Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I'm here for second round with Donald Hoffman. Welcome back. Thank you very much, Tom.
It's great to be here, dude. I am so excited to spend more time with you. I was listening to the first interview we did, which by the way, everybody, you're gonna want to watch that one. To really understand everything that Donald's about.
We'll give you a quick primer here, but we're gonna cover new ground in this. But the reason that I'm so excited was honestly, I'm trying to wrap my head around your take on consciousness and the way that basically we're living in a constructive reality, that we're essentially in the matrix whether we want to be or not. And I get that. And I was into it, I love it.
But some of the implications of that have only hit me now that I've had time to like, you know, take a step back, really think about it, interact with other people, dealing with what they call the hard problem of consciousness. So for us to be able to dive into that, though, give people the like, three minute primer on why your take is so different than everybody else who takes a really sort of physicality based approach to consciousness. Right. So most people who are looking at how consciousness is related to the physical world, like our brain, are assuming that somehow the physical world is primary, is the source of all cause and effect in reality, and therefore consciousness is an effect of physical causes.
Presumably neural activity in the brain, for example, but maybe also computer activity in a artificial intelligence that's sufficiently complicated. And my take is that our best science today, quantum field theory, Einstein's theory of gravity, and evolution by natural selection. All three of our best scientific theories today are telling us that space time is not fundamental and that physical objects in space time are not fundamental reality and science is good enough. Our best scientific theory is good enough to tell us where they stop.
But they're not good enough, of course, to tell us what's beyond. That's up to us as creative scientists to try to guess what is a deeper theory of reality that goes beyond space and time, but when we project it back into space and time, that deeper reality needs to look like gravity and quantum field theory and evolution by natural selection. And so basically what I'm saying is that my brilliant colleagues, and these are my friends, they're brilliant, I'm not putting them down anyway. But when they assume that physical objects like neurons or computing systems cause consciousness, I think that they're running against what our best scientific theories are Telling us, they're telling us space time is doomed.
We need a deeper notion of reality. And for most science, there's no problem to work in space time. But we're dealing with consciousness, the fiction that physical objects have genuine causal powers, which is a useful fiction most of the time. For everyday neuroscience, it's a very useful fiction.
I use it myself. But for consciousness, that's when the fiction comes back to bite you. Just a quick idea. If you're playing a virtual reality game like Grand Theft Autobot in a VR suited up multiplayer version, it's a perfectly useful fiction to think that the steering wheel causes the car to move around to the left or to the right and so forth hurt.
Perfectly harmless fiction. But if you're a software engineer looking to upgrade the actual software that runs the program, that fiction, if you were stuck in that fiction, you would not be equipped to do the upgrade that you needed. In other words, if you're trying to look at the reality outside the headset, you can't just live with the notion of cause and effect inside the headset. You actually have to expand your horizons to understand a deeper notion of cause, effect.
And that's what I claim we have to do with consciousness. It's useful most of the time to talk about physical objects as though they have positive powers, perfectly harmless. But when it comes to consciousness, it's the single big obstacle that's stopping progress in a strength. Okay, you did it perfectly.
Now I want to, like, really drill into that quickly so that people understand where we're going to be going from here. So we spent almost two and a half hours together last time with me doing with my pea brain, doing my best to grapple with these topics. And finally I was able to understand a couple things I'm going to lay out now that open up what this interview is going to be about. And it's going to be very interesting.
We're going to cover things like AI and whether that becomes conscious faster than light travel, which I think your theory predicts all kinds of very interesting things. So to say that analogy in my own words, maybe from a lay perspective, so people get what you're saying about Grand Theft Auto because this is the key to understanding the consequences of your theory. So when you think about what's really going on as a computer programmer trying to make this game called Grand Theft Auto, you're dealing with algorithms and mathematics and moving electrical currents around a Xbox or whatever. And so ultimately your goal is to move electrons and things like that around this machine that then creates this supposed experience right on a TV that I can interact with, okay?
When you understand that the difference between the reality that that programmer has to deal with, which looks nothing like, it's literally numbers, it's all code, all math. Math designed to move electrons around. Okay, that's not exactly right, but that's close enough. And that reality versus what you see, which is like, oh, look, I'm driving with the steering wheel.
What you're saying is what you see when you walk around the room and interact with stuff, you think about space time. And Einstein relativity is as divorced from reality as the computer programmer is from the gamer who plays this game. Now, it took me a very long time to understand that's what you're trying to get people to understand. And then it was one thing that was like a real key in the lock for me was somebody asked you a question.
It was so, so brave. And they said, donald, this is wonderful. I love it. But now predict we have the same conversation in 10,000 years.
What are we going to know then? And you said, oh, that space time isn't real and so we can create space time ourselves because space time is. Space time is the Grand Theft Auto game. It's not that code underneath.
So once you understand, Einstein just figured out a way to describe Grand Theft Auto, he did not figure out a way to describe the actual underlying code. And so if. If the space time is just Grand Theft Auto, we know we can manipulate Grand Theft Auto. We can now manipulate space time.
