I'm excited to have Donald Hoffman join us to challenge our very sense of reality. His book, The Case Against Reality, asks if we can even trust our senses and reveals why our perceptions may be entirely questionable. In this episode, Donald explains how reality is an illusion, how we can recognize the truth of that, and how our senses guide our adaptive behavior. I hope you guys love listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it, and if you do please leave a review on our podcast that really is the best way to support us so that we can help get the show out to more people just like you who are trying to reach their true human potential.
I'm Tom Bill, and welcome to Impact Theory. I'm Adam Hoffman. Welcome back to the show. Thanks a lot, Tom.
It's great to be here. Excited to have you back. I'm obsessed with the matrix and the idea that we're living in false reality. I know you don't believe that we are actually in a simulation, but do we recognize the truth of reality?
Well, our best science tells us that space-time is not fundamental. This is the conclusion of both physics and evolution by natural selection. The physicists tell us that space-time is doomed. It's not fundamental, and they're finding new structures beyond space-time, like the Appetoeutuhedron, that actually make the math easier in space-time for the things they need to do.
Evolution by natural selection also agrees with the physicists that space-time is not fundamental. Let's explain that. When you say that space-time isn't fundamental, what do we mean exactly? In the simplest, we'll get into the geeky deep stuff in a second, but for the audience that hasn't heard you talk before, what does that mean?
We tend to think of space and time as the basic level of reality. Everything that could possibly be is inside space and has some time. The big bang was the start of it all, and who knows what the end will be? Maybe a big crunch or just peetering out in low entropy and low temperature if we don't know yet.
We think, or we thought, is the basis of all reality. So space and time are the basic stage on which all of reality plays out. And how can it not be though? That's the weird thing.
Does that mean that whatever is real, and we should probably get people your headset, metaverse, explanation which speaks dear to my heart, but before we do that, does that mean that whatever is real is non-physical? Well, so the word real is a little slippery. So, in some sense, my headache is real, right, because it's a real experience. But it real in the sense that physicists are talking about it when they thought that space and time are fundamental.
They were thinking that this was the fundamental ground of all possible realities, like in a Newtonian universe and even in Einstein's point of view. Einstein thought that space and time was the grounding reality for everything. And now we realize that the four dimensions of space-time, or even at 10 dimensions of string theory or something like that, is not going deep enough. There are structures entirely beyond space-time and entirely beyond quantum theory.
So these new structures are not like little structures seeing inside that small scale and they can get structures, yeah, people are going to be super lost. So, the idea of the headset, I think, is a really core concept. So, somebody asks you once, in the future, we're going to start using different metaphors, what metaphors do you think we're going to use? And you said the metaverse, by somebody trying to contribute to the metaverse, my ears perked up on that one, why will that become such a useful metaphor for this moment and how we perceive things?
Right. Because the way that evolution speaks on this is it says that our perceptions of objects and space and time is really just like a virtual reality headset. It's there to help you play the game of life without knowing what's on the other side of the headset, what's on the other side, what's the hardware and software that's running the game. You don't have to know that to play the game.
And in fact, if you were trying to play a game of like Grand Theft Auto and virtual reality, and you had to toggle millions of voltages per second to drive your car, you would lose. When you were competing with someone who could just turn a nice little simple steering wheel and press on an artificial gas pedal. So, evolution gave us senses that allow us to survive by hiding the truth and just telling us how to act. So, as the evolutionary theorist would say, our senses guide adaptive behavior.
Why does natural selection as a theory predict that? Because I understand the theory, I guess, well enough at a high level, but I never would have guessed that it actually says that it makes a prediction anyway that you, whatever is real, the only thing I can tell you that evolution is selected for is not that. So where, like, would, is this something that Darwin himself saw in his theory or would he be surprised? I think Darwin would be surprised.
And in fact, many evolutionary theorists today are surprised. And so, how do we know this isn't just a cookie interpretation of natural selection by Donald Hoffman? Exactly. The way we pursue this is it turns out that Darwin's theory has been turned into a mathematical precise theory.
It's called evolutionary game theory. So, John Maynard Smith started that in the 1970s. And so, we now have, instead of Darwin's theory, which is imprecise in the sense that it's not a mathematical model, evolutionary game theory, evolutionary graph theory are mathematical precise. So, we can now prove theorems and we can ask technical questions.
So, what is the probability that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal any true structures of objective reality? That's a clean technical question. And it turns out that evolutionary game theory is precise enough to address that question. Okay.
So, I know I've gotten hung up on that a lot. And I think for people of my cognitive ability, we will have to accept that as the miracle of this conversation. Otherwise, we'll derail on that because I don't understand how his theory can be turned into a math equation. And I worry that for you to explain it to me would take an entire semester and cause me to tear my hair out.
But so, if we can accept unless you're thinking, it looks like you may have a little hint. I'll give you a hint. I'll give you a little hint. It's when we say evolutionary game theory, think about game theory.
How do you play Monopoly and win? How do you play various games? It turns out you can look at different strategies that someone might have. You know, I'm going to go for part play.
So, I'm going to go for boardwalk. I'm going to try to... There's all different strategies. And you can then write down mathematically, okay, if you take this strategy, what is the probability that you will do well against someone who's taking this other strategy?
That's all about most offspring. And so, the strategies are ways to survive long enough to reproduce. And so, you can look at different strategies for playing the game of life. So for example, some organisms will have millions or thousands of offspring.
But they don't care about the offspring. Most of them will die. But if 1% of them make it, you're good. And those tend to have just a handful of offspring.
