard-nosed about it and say here we need to do studies. Some cardiologists that I know, I'm not going to mention names, but that have seen a lot of this stuff, they're convinced by their own informal experience that there's something going on here. So I don't disbelieve it, but that's different than having the science.
Why do we suffer in such a reality? Like why would this transcendent power create organisms or perspectives that end up suffering, that end up in the worst of places? The concentration camp, the illness, the typhoid, the starvation? Why would such a transcendent power or consciousness do such a thing?
I'll try not to be shallow about it because pain is pain and death is death and certain deaths seem horrific. This is a profound question. I always feel like I'm risking being trite because anybody who's had serious pain knows that you just can't... you can't play with this stuff. When you're in that pain, it's really... when you're with that fear, it's... I think ultimately it may be like the wounds you get in a video game. You get the wounds, your avatar gets killed, and you're upset about it in the moment because you're losing the game and so forth, but then the game's over and you're fine. Ultimately you're fine.
But that experience... I'll put it this way: I don't want to be in that experience. It's striking that in Christianity, the deepest symbol of God is horrific. A crucifixion. It's absolutely horrific—the pain. It's not just like a little shot to the head with a gun or something like that. It's making it as painful and as drawn out and as horrific as you could possibly do. And that's sort of when you see the cross, that's what's right there.
So your question is right at the heart of Christianity. It's putting that right there and saying this most horrific way you could imagine a person dying, that's what happened to Jesus, and that's our symbol for the divine. So that's why it's not trivial, it's not shallow, there's something very, very deep there. None of us is volunteering to hop onto a cross. So I would say the challenge of your question is the challenge that is probably a deep spiritual challenge to all of us. And I'll say to me personally, which is to continue to grow up and be less and less identified with this headset and more aware of my transcendent being.
Because ultimately, even on the cross, perhaps the most profound thing I've ever seen in Christianity was Jesus' words on the cross saying, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." The heart of Christianity is right there. It's not like the heart of Christianity is "kill the disbelievers." No. The heart of Christianity is the disbelievers have pinned you on a cross, they're killing you in the worst possible way they can think, and you show them love. That's the heart of Christianity—you show love to those who are in the process of killing you in the worst way they can think. Not killing disbelievers or pushing away disbelievers or discounting them. That's the opposite.
So there's something very, very deep... and that's why I'm very, very slow in answering your question, because this gets to the very deep heart of Christianity and in all true spirituality that I don't think I truly understand. But I see these pointers to it and I see that it's real and that your question is pointing to one of the most profound and important things. And I have the feeling that my answer is only ineffectually pointing part of the way there. There's much more to it than I've been able to point to.
I'm hazarding a guess at what the role of pain and suffering might be in such a reality where consciousness is this transcendent thing that comes into manifest itself as these organisms. It kind of in part goes back to your idea of: I've only projected what I need to see through my headset in order to survive. So if there are survival dynamics in play in my headset, then one element of survival is suffering, because the fire is hot, so I put my hand in the fire, my hand gets burned, so don't do that again, Steve. So if that is the nature of my headset, then there will need to be cause and effect as it relates to things that will help me to survive and things that won't help me to survive. And so suffering might just be an input or a stimulus in this headset that helps me to survive.
And then the question springs to mind: Why does consciousness care about survival? Why would this transcendent consciousness... maybe that's not even a good question, maybe that's the wrong question, but why does it want to survive in us? Why doesn't consciousness end? I mean...
One thing that I've heard from one spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, which is interesting on this, in one of his talks, he said, "Let's pretend that we're humans. Oh, that'll be fun. And let's play some dramas. Oh, but to have dramas I have to forget who I am. Okay, so then let me completely forget who I am. And then after a few hundred thousand years, when I get tired of it, then let's wake up." And I thought that was a profound pointer. It doesn't get the whole thing, but it's an interesting pointer.
I think there's more to it than that, but I think it's playing dramas to further explore who I am by knowing who I'm not. That may be part of it. Knowing who I am by knowing different perspectives and knowing that as rich as this perspective is, I transcend that.
