- What's up everybody?
It's Dr. Zubin Damania, AKA ZDoggMD,
and I am just an icon, okay.
And, that will be explained,
by watching this episode.
I'm here with Professor
of Cognitive Sciences
at the University of California, Irvine.
And a personal intellectual hero of mine,
no bias here, Dr. Donald Hoffman.
Professor, welcome to the show.
- Thank you so much, Zubin.
It's a pleasure to be here,
and thanks for inviting me.
- Man, it's really crazy
to have you in my garage,
because I've seen your TED talk,
I've been to workshops with your.
I've read your book, "The
Case Against Reality:
Why Evolution Hid the
Truth from our Eyes."
And I have to be honest with you,
I'm like,
to the extent that a scientist
can be a fanboy of another scientist,
I am a fanboy!
Because what you've kind of proposed,
and again, we may be wrong here,
but it's the one thing that's
actually felt right to me
about the nature of reality,
that we don't see it, as it actually is.
In other words, we don't see truth,
we see a graphical user interface,
that is a series of icons,
that are tuned to keep
us alive and reproducing,
but not tuned to show us the truth.
And the underlying truth that is there,
may be much more
interesting than we think.
So.
- [Don] Yes.
- Let's start with that.
How did you even get
interested in studying this?
- Well, I was interested in perception
and artificial intelligence,
and the question, are we machines?
Are people just machines,
or is there something more
to us than just machines?
And so I was,
as a teenager,
I was very interested in these questions.
I was programming, so I knew
what programs could do, a bit.
And, but I was also, you know,
my dad was a fundamentalist minister,
so there were all these
other aspects of spirituality
or religion that were
interesting about human nature.
And I was trying to put
all this stuff together.
So I would, on the one
side with the programming,
and the new kinds of capacities
of artificial intelligence,
it was looking like, we might be machines.
On the other hand, there's
supposed to be something
about us that's beyond the machine.
And so, I was very, very curious,
and so I started.
I went to UCLA and did
an undergraduate degree
in which I was studying
computer science, mathematics,
with a major in psychology.
And then I went to MIT,
where I went to the Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory,
and what's now the Brain and
Cognitive Science department.
And so I was able to then study
both the brain and cognitive science's
aspect of human nature,
and the artificial intelligence
kinds of models of intelligence.
Trying to put together
a picture of who we are,
what is human nature, what are we?
Are we just machines?
Are we just biological machines?
Are we just computers?
Or is there something
beyond the space time
physical machine?
And,
I wasn't sure,
but I kept pursuing the
mathematical models.
And in 1986,
my collaborators and I,
actually had a mathematical model.
And studying it, talking
with my collaborators,
I realized that the
mathematics was saying to me,
what you are seeing may not be the truth.
And I still remember the moment,
when I realized what the math was saying.
I wasn't trying to get
there with the math.
It was just, I was just
trying to get a general theory
of perception mathematically.
And when I realized the math was saying,
you don't necessarily see the truth,
I had to sit down.
It was such a shock to the system.
And so, that was 1986,
that was 33 years ago.
I've been now following
that thread for 33 years,
and seeing where it takes me,
and it's pretty interesting.
- So, basically, that math was
like a red pill, back then.
- I took the red pill, or at
least, it was put in my mouth.
I don't know if I swallowed it completely,
but I was concerned enough
that I wanted to look into it.
- Do you ever feel like
you wish you were back,
you'd never taken it,
and you were just like everybody else?
- Oh, no, no.
The blue pill is boring, and
so I don't wanna be there.
I want to actually,
whatever reality might be,
if it's uncomfortable, I'm ready to go,
and find out what it's like, so yeah.
- So, you know, and that brings me
to how I first got introduced to you.
So, Tony Hsieh who I used
to work with at Zappos,
I think had sent me,
he's the CEO of Zappos.
He had sent me a TED talk,
and he's like, Zubin, you're
interested in consciousness,
you should check this out.
And so, I looked at it,
and it was your TED talk.
- [Don] Okay.
Where you were saying, you know,
it was about not seeing the truth.
And I watched it, and I
said, oh, here's a scientist,
so this is interesting, visual perception,
and how we don't really
see things as they are.
They're constructions of our mind,
and not only that, but they're
not even close to reality.
They are purely iconic to help us survive,
and we're not seeing the
underlying reality at all.
And you present this
really interesting case,
and I remember having this moment.
It was a red pill moment.
- [Don] Right.
- Where right towards the end,
I was like, I was just riveted,
and at the end, I said,
oh my gosh, so what is reality?
And you just said, I
have a couple theories
of what the world actually is,
but we'll get to that another time,
or something like that.
And I was like, what, no!
So, then I went down the
Don Hoffman rabbit hole,
and watched a lot of your
lectures on what the theory is.
So, maybe we should back
up and go, you know,
you study visual perception.
Why is it that you're saying,
and in this book, "The
Case Against Reality."
You actually do this, you build a case,
chapter by chapter by chapter.
Starting with things like
split brain experiments.
Like, how is it that
you can cleave conscious
experience in two.
- [Don] Right.
- All the way up to how, you
know, insects can go extinct
by trying to have sex with a beer bottle,
because it fools their system
into thinking that's a female.
- [Don] Right.
- And all the way into quantum mechanics,
general relativity,
up to, okay, everything
we see is not what's
actually happening.
Take us on this ride a little bit,
in the way you describe it.
- Right, and also, the
reason why I take this ride.
I actually published a book
in 1998 called "Visual Intelligence."
In which I actually put out the idea
that this is all just a user interface.
So, the book.
- [Zubin] In '88?
- '98.
- [Zubin] '98.
- 1998.
And in that book, the first nine chapters
are sort of standard modern
cognitive sciences approaches
to visual perception,
but in the last chapter,
I go after this idea,
that we're seeing just an
interface, not the truth.
And my colleagues used the book
as a textbook in various
universities and so forth.
They liked the book
except that last chapter.
They go, you know,
Hoffman goes off the
rails in the last chapter.
- [Zubin] (laughs)
- And I realized that
there was only one way
I was gonna convince my
scientific colleagues
to at least take the idea seriously.
Maybe not convinced that I'm right,
but take the idea seriously.
And that was to use evolution
by natural selection.
If I could show that
evolution by natural selection
does not favor organisms
that see reality as it is,
then I would get their attention.
And I thought immediately that maybe
it would be because the
truth is too complicated,
and it would take too
much time and energy.
- [Zubin] Right.
- And it turns out that that's correct,
but it's not the real,
deep interesting reason.
So, as I explored evolution
by natural selection,
I realized there was a deeper reason
that I'd never understood before.
And the reason is this,
that fitness payoffs,
which are like.
Evolution is like a video game.
In a video game, you
have to go running around
in the screen as quickly as you can,
grabbing points to try
to get enough points
to get to the next level.
If you do, you get to the next level.
If you don't, you die.
In evolution, you're grabbing
what they call fitness payoffs.
But they're like the game points.
And you know, grabbing fitness
payoffs, that you know,
food, the right mates, and so forth.
But if you get enough, you don't
yourself to go the next level,
it's your genes that go to the next level,
and your offspring.
And what I realized is,
I started studying this
with my graduate students,
Justin Mark and Brian Merrian.
We discovered that, what's
really going on is that
the fitness payoffs themself,
which is what we're gonna
be tracking.
That's what our senses are
gonna be telling us about.
It turns out that the
fitness payoffs themselves,
in general, do not carry information about
objective reality.
They just tell you, you're about to die,
you're about to get something that,
you're good, you're bad,
don't eat this, eat that.
- [Zubin] Have sex with this,
don't have sex with this.
- That's all they're telling you,
they're not telling you about the truth.
And I can say that more mathematically,
they're not homomorphisms of reality.
So, for mathematicians,
generically fitness payoff
functions are not
homomorphisms of structures
and objective reality.
But intuitively it's just
that, fitness payoffs aren't
about the truth, they're
about what you need to do,
to stay alive.
And that secured it for me,
that was a surprise to me
that I learned around 2008, 2009.
That evolution was even further
against seeing the truth,
than I'd ever imagined.
And so, I published a paper
in 2010, in The Journal
of Theoretical Biology with
my two graduate students.
Where we announced the
results of the simulations,
we did hundreds of
thousands of simulations.
And we found that organisms
that saw the truth
in the simulations,
went extinct.
When they competed against
organisms and saw none of the
truth and were just tuned to fitness.
This is equal complexity organisms.
And so, I proposed then,
that it was a theorem.
That organisms that see reality as it is,
are never more fit,
than organisms of equal
complexity that see none of
reality, and are just
tuned to fitness payoffs.
And I went to a
mathematician, Chetan Prakash,
a long time friend.
Who was actually there in 1986,
when we were working on that mathematics.
And I proposed this theorem
to him, and he's a genius
mathematician, and he
was able to prove it.
So he actually, so we
actually have a theorem.
And then we've done further
mathematics where we
actually show, yeah, in general,
fitness payoffs,
destroy information about
the structure of the world.
And so, it's a theorem.
Organisms that see reality
as it is, cannot out compete,
organisms of equal complexity
that see none of reality
and are just tuned to fitness payoffs.
- Okay, so let me reiterate
this, cause it's important.
By the way, for people
who wanna get a more broad
overview of all this,
listen to the first show
I did with Don, which was
an audio only podcast,
where we went through
this whole arc of this.
So we're gonna go deeper in
this episode, so this is for
people who care deeply
about the nature of reality,
how we perceive it, consciousness,
and things like that,
from a scientific standpoint.
So, what you're saying is
that, if an organism sees the
world as it is,
it will go extinct,
relative to an organism,
that only sees the world
in a dumbed down way,
that hides most of
what's actually going on,
but only shows the organism.
What it needs, the bare
minimum it needs to survive
and to reproduce.
- Absolutely.
So if you waste any of your
perceptual time and energy
on the truth, you are
wasting your time and energy.
It's not gonna help you to stay alive.
And you will not be able
to out compete organisms
that spend none of their
perceptual time and energy
on the truth, and only spend
it on looking for the payoff
points that help you win the game.
So, it's like in a video game.
If some guy is playing a video game,
and he's just there looking
around, enjoying everything,
and trying to figure out
how it works, and so forth.
Looking at the pixels and so
forth, he's gonna lose to some
other woman, who is, you
know, focused on the points.
- [Zubin] On the game.
- On the game points and trying
to get them and getting to
the next level.
So, you know, if you're
dawdling around with anything
but the payoffs, you lose.
- Right, and that makes
perfect sense, because it's the
same thing trying to
understand than a video game,
if you're looking at, you
know, Grand Theft Auto.
- [Don] Right.
- You're going so,
what I'm seeing here is
a car, and a bad guy,
and a this and that.
- [Don] Right, right.
- Is that really what's there?
And the, you know, some people would say,
yeah, no that's there, because
they're deluded, but then,
scientists would say, no,
that's not what's there,
don't be stupid.
What's there, take out a
magnifying glass and look at
the screen.
There's pixels there.
- [Don] Right, right.
- So what's really there, are pixels.
And then if you go back
even deeper, you know,
it's the little tinier pixels.
- Right, and then if you
go behind the screen,
you'll see it's circuits
and software that are hidden
behind the whole screen itself.
- And is that, in that analogy
is that the true nature of
reality there, is that base reality?
- Well that shows the
difference between what we're
perceiving and whatever
objective reality might be.
- [Zubin] Right.
- So it's a good metaphor, to
help break us from the idea,
that of course we're seeing the truth.
When we see an apple on
the table, or you know,
we see the moon, it's
just natural to think,
oh, of course I'm seeing the
truth, my friends see it,
and they can see it
when my eyes are closed,
so of course I'm seeing the truth.
And I'm saying no, no,
this is all just a headset,
a virtual reality headset
that we've got on,
and I look at the moon,
I render it, just like
in virtual reality, I look
over in Grand Theft Auto,
with a virtual reality hat on.
I look at my steering
wheel, and so I'm rendering
a steering wheel, now I look over there,
I'm no longer rendering a,
there is no steering wheel,
because I'm not creating a steering wheel.
There is still in that
metaphor, the circuits and
software and all the
program of Grand Theft Auto,
that I'm not seeing at all.
I'm just seeing the stuff that
I render, as I look around,
I see cars and steering
wheels and so forth.
- And not only that, but
if you saw the circuits,
if you saw the base reality objective,
the thing in and of itself.