We put a lot of effort into them. So, those are different strategies. And so, as you look... So, some strategies, for example, in perception.
Humans really have focused, in our evolution, on vision and hearing and less on smell and taste and so forth. Other organisms focus on things that we don't even have, like echolocation in bands. So, different organisms will take different strategies. The game of life is, how do I live long enough to reproduce?
And how do I raise my offspring to maturity? Do I just make lots of them and let them fend for themselves? And most of them die, but the fraction will make it? Or do I make just a few of them and really help them for 20 or 30 years until they can go on their own?
Or more those days. Or more those days. So, from evolutionary game theory's perspective, what is the most successful creature on planet earth? Probably bacteria.
Interesting. Right? There's a lot more bacteria than that. A lot more bacteria than that.
A lot more bacteria than that. But not us. And maybe viruses, if there were more. So, from that point of view, right, the winner is the one who survives long enough to reproduce and reproduces for a long period of time.
And I'm, you know, a sinal bacteria have been around for billions of years. So, you know, there are certainly candidates. I'm not saying that they're the final answer, but that kind of thing would be humans are, you know, relative newcomers. And I actually really like the theory that humans are bacteria's way of moving around, which is pretty interesting.
You think that we're outnumbered by the bacteria in our guts, on our skin, and all of that stuff. It's pretty interesting. I should have guessed that answer, but I didn't put that in a lot of sense. Right.
So, this gives you the idea that when you're playing a game, there's lots of strategies, especially in a complicated game, there's lots of strategies. And it's not that there's going to be one best strategy. It's rather that if Tom is using this strategy, what strategy should I use to counter Tom's strategy? And so forth.
And so, the question is, what strategies are you going to take? And what is the governing system and so forth, like with the laws and so forth that will all determine your strategy? So, you can use game theory and turn it into a tool for studying evolution as a game where your bacteria are trying to play the game of life one way. Humans are playing the game of life another way.
Every different organism, every different plant is playing the game of life with a different kind of strategy. That's really interesting. It's funny. This is the third time I've interviewed you and I've never pushed on this because there was something about I couldn't wrap my brain around it, so I'm glad you took the time.
What's fascinating to me is every species has its own oomvelt, which is a real thing. It's a really fascinating concept. So, I look this up once and every time I say this stat, I think I must be wrong because it just seems way too far off. But humans are able to perceive 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
And I was like, how is that about? That's so, like everything that we see and think of as the known world is 0.0035%. That is like vanishingly small, exactly right. So, our window on the world is trivial compared to what could in principle be available.
And so, the question that you can then ask in a technical fashion is, what is the probability that a strategy of seeing truth, true structures about objective reality, would that strategy help you to survive long enough to raise kids? And so, we can ask that as a technical question. Evolution has the tools to do that. And the key concept is something called a fitness payoff.
So, it's a fitness payoff is like, if you're playing a game, there's a certain way that you get points in the game. If you're playing a video game, you have to shoot things down or avoid getting hit to get points and to get enough points you get to the next level of the game. Well, fitness payoffs, if you get enough fitness payoffs, what that corresponds to is you're surviving long enough to reproduce and you don't go to the next level of the game, but you're offspring and you're DNA in your offspring, go to the next level of the game. So, here's the big idea.
We can ask these fitness payoff functions that govern our evolution. They do depend on whatever the world is and the world structure. So, they do depend on the world. They depend on the organism.
You know, what's fit for me is not fit for a benthic fish. Being 5,000 meters under the water would kill me. It's just what the benthic fish wants. So, the fitness payoffs depend on the true structure of the world.
Depends on the organism, you know, Hoffman versus a fish and the action, feeding, fighting, and mating and so forth. And you can then ask, what is the probability? Now, this is the key technical question. What is the probability that a randomly chosen fitness payoff function that's governed by evolution has information about the true structure of the world, right?
Because it's that, evolution tells us those fitness payoffs are what determine how your senses are going to evolve. They're going, what's the base assumption there that reality is so complex. In fact, I want to press, I want to take a second to really elucidate the example you have about grand theft auto, which I think is so brilliant. What's actually happening in grand theft auto is electrical currents are toggling on and off gates on the computer and that somehow makes things happen on your screen that you can interact with and score points and all that.
But if you look at a chip, it is so complicated that trying to zap electrodes in the right order is literally impossible. And so everything that we, we as the average non-computer programmer think of as a computer is really just the gooey. It's the interface. And so you're there at a really abstract level.
It is so abstract is to be nonsensical compared to what's actually happening at the electrical communication level with the machinery itself sending signals to your TV. Exactly. And if real life has that same level of complexity, then I get why it would need to be so abstracted that as to be just nonsensical compared to what reality really is, something I think breaks in people's intuition, certainly breaks in my intuition when I think though that there has to be some sort of mapping. So the example that you've said many times, which I think is really on point is people are going to make fun of you.
What they will say is, oh, you don't think any of this is real, go ahead and step in front of that train and see if it kills you. And of course, it's going to. So the representation of the train is pointing at something that will change your state from alive to dead. Now, whether all of that is so, again, abstracted from what's actually happening at a large level, I don't even know what to liken it to, but nonetheless, stepping in front of a train will flip you from alive to dead, whatever that means in the underlying reality.
So do you think at all about like, do you care what it's mapping to? Or are you just like, eh, it doesn't matter. It's too complicated. We're not there yet.
Well, I do care. That's why I'm interested in this particular theorem, right? So the first is I'm seeing a world of space and time and objects with colors and shapes and motions. How is that the true world?