And you said, we'll have this conversation from Alpha Centauri. And I was like, oh, my God. Even if you just get excited about the chill, even if you just get excited about our ability to manipulate what's in the headset, right? Manipulating space time, traveling faster than light, changing fundamental physics, things like that, then even that would be interesting, let alone the other part that you're saying, which is, oh, you might actually be able to figure out what the underlying code is.
That's. That's exactly right. And so one way to think about it is science, for all of its incredible breakthroughs and wonderful theories, has only been studying our headset. Science has not yet been studying objective reality outside of our space time.
Virtual reality that from an evolutionary point of view, was just evolved as a way for us to play the game of life and stay alive long enough to reproduce, not to show us the truth. So. So we have really, in the last four or five centuries, really gotten to be wizards of our headset, wizards of the Grand Theft Auto game. But just because you're a wizard of Grand Theft Auto does not mean that you know anything about the circuits and software that are running the game.
And for someone who thinks that they know everything when all they know is Grand Theft Auto means they're still stuck in the headset. Science, I want to claim, has the tools. We have learned the right tools as we've studied our headset. We are ready to use those same tools to venture outside the headset, outside of space and time.
So science has the right tools. We just have to open up, you know, open our minds to the fact that we're just playing a game in science. Space, time, it's just a virtual reality. The, there's an entire world else.
Now. The best physicists are already there, like Nima Arkani Hamed and many of his collaborators who are saying space time is doomed. We're looking for the reality that's beyond space time, in which in fact, the very language of quantum theory and relativity theory don't hold. There are no, what they call Hilber spaces.
There's no Hilber space there. In what they're finding, there's no quantum theory. What is hillbill? I've never heard of that.
Oh, it's, it's a mathematical structure that is used to describe quantum states and their evolution. They're called Hilbert space. And so, so what they're looking, they don't exist. That's right.
So these physicists are saying, look, we're finding structures beyond space time. And these structures don't care about Hilbert space. They don't care about locality in space and time. They don't care about so called unitarity, which is important for quantum theory.
These are deeper structures. They project into space time and give us unitary and locality, unitarity and locality in space time. In other words, they project the right things in our headset, but they're deeper and they have symmetries that you cannot see in space time. And when physicists find symmetries that are in the data but can't be captured in space time, they're very, very interested.
So the best and brightest physicists are boldly stepping outside of the headset. But the question is, where do you look? What kinds of ideas mean there's not space and time? How do you come up with an idea of what reality is?
So we just have to try ideas, make them rigorous, make them precise, and then project them back into our headset. That's the key. We know how to test things within the headset. So we're going to make theories of Reality outside of space and time with mathematically precise models of how they map into space and time.
And then we can test. So. So this is not just waving your hands and blowing steam, you know, this is not that. This is.
We want rigorous theories outside of space time that have mathematical projections into space time that lead to testable predictions. I right now am studying the physics of scattering amplitudes for the, like, colliders. They smash protons together and they have gluons smashing each other, and gluons go flying out. And you can predict the probability of these, these particle events.
So my goal is to start with the theory of consciousness outside of space time, mathematically precise, show exactly how it maps into spacetime, and then hopefully predict those scattering amplitudes to 10 decimal predictions of above accuracy. Then I don't mean I'm right, but at least now I'm doing the right thing to be testable. Okay, I want to ground everybody in why I've gotten so hyped on this. So do you read science fiction much?
A little bit right now. Very sad to hear that, but. So one of the things that I find so enjoyable about science fiction is they really play with big ideas. And I'm reading a book, it's the second book in the Three Body problem series.
And in that they're basically, Alien invasion is happening. They're trying to figure out like, what they do and the way that the aliens stop them from making progress, Whether or anybody plans to read the series is that they, they send these photons that can basically interrupt the large colliders to give them impossible to interpret data. And so they shoot these things to the colliders and they just give them completely nonsensical data. And the reason I said that is they're like, if you can't make the breakthroughs at the fundamental layers of science, you can't progress.
So for anybody who is feeling like, okay, these guys are drifting off into ether, why is this interesting? How does it relate to my life? First of all, say that you're a cognitive scientist that, you know, is your background. So this starts with him trying to understand consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness.
And it's leading me to this place that challenges the very substance of reality. And that matters because, by the way, we might be able to manipulate more of this stuff than we think. But we're still in this presentation layer the, the headset. So now as I begin to unwind some of this stuff, it's when we think about the fact that, okay, I'm guessing the scientists, the quantum Scientists, the reason that they're now looking elsewhere is they cannot make what they see mathematically make sense with the models that they have with space time.
And for them to make that leap outside is going to be brutally difficult in terms of science doesn't progress as the truth is revealed, science progressing. That said, basically, the old people have to die because they just. They can't update their model of the world. And then the next generation grows up just believing it to be true.
So how are we holding out hope for people to step outside of that? And what methods are they using to discover this stuff? Is it gonna be in the cloud? Cause that's all headset.