Someone commented on one of your recent videos saying, "Imagine being a character in a book trying to understand your way out of that book into a higher dimension."
That's right. But of course, the only thing I would say is: imagine being the author of the book, having written about characters because I'm not just a character in the book, I'm the author who's put the character in the book, that then wakes up, that's identified with the character, and then wakes up and realizes I'm not just the character, I was writing the whole book. So that question is good because it points to a misconception. I'm not just a character in the book, I'm the writer of the book, and the "Hoffman" is just one of the characters in the book. And the writer of the book is the one consciousness that when it really understands itself will love all the characters equally.
How do you know we're not separate consciousnesses?
I don't, and that's an interesting... by the way, I've got a mathematical model of consciousness. And that's a whole other topic. So you can either play the game here—we're understanding how is physical world and consciousness related. How are those two things related? Most of my colleagues say physical world is fundamental. Consciousness emerges when bright brain activity happens. So when neurons fire in the right way and so forth, for example.
Now as a scientist, I was at these conferences, they know what I'm going to do to them. I say, "So, you claim that conscious experiences come from integrated information. Give me one. Give me an experience." And they can't.
Can they not say, well look, I'm looking around right now and that's coming from neurons in my brain in a physical substrate?
They'll say that and they know what I'm asking. What I'm asking for is, "Give me the specific pattern of neural activity that must be the taste of mint." It must be the taste of mint.
They can't spot the sequence of neurons or physical interactions that cause me to taste mint?
That's right. So there's a big gap there. And then they have to explain why that particular pattern—with this say integrated information pattern—must be the taste of mint.
So it's basically cause and effect. They're seeing something happen here and then they're seeing an outcome which is an experience, but the gap in between they can't explain.
That's right. And sometimes they'll say that the conscious experience just is the dynamics, whatever the physical dynamics is. But even then the question is: why is this particular dynamics associated with this conscious experience? And for principled reasons, in science we tolerate no BS. No BS. There's got to be a concrete reason. And that's why I put a big zero... and I do this at the conferences, knowing that I'm one of very, very few non-physicalists at the conference. And I know the physicalists are out there and I say, "You guys have got zero, right?" They don't have a chance. Floor is open, tell me I'm wrong. And I'm not. They know it.
So start with consciousness. Now, I'm playing a different game. I'm saying: all this physical stuff, there's lots of physical stuff, there's space and time, Einstein's special theory, general relativity, there's the bosons and fermions and leptons and quarks of the Standard Model of particle physics. You're saying, spiritual guys, that you can start with a theory of consciousness, mathematical, and you will give me all of space-time equations. You'll give me quantum field theory, you will give me the Standard Model of particle physics. How many points have you put on the board, guys? What have you done? Can you give me what pattern of conscious agent activity must be a photon? What pattern of conscious agent activity should be the structure of space-time or a boson or a lepton or a quark? Zero points on the board.
So from that perspective, it's equal. There's no points on the board on either team. So what I'm... I've got a theory that I call "Conscious Agent Network" theory. I'm working on this with Chaiton Prakash.
How long have you been working on it?
You've got a book called *Observer Mechanics* there that was published in 1989. So I've been on this for 40 years, almost 40 years. I think we can put some points on the board in the following way. I think we can start with a theory of conscious agents. I just presented a talk Friday, and we proposed what light is. We proposed why the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames.
What does this mean? You've got to simplify this for my 16-year-old brain.
Right, okay. So if I'm on a train and the train's going 50 miles an hour, and I throw a ball and I can throw it maybe 20 miles an hour, then in some sense the ball is going 70 miles an hour, right? And that's the way things normally work. But if I have a flashlight and I flash the light, the light is going at the speed of light, which is about 186,282 miles per second. That's pretty fast. If I get on the train and have the train go like half the speed of light, and I turn on my light, and I'm here outside looking at the train going at half the speed of light and someone's turned the flashlight on, how fast is that light beam going to look to me?