Is that the true structure of objective reality? Or is this as divorced from reality is what we're seeing as divorced from the fundamental reality as my grand theft auto VR headset is from the voltages inside the supercomputer that's running it. I want to talk about the AI mistake most businesses are making everyone's racing to adopt AI, rightfully so, but AI is only as good as the data behind it. And if your data lives in five different systems that don't even talk to each other, your AI is working on a broken foundation.
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That's quince QU I N C E dot com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash impact pod. That's the simple question. Right. So when I talk about things outside of space time, it's just like suppose someone had played Grand Theft Auto since they were one day old and the parents had left them in a headset their whole life.
And when they're 25, the parents say, guess what? You've been in a headset your whole life and that person probably can't even what could possibly be outside of my headset. I've lived my whole life inside this headset and you pull it off and you realize, oh, wow, there's a whole world that's entirely outside of what you're in. That's the question we're asking.
Has evolution shaped us with just a little headset of VR headset that guides adaptive behavior but shows us none of objective reality. That's the technical question. And the answer is very, very clear. The probability is one that we don't see the truth at all.
Meaning 100%. 100%. Okay. So if the probability is 100% that you are seeing a very false version, right, the thing that that seems to predict to me is that the underlying reality is so complicated that at least in this form, and I'll also refer to that, in this form, it would with our oomveld, our ability to process data, whatever, it would not make sense to try to deal with the reality that it's far more efficient to create an abstraction layer.
But if underlying reality is dead simple, that doesn't seem like it would hold true. So do we just presume that there is extreme complexity? Well, it turns out that the extreme complexity isn't necessary for this theorem to be true. Interesting.
Why would you need such an elaborate abstraction if it isn't complicated? So it turns out when you actually just look at the math, so suppose the world has some number of states, a billion states or 400 states, whatever it might say, there's some number of states in the world, and you have some number of states of perception, like in seagreen, there's lots of things I can see. When you just do a simple count, look at all the possible functions from the states of the world to the states of y percent. Just count them.
So the world doesn't have to be complicated. It has just 100 points or 1000 points. When you count those, all the functions that are the fitness functions, and ask how many of those functions actually contain information about the structures in the world, it turns out that very quickly the proportion goes to zero. So even if the structure isn't that complicated, maybe there's only one structure in the world.
That's all it has, like a total order. One is less than two, it was less than three. It was a probability that that total order, so the world can be very simple. It only has one simple structure, total order, and the world only has maybe a million states, so it's not a very complicated world.
What is the probability that the fitness payoff functions that govern my evolution would preserve the total order of information, would actually be able to tell me about the total order, and the math is quite simple, and the answer is zero. But it hasn't predict something. So when I make the base assumption that it's because it is too complex, so to give people I want to start putting definitions of some of these words. So we're going to say state, let's say lights on, lights off.
So we all live where Earth has two states, the sun is up, the sun is down. That's one. Temperature would be another state. It could be hot, it could be cold.
Barometric pressure could be high, could be low, could be wet, could be dry. So there's a lot of different things, and so to your point about the fish, they're dealing with massive pressures. If they were to come up with no pressure, they would disintegrate or not be able to move or whatever, just like we crush down to the tiny can. So they would explode and we would crush.
So okay, when you say states, that's one example. I don't understand how if everything were static, it were one state that we would need an abstraction layer to navigate it more effectively than somebody that sees objective reality. So now I'm going to use an example to further illustrate what I mean. I'm using an example, you gave me the first one.
You cannot imagine how many times I've quoted you on this. You said, Tom, you have to understand that objective reality isn't like, oh, here's a table and it's got this nice swirly grain pattern. It's the number of photons reflecting off of that desk and the amount of reflectivity and all that. Now, irony of ironies as I have started working in the metaverse, you realize how complicated the visual world, the 0.0035% of the visual spectrum that we actually see is insanely complicated to replicate.
Donald, it's the hardest thing I've done in my life. It's crazy. And I don't even have to fully understand it. I just have to guide the team to understand it.
Anyway, when you said that, I was like, whoa, what reality is very different than how I experience it. So cool, complex. So now I get why the math works out. But if it isn't complex, so you don't seem to be struggling with this.
What is it that you understand that I don't or what is your base assumption that's different in mind that makes it make sense to you that to achieve maximum fitness payoff, you would 100% not retain elements of reality. Right. So first, I don't deny that I suspect that reality is very complicated. So my that isn't necessary.
That's not necessary for this. That's right. It's just simply accounting things. So if you look at all the functions from one set to another set, like, so I have functions for say I have numbers one through 10 and that's my base set and I'm going to map them into numbers one through 10.
So I can add one to three and two to five and so forth. So if you just do, okay, if you think about that problem, you can, I could probably figure okay, how many different functions are there, right? So you can write that right down. Now you can say, okay, how many of those functions have the property that, you know, they preserve that one is less than two is less than three less than four.
How many of them scramble that order? How many preserve that order? How many scramble? How many contain information about the one less than two less than three less than four?
So this is called combinatorics. It's a branch of mathematics. Oh, I'm unfortunately all too aware of it because of NFTs. Yes.
Which require you to understand this because you're making you have to your point and maybe this is what you're saying. So maybe I actually now understand it. Let me walk you. Sure.
So you can create all these traits, all these categories, I should say, and then within each category you have maybe 10 possible eyebrows that it could be eyeball types, hairstyles, facial hair, so on and so forth. That outputs let's say two billion potential permutations. Exactly right. But you want to maintain a distribution in the 10,000 that you're actually going to show.