Right. So I can tell you what the physicists are up to a little bit on this and why I'm interested. As you said, I'm not interested in particle physics for its own sake. I'm a cognitive scientist.
I'm looking for the simplest thing that I could possibly do to test a theory of consciousness in which consciousness is fundamental and space time is just a headset. And I think you have to explain that. We talked about it in the last one. But when you say that consciousness is fundamental, what do you mean?
All right, so. So by consciousness, I just mean simple things like having a headache or smelling garlic or hearing the sound of a trumpet or having an itch or feeling a mood like love or hate or something like that. So simple feelings or sensory experiences that I can imagine even a mouse might have. Like, a mouse might smell cheese, and it might enjoy the taste of cheese.
I think I'm ready to get behind that. But aren't you taking it way farther down to, like, there is an entity, I don't know what word around it. Its entire experience is either green or nothing. Right.
So I actually, then when I try to get a model of consciousness on its own terms, as a scientist, I have to write down a mathematical description of what I mean by having conscious experiences and acting on them, and entertain the possibility of very simple consciousnesses that might have, as you say, just one or two conscious experiences, like green or nothing or something like that, and look at how these kinds of consciousnesses might interact and so forth. And so I've been with my colleagues Jason Prakashan and Chris Fields and others, working on mathematical models of dynamics of. Consciousness is much like a vast social network, like the Twitterverse. We have lots of social entities that are interacting, tweeting and following and so forth.
And it would be like that. There's not just one consciousness, There are many, what I call conscious agents that are interacting and there's so many of them that it's overwhelming. It's too much for any one conscious agent to talk to all or interact with all the other conscious agents. And just like with social data, if you're like with the Twitterverse, if you're trying to understand what's happening there, well, there's tens of millions of users, literally billions of tweets.
You can't read the tweet, all the tweets, or interact with all users. If you want to understand what's going on, you need a visualization tool, maybe a VR headset where you can sort of see what's trending in the United States and then zoom in to what's happening in Moscow, and then zoom out to what's happening in over in China and then zoom down to particular street. So what you want is simple graphics, simple eye candy. Little objects that are colored that are doing different things that somehow let you grasp what the billions of tweets and tens of millions of photo users are doing, but in a way that you can just gotta dumb things down, put it in a colorful, simple eye candy format that you can understand.
And that's a big idea. I'm claiming that that's what spacetime is. Space, time, the sun and the moon, physical objects. Everything we see inside of space and time is just our visualization tool.
The reality we're interacting with is nothing like the visualization tool. There's nothing like space and time. It's a whole network of interacting conscious agents outside of space time, a vast social network. And we've made the rookie mistake of assuming that our headset, VR, our visualization tool, is the final reality.
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This is a paid advertisement. All right, so let's go back to this idea of conscious entities, which I find interesting. It took me a while to grasp this one. So the easiest one is inside the human brain right now.
There are two hemispheres. If you split the corpse close. We just, we discussed this last Time you get two different personalities. You've also got the microbiome, which conceivably all the microbes are conscious.
And so when you inside of all of our cells, there's hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria, which are living organisms inside of our cells. So it is very objectively true to look at a human and say you're not a single entity. You are a collection of trillions of entities that we just sum up as, like, that's Donald, right? But in reality it's not.
And if I go in and mess with the consciousness, like, if I go and mess with my microbiome, it'll change your personality, which is crazy. I can't believe it's true. But nonetheless, it's true. I can affect your energy output by going to mess with your mitochondria, which again, have their own DNA.
It's not like it's just a cell in your body. This, this is a. Its own entity that happens to be inside of your cells. And as we begin to recognize that humans already are just a collection of these much smaller consciousness, but they come together.
I get where you're going now. I don't yet know the implications of that or what we're going to take away from it, but my relationship with you has been like, hey, this crazy statement I can't fathom is true. I really want to write you off as a nut job, but I can't because, like, all of these things, like, do make sense. It's just, I so can't imagine what life outside the headset is.
But the more time I've spent with ideas, more it's like, okay, these are starting to coalesce for me. So cool. I just want people to understand that consciousness thing. I don't, I certainly don't understand it yet how exist outside the headset.
But I can't deny that already, even in the headset, we're a collection of smaller consciousnesses, right? Maybe one help for thinking about your consciousness outside the headset. I might mention this last time. If you just look at your face in the mirror, if you look, what you see directly is just skin, hair and eyes.
That's all you see. And if you looked inside, if someone opened your skull up, looked, you just see neurons and so forth. But what you know firsthand that you cannot see is your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your love of music, your mood, all the rich world of your conscious experiences. Compared to that rich world, this face is unbelievably simple and nothing like the world of your Experiences.
If I smile or you smile, I can guess that you're feeling joy. But a smile in no way resembles joy. A smile is a twitch of a face. A joy is that.
That's where it's like the things we see happening in the quantum realm that make no sense. That to you is the thing that tells you, your brain, the physical tissues, all that they are entirely in the VR experience. It's all VR experience. That's right.