- [Dan] Right.
- You would not be able to
play or survive in the game.
- Right, the guy that just
sees the, the steering wheel
and the gas petal and
so forth, will beat me,
if I'm in there trying to
toggle voltages in the computer,
to try to win the game, good luck.
I won't be able to do it quickly enough.
- Now, it's important to understand this.
There's a few things you said
here, that will make people
go, wait, it made Einstein go, wait.
So you're saying the moon
doesn't exist when I don't look.
- That's exactly right.
Space and time themselves do not exist,
independent of us.
So most of us think that space
time is fundamental reality,
and all the objects inside
space time are part,
are on the stage,
this preexisting stage of space time.
And I'm saying that,
that whole idea is wrong,
that space time is something
that you create in this moment.
You're the author of space
time, you're not a bit player,
that's shown up 14 billion years later,
after the stage was set.
So we are the authors of space and time,
and all the objects that we see.
We're not bit players in space time.
- Space and time are
constructs of our interface.
- [Dan] Absolutely.
- Now, but here's the.
So this is where it
becomes very solipsistic,
if you're not careful.
So, solipsism meaning that,
no, I am the only thing that
exists, and I create the
world, and everybody else is
a figment of my imagination and so on.
How is this different than that?
- Yes, I'm not a solipsist, so.
A solipsist would say that, as you said,
that, yeah, we're creating all of this,
and there's nothing
but me and my creation.
And, I'm saying, that there
are other consciousnesses
out there.
I'm talking with you, I
believe that you're not just a
figment of my imagination.
- [Zubin] Why, thank you.
(laughs)
Means a lot to me.
- That's right.
And I'm not a figment of your imagination,
and that, you know, that puts certain
responsibilities on me.
Even though what I perceive
as just an icon of Zubin,
I need to be very, very
careful how I treat that icon.
Because in interacting with
that icon, I could literally
cause pain to the consciousness of Zubin,
and you could cause pain to me.
So our interface gives
us a genuine portal,
to other consciousnesses.
All human consciousnesses,
my cats, are my icons,
but I believe that my cat
icons, are portals to real
conscious creatures, that
again, I don't want to hurt.
And, a mouse, ants, and so forth, it goes.
The interface, I claim, as
all to other consciousnesses,
but the interface is like
a visualization tool.
And of course a visualization
tool is there to sort of
hide the complexity and dumb
things down and so forth.
Because we don't, we'd
be overwhelmed by all the
consciousnesses out there.
And so, that's what space time is,
it's a visualization tool.
- Okay, so there's a lot there,
but one thing I wanna ask,
because I know this comes up a lot.
Well why, Don, and again,
for people who really wanna
go deep in this, read the book.
Why Don, is it that, why
can't you just say, you know,
yeah, okay, we're not seeing the truth.
Maybe we're just seeing part
of the truth, maybe we're
seeing a dumbed down version
of what's actually there,
maybe there is a Don in space
and time, but we're only
seeing enough of it, that
we need to see to survive,
we don't see infrared,
we don't see microwaves,
we don't see X-rays.
I can't see it, you know,
microscopic, you know,
quark-level, but this stuff exist,
we're only seeing some of it.
And wouldn't that help us survive?
- And that's what most of
my colleagues would say.
They would say, of course
evolution didn't shape us to
see all of the truth.
It only shaped us to see those
parts of objective reality,
that we need to stay alive.
And so that's the standard view.
And what I'm saying is,
that if you look at the
mathematics of evolution.
Very, very carefully.
It's called evolutionary game theory.
We don't have to wave
our hands about this,
so to my scientific
colleagues who are thinking
intuitively about evolution,
of course they know,
evolutionary game theory is
a precise mathematical model.
And when you look at that
mathematics, it says very, very
clearly, that it's not the
case that we're seeing just
those parts of the truth that we need,
we're seeing none of the
truth, almost surely.
We're seeing entirely a user interface.
And the whole point of a user interface.
Like, for example, again,
Grand Theft Auto, right.
The whole point, there's
nothing in what you see in
Grand Theft Auto, that in any
way resembles the circuits
and software and voltages,
that in that metaphor is the reality.
There's just no resemblance whatsoever.
And, that's not a problem, that's in fact,
an advantage.
It allows you to control the
reality, even though you're
completely ignorant about its true nature.
And that's what evolution has done for us.
I'm saying, we're not seeing
just little bits of the
truth that we need, we're
seeing none of the truth,
and that's what allows
us to control the truth,
effectively.
Because we don't know
anything about the truth,
it'll be too complicated.
And it's just not what we,
we need simple eye candy,
that let's us do what we need to do.
- So the truth is very
complicated, in order to survive
and utilize what actually
exists in reality.
Because you're saying, stuff exists.
- [Don] Sure.
- Stuff meaning, let's put that in quotes,
There is a world.
- [Don] Right.
- It's not a figment of
our imagination, it is a
construction, in other
words, it's like desktop on a
computer, it's a good analogy
you use, you see a trash
icon, you can do things to
that trash icon, you can throw
away stuff that you wanna throw
away, you can accidentally
delete something, and effectively die.
- [Don] Right.
- Because the stuff is gone,
so you don't take the trash
icon literally, you don't say,
oh there's actually
there's a trash icon there,
but you take it seriously.
- [Don] Absolutely.
- But, behind that trash
icon, are zeros and one's and
voltage gates, and quantum
engineering, you know.
This microscopic level that you don't see.
And if you saw it, you wouldn't
be able to compose an email.
- Absolutely.
And we pay good money for
these interfaces to hide
the truth.
There are all these engineers
at these high tech companies
that are spending untold
hours, thousands upon thousands
of hours to simplify, give us
this user interface so that we
don't have to deal with
all dials, and resisters,
and voltages.
- [Zubin] That's right.
And then there's organizations
like Epic Systems,
that makes a big electronic health record,
that spend hours and hours and hours
making it more complicated.
More difficult to use.
- [Don] (laughs).
- So, that being said, okay,
so let's say we're not seeing
the truth at all, we're
seeing a fitness function.
We're seeing a user
interface that we generate,
in a species specific way.
So, in other words, a cat,
that we see as an icon,
of this furry thing.
We cannot really get into
it's conscious experience.
Because the icon we see is
kind of just enough of the cat,
for us to survive, we know
we can't really eat it,
usually.
- [Don] Right, right.
- We can pet it, it's gonna
be, it has claws that could
hurt us, but it's also very
affectionate which is a
fitness payoff for stress reduction.
- [Don] Right, right.
- So we see all those
things, but we can't dig into
its mind, and go, oh, what's
its experience of the taste
of cat food, or of being
brushed, or whatever.
And that, but we can kind of guess,
because we can see when its
unhappy or upset or angry.
But when you get to the level
of this bottle of water.
- [Don] Yes.
- Now, you're telling me, of right now,
that this is an icon.
- [Don] Yes.
- I see it as wet, if I
drink it, I'm probably gonna
do okay, if I'm thirsty.
- [Don] Right.
- Etc.
But this is where I think
now, so you've talked about
what the world isn't.
The world isn't exactly what we see.
- [Don] Right.
- That's a fitness payoff
set of icons, okay.
So interface theory of
perception is what you talk about
in the book.
- [Don] Right.
- The theory that you have
of that, no, we're not seeing
things as they are.
And that dates back to
your experience early
on with the math of that.
But then, there's a parallel
thing that you talk about
in the book.
- [Don] Right.
- Which is, and they're related, they come
together, but it's this.
How is it, that we are aware of anything?
- [Don] Yes.
- How is it that a mass of goo
in our brain, these neurons,
gives us the taste of chocolate,
or the smell of an orange,
or the feeling of love?
And no one has ever been
able to explain that in any
meaningful way.
- [Don] Right.
- And so, how does that
relate to this whole thing,
because one thing that people
would say, Don is like well,
we're just living in the matrix then,
it's someone's simulation.
It makes perfect sense, of
course we're seeing icons.
- [Don] Right.
- It's a simulation.
But the base reality is there somewhere.
- Right, and so that's
called the hard problem of
consciousness.
And it's widely acknowledged,
it's one of the big open
problems in science today.
We have all these correlations
between brain activity,
and conscious experiences,
like if I take a magnet,
and use it to inhibit area
V4, in the right hemisphere of
your brain, visualery
V4, you will lose all
conscious experience of color
in your left visual field.
- [Zubin] So the color just drains.
- [Don] It just drains away,
everything that you see the
objects, but it's like a black
and white television image.
And then I turn off the magnet,
and the color comes back.
And we have dozens of these,
so called, neural correlates
of consciousness.
So we know that brain
activity and consciousness
experiences are correlated.
But scientists, my colleagues,
and my good friends,
have been trying for
decades, very, very hard,
to come up with a scientific
theory about how brain activity
could cause conscious experiences.
That's the standard view,
and they've not been able to do it.
- And this is not for lack of trying.
- [Don] Oh, right.
- So, then, the information
and theory, you have Tononi,
you have even folks like
Dan, Dan had another saying
that consciousness is a
kind of elaborate illusion.
Others saying that it has to
do with the quantum collapse,
and neural microtubules.
- [Don] Exactly.
- And it seems like in most
of these sort of physicalist
interpretations, their assuming something,
and this is how it
relates to your original
line of reasoning.
- [Don] Right.
- They're assuming that
there's a physical world.
- [Don] Right.
- Of matter,
that exists.
That atoms build up, molecules
build up, cells build up.
Neurons.
And these neurons are causal.
- [Don] Right.
- They actually cause something to happen,
in a physical world,
that somehow emerges
the taste of chocolate,
the feeling of love, this
objective experience.
- [Don] That's right.
- And that, if you give me
that, right, then I can spin
you up a world, and somewhere
we'll figure out at some
point, how that leads to consciousness.
We're just not smart enough,
maybe we will never be
smart enough to figure it out.
Maybe these theories are
on the right track, etc.
But, the truth is, we're not even close.
- [Don] Right.
- Starting with physical matter.
In other words, assuming
what you've already said,
is that not a valid assumption?
Which is that the world
exists as we see it.
In other words, matter
is real, atoms are real,
electrons are real, as
such, neurons are real.
So, the failure of a lot
of scientists who have been
working on this, including
people like Crick.
- [Don] Right.
- And others who you have worked with,
who are, you know, colleagues of yours.
It's been a struggle,
and so this the hard
problem of consciousness.
Let's just work on it more
using a physicalist basis,
which is atoms exist, neurons exist.
But you're saying, what
if we're just wrong,
and we've made a rookie mistake.
- [Don] Right.
- And what's that about?
- That's right.
So we've assumed that neurons exist,
even if they're not perceived.
And that neural activity causes
our conscious experiences,
or neural activity in an
embodied brain, right.
So it's your brain and
your body interacting with
an environment.
And, most of my colleagues, I'd say,
95 to 99% of my colleagues working on this
hard problem of
consciousness are assuming,
of course that's the form of the solution.
Neural activity, somehow will cause
our conscious experiences.
But, as you've pointed out,
we've been utterly unable
to come up with a scientific
explanation for even one
conscious experience.
So I, and these are
all my friends, I mean,
Stuart Hameroff who does the
neural microtubules idea,
we're buddies.
But when we get on stage, at
a conference, I'll ask him,
so, Stuart, we're interested
in doing science here,
can you use your collapse
of neural microtubules
quantum states to explain
any particular conscious
experience, the taste of
vanilla, the smell of a rose,
a headache, any one, is there
any conscious experience
that you can explain this
way, and he'll say no.
And I say, well, next year
I'll ask you the same question.
And that's the problem,
I'll sit with integrated
information theory.
I've asked Julio Tononi,
you know, a couple of times.
Can you use your theory, to
give a integrated information
circuit, that cause all
circuit, that is, or causes,
the taste of chocolate, or
anything, and he can't do it.
And so, until we can actually
have a scientific theory
that actually makes specific predictions,
this is the circuit, or this
is the microtubules collapse,
that has to be the taste of chocolate,
it could not be the smell of garlic,
and these are the principal reasons why.
Until then, there's not
enough science on the table to
actually even like falsify these things.
What they're really proposing
are, there are these
interesting correlates, and
it's true, that there are
very interesting EEG correlates,
complexity correlates,
of consciousness.
And there may be neuronal
tubules collapse of
quantum state correlates,
I'm good with that,
I'm not disputing that.