So we were all trying to do the math. We're working it out and I'm like, there's no way it's a symbol. There's some problem. And then we showed it to physicists and they fell out laughing and they're like, that's not a symbol.
You're going to maintain the percentage likelihood to get gold eyes, let's say, out of your two billion combinations. They're like, you have to force it down into this thing, which they call the combinatorial or whatever. That's right. Okay.
And so that's that really is the point here that even though I agree with you that the universe is probably the real universe, whatever it is, is very complicated. I believe that combinatorics blow up so quickly. Got it. By the time you just get to a few hundred elements, you know, that as you found, the thing, the explosion of possibilities is so great that when asked how many of those possible fitness functions would actually be so special that they contain information about the structure of where they came from out of all of the possible fitness functions that were not an overly complicated world.
It's just the number of potential mapping points and combinations. Exactly right. Very interesting. Because evolutionary theory puts no restriction on the fitness payoff functions.
Any possible thing. There could be as many as you can imagine. And there's no respect. There's no restrictions as they have to show you the truth.
That's not part of the theory. Right. So until, until, and by the way, no one knows how to put that into the theory, right? So I mean, to say that it requires that only the fitness functions that preserve the truth would be a major revision to evolutionary theory.
It would be unrecognizable. So when you look then and say, okay, every fitness payoff function is equal likely as any other fitness payoff function. They're all equal footing. And then you count the ones that actually have information about the truth.
They go to zero probability in fast order. Now there is one, I should bring out there's a group at Yale that has recently published a paper that's trying to push back on this. And what they say is if you have say a bunch of thousands of fitness pay functions, they're all radically different. Then they say that you'll be forced to go to the truth.
And the argument that they make is that if our high level cognitions, our beliefs, our goals and so forth, are not going to interfere with our perceptions, they claim that then our perceptions have to map have a single mapping from the state of the world into the state of our senses has to be single mapping. You can't have more. So because one thing I could do with a lot of fitness functions is say, well, this business function is different from that one. So I will do this kind of mapping from the world into my senses with this fitness payoff function.
They'll do another mapping with this fitness payoff function. And they say, you know, if you're going to have what we call cognitive impenetrability, so what you believe cognitively cannot affect what you see. Okay, that's the argument. Then you must have only one mapping.
Well, it so that's their assumption. So hold on, let me make sure I understand that. So they're saying that basically so that your delusions don't create the exterior world or at least your perception of it, you have to have this mapping so that you're actually detecting and seeing what is real. They're saying that if what you believe doesn't affect your senses in a fundamental way, then they claim that that entails that you can only have one mapping from the world, the fitness, the mapping of your senses from whatever the world is into what you're seeing, the colors and the shapes and so forth.
There can only be one map that holds regardless of what the fitness payoff functions, that was their claim. So and the only reason I bring this up is because this is a recently published paper that the claim is false. It's trivial to show counter examples. They're fundamental claims false.
Please do as a way just to make sure that I actually understand what they're saying because it sounds like what they're trying to protect against is hallucinations basically becoming subjectively real. Right. So I actually think that it's true probably to a large extent that what we believe does not really affect fundamentally what we see. So technical term we use, the geek term is cognitive and penetrability of perception.
That's what the philosophers of science will talk about in cognitive scientists that are and you can think about what scientists might like this because they'll say, look, we want to use our senses in our experiments. I want to, my theory makes a prediction. I have to go look and see if the prediction is true. Well, if my theory that I'm holding would change what I see, then science isn't going to really be objective, right?
I mean, if I believe this theory and it changes how I see the data, then I might just see the data that confirms the theory and I can't escape. So that's why philosophy of science has been very interested in this question. Are high level theoretical beliefs and just our beliefs as everyday people, do they get in there and somehow fundamentally affect how we see the world? And there is a sort of way to say that, you know, the way I believe things does change my world, but not, they don't change like the color I see or the three dimensional structure of the cube here that I'm seeing.
I mean, they might change it in some way, but not fundamentally like that. So that's the question. And so it's trivial. I mean, so when the group at Yale makes this point that, you know, if you have lots of different fitness pay off functions and you don't have your high level beliefs interfering with the process of perception, then you can only have one map from the world into your senses.
And of course they don't prove that. They just state it without proof. And so it's trivially false. We have made counter examples.
It's very, very easy to make counter examples. I can design a system in which I have say two fitness pay off functions. And I use one fitness pay off function to make one map from the world into my perceptions, use the other fitness function to make another map. And if I have a system that has no high level beliefs, then the high level beliefs are interfering with it.
There's a counter example right there, no cognitive penetration of perception multiple maps. But then I can add beliefs and say, I know I can have beliefs there as long as they don't interfere with this mapping here. I could have two maps. Why not?
So it's the guys that the group at Yale are brilliant experimentalists. And one of them is a really good friend of one of my collaborators. I mean, they were postdocs and MITU together and so forth. So they're brilliant experimentalists, but the fundamental assumption that they're making is just trivially false.
And so then how do we see this in our perceptions? The way we see it in our perceptions is we have probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fitness pay off functions that are governing our behavior. So what do we do with all that complexity? What we do is we group the fitness payoff functions into groups that are similar.
And we take that and we make simple little data structures out of them. And those data structures are what we call objects. So this object is good for drinking. Can you what is a data structure?