And so, strictly speaking, no physical object, including my body, is conscious. Strictly speaking, my brain isn't conscious, because my brain, in fact, doesn't even exist unless I render it right. So if you're playing Grand Theft Auto, I'm playing out of VR version. I got the steering wheel in front of me.
I'm holding the steering wheel. If I look to the side, I no longer render the steering wheel. And there is no steering wheel. When I look here, I render it, and now there is a steering wheel.
The same thing is true, strictly speaking, of neurons and brains. They're there when you render them. They're not there when you don't. It's a VR system that you render objects in space and time as you need them because they're part of your visualization tool.
And then you garbage collect them, you delete them when you don't need them. So, strictly speaking, no physical object is conscious. So human bodies aren't conscious. Rocks aren't conscious.
So I'm not panpsychistic. A panpsychis is someone who. At least one version of panpsychism is that there are physical objects that obey the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are, in some sense, fundamental, but consciousness is the reality that's inside the laws. And I'm saying something entirely different.
I'm saying that the very laws of physics themselves are really no restraint to consciousness whatsoever. They're just a visualization tool that certain consciousnesses happen to use, but they're no restriction on the nature of consciousness itself, itself, at all. And so. So before we move off that.
I know you don't know, but I want you. You must have flashes of images or favorite metaphors or whatever. So if I buy that this really is a simulation. True, true, true.
Like, as. As simulated as it's going to get down to the fact that space time is just a part of that simulation, and it is consciousness that is fundamental. Meaning that the complexity of my brain will never give birth to consciousness. My consciousness, which is outside of the.
The headset, is outside the VR world, is outside the Grand Theft Auto Game. That thing has a need to, from a evolutionary standpoint, based on the gains it gets from certain behaviors. It needed to create a virtual reality so that it wasn't overwhelmed with data. So what is that conscious being that was evolving as it sits outside of this?
Where can I scrape through and find the conscious thing? Right. So. So, well, the consciousness won't be inside space and time.
Understood. Instead, space and time is inside consciousness. Yep, I get that. But I'm still imagining a little person outside of the VR.
Is that just fundamentally broken? No, I would say that probably, given the current state of human imagination, including mine, that's probably the best thing we can do is to think about these entities. And of course, as soon as we think about entities, we place them in space and time. That's how we think.
So. So it's harmless to do that as long as you realize that the space that you're thinking about isn't. They're not embedded in space. They're the creators of space.
That's. That's the interesting thing. So it's hard outside space and time. I am eating things.
Right. Well, so. So inside space and so I don't know what we're doing outside of space and time. That's part of what I want to understand is what are we actually doing?
We don't see. I don't know what I'm actually doing. I know what I'm doing under a description, like I'm moving my hand right now, and if I grab a steering wheel in my car, I know what I'm doing under a space time description. But I don't know in ultimate reality what I'm really doing.
It's just like the VR player. When they turn the steering wheel in Grand Theft Auto, they know what they're doing. In the language of the game, I'm turning the steering wheel. But what they're really doing in terms of the supercomputer, by which deeper reality, they're toggling voltages and magnetic fields and circuits that they have no idea.
There's. There's probably trillions of voltage togglings going on for one turn of the wheel. All they see is a turn of the wheel. That's their notion of cause and effect.
It's trivial. The real cause and effect is trillions of voltages getting toggled in some. In fractions of a second. It's much more complicated.
So from an evolutionary. So when we talk about evolution, as you did, you have to be from this point of view, it's very, very important to Be careful, because now we talk about what part of the framework we're talking about. So when I talk evolution, I'm only going to be talking about assuming the headset. I'm within the framework of the headset because evolutionary theory is only a headset theory.
It's not a theory of consciousness beyond space and time. Okay. This is where things start to break a little for me. So I'm going to articulate what I think you have said about.
Because all of this was born for you, you basically said you have two choices. You can either keep space, time and get rid of evolution, or you can keep evolution, get rid of space, time. And your argument goes like this, and obviously stop me where I go wrong, that all evolution cares about is fitness, payoffs. There are certain behaviors that must be taken in order for you to have children.
To have children. And there's so much data coming in that, like looking at a desk or a table or something would simply be a string of numbers that dictate the number of photons reflecting off that coming back. And you can interpret that as different colors and brightness and all that, but in reality, it is just the math of that situation. And what you see around you is something to simplify that so that you only have to render what you're looking at.
When you look away, it seems to exist, but just the overwhelming complexity, it would paralyze any animals. So the evolutionary strategy that was chosen is this crazy simplification that we exist in, which is very convincing, but it's ultimately a convincing lie and isn't real. So I'm like, okay, cool. I can actually get behind that.
Where it breaks down for me is what's actually evolving, like something needed this simplification. What is that something? Right? So there's.
So there's got to be a deeper dynamics, right? There's some deeper dynamics that in space, time looks like evolution. That's what it looks like inside of our headset. But there has to be some deeper dynamics.
And I've only had one idea that I've run across that seems deep enough. I'm not saying it's right, but this idea will tell you how deep you have to go. At least get a contender. So if consciousness is doing something, if it's quote, unquote, evolving, but not from a natural function point of view, just by evolving, it has some kind of dynamics.