The question is not
about these correlations,
the question is, where is the theory?
Sure these things are
correlated, that's fine.
Where is the theory that
says, what is causing what?
Or if its an identity theory,
you're saying, no, no,
its not the activity in the
brain that's causing the.
The activity is the conscious
experience in the brain.
And so that's one gamble
that they'll take, fine.
Give me precisely the class
of neuronal activity that is
the taste of chocolate, and
tell me why it could not be
identical to the taste of vanilla.
Until we're doing that, we
again, are not doing science.
And there's nothing on the table there.
So, that's why it was realizing
that these really brilliant
colleagues, and they're good
people, they're brilliant,
they're trying very, very hard.
And it, you know, it's a
framework, physicalism is a
framework that's worked
for three centuries.
It's done a lot of good stuff,
so they're not stupid to
use that framework.
It has given us all sorts
of insights and modern
technologies, so, it's actually
a smart move on their part.
But I don't think it'll work.
I don't think you can start
with unconscious ingredients,
and boot up consciousness.
It's just that simple.
- Okay, let me say that again.
Don does not think you
can start with unconscious
ingredients and boot up consciousness.
So either, if that's true.
- [Don] Right.
- It means, either, there
is unconscious ingredients.
- [Don] Right.
- And some outside consciousness.
- [Don] Right.
- You know, whether it's soul
or spirit or consciousness,
whatever you call it.
- [Don] Right.
And that's a dualistic--
- [Don] Right.
Kind of philosophy.
- [Don] Right.
- And so, panpsychism, is
one philosophy that says,
oh, no you're right
Don, you cannot boot up
consciousness from
non-conscious ingredients.
So, this bottle, is both a
bottle, it's a physical thing.
It's full of atoms and H2O.
But it also has a
valance of consciousness,
that's kinda tacked on
and associated with that.
- [Don] Yes.
- And what,
what's wrong with that theory?
I mean, is there anything
wrong with that, is that?
- Well, so I also have good
friends who are, you know,
who take that theory quite seriously.
They're panpsychists, and it.
Russel, Bertrand Russel,
the very famous logician
and philosopher, was one of
the first to propose this
kind of thing.
He pointed out that the laws of physics,
are quite good, at
describing what matter does.
But they don't tell us what
matter is, intrinsically.
And so, he proposed, and
others as well, that maybe,
what matter is, intrinsically
is conscious experiences.
And it's and interesting
philosophical idea.
But what's happened is,
it has never been turned into science.
So panpsychism is a philosophical stance,
and an interesting one.
But no one has been able to
turn it into a mathematically
precise scientific theory.
So as a scientist, there's
nothing on the table for me.
And, most versions of it
are as you say, dualist.
And most scientists, are
not on board with dualism.
We want a simple a foundation
to scientific theories,
as possible.
Something we call accom's
razor, make your assumptions
as simple as possible
in trying to explain,
the phenomenon of science.
And the two experiments are,
or I'm sorry, two theories
can explain the same
phenomenon, but one is simpler
in it's premises than of course
choose the simpler theory.
And so, most scientists,
myself included what we call a
monistic theory, where we only
have one kind of assumption.
There is, for example,
only physical stuff.
So a physicalist is a monist.
And so they're obeying accom's
razor, except that they
can't solve the problem.
So accom's razor only applies
if you can solve the problem.
So their theory cannot solve the problem.
And I, so you could be a
dualist, panpsychism as a
dualism, but it's not a scientific theory.
It's a philosophical position.
And that I'm proposing,
just go with consciousness.
Let's have a mathematically precise theory
of consciousness that starts
as simple as possible,
and then we have to boot
up what we call space time,
and the physical world,
as,
conscious experiences,
within conscious agents,
that they're using as an
interface, a simplifying
interface to help them
interact with other conscious agents.
- So, you're monism,
you're keeping with accom's razor,
and keeping it as simple as possible.
Saying, okay, the materialists,
are saying everything is physical matter,
and somewhere in from the big
bang up through evolution,
a miracle emerges, and
that's consciousness.
- [Don] Right.
- That we can't explain yet.
You're saying, well, maybe
this is just a rookie mistake.
- [Don] Right.
- We're mistaking our interface,
which sees physical things.
- [Don] Exactly.
- Which are physical,
because they're hard when we feel them,
in other words the experience
of holding this bottle
is a pressure, solidity, liquidity, color,
luminance,
these kind of things.
And so, of course, since
that's how I see the world,
I'm gonna assume, this
is fundamental reality.
- [Don] Yes.
- And it turns out for
the last 300, 400 years,
that's worked really well.
- [Don] Absolutely.
- We can build, ipad's and
microphones, and transmit 4K
video signals, based on our
manipulation of our icons
in our desktop interface.
So, it makes perfect
sense, until you go well,
but then how do we boot up consciousness?
- [Don] Right.
Why is it that quantum
mechanics in general relativity
don't really mesh?
- [Don] Exactly.
- Why is it that quantum
mechanics is so strange?
In other words, why is it that
the idea of local realism.
In other words, that something exists
when it isn't observed,
in a particular spin or you
know, momentum, or whatever.
And that, you know, entangled
particles can somehow
interact in a way that violates
locality, meaning things,
communicating less fast
than the speed of light.
- [Don] Yes.
- Let's shelf that and say
that physicalism is true
and we get a miracle of
consciousness and we get the
mystery of quantum mechanics.
- [Don] Right, right.
- If that make sense.
What you're saying is, and
this is what compelled me.
You're saying, scientifically,
science is not a dogma,
it's a method of study.
- [Don] Right.
- You can study this
looking at the other way,
the rookie mistake is well
we confused our interface
with reality.
What if we said, reality was
the thing we're trying to
explain, which is consciousness.
Everything is consciousness,
exchanging experience,
experiences, the currency of everything.
- [Don] Right.
- And from that fundamental
building block, the smallest
conscious agent, you can spin
up the interface, reality,
quantum mechanics, every
conscious experience.
- [Don] That's right.
- Everything from near death
experiences, to different
levels of consciousness,
to higher instantiation of
consciousness, all that.
Is that correct?
- Absolutely.
So I'm saying that
consciousness is fundamental.
So I'm gonna try to do it as
you say, a scientific theory
in which I precisely state,
with mathematical precision,
exactly what I mean by, what
I call a conscious agent.
So it's a mathematically precise term.
And I can talk about how
conscious agents interact,
how they share experiences
and how as they interact,
they create new conscious agents.
And so I get a dynamical system.
Think about it as, a vast social network.
Like the Twitterverse.
These conscious agents
are passing experiences
and receiving experiences,
like tweeting and following.
And, just like in the
Twitterverse, there's tens of
millions of Twitter users
and billions of tweets,
and lots of stuff trending.
No one could really grasp that
the whole richness of that,
of the Twitterverse.
And whenever we have
overwhelming social media data,
what we do with big data is,
we find visualization tools.
To allow us to grasp what,
the just of what's going on there.
And that's what we have in
space and time and what we
call the physical world.
That's just a visualization tool that
some conscious agents use,
to deal with this vast social
network of conscious agents.
And we've made the rookie
mistake of mistaking
our visualization tool
for the final reality.
- So space and time are desktop.
They are a, to some extent they
are a data compression tool.
- [Don] That's right.
- So by having three dimensions of space,
you get a little extra error correction.
- [Don] Right.
- Because all you really
need are two dimensions,
cause the holographic principle,
which we talked about
on the past show too.
- [Don] Right.
- Says that, really all you
need is a two dimensional
space with bits of information,
and you can encode,
three dimensional truth, or experience.
So, what if the fundamental
bits of information are
experience, consciousness awareness.
Outside of space and time,
space and time is our construct.
And in order to, then it
starts to evolve over time,
so you have these one
bit conscious agents.
- [Don] Right.
- That can then combine and
instantiate, that's the term
we use, higher level
conscious agents that evolve,
compete in this vast social
network, by exchanging
experience, and it turns
out the way humans exchange
experiences is in a 3D space
time, desktop video game.
- [Don] Exactly.
- Where the Don icon,
who's facial expressions,
are such that, I've
evolved to be able to read.
- [Don] Right.
- To the degree that I can.
- [Don] Right.
- Assuming you're not
trying to deceive me.
- [Don] Right.
- And, it works very well, for us.
It dumbs down everything else.
We see a rock as a rock.
- [Don] Right.
- But in your conception
then, we see this rock.
And this is where people get really upset,
when I talk about this
theory they get angry,
they'll like, you telling
me a rock is conscious, bro?
That rock doesn't know me,
okay, I've thrown rocks,
now I feel guilty.
- [Don] (laughs).
- That's not really what you're saying.
What are you saying about a rock?
- That's right.
So, I'm not saying that
a rock is conscious.
And in fact, I'm not saying
that, when I look at you,
the icon that I'm perceiving,
I'm perceiving your face
and your body, but those are
my perceptions, it's my icon.
That icon is not conscious.
Zubin Damania, the conscious
agent, is conscious.
I don't see, Zubin Damania,
the conscious agent.
I just see skin, hair and eyes,
and that's my, my portal.
In my interface, into the
consciousness of Zubin Damania.
When I see a cat, I've got a
portal, that's not as clear,
right, into the consciousness of my cat.
When I see an ant, my
portal is really giving up.
And when I see something, I call a rock,
I am interacting with conscious agents.
But my interface has to give
up, that's the whole point of
the interface, is dumbing things down.
So of course at some point,
I'm gonna get no clue into
the realm of conscious
agents from my interface.
That's the whole point.
At some point you're saying it's too much,
it's too complicated, I'm
just gonna ignore all that
aspect of objective
reality of consciousness.
So, just like my Zubin
Damania icon is unconscious,
the rock is unconscious,
but my Zubin Damania icon,
is a portal into the
consciousness of the real
Zubin Damania.
That allows Zubin to interact
with my consciousness
and me to interact with
Zubin's consciousness.
Whereas with a rock, the portal is closed.
I am interacting with conscious agents,
but the portal is closed,
there's no way that I know
what I'm doing with them.
And I don't see them really
doing too much to me.
- So, let me see if I can
understand this with my
monkey mind.
In my interface, all right.
So a rock, we're seeing.
I'm constructing, when
I look in the direction
of a rock, and when I even
say direction, I'm talking in
space time language.
- [Don] Right.
- Which is our interface.
So we're sharing that interface.
By the way, the reason you see
the rock and I see the rock,
the same way, is that
we evolved in similar
space time interface.
- [Don] That's right.
- And we're interacting with
the same objective reality.
- [Don] Yes.
- So people who say, well,
my car, you know, is my interface,
it's not yours, no, no, no.
We have the same species
specific in a race.
To a large extent.
- [Don] To a large extent.
- If we talk about extent
exceptions to that,
cause they actually prove the rule.
We agree there's a rock
there, because we're looking
at the same conscious agent,
the same icon that's pointing to this.
But it turns out that
evolution hid the truth,
about that rock.
- [Don] Right.
- From us, because if I
actually saw what it was,
first of all, it won't help me reproduce,
it won't help me survive.
What helps me survive,
is seeing it as a rock.
- [Don] Right.
- Because in my space time
interface, there's a certain
energy it takes to pick it up,
I can use it as a tool perhaps.
- [Don] Right.
- Maybe I can pulverize it
into it's constituent icons.
- [Don] Right.
- Manipulate my icons to build, concrete.
- [Don] Right.
- So, that's helpful.
But I don't need to know
what's the actual experiential
substrate of it.
- That's exactly right.
I am doing something, when I take a rock,
and I crack it in half.
I am doing something in the
realm of conscious agents,
but I'm utterly ignorant
about what that is.
Whereas in the case of
the Zubin Damania icon,
there's a lot of course,
that's going on in your
consciousness that I'm unaware of.
But I am genuinely
aware, unless of course,
you're trying to fool me.
I am genuinely aware of
some of your emotions,
some of your thoughts,
and some of your feelings.
So there's a genuine portal there.
Whereas the portal into
the realm of consciousness,
it's very, very obscure with a rock.
And one reason why we're
so stuck on these objects,
why, you know, we say,
look, there's a rock there,
you see a rock, my friend sees a rock.
If I don't look, I can go
touch it, and I can feel the
rock, so there really is a rock there.
The reason we, objects
like the rock and the moon,
and trees and so forth, have
such a grip on our imagination.