When you say that it's an object, meaning my mind groups it so I can differentiate the cup from the coaster from the desk, what I'm saying is we're making all this stuff up as a simple way to represent the fitness payoffs and how to get them. So for example, in when you're playing Gran Theft Auto, you're playing a game. If you look inside the supercomputer, there is no red Porsche, there is no steering wheel, there is no gas pedal. In some sense, those are what I call simple data structures.
They're coding for the gas pedal and pushing on the gas pedal is coding for who knows countless millions of voltage changes happening in exactly the right sequence in the computer. I have this trivial data structure, gas pedal, push on it that triggers this whole other thing that I don't want to know about. It's really too complicated. So that's why I mean by the simplifying data structure, my steering wheel is a simple data structure that I can use to interact with who knows how many billions or trillions of voltages and make them do exactly the right sequence in the right order.
Could I say representation instead of data structure? Absolutely. Data structure is a computer science term. So computer scientists would be very happy with that, but representation is perfectly good.
And so the idea then is what evolution is done from an evolutionary point of view is it takes all these fitness payoffs functions that govern us, that govern our survival, and that we need to respect in order to play the game of life. And we organize them. So an apple is an object. It's a representation of a bunch of fitness payoffs.
For example, the apple, if I'm interested in mating, apple is no good. If I'm interested in eating, great. If I'm interested in a weapon, so so I could throw it at someone's head, but it's not going to do much damage. If I'm, you know, so there's, if I have a sword, a sword, well, for mating, no good for eating.
Not really, I can use it to cut a coconut in half, but I can't eat the sword for fighting great, but not if you're fighting against a gun and things like that. So every object, we can recognize, I would say, on the order of 30 or 40,000 different objects, basic kinds of objects. So what that indicates is that evolution has taken all these hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of fitness payoffs functions. And it's not making one map from the world into our senses.
It's making a bunch of different maps and those different maps are what we call objects. And our high level cognition, all it does is I'm hungry. Okay. Well, I won't be looking for tables.
I won't be looking for the moon. I'll be looking for apples and bananas and things like that. Those data structures, those representations that have high fitness payoffs for the action of eating. And so visual attention, paying attention to different objects is our way of switching from this representation of fitness payoffs to this representation of fitness payoffs as I need to be able to do to survive long enough to reproduce.
And so that's, this sort of technical, but the reason I bring it out is because this is brand new. It's gotten a lot of attention from Yale. And so it's an important thing from the scientific side to really to rest that there's not one mapping that's required from the world into our senses by evolution. Even if we assume that our beliefs don't interfere with our cognition, our cognitions don't interfere with our perceptions, that doesn't entail that we have to have one mapping.
It's just a false assumption. Once you let go of that false assumption, then you're open up to realize that every object is just a data structure coding for a whole group of fitness payoffs. And that's how evolution deals with this. Okay.
So the reason that I find this so endlessly fascinating is I in trying the whole reason I stepped in front of the camera in the first place was I made a very profound change in my life. And I thought, hey, anybody can do this, but it really is about reframing the world. So recoding, re coming up with new references or seeing the cup in a different light, whatever. So it's interesting.
So the idea of our beliefs don't influence our cognition or influence the mapping to the, the real world. It's probably only at the margins. It's pretty minor, as you said, but I think that there is a lot of difference in outcome in the game of life as we think about it in a modern context, depending on how you code things. But I've struggled with this.
So at one point, I was going to write a book and I was working with a ghostwriter and I was saying like, it doesn't matter what's true. All that matters is that it's effective and that the way that you view the world is moving you towards your goals. And this was like at the height of Trump and the ghost writer was like, yo, I'm not writing that. And she was like, you need to tell me that you don't believe in like a post truth world.
And I was like, that's interesting. Because no, I don't mean just lie and make things up, but what is guiding my decision making isn't a quest for what's true. It's a quest for what works. And so as I think about fitness past, I get that I'm going to put a pin in the following for when I hear you talk, it feels like you think the level of abstraction is like being in a game headset versus what the game machine is doing itself.
That is so different. And so we'll get to that in a minute because that's what we're talking about. But even like at the layer of, okay, I've got my headset on, I'm locked in like even there how you can influence things by how you perceive them is interesting. And we're living in a moment where saying post truth triggers a lot of things.
I want to strip all that away, but get people to focus on because really, really truly in life, what you're talking about with fitness payoffs is how people should look at their own belief system of like, okay, I believe the way that I tell people to judge what is true is what is the thing that allows you to better predict the outcome of your actions. And so if I believe in gravity, that allows me to better predict how to handle this cup, right? Because if I hold it over here and let go and expect it to stay there, I'm going to be very disappointed when it crashes to the floor. And so believing in gravity, even if it's fake is very useful.
Stepping on the gas pedal, even if there really is no portion of the reason I'll gas pedal, if I'm in the game, like just assuming that that's how it works, even though it isn't true, it's a total abstraction, it's going to help you get towards your goal if you go else in that game. So all of that is very interesting. I do think that we can even take something like synesthesia where would you say that that's they're intentionally using cognition? No, but their perception is like, I don't know if you know who Dave Grohl is, but drummer for Nirvana, lead singer Foo Fighters.
And he is a synesthet of his own claim, on admission, yeah. And he said that I forget if he sees or shapes, I think there might be shapes and for him. And he said that's why it's so easy for him to remember songs because they have these literal shapes. And so he just has to remember the sequence of the shapes and he can play the song.