The question is why? What is it up to? What is consciousness up to, Right? Because now that the typical stuff of trying to get food and procreation, that doesn't Apply outside of space and time might not apply.
So what's the deal with that? The only idea that I've seen that's deep enough comes from something called Godel's Incompleteness theorem. Yeah, I struggled with this in the last interview. Now I think I have it mastered.
Okay, well then you're better than me because Godel's theorem is unbelievable deep. But basically what girls said without going into details, is there is no end in principle, no end to the exploration of novel mathematical structure. Even God could never know at all. There's always gonna be an unbounded inquiry ahead.
No matter how much you know, there's unbounded structure left to explore. And if we make the assumption, and now just speaking as a scientist, like saying, look, I don't know what the truth is, we put some ideas on the table and see where they go, right? That's how you science. So maybe everything I'm saying is wrong, but I'm trying to be precise so we can figure out where it's wrong.
So if we assume that consciousness is all, is really the fundamental reality, a bunch of these conscious agents, the social network, and if that's all that there really is, then the only thing that mathematical structure can be about is consciousness. That's all it's about because that's all there is. So Godel's theorem then would say because there's an unbounded and never ending possibility for exploration of mathematical structure, that means there's a never ending and unbounded possibility for the exploration of varieties of conscious experience. In other words, consciousness is like a kid in a candy store.
It's an infinite candy store. I call it Girls candy store. It's a never ending exploration that is in principle never ending. It's not like you never come to the end of it.
And so that is deep. And I'm not saying it's right, but it's deep enough to be a real contender. Why should consciousness be doing anything at all? Well, here's one reason.
Because no matter how much consciousness explores its possibilities, it can never come to the end of its own possibilities. And so it's in a never ending self exploration. And what we call Tom and Dawn are just parts of this overall exploration of consciousness and all of its possibilities. And you know, our little bit that we're exploring right now as riches of things to us is trivial, literally trivial compared to all the possibilities that girl says are out there.
And we get some feeling of the triviality. But I can imagine a square. I can imagine a cube. Now Go up one more dimension.
Imagine a cube in four dimensions. My brain halts and my mind catches on fire. Nothing happens. That's only four dimensions.
I can't even go to four dimensions. I mean, how that's terrible. It's just an incredible limitation. I can only see three dimensions of color.
Red, sort of a red, green dimension, blue, yellow and so forth, light and dark. We have three cone systems and so forth. There are some pigeons who have four color receptors. Presumably they're in an extra dimensional color that I can't even imagine what it's like.
Can you imagine a specific color you've never seen before? Quite. Imagine one specific color you've never seen. So as rich as our world seem, we know that there's a rich possibility of conscious experiences that we can't even concretely imagine.
But consciousness itself, on this theory, is exploring all these possibilities. And right now we're sort of stuck in this little headset. Three dimensions, small amount of color that we can see and so forth. Just we thought it was the whole world.
No, it's a little headset. It's a prism, right. For me, I realized I sort of stuck to this. It's like my imagination is stuck in all the three dimensions.
My colors are stuck in a certain range. Consciousness itself is exploring the vast possibilities that's going on. So that. Now here's the challenge.
Suppose we chase that down. We say, okay, there's going to be this ongoing dynamics of consciousness constantly going beyond what it knows, exploring the candy store further and further. Well, there's several things to say about it. One is that's not the candy store.
Makes it sound like all funny names, right? Oh, but there's going to be a dark side to it. Because going into the unknown means letting go of what you know. And that can be terrifying.
So this suggests that consciousness is going to have this thing going on all the time. Of the exhilaration and the terror of going literally into the unknown, where literally you don't have concepts. All of your current concepts are inadequate. And this is what Goebbels is saying.
These are going to be new structures that transcend. So for those who meditate, when you go into silence, it's both healing and terrifying, right? If you really let go of all thoughts and go into the void, it's sort of. It can be scary.
Like you want to go back and you grab back on your. It's a life jacket, right? You grab onto your teddy bear, your thoughts. So there's going to be this.
To really go into new conceptual Frontiers, you have to let go of old concepts. So there's going to be that aspect to it, which is sort of a spiritual side. There's aspects of making progress, I think. So I think that.
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So I, I'm in this VR experience to the advantage of something, and I want to know what that something is. It isn't me as I perceive me, but it's something. Right. So what's your essential question?
Well, the answer is I don't know, but. And so there's no specific thing you're chasing? Well, what I'm chasing is the idea that, that we're chasing, that the consciousness itself is only about exploring new possibilities of experience. So I'm gonna push on that.
Let's go into the way that AI researchers think and work. And I know that was your degree, so this ought to be, I'm taking right home. You have to imbue the robot with directives, desires. Right.
So to put it in human terms, it's like there are certain things that humans want to do. We, we're an active species, so we tend to go and explore. We try to take control of our environment. We certainly eat, procreate, like all those.
We have the drive to quench thirst, hunger, sex, so on. And so Forth. So like those things are pushing us to go do things even if we don't want to. We find ourselves compelled to seek pleasure, to move away from pain.