It is something that Piaget
called object permanents.
By the time we're 18 months
of age, he points out,
before 18 months of age, Piaget said,
if you show a baby a doll,
it'll play with a doll.
And then you take the doll and
you put it behind a pillow,
and for the baby that's
not yet 18 months of age,
they act as though the
doll ceased to exist.
And, but after the age 18
months, then Piaget said,
you get object permanence.
And you put the doll behind the pillow,
and now the baby is looking
for the doll behind the pillow
if they wanna play with it.
And later research show, that Piaget,
his techniques were too
crude, actually we get object
permanence maybe around
four months of age.
But the point is, that we're
built to have this assumption,
that objects exist, and are real,
even when we don't perceive them.
And that's just automatically
built into our psychology,
to our perceptual psychology,
before we're at the age of reason.
Before we can even argue about it.
So by the time you come
to the age of reason,
that's just one of the deep assumptions
that we bring to the world.
It's not an assumption we question.
And so, that's why its so
hard for us to question that.
We've always believed it,
from the time we could ever
even start thinking.
We've always believed that
objects exist, and are real,
and don't depend on us
for their existence.
And so, I'm challenging
something that was built into
us, before we could reason against it.
(laughing)
- And therein I think, lies
the challenge in this theory.
I think a lot of people
intuitively reject it.
- [Don] Right.
- It's like kinda being
shown the red pill,
and saying, I wanna go back in the matrix,
this makes no sense to me.
- [Don] Yes.
- Everything I intuit about
the nature of reality is that
physical objects exist in space and time.
Now, again, I wanna double
down on making clear,
that you are not saying
there isn't a reality,
you are not saying we
create objective reality.
- [Don] Right.
- You're saying we
create a representation.
- [Don] Right.
- Of what is objective
reality, and that objective
reality consists of a vast
social network of conscious
agents interacting with each other,
and exchanging experience.
- Absolutely.
I have life insurance.
And that's a bet, that there is a reality
that exists.
And we're like, my wife's
consciousness could persist,
even if I'm dead.
- [Zubin] Yes.
- And, so I'm betting that
there is an objective reality
that exists even if I don't
perceive it, so much of your
experiential world right now
is a reality, and I'm not
perceiving but a tiny little
part of your experiential
reality, the part that
you're letting me see.
And even if you try to
let me see most of it,
I could never experience
all the colors and emotions
and things that you're experiencing.
So, I'm, you have an objective reality.
And every person on the planet,
has a conscious objective reality,
that doesn't depend on my
perception for it to exist.
So I'm not a solipsist, there
is an objective reality.
But, space and time and physical objects,
those are my virtual reality.
We have a headset on.
This is all a virtual reality headset.
And as I move around,
I'm rendering the chair,
I'm rendering a bottle,
I'm rendering a table.
And them I'm garbage
collecting, as I move around.
The conscious agents that
I'm interacting with,
are still there.
Whether or not I'm rendering anything.
But, all I can do is to render
my interface as my way of
interacting with those conscious agents.
- That's pretty awesome.
See to me, that makes perfect
sense, and it actually,
it feels more valid than a
physicalist interpretation.
- [Don] Yes.
- Because at, now, there's
a lot of weirdness in this.
- [Don] Yes.
- That we could talk about
for hours, and I think we
should make this point,
that there are quite a few
physicists now, that
are saying things like,
space time as a objective
reality is doomed.
It's not, it doesn't make sense.
- [Don] Right.
- And, looking at, and you do
this in the book very well.
Going through quantum
mechanics and saying, hey,
what's going on here?
This actually doesn't make
sense, if you're trying to say
that objects exist in and of
themselves in space and time.
Then you have to kind of
say, well quantum mechanics
isn't right, but all
experimental evidence shows,
that it is right.
And it's weird in a way, that
it's more consistent with
the conscious agent theory,
than it is with the physicalist theory.
Am I wrong about that?
- No, you're right in the following sense,
that,
experiments have shown that
local realism is false.
So the joint claim that,
objects exist and have
definite values of their properties,
like position, momentum and spin.
And that those properties
have influences that propagate
through space and time, no
faster than the speed of light.
So the joint of those two,
has been shown that,
which is local realism.
That's shown to be false.
Now, some physicists will
then go and say, well look,
I still wanna keep the realism.
Like David Baum, for example.
- [Zubin] Right.
- He'd propose that.
Electron has a position, and momentum,
even when its not
observed a definite value.
But that there's these
non local influences.
But there's another aspect,
another theorem about,
what's called non-contextual realism.
Which says, and non-contextual
realism, it turns out.
Non-contextual realism contradicts,
quantum theory.
So, if you're a quantum
theorist, you have to say
that non-contextualism realism is false.
And that says, both that
realism, so it's realism,
but also that the properties,
like position, momentum,
and spin, have values
that don't depend on how
you look at them.
How you observe them.
- [Zubin] Doesn't depend on the context.
Doesn't depend on the measurement.
- That's the claim of
non-contextual realism.
And non-contextual realism is false.
And notice, that's false
independent of local,
locality issues.
So, I think non-contextual
realism is the real
tough one here for our idea of realism.
To say that a physical
object has definite positions
and other properties,
momentum spin and so forth.
That don't depend on how we
observe them, that is false.
And that gets really closer
to the heart of saying,
well, now the realism is
the really bad thing here.
But then you pointed out
that, that state of the art
physicists, like Nima Arkani-Hamed,
at the institute for
advanced study at Princeton.
They're saying, look, when
we try to bring general
relativity, and quantum field
theory, the standard model
of physics together into
some kind of, you know,
theory of everything,
or unified theory.
We're finding that we're gonna
have to let go of space time.
That physics, for the last
three centuries has been about
what happens inside space and time.
And now, we're going to have
to let go of space time.
It's not fundamental,
there's something else,
that's more fundamental
from which space time arises
as an emergent concept or property.
And they don't know what
that deeper thing is.
He's dealing with something
called, that he calls the
amplituhedron.
And what he's finding is,
in the large hadron collider,
when they, you know
shoot particles and smash
them into each other,
and you start having these interesting
events, like two glue-ons,
smashing into each other
and four glue-ons spraying away.
You try to write down the
probabilities, what they call the
scattering amplitudes.
But the probabilities
are for things to happen.
All these smashing and scattering events.
And you find if you do
it inside space and time,
so you do al this calculations
in space and time.
The math is nasty, you
get hundreds of pages,
even a thousand pages of algebra
that you have to compute.
And they've discovered,
you miss certain symmetries
in the data, that are there,
but cannot be expressed
in space time.
But if you go to this deeper,
geometry, that he calls
the amplituhedron.
You capture these deeper
symmetries that are not
expressible in space time.
And the math becomes trivial.
You can write it on
the back of an envelope
and calculate it by hand.
And so, these two things start
to convince physicists that,
hey, space time has had a
good run, it was a great
horse, for 300 years.
It's been really, really good.
But that doesn't mean it's the truth.
It was a really good
vehicle for our thoughts,
for several centuries.
Now it's come to the
end of its usefulness.
We need something deeper.
And they don't know what
the deeper thing is.
And the really, brilliant thinkers,
at the state of art
aren't worried about that.
For them this is like,
holy smoke, fabulous,
there's something new to learn here.
The old guys and their space
time, they did a good job,
but us young guys, are gonna
do something even more fun.
So what's behind space and time?
And how does it give
rise to space and time.
Whatever the new theory is,
it will be constrained
by our old theories.
Whatever the new theory is,
when we project it into space time.
We better get back general relativity,
or generalization of it.
And also the standard model,
or a souped up version of it.
So we can't throw away what we've done,
we don't wanna throw away what we've done.
In fact, it's a good, all
the work that we've done in
the physicalist space time
science, is great work.
It is a constraint on any
deeper theory we have,
it better project back in
space time to our current
scientific theories.
And the same is true of my
models of consciousness.
I will be able to test them
as I develop the theory of
conscious agents and get the
mathematics of the evolution
of consciousness.
One constraint of my theory will be,
when I project it back
into space and time.
I better get back all of modern science.
Evolution by natural selection.
General relativity, quantum field theory.
Or hopefully, even
generalizations of those theories.
If I can't do that, I'm wrong.
And, if I'm not smart
enough to figure out,
what the dynamics of
consciousness is about.
Then what I will probably do, or my team,
is to look at the dynamics
that we know about in space
and time.
Pull it back from the interface,
into the realm of
conscious agents, and ask,
what kind of dynamics would
give rise to the dynamics
in space and time.
- [Zubin] Reverse engineering.
- Reverse engineering, and then go, oh so,
that's what consciousness is about.
So, I hope to do it from first principles.
But if I can't, then I'm
gonna fall back to, okay,
let's you know, I'm just not
bright enough to figure it out,
so we'll try to pull it
back in reverse engineering.
- In which, you know, the
Chinese are very good at this.
- [Don] Yeah.
- They're pretty smart, so.
- It works.
- [Zubin] Yeah, it works.
Okay, all that is, again
in my, I'm a doctor.
I'm just a medical doctor, Don.
I'm very, very limited in my icon,
in my desktop understanding
of this, but I'll say this,
that physics and that sort of.
And I'm gonna argue this,
medicine has hit a wall.
- [Don] Yes.
- And so, we've been on
a tear for centuries,
like you said, and it's because
we've really figured out
in fine grain detail how to
master this space time icon
desktop that we have.
So we're really good
at manipulating icons.
- [Don] Yes.
- Surgery is manipulating icons.
- [Don] Right.
- We're not playing, we
don't understand conscious
agents or anything underneath it.
We're like, I remove
appendix to outside of this
physical space, patient doesn't die.
- [Don] Yes.
- I take gallstone out of this
tube, patient doesn't die,
or have pain.
So actually there's an
experiential connection, right.
Patient no longer experiences pain.
- [Don] Yes.
- If I move this icon here.
But now we're at a wall, where we're like,
how do we explain schizophrenia?
Our reductionist, materialist approaches,
are no longer working.
We're finding that things
like the placebo effect,
the sort of mind body
integration, these kind of ideas.
We can't explain them
properly, because we're using a
physicalist framework.
- [Don] That's right.
- We're mistaking our
interface for reality,
and we're running up to
the boundaries of that.
- [Don] Right.
- We're now, well, how
do you explain this?
Well, what I think about
your theory is, you're saying
well, okay, this is
the next iteration now.
Let's reframe all this, same science,
you don't throw anything out.
- [Don] Right, right.
- You transcend and include,
and say, yeah, of course.
- [Don] Exactly.
- In our interface that
makes perfect sense.
Here's what's beyond the
interface, maybe now we can solve
these bigger problems of,
how it is that all these.
And you gonna, we're gonna
have to get in to how it is
that conscious agents even work, so.
Maybe that's a next part
of this conversation, yeah.
But so, I think that's
where the opportunity is,
with your theory, if it's true,
you have a mathematical model
of how conscious agents exert
dynamics with each other.
- [Don- Right.
- How they instantiate
higher levels of conscious,
more complex conscious agents.
So, in that world, you
and me are both perceive,
decide, act, that's what we're able to do.
- [Don] Right, exactly.
- But we're made up of
smaller conscious agents.
- [Don] Right.
- That are nested, that also do that.
That feed up experience
to us at the higher level,
and we feed down to them,
and it's this dynamic
relationship that creates a human.
- [Don] Absolutely.
- And also, keep
psychotherapists employed.
- [Don] That's right.
(laughs)
- It's our unconscious
mind is actually nested
conscious agents that are
in their own way conscious.
But that we can't directly access that.
- That's right.
And, I think there's a good,
as we get into the realm
of conscious agents and talk
about how they're nested,
and so forth.
I think it's good to step
up, just for a second,
and say that, as you were
just saying a moment ago.
We've gotten very, very
good at the interface.
We're like, in the Grand
Theft Auto example,
that we're using.
We were like, we've
become wizards at playing
Grand Theft Auto.
And its, we've been,
become stunningly good.
We used to be really bad
at playing our interface,
and we died from not being
able to take out, you know,
problems, in the body and so forth.
And now we've gotten
really, so we're wizards at
Grand Theft Auto.
But now imagine someone,
who discovers that,
Grand Theft Auto, that's
just a program on the screen,
that you're seeing.
There's all this circuits and
software, and they actually
get access to the code.
And they realize that
they can hack the code.