And that, I mean, that really has an impact. He's able to remember things that I wouldn't be able to remember for instance, because his perception is being influenced by the way that his brain processes data. So for whatever reason, two areas of his brain trigger when he hears something whereas in mine, only one triggers. And so that to me, when I again, going back to why I find this so interesting, that to me says, hey, I don't know how much of what you're perceiving is real, but I know that there are consequences to how you categorize.
So your idea of data structures is going to matter a lot. And so if you can categorize something as shapes and sound, it's going to be easier to remember. If you categorize, like for instance, the thing I'm always trying to get people to understand is if you have what I call the only belief that matters, that you can, if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you actually will get better. If you believe that, then you'll pursue improvement.
If you don't believe that, then you won't because it wouldn't make any sense. So you miss out on fitness payoffs based on your cognitive assessment of how the world works. Right. So all of that's fascinating.
Okay. Absolutely. And important to understand where my brain breaks with your thesis is how different what you perceive is and what the world is like. And I know, and this is where it gets hard because I think you would say, we don't know what's under space time.
But what's your best guess? Like as we strip away this layer, and this might be the time to talk about consciousness, but I don't want to lead the witness. But if it isn't space time, just having the dark for me. What the hell is it?
Well, I'll tell you what the physicists are doing on this because the physicists are the ones who are saying space time is not fundamental. So it's there. It's a pointer. It's a representation.
It's a data structure to something deeper. That's right. It happens to be the human brain, which is already a data structure. You're already making that up.
Exactly right. But that data structure represents things through space time. Exactly right. That's our headset.
Space time is just our headset. And it only goes down to the, is that the plank length, I always hear you quote a size plank that's 10 to the minus 33. So that is what you're quoting. That's the smallest thing that we can measure.
Yeah, that's the smallest thing. That's the smallest scale at which space time has any operational meaning. If you try to go smaller, space time ceases to make any operational sense at all. Because gravity insists that below that things have condensed to two find of a point that becomes a black hole.
Exactly right. You create a black hole. Okay. So, and if you think about it, and we know that isn't true, like why can't that just be true?
Smaller than that is a black hole. Yeah. We know that at the plank scale, you know, space time stops and you get black holes. What's the problem?
Well, black holes are singularity means we don't know what's happening. So you get infinity is popping up. But black holes are real. They're real as a data structure.
They're real stopping points in our understanding, but they're in the universe. Well, they're, I know this is not the case of a representation. Oh, yeah. So I want to start here.
And there's been studying the properties of black holes, right? And Rose, one of the Nobel prize is very recently for his wonderful work on black holes. And so there's a lot of work that's being done to understand the properties of black holes. For example, the amount of information you can store in a black hole doesn't depend on its volume, only the surface area.
Yeah, I understand that. Right. Right. This is very, very strange.
But that turns out to be true in everyday space. The amount of information that you can store in this volume here is not dependent on the volume, but it depends on the surface area. That's the universe we live on. So that's led people to this holographic kind of like, oh, every word out of your mouth.
I'm like, we actually are in a simulation. We haven't even talked about the non-local things are not locally real. Right. What get to that?
Because that's the new Nobel prize this year, which is insane and literally just says you're in a simulation and it's the same as rendering and when you look at something it renders when you look away, it doesn't. And we can prove it mathematically. Yeah, that's right. Way too fascinating.
We'll get to that. But first I want to understand like black holes, the word real gets very slippery in this conversation. Right. But black holes are observable.
Yes, we thought it seems consistent. Right. So the idea is that the notion of space time like instead of 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, say 10 to the minus 40 centimeters, what would that mean? It does.
It has no meaning. It has nothing you can do with it. So black holes are fine. They're objects.
They're at the endpoint of what space time can do. But if we say, but I thought space time was fundamental, that means I should be able to talk about what's happening at 10 to the minus 50 centimeters and you just cannot. There's no operational meaning. And in that sense, so you're saying whatever is fundamental, we'll be able to tell you exactly what's happening inside of a black hole.
Well, or you will tell you that this whole framework in which black holes appear is the wrong framework. And thusly, black holes are just a data structure for something else that is describable once you get outside of space time. And you know, it's hard for us to think outside of space time. Like, can we beat this point to death for a second?
Because this one was a breakthrough for me when I realized I always thought of the plank, plank length as like so infotecimally small that like we should all be in awe and you're like, like that space time breaks down that early is just ridiculous. And I was like, okay, that's a different frame of reference. Yeah, it's a very shallow data structure. If it was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters that it broke down, I'd be impressed.
10 to the minus 33. We got cheated. This is a really shallow data structure. It's only four dimensions.
I can't even imagine something in five dimensions. I can't even imagine a new color that I've ever seen before. So we've been given this really, we think that we're in many cases, we think we're the epitome of intelligence and the smartest thing in the universe. My feeling is we've been shortchanged.
Really shallow data structure, only three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. We got a cheap headset. And so when that's a fun way to say it. When data breaks down like that, what, so I always forget the guys name started it down, but Nima Arcani Hamed.
So I've heard you talk about him a lot. So I started doing some research on him. And if I'm understanding what he's saying correctly is basically when you have a data structure that falls apart that early, which was again, a total reframe for me. So I thought of that as like, oh my God.
But apparently when you understand this better, you realize that's a pretty early tap out. So when a data structure falls apart that early, that tells you that it's proximal, which I'm interpreting as a, it's the finger pointing at the moon. It is not the moon itself. And so now you know you're looking at a pointer.
And so that seems to be the thing that his whole case rests on for space time being doomed. That if your data structure falls apart that early, you know there's no way this is the fundamental thing. That's one of the big pointers. The other big pointer, a couple other big pointers to give us is that when you let go of space time and you start computing particle interactions like two gluons hit each other and four gluons go spreading out the kind of thing that happens with a large head run collider all the time.