The speed of light plus half the speed of light?
That's what we would mostly think, right? And it turns out no, it goes the speed of light. If you have mass and you're not moving at the speed of light and we try to accelerate you to get to the speed of light, you'll never get there. There's a speed limit. You can't get there. So that's really counterintuitive, right? But Einstein said this is my fundamental hypothesis on which I'm going to build my theory of space and time: that light, no matter how fast you're moving, always moves away from you at the speed of light, and also that there's no special observer, no special inertial frame.
So the question is: how do I start with a theory of conscious agents? Which is a mathematical... it's complicated, so I'll talk about only one essential part of it. And that is, if you are conscious, you have experiences. Like I can experience colors, red, green, blue. Keep it very simple. So imagine a very, very simple conscious agent and what it can do is experience three colors: red, green, and blue. That's all it can do.
Of course, you have a much richer set of conscious experiences, but you include that kind of observer, right? Because you can do red, green, and blue. And now I'll talk about another observer that only sees red and green. And now you don't just see one color, you see a color for a little bit and then you see another color. I see red for a while, then I see green, then I see blue, then I maybe go back to red or whatever.
So there's going to be this sequence of colors that I see. Maybe the best I can say is that if I see green right now, then it's a 20% chance that I'll see red next and an 80% chance that I'll see blue next. I can write down probabilities. How do you capture that mathematically? There's something called a Markov kernel, a Markov matrix, that says basically it gives you all the numbers. It has a first row of numbers and says, "If I see red now, what's the probability that I'll see red next? What's the probability I'll see green next? What's the probability I'll see blue next?" So you just write the numbers down—maybe it's 0.2 that I'll see red again, 0.4 that I'll see green, and then 0.4 that I'll see blue again.
And then the next color, I'll have another row for if I'm now seeing green, what's the probability I'll see red, green, and blue, and then finally blue, what's the probability I'll go to red, green, and blue. So I need nine numbers. That's all I need. For three colors, I need nine numbers to talk about all the possibilities. And then I'll just have a counter as well. Every time I see a new color, I'll just have a little counter. So I saw red now, that's one. Oh, now I see green, that's two. Now I see green again, so that's three. So I'm counting the colors, the experiences. That's all I'm going to talk about, that's all I have.
The question is: if I start with just that notion of an observer, it has colors and a matrix of probabilities of I see this color, I can see another color, what's the probability, and every time I see a new color I get a counter incrementing. That's all I'm going to start with. Can I get Einstein's... can I get that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames? That if I'm on a train and I flash a light, that it will go at the speed of light even for someone who's on the train going at half the speed of light? And I discovered just in the last three or four months that the answer is yes, I can do it. And that's what I presented last Friday at this conference.
So what does this mean about the nature of consciousness? It means that starting with a theory of consciousness outside of space-time, I can actually give you with mathematical precision the structure of space-time. Which means that your belief is space and time and everything I see and experience actually comes from consciousness itself.
Consciousness itself is the source of everything.
So my consciousness didn't come from my brain, my brain came from my consciousness.
§02Transcript — part 2
That's exactly right. That's exactly what I'm saying. And we've talked about the headset. What I'm doing is I'm building the headset. I'm saying here's the conscious agents, their dynamics, and I'm now starting to build the space-time headset.
Is there a concern that believing these things can make one go mad? I sometimes think that thinking very deeply about who we are, why we're here, how we got here, sometimes makes me lose a bit of my orientation and I get a bit of a wobble. These stories that we've constructed our lives on give us... they anchor us and they orientate us and they give our life meaning. So if it's not true, then I lose the meaning of my life and I worry if I risk going bonkers.
Well, I certainly empathize with that. And that's also what happens in the meditation process. It also leads me to have to face all sorts of emotional stuff. My deep belief that I'm just my avatar, and letting go of that is like a death, and it's very, very painful. So for me, the meditation process is not all love, joy, and peace. A lot of it is deep, deep tough emotions as I let go of what I thought was myself. And that's a kind of... it's a death of an illusion, but it feels like a real death to me.