They can start to do
stuff to Grand Theft Auto,
that the wizards are
gonna go, that is magical,
I had no idea that you could do that.
So the wizards themselves
will be left in the dust.
And that's what this new
level of seeing the conscious
agents beyond objective
reality is gonna open up
a Pandora's box.
It will be allowing us
to get behind the screen.
And get into the source code of the game.
And even change the parameters,
perhaps of space and time.
So, this is going to be the
technology that comes out of
this, is going to be
truly, truly stunning.
We've, all of our science,
are scientific tools, and our
theories have been about the
interface, and how it works.
We've been wonderful at that.
The tools of science are up to the job,
of going beyond the
interface, and looking at this
realm of conscious agents
that are behind the interface.
And then reverse engineering
that whole thing,
and playing our interface.
So this is gonna bring a
lot of responsibility to us,
because it's gonna open up.
Once we understand the mapping
from conscious agents into
our space time interface.
We understand how to hack it.
Who knows what kind of
technologies are gonna open up.
This is great for science fiction.
To think about the possibilities.
But it will be,
it'll leave current scientific
technology in the dust.
It's gonna be a whole new level.
But now we can go after the,
what I think, right now,
my ideas are about this
conscious agents realm.
And I should say, what you described,
is exactly how I'm thinking about it.
That you can have these
simple one bit agents,
and its really asteer,
conscious realm.
I mean, there's only two
experiences that this
consciousness has.
What would it be like to
be such an asteer conscious
agent, you know it's hard
to put myself into the shoes
of that conscious agent.
When they interact, you
can have 2-bit agents
and 4-bit agents and all
the way up to infinity.
So you could have
infinite conscious agents.
And, this opens really
interesting technical questions.
How many infinite
conscious agents are there?
Is there one, biggest, all inclusive,
infinite conscious agent.
I mean, this is going to be
a matter of theorems now.
I don't know the answer.
Maybe there are a bunch of
infinite conscious agents,
and what not, one at the top.
Or maybe there is, just the one.
In which case we're all
conscious agents that are part
of this one big conscious
agent, but we're all genuinely
single conscious agents ourself,
interacting with the one.
So, these kinds of issues
which are obviously in this
spiritual realm now.
When we talk about infinite
consciousness and so forth,
we're talking about things
that various eastern
and western spiritual
traditions have tabled about.
But, we've only used words.
For the first time, we
can use mathematics.
And my definition of conscious
agent is probably wrong,
and my definition of.
So I could propose, a definition of God.
It's the one infinite conscious agent.
So for the first time, I've
proposed a mathematically
precise theory of the word God.
Of course I'm probably wrong.
That's not the point.
The point is to have something
precise on the table,
so now, science can start.
Because once you got something
precise on the table,
then people can jump on it
and say, well I think it's
wrong because of that, and
if we do this experiment,
we'll show you that you're wrong.
Now, we can actually
start to evolve our ideas.
And so that's what I want as
one feature out of this theory,
is that we can get a
scientific spirituality.
The biggest and deepest
questions, the most human
and personal questions,
that for thousands of years,
we've only had,
words.
Lectures.
But no mathematically precise
statements and predictions.
Why shouldn't we use the best
tools of understanding that
we have, namely the scientific method.
To address the questions that
are the most important to us,
as human beings.
Science is up to the task.
And so, what I want to see is,
an interaction between the.
I think the genuine ideas
that the spiritual traditions
have come up with.
And the new methods of
science, that take those ideas,
make them absolutely precise,
make rigorous predictions
that we can test.
And then go back and forth.
That's how we find out, which
of our ideas are the genuine
insights and which are just nonsense.
And of course, we have both.
And spiritual traditions have both,
they have genuine insights,
and they'll have nonsense.
And, how do we figure out which is which?
We start to use a scientific
method to make all of our ideas
precise and then test them,
and then see what works and what doesn't.
So I'm very interested in
those potential outcomes
in science and
spirituality, to break down,
what is a bit of a animosity
right now between the two.
- Non-overlapping magisteria.
- That's right.
As Stephen Jay Gould said, right.
- And you're arguing, no,
you can use the scientific
method, to have a scientifically
precise spirituality that has to do with.
It starts with consciousness agent theory,
and boots up everything.
Because higher agents than
us, maybe classically,
have been called angels.
- [Don] Right.
- Higher agents than that,
may have classically,
been called gods.
- [Don] Right.
- Higher agents that that,
may have classically,
been called God.
- [Don] Exactly.
- And you can actually start
to talk about it in a way,
where people don't look
at you like you're insane.
Because you're not, it's
not based on belief,
it's based on, well, let's test this.
- Absolutely.
And by the way, the ideas
that I'm putting out here,
I'll be the first to
say, I'm probably wrong.
So, what I believe is that
the ideas I've got now
are better than the physicalist ideas.
Which doesn't mean that I
believe I'm absolutely right.
I think I'm on a better
track, and we'll see.
So, belief gets in the way.
When dogmatism gets in the
way, it's best to hold all of
our ideas very tentatively.
But on the other hand, you
can't be too tentative.
In the sense that you do
need to invest enough,
emotionally in them, to
really pursue them, right.
If I, as a scientist,
you have this balance.
On the one had you don't
want to be dogmatic.
I don't wanna be dogmatic,
on the other hand I need to
find the idea exciting
enough that I'm gonna invest
my valuable time, trying to
write down the mathematics,
and pursue it.
I think it's, I think its
good enough lead to follow.
So, there's this balance
that we have to have,
between the two.
- Man,
I tell you.
This is the reason I
became such a fan of yours,
and to be honest, everything,
all the stuff you just said
in general, is an answer
to the question that
I sometimes am faced when
I talk about this stuff.
Which is, who cares?
- [Don] Right.
- So, in other words, why do I care
that everything is
reality is consciousness,
or matter or why do I even
care about consciousness,
it doesn't get me through the day.
Well, A, if you can hack
into the source code,
the technology changes.
- [Don] Right.
- B, we're stuck, on so
many scientific fronts
and have been for a couple of decades now.
So maybe we're missing something,
that could help us progress.
- [Don] Yes.
- And, three, the fundamental
thing that makes us human
is our desire to understand our place.
- [Don] Right.
- And so, like you said, I
think you're not supposed to,
you know, fall prey to belief,
but you have to be passionate enough.
- [Don] Passionate enough.
- You now it's funny, cause I,
you know, I went to like a
three and a half hour workshop
of yours at this conference in San Jose,
which I talked about
previously on my show.
And, you know, you took people
on this journey, like we're
not really doing that here,
we're kind of hitting all these
different points, kinda.
In the book you do it, and
it's like, okay, let me make
this case, that everything
we believe about reality,
is based on an interface,
and a rookie mistake.
- [Don] Right.
- And here's the deeper truth.
Here's the math, here's what
a conscious agent looks like,
here's how that relates to
different things, we've done
like, split brain experiments.
- [Don] Right.
- Turning a single conscious
agent into two independently
conscious agents that
argue with each other,
in the same scull.
- [Don] Yes.
- By cutting this meat,
called the corpus callosum,
which we may presume, is not
meat, but some icon pointing
to how conscious agents
are exchanging experience.
- [Don] Yes.
- And when you cut that physically,
physically,
meaning you do something
to this conscious agent.
You now have two
instantiatians of awareness,
they're independent.
And this is shown in experiment,
to actually be experientially true.
So, you took us on this
journey in this conference,
and you have scientists there,
you have spiritual kind of
people that are like, hey
man, the crystals man,
is this like drugs, man.
And these guys called
you like the guy who like
invented the graphical user
interface for the Mac is there.
And these guys.
And I'm just sitting there.
And by the end, it was like,
you get this feeling of emotion
and I'm speaking for
myself, where I felt like,
you know what, what you're saying,
even if it's not exactly correct.
Is more correct, than
anything I've ever felt,
and I've studied science all my life.
I do medicine, I take care of people,
It's like, that's when I said, okay,
anything I can do to help
promote this understanding
discourse dialogue expansion,
refutation of this idea, I have to do.
And that I think is how
the intersection of science
and inspiration and emotion
and the human condition.
- Right, absolutely.
I agree that,
it's relevant, because
these are the questions
that drive us, we are curious.
Why are we here?
What is life about?
What happens when I die?
These are the big, big
questions that we would
like answers to.
And we have a chance with
the tools of science,
to take the spiritual
insights and fashion them into
something so precise, that
we can get precise answers
to these questions.
- What happens when we die Don?
In your theory.
- Well one interesting option is this,
and I'll give you a metaphor,
that sort of spells it out.
Suppose that you, go with
some friends to a virtual
reality arcade, and to play
virtual volleyball at the beach.
So you put on your headset and bodysuits,
and you're immersed in the beach scene,
with a net and palm trees,
and seagulls and so forth.
And you see the avatars of your friends,
and you start playing volleyball.
And then one of your
friends, you know, Tom,
at one point says, I'm
thirsty, I need to get a drink,
I'll be back in a minute.
He takes off his headset
and bodysuit and his avatar
collapses motionless in the sand.
To you, in the interface,
in the VR interface,
it looks like, Tom is dead.
But he's not dead, he just
stepped out of the interface.
And, perhaps, death is like that.
We see the body,
dead,
cold,
sitting there,
lying there.
But that's just the avatar.
That wasn't the consciousness
in the first place.
What I see, right now, in front of me,
when I look at Zubin.
I'm seeing an avatar that I create.
I'm not seeing the true
consciousness of Zubin.
So if that, if that
avatar ceases to function,
that doesn't mean that your consciousness,
is necessarily dead.
So, I'm want to explore
in the mathematics of this
conscious agent theory.
What does happen, the
theory absolutely allows,
that consciousness persists
after what we call,
physical death.
Absolutely allows it.
The technical questions for me are,
so how much of the I,
how much of the memories,
how much of my personality,
how much of all those things,
persist.
And those are gonna be
very interesting technical
questions, that I don't
know the answer to.
So I'm really gonna be
interested to pursue that.
- If.
(laughs)
If we are the sort of
nested, conscious agents,
and we have access at a
particular instantiation.
In other words, we are
the sum total of all these
unconscious agents.
Unconscious.
All the conscious agents,
at this particular level,
where we are aware,
we're not exactly able to access directly
the conscious agents underneath us.
- [Don] Right.
- Or the conscious agents above us.
But both of them exert influence.
- [Don] Yes.
- So, we are, you know,
our conscious agent that's
responsible for auditory
perception, is probably a
nested consciousness that
does something with experience
out in the objective
world of conscious agents
that feeds it up to this particular level,
that we then experience, so.
Death is an interesting thing.
- [Don] Absolutely.
- Because, what is it?
Maybe the stepping back down,
through the instantiations,
or a stepping out into a higher.
- Absolutely, and I don't
know the answer to that,
that's gonna be very, very interesting
to ask that question.
But the interesting this is,
it should be a precise
question, and the mathematics
should allow us to give precise answers,
or we'll need to enhance
the mathematical framework.
So that's.
So the mathematics that I have to learn,
is Network Information Theory.
- [Zubin] Oh.
- It's a fairly new branch
of mathematics that's really
come on because of the
internet, and wireless,
and so forth.
We've, so, fortunately,
because of all this new
technology, we've had
to solve these problems.
So it turned out that
mathematics, graph theory,
related to, you know,
agents interacting,
is a new and well developed and developing
branch of mathematics.
So, I and my team are gonna
be learning this mathematics,
and using the theorems
to try to understand how
conscious agents interact, and understand.
So, to try and answer the
types of question you were
asking, when we die, do we
somehow interact with lower
level conscious agents, higher
level, what's going on there?
So the graph theory is gonna
be very, very interesting.
So we'll go after this.
But it's non trivial math I must say.
- Any math for me, is non trivial math.
- Me too, I go to the mathematicians.
- Yeah, when I looked at
your stuff, I read one of
your source papers that you
published, and looking at
Marcavian kernels and this kind of thing.
And it gave me chest pain.
But I also enjoyed it,
because it was a fun ride,
to try to wrap my
particular interface around.
So, see, this kind of
thing, and then the question
of artificial intelligence.
- [Don- Yes.
- How does artificial, so
we talk about artificial
intelligence the way
we think about it now,
is there's some ghost in the machine,
there's a machine that's physical,
that we create that either
approximates or somehow
attains consciousness or at
least is behaving intelligently.
- [Don] Right.