If you compute it inside of space time, that one I mentioned, two gluons in, four gluons out, hundreds of pages of algebra for one interaction. Why is it so complicated? Because it's the wrong data structure. It's an ugly nasty data structure.
And the thing that you're doing algebra on is in what way they scatter inside space time. You have to do to make all the math work out. You have to have the spline diagrams with virtual particles. People are trying to say, okay, a theory of everything, which you are saying does not exist and will never exist.
We'll get to that later. So if there were a theory of everything though, we should be able to know everything so finally that I can tell you, oh, if they collide at this energy with this directionality, it will scatter exactly like this with these probabilities. You have probabilities of their scattering. Okay.
And so they're just like, oh my God, it's a dizzying amount of math. That's right. Did you do it until you let go of space time? And then that one that I mentioned, two gluons in, four gluons out, it's one term.
You can compute it by hand. It's like when they hit, they'll be a diamond. Yeah. Well, you need to start talking in shapes, right?
Well, yeah. So it's a shape beyond space time whose volume. So yeah, it's a shape outside of space time outside of our headset. And the volumes of the shape actually tell you the probabilities of the various kinds of particle interactions.
Okay. So and so it turns billions of terms into a handful of terms and it shows you new symmetries. That's what the physicists really love. It's a simpler math, which is great.
And then all of a sudden you see new symmetries that you can't see in space time. Okay. I'm going to try to draw an analogy, which is already going to break things, but let me see how close I get. You're in Grand Theft Auto, right?
You step on the gas and you go forward. And we're just like, oh my God, the math to predict in what way the car is going to move when you step on the gas pedal is ridiculous. But if we were to be actually looking at the electrical pattern that's stepping on the gas, which would be pressing buttons on your controller in a certain context, if we understood that there's a pattern outside of the headset. So in the PlayStation or the Xbox, there's an electrical pattern inside of that that looks.
So if you know chess and I don't, but I'm familiar with the idea of chunking. So apparently what chess masters do is they're not looking at the individual pieces on the board. They just know the patterns. So they're like, oh, that image of where the pieces are in this order, that's this setup.
So they've chunked the whole board into like, oh, I know where we're at in the game and I know what the right next move is. So basically what you're saying is you step on the gas and it gives you an image of a shape of electrical patterns outside of the headset. If that's what you're saying, I at least understand. I don't, I could not give you the math or any of that.
But I get like this representation, this data structure, which you think of as being real, stepping on the gas and the red portion goes is actually this chunk of electrical impulses, if we think of it as a shape or a pattern or a rhythm or however we're going to think of it. Is that what we're saying? That could be a helpful metaphor. And I've got another metaphor that may also try to help people on the, because that's an important point that you raised them.
So suppose, here's another way to think about this. Suppose that I'm looking at a video and seeing all these pixels and the pixels are moving in really complicated ways. You know, there's red pixels and green pixels and light pixels and I know that there's something interesting going on. So I write down all these equations for the motions of these pixels.
But someone says, you know what, there is just this, I've got this little Rubik's cube. And all I'm doing is rotating a Rubik's cube. But you're only seeing the pixel projection of it. You just could see this 3D object.
You would realize how simple it is. But when you only see the pixels and see all the, oh man, I've got to model all the pixels moving in my screen. How do I do that? If you can just let go of the screen behind it, there's this unified geometric object, the Rubik's cube.
And if you just see, oh, it just rotates rigidly. And that rigid rotation is the only motion I need. It's a rotation. Here, I have to look at all the pixels.
This pixel goes this way. I'm changing the dots rather than the shape. Space times. That's way better than the pixels.
Right. So in space time, we're stuck on the video screen and we're trying to model all the pixels moving around the video screen. And what the physicists have said, if you let go of the video screen, take it off. You see that these geometric objects like that Rubik's cube are outside of it and their structure is much simpler.
I'm not saying simple, but much simpler. But when it projects into this, really, you lost information in the projection, right? That's why you have all these little pixels. You have a 3D object here, two-dimensional screen.
So you love, so now it looks really complicated. So what's happening then when these things collide? They're making a new Rubik's cube? So they're just rotating a shape that's already there.
This is where I have no way to anchor myself. Well, so particles are things inside space time, right? So when we look at particle interactions at the Large Hadron Collider, we're looking at the pixels, the motions of the pixels inside space time. The amplitude, and other structures that they're finding, amplitude, and something you say so fast, I've heard you say this because the only time is I had to look it up.
So an amplitude, hedrin, is a shape, geometric shape in how many dimensions? They can be in small numbers dimensions, but they can go to infinity. So there's different kinds of different size of absolute, depending on how many particles you want to interact with. And that's our Rubik's cube.
That would be the Rubik's cube beyond the headset. And by the way, this is brand new. This was published in 2013. This is not even 10 years old.
So this is all new stuff, this amplitude, hedrin. So it's no surprise that people haven't heard of it, and many physicists haven't heard of it. Truly remarkable. And then quantum theorists, in fact.
And so what makes people think the amplitude, hedrin, is actually real, that we have detected the shape outside of the headset. Well, I think that the really brilliant physicists would not say we're done. They would say, we've taken a first step outside of the headset of space time. And one of the first structures we found is the amplitude hedrin.
That doesn't mean it's going to be the final answer. They're looking at other structures, something called the cosmological polytope and surface hedrin and so forth. Cosmological polytrope, polytope, polytope, polytope, polytope. What is that?