But now here's the positive side. I'm proposing that science has got the tools, if we assume consciousness is fundamental, to step entirely outside of space-time and do serious mathematics and show how space-time is built as a headset. And this means we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are going to make everything that we've done in science and technology so far seem trivial.
And here's the reason. Suppose you're a wizard in Grand Theft Auto and you know how to use all the tools in Grand Theft Auto. That's fantastic. It's really good. You can drive your car from A to B faster than anybody can do. But now, if you're the software engineer who knows how Grand Theft Auto has been... because you wrote the code, you know it, you can do miracles. You can take the wizard's car and take the air out of their tire, just like that. You can take the gas out of their tank. You can take their car and move it from A to B instantly, not through Grand Theft Auto, you can move it there instantly because you've got the code outside.
What I'm saying is: this is real. I started now to really believe this when I could get Einstein's space-time coming out of this. I got light and I think I've got an electron now. I think we're reverse engineering the headset. And the technologies that are about to come out of this will make everything else seem like firecrackers. Because we're now getting to a deeper layer outside of the headset. We're not wizards inside the headset, we're the software engineers that are making the headset, and now we can play.
So for example, right now the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.4 million light years away. If you hopped on a spaceship and tried to send your offspring, it would take thousands of generations I would guess to get there. And that's the closest! The universe is much, much bigger than that. That's just our little neighborhood. It's not feasible. We're not going to be able to travel with our current technologies inside space-time. Travel inside space-time to Andromeda is not feasible for the foreseeable future.
What if we don't have to go through space-time? What if space-time is just a headset? It really is just a headset, and we don't have to go 2.4 million light years to get there. We learn the code outside of space-time and we can just change the code. In Grand Theft Auto, the car has to drive through the road to get from A to B. But not if you look at the code. In the code, I just need to change the value of a register and all of a sudden the position of the car is now at B. It was at A and I put it at B.
Is this what time travel is?
This would be like immediate time travel or immediate space travel.
Is there anything within the laws of physics that tells you that this isn't possible?
It's impossible inside space-time. If you only use space-time, it's impossible. But a theory that's outside of space-time that properly contains space-time as a projection of the theory allows us to then build technologies that aren't restricted to space-time.
Do you think we're getting closer to being able to edit the code of this experience so that we can do things we never thought were possible and things that sit outside of what we know within the laws of physics?
That's exactly what I'm working on right now. That is my research project right now. That's what I'm doing.
What do you hope to do with this research and do you think about the consequences of it?
I do. So, what I hope to do with the research: I'm hoping to show that I can get all of quantum field theory, all of special and general relativity, all of the Standard Model of particle physics from this theory of conscious agents outside of space-time. That will be able to explain all of the laws that we see and then show that space-time theories are in fact a very tiny projection of the much more informationally rich dynamics of conscious agents.
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You know, whenever someone talks about editing genes, right, there's CRISPR DNA technology that allows you to edit genes or other technologies that people talk about that allow you to... they're talking about putting our memories on hard drives and stuff like that. People get quite precious with the idea of playing with the nature of reality too much because some people might suffer. And even in your perception of what the world is, if we're all one consciousness, it becomes a slightly different conversation. But I guess the question I'm asking is: if we were able to play with the software of this thing that we're all experiencing right now and do things that sit outside the laws of physics, is there a question of morality? Is that the right thing to do? Will people suffer? Or if this is all just code, does is that just a pointless question?
No, I think it's a very important question. It's like Pandora's box. Are we opening Pandora's box? All sorts of nasty surprises that could come out of the box once we go beyond space-time.
Who gets to open the box? If you get to open the box, then you could become God as far as we're all concerned, because if you have that power to play with the code—
I'd be only the next level of God, right? As I've said, my theory is just a theory, so it's not the truth. It's just more comprehensive than the space-time theory. And because I have a more comprehensive theory, I can do new technologies that you couldn't do. So I'm not God, but I'm outside of the limits of space-time, so I can give you new technologies. If I can show how space-time arises from this deeper theory, then if I'm right and I'm mathematically precise, that means I have the tools to prove that I'm right, that means I can make technologies that will be miraculous from within the space-time.