- But you're saying,
something differently.
First of all, there's not a machine.
- [Don] Right.
- We're saying, we can
tweak within our interface
something, that might open a portal.
- [Don] Right.
- Into the realm of
consciousness agents that we
currently don't have,
can you explain that?
- [Don] Yes.
- Cause this will melt people's heads,
cause it melted mine.
- That's right.
So, I've been involved in
artificial intelligence
since 1979, when I went
to the AI Lab at MIT,
and I've been very interested in it.
And the question of, could AI's.
Of course we can make them
smart, they are beating us at
all sorts of stuff now.
So that's not an issue.
The issue is, could they actually
have genuine experiences.
Could,
an AI, feel love?
Could it taste vanilla,
and actually enjoy the taste of vanilla?
Could silicon circuits and software,
do that?
Most of my colleagues, think, yes.
They think that somehow,
programs, sophisticated programs
are in fact, what consciousness
is, although they can't tell
me the program and they
can't say, so they,
it's just an idea, right now,
it's a philosophical idea.
There is no scientific
theory on the table.
But in general what they're
saying is that somehow with
these unconscious circuits
and unconscious software,
we will boot up real
conscious experiences.
So that's the question
typically about could AI's
be conscious.
The question is, could
the circuit somehow,
that originally were unconscious,
could they become conscious?
Are they complex enough.
I'm saying that's the wrong
way to think about the problem.
We're assuming that
circuits in space and time
are objective reality.
But in fact, that's just a user interface.
And we know, that our user
interface, as you've said,
gives us portals, into consciousness.
My icon of Zubin Damania,
has given me a portal,
into the experiences of Zubin Damania.
Very, very small portal,
but a genuine portal.
So for me the, the question is this.
Once we understand, the
realm of conscious agents,
with mathematical precision.
And we understand the mapping
between conscious agents,
and their dynamics, and
our space time interface.
So that we understand it
well enough to hack it.
Will we be able to open new portals,
in our space time interface,
into the realm of conscious agents.
Perhaps using technologies, like silicon,
and circuits, and software.
Will we be able to
understand that technology,
in a deeper way, that allows
us to open portals into this
preexisting realm of conscious agents.
For what it's worth, I
think the answer is yes.
And I say that both, with
excitement and trepidation.
Because that's unbelievable power.
And it's not clear, what
we're going to meet,
on the other side.
And I don't know, if all
those conscious agents out
there are what we would call
nice, I just don't know.
So, I think the, so but
notice, it's not could
unconscious circuits and
software boot up consciousness.
It's rather, will we understand
our interface well enough,
and what's behind the
interface, so conscious agents.
Well enough, that we
can rejig our interface,
perhaps he's using silicon and germanium,
and other circuit kinds of materials.
And open a new portal
into the preexisting realm
of conscious agents.
So that's on kind of answer,
I think the answer is yes.
There's, but in that case we're not,
creating new consciousnesses,
we're opening portals to them.
So there's another question here.
Once we understand this technology,
could we create new consciousnesses,
in the realm of conscious agents.
And, if we look at what we
can see in our interface
right now.
We do see, cases where it
looks like new consciousnesses
are being created.
Reproduction.
Sexual, or asexual.
When cells divide,
we may be in our interface,
getting a pointer to a
birth of a new kind of
conscious agent.
When two parents reproduce sexually,
and have a kid.
We believe that we're being introduced to
a new conscious agent.
And that I, that new
conscious agent is having
conscious experiences that I
don't have direct awareness.
So, the mother, the father
have their consciousnesses.
They come together, they have a child,
which has a consciousness,
that is opaque to them.
They have to interact
through an interface.
The body of that child, to
see what's going on with the
child's consciousness.
So we seem to have
hints, in our interface,
of technologies,
for creating new consciousnesses.
Now, if that's right.
If that's the right way
of reading the interface,
and maybe I'm reading it
wrong, I mean that's one thing
I'll have to find out,
when I get through the
conscious agents more worked
out, and the projection.
I'll be able to see, am I
reading the interface wrong?
But suppose, that's not wrong.
That we really are seeing
new conscious agents being
created, when we reproduce
sexually or asexually.
That would mean, that
there are technologies,
within our interface, that we can use,
to create new conscious agents.
The technologies we have are
crude, we're not having sex,
I mean, that's not a high tech thing.
But it works.
- [Zubin] Speak for yourselves.
(laughs)
- Yeah, but eventually
we, once we understand it,
we may be, and we understand, you know,
asexual reproduction, you
know, and just mitosis.
We then may be able to understand,
how to use our interface
to create new consciousnesses.
So, the answer, you know, the
AI thing, we may just open
new portals into existing
consciousnesses with the new
technologies, or we may get
to the point where we're
creating new consciousnesses.
But it's in different
way than the AI folks are
thinking about it.
They're saying, we take unconscious,
fundamental reality, and
make it complicated enough,
and it creates consciousness.
And I'm saying, no, no, no.
Reality is conscious all the way down,
my interface is hiding most
of it, but my interface is
giving me tools to play with the realm
of conscious agents.
Will it give me the tools to,
actually open new portals
to consciousness and perhaps
to create new consciousness.
And I think the answer might be, yes.
- Wow.
- [Don] It's a different
way of thinking about it.
- I really like that.
One interesting thing is,
consciousness, like energy,
the question is, can it neither
be created nor destroyed,
is there just an infinite,
out of space out of time,
conscious pool, and you're
subdividing it, and so
a child is like a little
split off, and it you know,
starts to evolve out, which
gets to the question of
the evolution of conscious agents.
- [Don] Right, right.
- Complexity, yeah.
- That's getting to the
limits of my brain some.
- [Zubin] (laughs)
- But here's how I'm thinking about it.
And I'm hoping to have a
new generation of younger
researchers that can you know,
help push these ideas further.
I don't think that there's a
limited pool of consciousness.
I think it's endless.
And there's some dynamic,
that will never end.
And one reason I think
that it's something that's
called, Godel's incompleteness theorem.
- [Zubin] Yeah, explain that.
- So Godel was this brilliant logician,
mathematician, logician.
Who did some of the most profound research
and logic of the 20th century.
He was a friend of Einstein,
they hung out together,
at the Institute for Advanced Study,
And one of the, among the
many contributions of Godel,
was this, that if you have
a mathematical system,
that has a set of premises, axioms.
You can, in a sophisticated
enough to say do arithmetic.
Then you can, as a mathematician,
you can grind out all
the theorems, you know, use
the axioms to prove all these
various theorems.
And what he showed, what Godel showed was,
all the theorems that
you get, like grinding,
through the axioms, mechanically.
Will not get you to all the truths,
there are truths that can't be proven.
Now, that truth that
escapes your current set of
axioms, may be if you
increased your set of axioms
or change your axioms, you
could get to that truth,
but then there would be new truths,
that you couldn't get to, by your proof.
And this, I think pairs on science.
Science, starts with, every
theory starts with premises,
assumptions.
These are the magic, the
miracles of the theory.
No theory in science, explains everything.
There's no theory of everything.
Every scientific theory says,
please grant me these one
or two or three handful of assumptions.
If you grant me those I can
explain all this other stuff.
But Godel seems to be saying, to us, is,
no matter how, a lot of assumptions
of scientific theory has,
there will the truths,
that escape that scientific theory.
And, when I think about this now,
from the point of view
in which I say, consciousness
is the fundamental reality.
That's all there is.
How does mathematics fit into that?
The way I think of it is,
that mathematics is like the
bones, within consciousness,
it's the structure of consciousness.
When we actually study consciousness,
in a field called psychophysics.
We actually have, more many decades,
studied with precision,
conscious experiences in the lab.
And they're structured, we
can write down mathematics.
Math and consciousness are not alien,
they're not separate.
It's rather they're really integrated,
like flesh and bones.
Into one unit.
That's why, think about, like mathematics,
is the structural bones of consciousness.
It's not the whole of consciousness,
but it's an essential
and ineliminable part,
of consciousness.
And given that, now, Godel's
theorem is telling us
something very important.
First my assumption is
that, all that there is,
is consciousness, so all the
math and structure is about,
consciousness.
There's an infinite variety of structures,
and Godel's theorem is
telling us, the exploration,
of this mathematical
structure, and therefore of the
consciousnesses with that
structure, is never ending.
Never ending.
It cannot come to a halt.
There is no halt.
It's provable, that this never halts.
Is that the deepest
dynamic of consciousness.
The endless exploration
of all the possibilities
of consciousness and its structure.
That's the best idea I've got so far.
It's like, the kid in the candy
store, but the candy store
is infinite and there's all
sorts of chocolates and other
things that you couldn't
even imagine are out there.
And, go for it, kid,
explore, it's never stopping.
That's what Godel's theorem
seems to be saying to us.
And so that's seems to be
saying to me, that there's no
end to the proliferation
of consciousnesses,
it's never going to stop.
And so, it's pretty exciting,
it's very, very exciting.
So, that's the best idea I have so far.
And that may be the deepest dynamic.
- Wow, man.
That is a beau.
If that's true, it's beautiful.
- [Don] I hope it's true.
- It's as beautiful thing as I've heard,
and I have to say maybe
that, if that's true,
and everything again,
consciousness is primal.
Math is the bones of it,
these theorems say that
it doesn't end, it's gonna
constantly keep spinning out
and evolving and we're
a kid in a candy shop,
just making it happen.
People ask about the meaning of life.
I can't think of a better
meaning of life than that.
- [Don] Explore.
- Explore.
Grow.
Evolve.
- [Don] Enjoy.
- Enjoy.
- [Don] Right.
- Experience.
- [Don] Absolutely
- That's the currency of everything.
And, love each other too.
Because we are all connected.
- [Don] Absolutely.
- And, so here, and this
is where all the scientists
tune out.
Okay, he said love, we're out.
- [Don] (laughs)
- The interesting thing about,
you know about all of that
is, does it ultimately get
up the dynamics of conscious
age and evolution, that
there is a deep drive even,
that, you know,
because anthropy says things
go to disorder and so on.
- [Don] Right, right.
- But yet, evolution, seems
to be this, it's not truly
an exception, cause the
system still goes to disorder,
but you're creating increasing complexity.
Maybe conscious agents
really just want to connect,
and exchange and--
- [Don] Right.
- Get more complex.
- I think that's a very, very good point.
It's in the interaction of
conscious agents that you
get new conscious agents.
And so the exploration continues, and so.
I could imagine that the
genesis of new agents comes
from partly the interactions, the love,
hopefully all love, we'll see.
(laughing)
The interaction between conscious agents,
leading to new ones.
And maybe some, I may have to partial it,
also de novo,
new conscious agents, just appearing.
We'll have to see, you know,
what, I won't do that if
it's required, but one
of the minimum magic,
in any scientific theory.
So it'll be interesting
to see where that goes,
and, but it does, I think,
that the notion of love may
play a role in the sense
that, it is the connections
within conscious agents,
the interaction between
conscious agents, that
does give rise to new
conscious agents.
So, yeah, I'm on board with that.
- Man, and this the thing,
like people will talk about
this stuff, for millennia
right, but they've never talked
about it, with a scientific precision,
with the actual theorems.
- [Don] Right.
- And I think what I
thought was so interesting
about your work again is, that
you're bringing that to it.
And even if they're wrong,
at least we're trying,
that's interesting,
and if you're going down the wrong route,
we'll find that out
Cause those theorems will be disproven,
or you'll find something
incompatible with it,
and then you'll have to alter it.
That's science.
- [Don] That's right.
I think the, we all want
to understand who we are,
we want to understand
what this is all about.
And dogmatism gets in the way.
Assuming that you know the answers.
Means that, if you happened
to be wrong, you're stuck.
And so it's best, to hold our
beliefs, very, very loosely.
Have enthusiasm, but be open to be wrong.
And the point about
science is to be precise.
So you can find out
precisely, why you're wrong.
And hopefully quickly, it's
better to be disabused,
of your wrong ideas
earlier, rather than later.
So that you can move on.
So, it's hard for us, because we like,
dogmatism seems to come natural to us.
Its seems to be part of our nature to say,
I believed this since I was five,
you're not gonna dissuade me of it.
But that really closes
us off to, new ideas,
and new exploration, and
so that may be part of this
whole dynamic too, maybe.
There's an infinite amount
to explore and part of the
exploration is letting go of
what we think we already know.