That's another geometric shape. It's another geometric shape that Nima, Arcani, Hamid, Juan, Maldessina and others. A lot of work has been done at the Institute for Advanced Study and collaborators with the people there. And this is trying, see the amplitude hedrin is primarily for flat space time, my understanding.
So without gravity. But when you deal with gravity and Einstein told us that sort of curve space time, then things get a little more complicated. And in that case, I think they're looking at the cosmological polytope for more like cosmological kinds of predictions. So the amplitude hedrin, so, and I'm sure that they're saying that they're not saying the cosmological polytope is the final word.
What's really interesting is they've already taken a step beyond the amplitude hedrin. So there's something called meaning even that they don't think it's fundamental or just that it's part of the fundamental. They think it's an important step outside of space time. But what surprises the physicists is that the heart of the amplitude hedrin is something called a permutation, a kind of permutation called a decorated permutation.
It's like shuffling cards, you're permuting cards. So it's a surprise that if you let go of space time, things become simple, you get this amplitude hedrin, the math becomes simple. And then when you look at the amplitude hedrin, and ask about a essential character, you find out that behind the amplitude hedrin is just permutations, decorated permutations, shuffling cards kind of thing. And so we're at this position.
So this is only in the last couple decades, right? But this is to happen. The amplitude hedrin is 2013. So it's only nine years old.
So here we're at this really interesting position in science, in physics. I like to think of it like the movie 2001, a space odyssey. Remember the scene? There's a great movie.
Yeah. And there's a scene where there's the monolith is just sitting there, pregnant with meaning. The apes are looking at it. They're afraid of it.
They're beating on it. They don't know what to do with it. You get the sense that they know it's important, but they haven't acclue what it's pointing to. That's where we are.
The amplitude hedrin and the decorated permutations are these monoliths outside of space time. There's no dynamics. Who ordered this monolith, the amplitude hedrin just sitting outside of space time? It captures all these amplitudes, all the particle amplitudes.
It captures the structure of space time, Einstein's special relativity quantum unit, quantum theory and it's so-called unitarity of quantum theory. So this is deeper. This thing is deeper than space time. It's deeper than quantum theory.
Quantum theory itself is not deep enough. This structure, the amplitude hedrin, this monolith is beyond quantum theory, but it codes for quantum theory as projection in space time. So who ordered this? Like just in 2001 to space, I'd say the apes, you can imagine, what is this?
Where did it come from? Why? What's it going on? I can imagine me asking that.
Yeah. Well, everybody's asking it right now. Who is just a static structure? Physicists like dynamics.
We want something, we want to have equations of motion. We don't have that. We just have here's the geometry and here's behind it this permutation. They're just sitting there.
Who ordered that and why? So that's where, but the attitude is not one of despair. This is really for the young geniuses who are doing this stuff. This is like fabulous, right?
We're the first generation, not me, but the young physics, the first generation that really gets to step outside of the headset of space time. They've already found these monoliths, the amplitude hedrin, decorated permutations. And just to really make that simplistic. Shapes?
Shapes. And then the shuffling of the shapes. That's right. Some shuffling that codes for the shapes.
There's a shuffling that codes for the shapes. When you say codes for the shapes, what does that mean? It captures their essential structure. In some sense, even the geometry, the volumes and so forth are redundant.
There's this even simpler, more compressed description. Right now the decorated permutation is the most compressed description that doesn't have any extra bells and whistles. The amplitude hedrin in some sense, the positive cross-mining that they use to build and so forth. They have extra bells and whistles.
In some sense, the amplitude hedrin boils it down to its essence. But the shuffles, permutations. And the big question is why? Why this?
In the beginning, God said why would God say that? What is the... Let there be shapes. Let there be the amplitude hedrin, let there be shuffles.
That doesn't seem quite deep enough. It seems like there's got to be something beyond it. Something dynamical. And there's no clue right now in the physics about a dynamical thing behind the decorated permutations or the amplitude hedrin.
Well, we just lost me. So I'm guessing that we lost a lot of people. So this is outside of the headset. So we're beginning to get to what we think may be these foundational pillars.
But it's so early that nobody really knows what these are yet. Let's go back to the quantum realm for a second. So this is one of my pet peeves that people in the mindset space tend towards magical thinking. And there's something about quantum entanglement, the quantum tubules in the brain or whatever it is that they think about collapsing and all that.
One, is there anything, even inside the headset, is there anything to be learned from the quantum realms or the quantum realm point, anything outside of the headset? And where are we? Like, how do people not drift into meaninglessness as they begin to pursue this? Because I'm so focused on usefulness, I get very agitated, might be the right word.
When people are like, oh, we're a quantum entangled, then that's what the soul is. And I want to tear my hair out. Right. So it's one thing just to say those words.
It's another thing to have a mathematical model. A mathematical model that actually predicts precise outcomes of precise experiments. And so that's the difference. When physicists talk about quantum entanglement, they're talking serious math and the serious experiments that just a week ago, the Nobel Prize was awarded to three of the pioneers in testing one of the key predictions of entanglement, which is that the real world isn't real.
So it's called local realism. The belief that we tend to have a local realism. So objects like an electron has a property, like its position or its spin, whether or not you observe it, it's got a value of that, because it's real. And we assume that's right.
That's the reality. Whether you see it or not, it is spinning up or spinning down. It's like saying the train is there and it's going to hit you. You close your eyes, it's not going to stop the train from hitting you.