All right, by default, AI wouldn't have those. So now you've got to give those, those things. And I love that concept of minus a desire. Any entity just sits or is blown around by physics, right?
So obviously we're in headset now. But like you've got wind, it's okay. Something lighter than wind is going to move, but otherwise everything just sits. So what is it like what.
How has this conscious entity, in that question that you just posed, been given some sort of impetus to explore the infinite candies in the infinite candy shop? Well, by the way, I'm on board with what you're saying. I think that's really a good way of thinking about this and that you could think about our, your life. And my life right now is we're in a similar, a space time simulator.
And we've been given like an AI system. We've been given certain intrinsic desires that we then find. And so, so my wife is an artist. That's how she's exploring.
I am still stuck at third grade, six figures. So that's not how I'm exploring. I'm exploring in a different way. So, so, so there's billions of humans and there are billions of different ways that we explore in music, in art and literature, in science, various kinds of science, meditation, sober, it's sports.
There are all sorts of ways that consciousness is exploring through, through us. And there's not like one is the best or makes consciousness want to go to all the assay to create this VR experience to run. Each of us is sort of an individual experience in consciousness. The idea would be that that is what consciousness is about, is the exploration of all of its possibilities.
So is that just the miracle? Like I've now hit the part where you're like, I don't fucking know, this is the miracle. Well, yeah, and when we say that that's something that we have to say is true of any explanation, right? Any explanation.
At some point we say, if you grab me these assumptions, then with those assumptions I can explain everything else. So I totally buying that. Here, here's the basic assumption I've always made about the miracle. That the whole point is to say, everybody, I've got this theory.
Here's my miracle. Check it out. Theory works, right? Yeah.
Wow, this is better than everything. Okay. The only reason I told you about this thing is so you can tell me how to Move the miracle back even farther or are you just like, cool, I'm good with that miracle. And now I just want to explore within that where that miracle is.
Or well, so I'm gonna do both. So this miracle is so new that you don't need to explore. So I want to push on this one. But the miracles I'm proposing are consciousness is fundamental.
So experiences themselves don't come from physics. They are fundamental. So that's a miracle. And second, this other miracle that go proved where he proved it, but it's still a miracle, right?
The incompleteness of mathematics that you can get there's endless X square. That's just a fact, which is remarkable. In fact, we proved it. But it's nevertheless, why should the universe be that way?
Why should logic demanded. That's so that's. But it's a satisfying kind of endpoint where we say that's the way the world is. Here's the theorem that says that's the way the universe is.
And that that one theorem tells us why. If you're up to exploration, then have fun because you will always. There's no getting there. That's the key.
There's no arriving. Can I say Godel's incompleteness theorem in a real world example? Because this one. Anybody that watches the first episode, I must ask you 75 questions about this theorem.
And I just could not get my horrendous. And now the punchline is, as far as I can tell, it's turtles all the way down. So Godel's incompleteness theorem, as I understand it, says no matter how much you use math to try to find base reality, you will never find it. There is no end.
There will always be another layer to discover. On and on and on and on and on. Literally for infinity, right? So I said a little bit more about what Godel was up to on that and how it relates.
So Godel was the question they were asking. It was a mathematical question. That is if you write down a bunch of axioms, right? Some these things are true, these things are just give me the two points.
Define a line, two lines intersected, give me a few things like that. And then you ask what are all the theorems that you could prove from those assumptions? And so, you know, we did all the nasal algebra and so we would prove different things. What Godel.
The big question that mathematicians said David Hilbert really put this out there was can we, with just grinding through these theorems and proofs, get all mathematical truth? Is there some finite number? There's maybe 6.7 million. But we can do it even if it's infinite in principle.
If we could just grind forever, would we get all the truths? And that was. So Hilbert asked that question and Godel showed that the answer is no. That no matter how big your axiom system, how many axioms you've got, he found a way to show here's something that's true, but you can't prove it within your axioms.
So now, so you can take that new truth, state it as one of your axioms. And then he showed, well, there'll be another truth that now pops up. And so this never ends. And so no matter how, so you can't just mechanically grind through and get all the truths.
And the key thing about this, which is really interesting for consciousness now is Godel used self reference. It's when you get a mathematical system to talk about itself that the problems start to arise. And that's really interesting because what I'm suggesting here is that consciousness is trying to understand itself in all of its possibilities. And because of that self reference, it's a never ending enterprise.
And you seem to sort of quietly draw a parallel between math and consciousness. Are they separable or inseparable entities? That's a really deep and important question. I don't know.
Here's just my thoughts. My. I study psychophysics, which is a branch of science which we experimentally and mathematically study conscious experiences, perceptions of shape and color and so forth. We write down math models and we test people in the lab.
Every conscious experience has structure and we can write down mathematical structure. I've never seen a conscious experience that doesn't have mathematical structure. And the structure is derived from what, what neurons are firing and things like that. Well, sometimes it has nothing to do with neurons at all.