I think about the atomic bomb and how the first nation to figure out that there were new possibilities within technology and because they had discoveries within physics, basically won the war. They were able to control every country. They became effectively the God because they could wipe anybody out within an instant. It's like an analogy for how reimagining physics creates new possibilities in technology.
That's right. And this is even bigger than that because nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers compared to what you can do with a technology that's utterly outside of space and time.
You could do anything. I mean, you could live forever, but that's not even something that would really matter once you realize it's just a game.
But you could give yourself extra time, as much as you wanted in this. So the moral question is a very, very interesting one. It's not to be taken lightly either way. And ultimately, it may be very related to the question you asked earlier, which is about the nature of why did the "one," if there is a "one," allow all this kind of horrible pain. I have a sense, and I can't defend it, that all is well. That even with the technologies, even if the technologies are really far more powerful than anything we've seen before, nothing can actually hurt the reality of the one. And all the headsets are just headsets, they're taken off anyway by the one. They're just tried on and let go.
Apparently, the one even without all this technology has already put Jesus on the cross. If that story about the one is correct, then it's given a thumbs up for choosing to do that because it did it.
It's created cancer and the Holocaust and—
That's right. But the one's relationship with the pain of the things the organisms it's created is different to the perception of pain in the organism itself, potentially. Like I hate pain, but maybe the one consciousness that we all share, that we all return to and came from, might see it as a useful signal or might not be as subjectively bothered by it because it's choosing to do that. I agree with you, that seems to be a reasonable kind of conclusion. And in meditative practice often what you find is—and I always risk pretending that I'm further along than I am, so I'll just say I'm a neophyte—but so I'll talk about what I've heard from other more advanced people: that they... what was a deep pain, emotional pain for example, when they stare at it and really accept it, it dissolves.
I read a comment on your video from a guy that wrote this. He wrote, "I'm a schizophrenic, I do DoorDash for some extra money. One night I arrived and walked to the door, I placed the food down on the door, and I took a picture. I got in my car and I drove away. 30 minutes later, the customer called me and asked me where the food was and I told him exactly where it was. I remember taking the picture on his doorstep. So he took it up with DoorDash directly. Sometime later, I opened my back door and I saw his order on my back door. I was so confused why it was there. I remembered everything about going there and taking the picture. He said I was never there on his cameras. Apparently, I hallucinated the whole delivery. I was there, but must have never left the car or even drove up. What was I doing then? Was I staring blankly at the windshield with my eyes glazed over? I called him and apologized, but he already got his refund. I felt so terrible. I'm on medication and nothing works. It just goes to show how easily some misfirings in the brain can completely alter your sense of reality, but it also poses deeper questions about reality." I thought it was a very interesting point, but it also speaks to when we talk about people that have various mental illnesses like schizophrenia that are experiencing the world entirely differently. It raises big questions about what consciousness is again.
Absolutely. And someone might take that example and say, "Doesn't that show that brain activity is causing consciousness and you get the wrong brain activity then you get these false experiences and you get these illusions?" So a lot of people take this as a victory point for the physicalist point of view.
But here's the other point of view, and that is: think about the experiences that you have when you're dreaming. They can be very, very vivid. And in a dream, you are de novo creating that reality. That's not a reality that's there in front of you, you're creating that reality. So we know that you have the ability to project a reality. A very compelling reality. All of us do, without schizophrenia, we do it every night in our dreams.
So no surprise that we do that. And the way I view it is that it's consciousness that's making this particular headset, and it's consciousness that uses the headset in dreams to make the realities we see in the dreams, and it's consciousness that outside of space-time also creates what we call the real reality when we're not dreaming. And if you construct the headset in certain ways, then you can get the dreaming stuff mechanism, for example, interfering with the what you'd call the waking mechanism and you could effectively... I'm not saying schizophrenia is dreaming. But I'm just giving this as an example of the kind of thing it could be.