That may be part of what this
whole dynamic of consciousness
is about, is this letting go of dogmatism,
is part of what it takes,
to be the kid in the candy
shop, that gets to do all this exploring.
Hey look kid, if you
stick with your dogmatism,
you only get to see
these candies over here.
You get all these other
candies are forbidden to you,
unless you're willing to let go,
and open up to a broader perspective.
- Ha, ha, ha this man, Don
Hoffman, you speak my language
you know, these are the only
things I am interested in
any more, in life are these
questions, which is strange.
Cause I'm getting older, and
these are the things, you know,
I'm supposed to be interested
in the, my new show of
medicine and all that, and I'm like,
just manipulating icons.
I wanna know what's behind the icons
[Crosstalk]
Okay, now there's a lot, oh,
man, where to even, gosh,
is so good, could talk
to you for like 30 hours.
So, I wanna at least get into.
All right, let me ask you this question.
You're talking about
closing off the candy shop,
because dogma.
We evolved reason.
- [Don] Right.
Right.
- Not to find truth, we evolved reason
to persuade others in our
tribe, that we're correct.
It's like our Conamin's, Daniel Conamin.
Talking about system one and system two.
Jonathan Haidt talking
about Elephant and Writer,
our mind is really two minds.
We have this very conscious,
deliberate, strategic,
high energy requiring mind
that does logic and reasoning
and math and verbal
and that sort of thing.
And then you have this
unconscious emotional, intuitive
heuristic mind that,
operates in the background.
In your conscious agent theory actually,
this actually might,
might unfold and that you
have this level of conscious
agents emerging in your current awareness.
And that's system one, like
you can be thoughtful and
deliberate but that emotion
you feel or that threat
you feel, or that fear you
feel, let's your quickeristic
all the agents underneath
feeding up to you.
- [Don] Yes.
- And influencing your
quote on quote, fee will.
- [Don] Right.
- So in your estimation,
like each of these agents
has its own kind of ability
to perceive, decide and act.
- [Don] Right.
- Based on its world that its
encountering, which is the
conscious agent, social network.
The experience that it has, and
the action it wants to take.
And, but the lower agents
kind of constrain what the
higher agents can do, and
the higher agents feed back
and constrain.
So your mind is this
constant dynamic between
processes unconscious to you.
- [Don] Right.
- And processes that you're
conscious off, and maybe even
higher processes when you go
into a football game and you
feel that connection, or you
go to a church or a monument,
and you see art with other
people and you're all too.
And I was at your conference
everybody was like this,
and there was on sort of, you
can almost feel an emergent
understanding, right.
And so, it's this constant
sort of dynamics, I don't know
what I'm getting at with this
beyond this is me thinking
out loud about how our own
minds work, and how I can think
about Elephant and Writer and Conamin,
system one system two.
- [Don] Right.
- In the conscious agent framework.
- [Don] Right.
It's a very, very good
point you're bringing up,
and I think its an important issue.
You're right that, from
evolutionary psychology,
it appears the best
understanding form evolutionary
psychology is that logic and
reason in some sense evolved
as a social tool of persuasion.
This is the thesis of Dan
Sperber and Hugo Mercier,
and others.
And this, you know, it's controversial.
But it's very, very interesting.
And there seems to be a lot to it.
That we evolved logic and
reason to persuade others about
what we already believe.
I mean, I think the right
way to take down that
wooly mammoth is this way.
And we're gonna need all 17
of us guys to do it this way,
together.
Cause we can't do it, I
can't do it by myself.
And someone else say, no,
no, I think the right way to
take down a wooly mammoth
is this other way,
you should run it off
a cliff or something.
And so, it's not the dispassionate
search of truth tool,
that we might think it is.
It's rather the social persuasion tool,
and some evidence that
that's the case comes from,
we are best at our logic
and reason when we're in
a social debate.
We find that ideas come quickly,
we're quick on our feet,
and so forth.
And a lot of my research
is done, in a group with
other researchers, where
we're talking, because it's in
that social setting, that
the logic and reason.
That's its native ground,
that's where it evolved to hunt.
And so I get together with
my team, and we hunt ideas
together, because that's where
the logic can reason evolve
to this kind of hunting of ideas.
And the back and forth.
But now, at a deeper level,
so that's evolutionary psychology.
And I love evolutionary psychology.
It's an incredibly powerful tool.
So I'm not putting it down at all.
In fact, I talk about evolutionary
psychology in my book.
But, I think there's a
deeper point of view,
outside of space and time.
Evolutionary psychology is a
theory within our interface.
And there's really, there's
an interesting assumption
that goes into evolution.
Limited resources.
If resources were not limited,
there would be no need for competition.
And there'd be no need for evolution.
We could all just have
everything we wanted.
It's the limited resources.
And I have to think.
Is the,
belief or the idea or the experience,
that we have limited
resources an artifact,
of our interface?
And not an insight into reality.
- [Zubin] (laughs).
- Reality itself, resources
may be totally unlimited.
And maybe in the realm
of conscious agents,
it's not an issue.
I don't know, I don't know.
If that's the case though,
then there would be
a deeper dynamics.
And when we project it into an
interface and which it looks
like resources are limited,
then we get this, sometimes
bloody, competition,
for resources.
That leads to evolution
by natural selection.
So I want a deeper framework,
in which we understand
evolutionary psychology as
a projection of a deeper
dynamics of consciousness.
So it's sort of getting
what you talking about,
this whole dynamics of consciousness,
how does it relate to
evolutionary psychology,
I think it's gonna be again,
we'll have to have a deeper
dynamics of conscious agents.
And maybe when we project in
an interface where we have
this appearance of resource
limitations, we're gonna get
a lot of the features of
evolutionary psychology coming out.
- This idea of resource limitation to me,
I've sat and thought about this.
By the way, so were you
talking about social connection
being facilitative towards
reasoning and thoughts,
a 1000%.
And I just wanna put a
point on that, in medicine,
in healthcare.
One of the great tragedies
of the last decade or so,
has been the silicification
of our communication.
So instead of getting in a
room in a doctor's lounge,
your in a nurse's station,
exchanging ideas about
patients with specialists and
people taking care of them
at all different levels.
We go behind the computer interface,
and we send staff messages.
- [Don] Right.
- And it's not the same.
- [Don] No, no.
- And so, a lot of that fluidity,
a lot of the creativity,
a lot of humanity and a lot
of the brilliance of medicine
has been sucked into
algorithms and checklists,
and things that we think
using a computer model,
of thinking, of the brain is a computer,
we should think more like a computer.
We're missing the underlying,
reality, the conscious
experience of our patients,
the internal experience, and
how it affects this physical
icon of their.
And it's been a tragic thing,
so, we need to get away
from that, or at least use the
tools where they're useful,
and use what we are uniquely human about,
which is connecting with other humans.
- [Don] That's right.
- More effectively.
Now, resource limitation is fascinating,
because it's the central
driver of everything.
- [Don] Right.
- In our current,
universe interface.
The lack of energy.
- [Don] Right.
- And constantly having to budget.
If we had unlimited resources.
In other words, we have to
hack into Grand Theft Auto,
where you have unlimited
life points or whatever.
- [Don] Right.
Right.
- Suddenly it's not much fun
of a game, I'll tell you that.
- [Don] Right.
- Cause you're just
doing whatever you want.
But, all that competition,
all the strategy,
all the effort that goes
into being frugal, into,
you know, making sure that
you know, maybe space time
that evolved as an interface
because it tells me how
many experience points I
need to get to that apple
over there, means it's gonna
cost me this much calories.
Why do we even need calories?
So, it's interesting, if
you're gonna dive into the
fundamental nature of an
infinite conscious universe.
Why is there finer resources.
- Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it may just be an illusion.
That the appearance of
finenites may be an illusion,
I'm not secure on that point,
I mean, and I'm not saying
that, that I'm absolutely sure.
When I go out this realm
of conscious agents itself,
I may find resource
limitations there as well.
But I'm not sure that I will.
And this idea from Godel
theorem that there's endless
exploration, and there's no limit to it,
makes me think that maybe,
it's unbounded, in its potential.
- So maybe at this level,
there's limitation.
So, I think you mentioned in the book,
and I think this is an
important point to make that,
there are limited resources
involved in being able to
have experiences, in other
words, having a large
repertoire of conscious
experiences, is somehow costly.
It takes effort and energy.
- [Don] Right.
- And so, we dumb it down by--
- [Don] Right.
- By definition.
And our particular
instantiation of complexity.
- [Don] Right.
- We can't overdo it,
or we run out of steam.
- [Don] That's right.
- It's kind of like
we're using system two,
and we're trying to overthink things.
- [Don] Exactly.
- It gets exhausting
and we rely on our gut.
- [Don] That's right.
- And so,
you know, this idea of,
again, getting at this sort of limited,
then again this is a
conversation for another time.
But I have to make sure.
By the way, any comment on that?
Beyond what we're talking about?
- Yes, I think that what
you're saying, is exactly the
right way to think about it,
from an evolutionary point of view.
- [Zubin] Right.
- That's exactly the right
way to think about it.
And the question is,
is this resource limitation.
So for example, the
argument that I've given.
That we have to have this
interface that dumbs things downs,
and so forth.
The assumption I was making is,
let's assume space time and matter,
and evolution by natural selection.
The reason I did that was,
that's where my colleagues are.
Those are premises that they will accept.
So, let me start with premises
in a scientific theory
that my colleagues will
accept, and show that it means
that we're not seeing the truth.
This is just, a dumbed
down user interface.
And so I was able to.
Now, given that I've done that.
I can now, step back and say,
well, but I don't need to
commit myself to space time.
And I don't need to commit
myself to evolution by natural
selection, being the final true theory.
That was just the best
theory we have so far.
And I can use that theory,
to bring my colleagues,
hopefully along to a new way
of thinking about things.
But now, when I go to this
deeper theory of conscious
agents, I don't yet know
whether the notion of limitation
applies there or not.
And that's really weird, I
mean, when Einstein wrote down
general relativity, he didn't
know that it was going to
entail, black holes.
So that's the thing
about scientific theory.
That's why we do the math.
The theory is smarter than you.
At some point, the theory
teaches you, and you become a
student of your theory.
And I expect that there are
all sorts of implications
in the theory that I've written down.
And by the way, when I say
my theory, I have, I should
mention my colleagues Chetan
Prakash, Chris Fields,
Manish Singh, Robert Pridner,
Frederico Vishine.
I'm working with, so it's not just me,
it's a whole group.
A whole team, Shanana Dobson.
So we're all working on this together.
So, but the math is
smarter than any of us.
And there's, you know.
There's some pretty smart
mathematicians in that group,
and the math is smarter than them.
And so, it'll be fun to
study what it entails.
Are there limited resource
implications, or not?
- So, and you know one thing I gotta say,
every time I listen a little bit before.
Nobody really funds this kind of research.
- [Don] Right.
- And it's just like I
forget it was Shaun Caroller,
he was on Rogen's show recently,
and he was talking about,
studying the fundamental
foundations of quantum mechanics.
- [Don] Yes.
- And this idea that no
one wants to pay for that,
because nobody cares.
- [Don] Right.
- What they care about is,
what can you build using
the current interface.
- [Don] Right.
- And so, one think I wanna
makes sure that people
understand is that, you know,
there's people out there,
that independently,
philanthropically fund research.
They should look at the kind
of research you're doing,
because it is, in my mind,
the most important thing
we can possibly study.
And then, I wanna make
sure that I mention this,
because this came up as soon as we started
thinking about this.
And at the conference as well, which is.
So, you are someone
that, and you've told me,
privately and publicly.
You've never done psychedelics.
- [Don] Right.
- You've never smoked a cigarette.
- [Don] Right.
- You're a pretty straight shooter.
You're father's a
Methodist fundamentalist.
- [Don] Yeah.
- Is it not how you roll?
- [Don] Right.
- You're not some like,
you know, yogi in India,
sitting on a mat all
day, doing psychedelics
and saying, the nature of
consciousness is there is
only consciousness.
- [Don] Right.
- So.
- [Don] I'm a geek.
- What's that?
- I'm a geek.
- [Zubin] Like me.
- Right.
- And so, now the thing
is, someone who had
dabbled in college in psychedelics,
and whose talked to other people who've,
who have done them.
It seems clear, from anyone I talked to,
I talk about this theory.