For example, in color space, you can talk about it seems like red and orange are closer to each other than red and green. That's a structural notion. We can write down what we call color spaces and they turn out to be these non Euclidean color spaces. Tara Wendow and others who did the mathematics on this come up with really interesting, complicated mathematical spaces which model all the relationships of colors to each other.
So we have color experience and their structure. When you see a shape like a ball, we can write down equations that model the 3D shape that you're experiencing. So there's an intimate connection that's been studied scientifically between conscious experience and mathematics. The way I think of it is that consciousness is to mathematics like the living organism is to its bones.
Or if You're a vertebrate, you need the bones, but you're more than the bones. And so that's why I think about consciousness can't be reduced to mathematics. I don't think there are others like Tegmark who say that everything can be reduced to mathematics. Max Tegmark says that kind of thing.
You know, he may be right, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that mathematics is the structural aspect of conscious experience. But there's more to the conscious experience than just the structure. In part because so far as we know, different kinds of conscious experiences can be structurally identical.
So if that's the case, something with the same structure could have been Qualia field. Exactly right. That's right. So is that context dependent how see.
Well, that's now where I'm getting to the edge of my understanding here. I did actually prove a theorem. It's called the scrambling theorem. I published it in 2006 where I proved that that your colors could be scrambled with respect to mine, but we would be functionally identical in every single experiment we could do.
So there was no structural thing that I could do to show that your color experiences were different from my color experiences. So. So your experiences aren't devoid of mathematical structure, but the mathematical structure isn't the whole story about your conscious experiences. That that's the best I can say right now.
And I agree with you if that feels like we need to press further on that I couldn't agree more. We do need to press further on and I look forward to because I think there some profound insights are yet to be revealed. So where this all to me I'm so curious like I'm always trying to find how is something usable, right. How does this come back?
So if it reveals something about myself and how I can move through the world in a way that's more interesting, more fulfilling, more whatever if it actually the big thing between last one, this one was the idea that space time is as malleable as video game code and that we really could, even though we'd only be experienced in the headset, that suddenly things within the headset, like faster than light travel, suddenly become very real. We just have to figure out what the real substance of the headset code is so that we can get in there and begin to make changes. But that to me forces the question of the me that I perceive as me is inherently an object of the the headset. So there is, there is no me outside of the headset.
There is something outside the headset And I don't know if our minds may just work so fundamentally differently, but as we talk about, this is what I started imagining. Okay, hey, Tom. This is a collection of different conscious beings, and consciousness is the, the, you know, the driving force. And it's running through all these experimentations.
And so I'm like, okay, cool. There's this thing underneath the 3D and it's, you know, essentially popping up all these different. Well, let me see what the color blue would be like for a kid that grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and went to Harvard Elementary. You know what I mean?
And like, oh, that's interesting. And then. But, like, needed my entire sort of life and universe to go for it to truly be an infinite exploration of what these are things. So there's a me that they spun up just to know the color blue at the age of 44, you know what I mean?
To have this exact history. And then there's, oh, over here under that same test. But I want to know what salmon tastes like. When you had the early bad experience with salmon as a kid, but later you fall in love with this girl who's really into salmon.
What does salmon taste like then? And so that's like where my mind goes, right? And so now I'm imagining like this consciousness of some kind. Maybe it too is the Borg.
And, you know, maybe the Borg is what's feeding its drivers and all of that. But I'm still trying to imagine, like, my brain immediately goes to, there's a thing. And that thing in my mind is basically the most classic looking alien ever. But they have like these long fingers that, like, each finger is an entity that becomes a conscious entity living in the headset just to go, oh, cool.
That's what that experience is like. Do you have any sort of analogy metaphor that you think about this stuff in? Or is this just because I have a limited brain? I'm not sure.
No, I, I love your metaphor. And I don't have a better one. And I, you know, there's a couple things to say about that metaphor, though, which is one, in some sense, you know, lot of spiritual teachers tell us to relax and enjoy the ride, right? Don't get all anxious, don't get all bent out of shape and so forth.
Rich or poor, whatever you might be, enjoy the ride. In some sense, when you do that, it feels right. I mean, it feels like, I mean, of course I'm exploring, I'm not being lazy, but there's something about, hey, you know, smell the roses, enjoy this thing, you know, you don't want to come to the end of your life and not have really enjoyed the ride. And so the idea that it's about not arriving anywhere, but the joy of exploring for its own sake, that's one thing that's on the table here.
Is that what it's about? Now, there's nothing that I'll put on the table, though, which is, of course, we should be very modest about all of our claims here. I'm probably wrong, right, about all this. Right.
And. But as a scientist, what I want to do then is to say, well, how can we go about trying to figure out where we're wrong as fast as possible? And for me, what I'm doing while I'm exploring these ideas that we're talking about, I'm also trying to say, how would consciousness, precisely this bad social network, project mathematically into space time? Clearly, there's a projection.
I'm interacting with Tom's consciousness. I'm not seeing that consciousness. I'm seeing skin, hair, and eyes. I'm seeing a spacetime projection.