I'm about to leave this chat as are you and I'm going to go back to my life where I'm building businesses, I've got a girlfriend, I've got a team, I've got plans for the future. I have all of these things. My listeners, they're sat at home, they're in a taxi on a plane, train, walking, in a gym, wherever they might be right now. And I imagine that they are also looking for a conclusion here, a conclusive point of what all this means for me in my life, in the things I had planned and how I should show up and treat people and act. Can you give me the conclusive point that all of this teaches you and us about how we should live our lives going forward if everything that you've said about the nature of reality is accurate?
In a nutshell, I would say: the critical thing practically is love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. And second, reality is far more interesting and exciting than you could ever imagine. So never think that you know everything. Recognize that the moment you think you know everything, that's the moment that you're missing the astonishing reality that you're a part of. So always have a childlike curiosity. Always recognize that there's infinitely more than you've ever imagined so far. And that infinite more is you.
And on a point of removing some of the stress and suffering from my life?
I think... of course, first some humble pie is required. I have stress and suffering. So I am not speaking as someone who has transcended stress and suffering. So I speak as another fellow person with stress and suffering that is still dealing with it on a daily basis.
Given the humble pie, then I will say this: I think a lot of my problems, my stress, a lot of my suffering is because I believe illusions. To the extent that I believe that I need to become something at all, need to be better than I am in any way, need to prove anything to anybody else, that's an illusion. I'm already the infinite. I don't need to prove anything. I'm making everything is already... so I don't need to get anywhere, I don't need to accomplish anything, I don't need to be succeed at anything to become what I need to become. I'm already that.
So the suffering comes from me forgetting who I am. I don't actually need to impress anybody, accomplish anything because everything that I'm seeing I'm already making this all up. This is already me. I've already done all this. What more do I need to do? I am transcendent. I am completely transcendent of this thing.
And my suffering is not recognizing that. My suffering is entirely from being caught in my avatar. This is just my avatar, it's not me. So my suffering is because I made this avatar, I let myself on purpose be identified with the avatar, knowing that I would be suffering because of that and knowing that I needed to wake up. So I'm suffering because I'm identified with the avatar, but I put myself in that place because I really wanted to look at the world through this avatar. That's why I'm suffering.
But eventually I wake up and I look and I see the avatar for what it is and I realize that everything I was trying to do to prove that I was worthwhile and I was better than you or not as bad as you think I am or things like that—all of that was just you know all the pain and suffering was because of an illusion. But I needed to do that, I needed to look at myself from that perspective for a while in part to find out who I am by finding out who I'm not. I'm not just that avatar.
Do you find yourself toggling back and forth between this realization and then the avatar? Especially when times are hard. Do you find yourself reminding yourself in difficult moments that this is just an avatar and you're transcendent and this is a game that you're playing? And that will help you move through that situation?
It is very practical in that way because if it really is true... well, we'll put it this way: from a big perspective, we're all going to die. And if I asked you who was the most rich and famous person in 1743? Who knows and who cares? Same about us. A thousand years from now, is anybody going to know our name? No. Is anybody going to care? No.
So that's really important to see. No one's going to care. And does that mean that I'm worthless, pointless, I'm meaningless? No! It means you're infinite and this is just one of the games you're playing and enjoy it! Enjoy! And don't try to get your identity from this game. You're in some sense you're getting your identity from finding out that you're not this game. That's how you're learning about who you really are is to know: I thought I needed to be the CEO or the professor or whatever it might be and to get all these accolades and so forth. And that motivated me for a while and then I realized oh, no one's going to really care. And in fact, you know what? I don't really even care! That was just a game I had to play and I'm not that and I learned that I transcend that.
So it is practical. In some sense, life is full of all these irritations, things that go wrong all the time. The lesson of life is to just say yes to whatever happens. Just... this is what happens, this is what needs to happen. And to not resist. In some sense, I am the infinite, I put myself in this game and I am smart enough that I've... it's a good game! So hey, just go with it.