They say, oh yeah, of
course, whether I've done
5-MeO-DMT, or whether I've
done, that comes from a toad,
or whether I've done
psilocybe, which comes from
a mushroom, or whether I've
done LSD, which comes form,
you know, a synthetic ergot, I mean.
Ultimately form a bulb I think.
All those things seem to do,
is open a different interface,
that now we encounter.
And one of the common
things that people say is,
it's an overwhelming experience,
that feels as real as
our current, maybe more real,
than our current interface.
That they feel like the're
seeing things that are there
always, but that we
are, have no access to.
- [Don] Right.
- And that, they're able to
make these sort of experiential
have these experiences
that, again, feel like maybe
their experiencing
plant, you know, reality,
or fungal reality, or something like that.
And they have truly, quote on
quote, mystical experiences.
- [Don] Yes.
- Is it possible that something in these,
and these are microgram
quantities of chemicals.
If chemicals are an icon.
- [Don] Right.
(laughs)
- Could it be that your
somehow moving some sort of
conscious agent that
interacts with your network
of conscious agents and
some network affected,
oh, changes the interface,
so that transiently,
you can experience something, even,
people say they're
outside of space and time.
They're eternal.
- [Don] Right.
- You know, Sam Harris, said
in his book, "Waking Up."
Talks about, spending an
eternal communion with a
redwood tree, while on acid.
- [Don] Wow.
- That's one of his earlier experiences.
He says, one thing to think about this,
it's another thing to experience it.
And it's, inevitable, you
can't put it in words,
because it doesn't make sense
in our current interface.
Again, you haven't done these drugs.
Do you think that's possible, in this?
- Yes I think this whole
framework allows that,
psychedelics, may be a
technology, perhaps an initial
and crude technology.
By which we can hack our interface.
And either, open up the
interface to have a more direct
perception of conscious
agents, or to transition to
other interfaces.
This theory allows an infinite
variety of interfaces.
There's an infinite variety of exploration
of different kinds of interfaces.
And there is an infinite
variety of conscious experiences
that various conscious agents can have.
Color,
vision,
tastes,
smell,
touch,
emotions.
These are our limited
range of experiences.
The theory says, there's
an infinite variety,
of kinds of sensory modalities.
Not just colors, but sensory modalities.
That are utterly alien
sensory modalities to explore.
And so I would think that
as we make progress on
understanding the realm
of conscious agents
and our interface.
We will develop
technologies, that allow us,
to systematically, go
beyond our interface,
and perhaps enter different
interfaces and play in
different interfaces.
And that, we will go back
and recognize that the
psychedelics were the first
very, very crude technology.
We didn't know what we
were doing, it's like,
when you first start playing
with fire and then eventually
we have rockets that
go to the moon, right.
But we had to start playing with fire,
before we could send someone to the moon.
And, so that may be
what's going, you know.
The crude technology, but
eventually, we will be,
not just spychonauts, but
we will be in you know,
in the realm of conscious.
- [Zubin] In reality.
We'll be in reality.
- [Don] We'll be in reality.
- Yeah.
- And we'll we going through
the realm of consciousness
agents and exploring there.
And maybe even, going
beyond all interfaces.
And experiencing, what is it like to,
be a conscious agent without an interface,
without a self.
And I think this is all fun to explore.
I think science fiction
should explore this,
and then hopefully the
science will catch up.
With the imagination of science fiction,
our mathematics can catch up.
- Yeah.
Do you remember the movie, "Brainstorm."
With Natalie Wood?
- No I don't.
- Oh, it's one of these
early VR movies of 1979.
And Natalie died in the middle of it,
but it was a technology where
you could put on a device
and experience someone else's experience.
- [Don] Oh, okay.
- And someone dies wearing
the device, and recording.
- [Don] Oh.
- And so people have
this experience of death.
It's really, really interesting.
- [Don] I'll look at that.
- If you have time.
Yeah, so these ideas of
like opening these portals.
And this idea of,
this idea of,
consciousness without self, experience.
These are ancient spiritual ideas.
- [Don] Right.
- You can access these
things through meditation.
I've had glimpses of these
experiences in meditation.
So a selfless conscious
awareness, that's just a still
silent awareness as
maybe even the substrate,
of what awareness is.
- [Don] Right.
- You can experience that.
And I think.
We were talking earlier
about Rupert Spira,
and other people who are
more of that sort of mentors,
of how to discover this
type of meditation.
And it doesn't require drugs,
and it doesn't require--
- [Don] Right, right.
- Anything like that.
But I have this idea
this is kind of primitive
technology, like fire!
- [Don] Right, right.
- You know,
I used to make this, you
know smoking marijuana.
It's like being hit on the head.
- [Don] Right.
- It shifts your interface slightly.
- [Don] Right.
- And for some people.
This is my theory.
For some people who are innately anxious
or restless, or something's wrong.
It shifts the interface slightly,
so they can actually get by.
- [Don] Interesting.
- For others, like myself,
it shifts it to be slightly
more paranoid.
- [Don] I see.
- Tastes are different,
everything's a little bit
turned up and some things are turned down.
And sleep is disrupted and this and that.
So, again, thinking about
it from an interface theory.
- [Don] I see.
- The effect of drugs
make a lot a more sense,
than even thinking about it
from a mechanistic causal.
The brain is causal.
- [Don] Right, right.
- As opposed to a correlat, an icon.
- [Don] Right, right.
- How do we make, how
does a tiny compound,
make the brain somehow create this
brand new insane experience.
- [Don] Right.
- Makes much more sense that
it's a rejiggering a little
bit of our interface.
- [Don] Right.
- That makes me wanna ask you this.
Again, I don't know that
we have the answer to this.
How are our interfaces passed on?
What's encoding them?
- Oh wow.
That's a really interesting question.
And it's a big open
problem for me and my team.
What is DNA?
What is genetics?
That is an interface symbol.
What is it point to,
in the realm of conscious agents?
And why is it when we reproduce,
we reproduce a consciousness that's
very, very similar to us.
- [Zubin] Personalities are the same.
[Crosstalk]
- So, that's gonna be a really.
So, I really want to
reverse engineer this,
our interface, to find
out what is the DNA,
what is that technology doing?
Why would conscious agents
in the realm of conscious
agents tend to create
new conscious explorers
that are similar to them.
Maybe it's like it's a systematic search
that's going on right.
So, of course there are
tens, hundreds, of millions
of different creatures
that have been on earth.
And so, since then
there's been a wide range
of exploration that's going on.
And maybe it's just, you
know, and I search procedure,
were searching this part
of the search space,
and so, we're creating.
Our children are really
just new conscious agents,
searching more in the same
part of the consciousness
search space that we were in before.
So that might be, but how that
cashes out in terms of DNA,
and understanding DNA, in the
realm of conscious agents.
I am really eager to solve that problem,
that's gonna be really fun.
- Ah, it's hugely interesting to me,
because the genetics beyond DNA.
- [Don] Right.
- But what does it mean again.
What is it pointing at really,
if we believe this to be--
- [Don] Exactly.
- The correct, this sort of interface--
- [Don] Right.
- Theory.
And by the way, for people
who don't still believe
that this is just an interface.
That he example of sinisteed.
- [Don] Right.
- People who has synesthesia.
They are mutants.
- [Don] Right.
- In the interface.
- [Don] That's right.
- They're variants, where
they may see tastes,
or feel tastes, so you give
great examples in the books,
of people who do this.
- Right.
And one example, so, about
4% of us, are sinisteeds.
So it's not a small fraction.
And it looks like it's from
an evolutionary point of view,
evolution is tinkering with the interface.
And that's no surprise,
we're mutating all the time.
And that's how, you know,
we adapt to new situations.
And, synesthesia, is a really
good example for one of
the problems that most of us have.
Most of us think that,
when I see a bottle,
there is a bottle.
I see the moon, there is a moon.
Physical objects have a real
grasp of our imagination,
it's hard for us to imagine
that when I see a bottle,
that it could be anything other
than just seeing the truth.
It really is a bottle.
And so sinisteeds are helpful,
because there are some
sinisteeds that experience
three dimensional objects
for things that are not
three dimensional objects.
So, Michael Watson.
Everything that he tasted on his tongue.
He felt a three dimensional
object in space,
in front of him, with his hands.
And he could feel all the way around it.
It had a temperature, a
surface shape, a texture,
it could be plieable.
It had a weight.
And so mint, the taste of
mint also made him feel in
three dimensional space with his hands,
a tall cold smooth column of glass.
Somehow that seems right to me.
- [Zubin] It does right, yeah.
- I don't know why.
It does seem right.
- So he spun up three dimensions.
- [Don] Three dimensions.
- From a taste.
- [Don] From a taste.
And a mint does not resemble
a tall cold smooth column
of glass, and a column of
glass is not the right way
to do mint, right.
- [Zubin] (laughs)
It might be.
- That's right.
- So in an evolutionary sense.
- [Don] Right.
- In the future it might be.
- Absolutely.
If for example, we were in a world which,
women, really prized men
who could really cook.
It turned out, because
Michael Watson had this extra
dimension of taste, he felt
it in 3D, as 3D objects.
He was a great cook, so
he could cook in ways,
with subtleties that most of us.
So if turned out that women
really loved men who could
really cook, then that, his
genes could have passed on
and we would all, every
time we tasted something,
we would not only taste it on our tongue.
There would be all these rich
three dimensional objects,
in front of us, that we
would feel with our hands.
- How heritable is synesthesia.
- Oh it runs in families.
- [Zubin] So it does.
So, we're seeing this
heritable interface, right.
- [Don] That's right.
- Again, what is it?
What is DNA pointing to?
And what is the other embryologic
development factors that,
you know, we're anthology, phylogeny.
We have gills and a tail, right.
- [Don] Right, right.
Lots to explore.
- [Zubin] I know.
- And these are gonna be
endless clues that if we're not
smart enough to figure out
from first principles what's
going on in the realm of conscious agents.
These are the clues, that we'll pull back.
We'll reverse engineer,
to help our imagination,
go where it couldn't go.
- Man, it's an exciting
time, I'm telling you.
I hope, I really hope that
there's more research along
the lines of what you're doing.
That your own research is well funded--
- [Don] Thank you.
- And publicized.
Listen, the one think
you guys can do Z Pac,
is get this book and read the F out of it.
It is fantastic.
And it takes you on a journey.
And look, if you get to a
part about visual perception,
and you are like, this is too heavy.
Just skip ahead, there's so much stuff.
And the last chapter is
about conscious agents,
he saves it all of the end.
He's like, oh by the way,
here's the nature of reality.
I'm like, what!
That's the whole book.
That's like 30 books, in and of itself.
- [Don] (laughs)
So.
- [Don] The next book.
- The next book.
I don't know Don, was there
anything else you wanted to
discuss as we pull up on.
How long have we going?
- [Zubin] Victoria.
It's been a while.
We're at 12:30 right now, so.
- No, I think we've
covered it pretty well.
- Zubin] I think we, yeah.
- [Don] I think so.
- Although I could talk for
another couple of three hours.
- [Don] It was endlessly fun.
And what we've pointed out,
there's centuries of work
ahead, in this framework.
Centuries of work.
- [Zubin] It's exciting.
Now people are gonna be like, it's all BS,
and screw you guys, I'm going home.
That's cool.
But I will say this.
This topic of discussion is
something that has provoked
the most outrage from my audience.
They get viscerally angry
when I talk about this stuff.
- [Don] Why, why?
- And then there's a
contingent, maybe, let's say,
15% that are like,
this is the only reason I watch your show.
- [Don] I see.
- And they're like really, this
is a field of inquiry that,
that they really care
about, and I think, again,
as the science starts to evolve.
It's gonna be exciting to bring
you back and keep talking.
- That would be fun, absolutely.
- And anything we can
do to promote your work,
let us know.
Again, get the book, I think
the book is so important,
to really understanding, the
path that gets you to the
realization that, okay,
first of all, this is all,
a construct.
Second of all, what's underneath?
And if you don't believe
conscious agent theory,
then come up with a theory of your own.
- [Don] Right, right.
- But one thing, you cannot believe,
is that this stuff is real.
I just don't think you can.
Look at the science and believe that.
That being said, Don Hoffman.
Thank you so much for
coming on the show, man.
- It was a great pleasure, Zubin.
I'm really, thank you for having me on.
- Thank you, all right.
We out!