I'm not actually seeing your emotions, I'm not seeing your mood, but I am genuinely interacting with your experiences. It's a genuine interaction. And so there is a projection from this conscious realm into space time. I want to get a mathematically precise model of that projection.
The thing about gluons and this large headroom collider, predicting that is just not because I'm so interested in blue lines. It's just to make sure that I'm not BSing myself. Did I get the mapping right? If I can't predict blue line interactions, then I still have my homework to do.
But now, once I get that, here's the kicker. We can take what we understand in the headset and pull it backwards. If we can project from consciousness to the headset, then we can try at least to go from the headset and pull backwards. It's a fallible enterprise, but it may help us to open our minds to the possibilities for deeper theories of what's going on outside the headset.
So the reason I'm doing this is because I can't even imagine a specific color that I've never seen before. I can't imagine in four dimensions. In other words, I take it as a given that I'm deeply, deeply limited in my imagination, and I need all the tools I can get to help me step outside of my headset and try to guess the unfathomable outside of it. So that's why I want to get this mathematically mapping into space time and then pull it back to give us a guide that can help us to not just be wildly speculating about what's going on in the realm of consciousness, but to have more tailored ideas that we can test in the loop.
I get ideas in my headset. I pull them back to what they might mean outside the headset, take those ideas, play with them, project them back into the headset to get new predictions. So in other words, we. If we don't want to.
Yes, ourselves, we have to figure out a way to make this an experimental scientific enterprise. And that's the loop. But this is a bigger scientific loop that goes outside the space time headset to a theory of what's going on in consciousness, projecting back into space time, which is the only place where we know how to do experiments, and going through that loop. So science is up to the task.
But here's the kicker. For me as a scientist, this approach says there will be no theory of everything. Why not? Because Goebbels theorem says there's two ways.
Any theories can have a finite set of assumptions, and the implications of that will be finite. You could have such a deep theory of so many things that, I mean, it's. There's always a new sort of theorem to discover. But does that in any way, shape or form, break?
Because here's. Here's my understanding of why people are searching for a theory of everything. You've got Einstein, Newton dealing with the macro world, and then you've got the quantum dealing with the microscopic world. And for whatever reason, all of your predictive models, things are big.
They work just fine. All of your modeling, when it's small, works just fine. When you try to make either one of them work together, then it falls apart. But we are.
I could see sort of closing the loop on that. That becomes. And everything. Right.
Even though it's actually just a very small subset. Right. It's the headset. And so it's not the, you know, the true theory of everything.
But if it allows you to unify the known universe, that seems like it would be incredibly useful. I'm assuming there's some. There is something for us to understand, like that loop you were talking about that goes and takes in consciousness, comes back into the headset that we can create a loop. So I'll make this more concrete again, thinking maybe more as a writer than as a physicist, for sure.
But so when I was thinking about, okay, the big bang and things expand, what are they expanding into? And the idea that a universe could sort of pop in and out of exist. Like how is all this possible? And one idea this before is that basically the everything.
So I'll hesitate to call the universe, but the everything, whatever that is, is like a foam. And every bubble is a universe. And the bubble sort of come go and you're in the bubble, you see, it's a bubble. The bubble to you seems like everything.
But if you were to actually punch her through that bubble, oh, now I'm in the, you know, the bigger matrix of stuff. And so you begin to understand how you get a temporary limitation. But actually then once you see what's behind you like oh, I get it. And then Godel's incompleteness theorem answers the question of okay, but what's that goop sitting in?
Oh, it's sitting in this space. What's that space sitting. Oh, it's sitting in this. Oh, fucking girl.
Right? And you just like, ah, it goes on and on forever. But you would like at some point being able to predict seven, you know, bubbles on it's like, ah, do I really need to go to the infinite? There's just as long as if the.
You poke through one bubble and all of a sudden all physics are backwards and doesn't make sense. Okay, that would be problematic. But assuming you're just punching through to the next thing, that's exactly like where you currently are, seems like you could come up with something unifying. Ish.
Right? So instead of turtles all the way down as girdles all the way down. Right. Endless exploration.
And Godel's theorem could be like the deep meta theory. It's not the theory of everything, it's sort of a meta theory that tells us why we will constantly be exploring for new theory. So if you were looking for the deepest theory from this point of view, maybe I think about it, maybe Godel's therm would be this meta theory that explains why all the concrete theories will never be the final theory of everything. And so in that sense maybe we with Godel we have made a candidate for this meta theory of everything, which explains why the joy of exploration will never cease.
Which is an interesting. But I agree this is a really interesting thing to try to understand the scientists and we can use some of the tools that we've been learning from deep learning, so deep neural networks and so forth, where we get the agent based models of interaction for exploration and learning. So those, those tools that like DeepMind at Google has some papers recently where they've come to the same conclusion that my team has come from evolution. They found that Instead of giving Deep Neural networks a strict model of the world that they want them to make reasons in order to make guesses in order to live in, they just give them, as you were saying, some payoffs, some, you know, positive and negative rewards for their behaviors.