Now, things go wrong. Now, that's easy for me to say. If you asked me this when I'm on the ER, which I was with my heart about to fail and so forth, now I'm... my emotions are going crazy, I'm thinking about my wife, I'm saying goodbye to my wife and so forth. It's hard to have a nice dispassionate thing going on like I'm talking about now in that situation. But I think people further along than me in letting go of identification with—I'm still tied to my avatar quite a bit, right? So that's why I suffer. But there are people I think like spiritual people, maybe the Dalai Lama, probably Jesus, Eckhart Tolle, there are people like that who I think really have disidentified from their avatar. And I think they probably just don't suffer. They might have physical pain but they don't suffer.
Should love therefore be unconditional? If we are... if you are me, if we're this same consciousness, if we're the same transcendent source, doesn't that really mean that I should love you really irrespective of what your avatar does because we are the same thing?
I would say unconditionally yes, and I would also say that Jesus said that. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount basically said "Do not judge," period. And "Don't condemn other people," so it's... so for those who are followers of Christ, if you judge somebody else then you're not following Christ.
Are you religious?
I'll put it this way: I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church, my dad was a pastor for a while in a church. I think that the Bible has good stuff in it and I think that, as I've pointed out, I think it has bogus stuff. Stuff where they say women can't talk in church, I think that's completely bogus. So I have to have a nuanced view. I think when Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself, I think that's deep and right.
And I wouldn't say I'm a card-carrying believer in any particular religion. I am a believer that consciousness, there is one consciousness and that you and I are it. And I think that Buddha and Jesus and Muhammad and a bunch of people were very, very helpful avatars to help other avatars sort of wake up to their true nature.
Donald, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is: "What would you do if you knew you could not fail? What would you say, do, become?"
I'd probably do what I'm trying to do right now, which is to show how all of modern physics falls out of a theory of consciousness. And develop the technologies that would come out of that. And the reason: of course that's fun, so one reason is fun, but the other reason is why do most of us not take spirituality too seriously? Because the physicalist science gives us all the technology. It works! And spirituality doesn't give us any technology. It doesn't work.
So if you're just hard-nosed, you'd go, well, spiritual stuff that sounds really good but what does it build? Nothing. Physicalist stuff says "Look at what they gave us, our laptops and electricity." So... but what if we change the game and all of a sudden the spiritual theory gives us technologies that are impossible with a theory that says that space-time is fundamental? Brand new... all of a sudden the game is changed. Now the technological advantage goes to those who say that space-time and physical stuff inside space-time is not fundamental.
So now it's no longer the smart person who is a physicalist, it's the smart person who says all of the evidence from science and technology is in favor of something beyond space-time. So maybe those people weren't crazy after all, they just didn't have the tools to show what it could do.
Donald, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. It's so incredibly important because it once again challenges the paradigm, the box in which we live, and it asks us and invites us to consider something beyond that. And actually, when we think about all human discovery that's moved us forward, it starts with someone who's willing to suggest that there might be more to know. And that's exactly what you do.
You make me feel dumb because you make me realize that you make me question all of the assumptions that I've built my life on. And actually, in doing so, one of the great byproducts of that is you can start to realize that some of the things you've constructed cause much of your suffering, and that those things are not necessarily true. And if those things aren't true, then I have greater choice and optionality over how I feel, how I experience the world, the choices I make, the feelings I have, and the life that I live.
And that's actually freeing for me to realize that the cage, the prison that I see and that I experience might not be all that there is. And I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your book if you want to dive deep into these subjects. It's called *The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes*. There's a quote on the front of it from Deepak Chopra who's a former guest that says, "Read this book carefully and you will forever change your understanding of reality." It's exceptional. It's accessible and it creates wonder, which I think is the path to a wonderful life. So thank you so much, Donald, for the work that you do.
Thank you, Steve.
Truly fascinating and thank you for helping me simplify some of these concepts so that we could all understand them.
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