The Emerging Science: “We Are ONE Consciousness” - Life, Death & The Simulation | Donald Hoffman

we have assumed in science for hundreds of years that SpaceTime is fundamental reality in the last 10 years for the first time scientists have taken off the SpaceTime headset what are we going to find so I should be very very clear on this point now I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and when I say that SpaceTime isn't fundamental in objects and space time aren't fundamental that means neurons don't exist when they're not perceived what I'm saying is very very uncomfortable that we don't see reality as it is this theory of conscious agents is really the first layer

of software outside of our SpaceTime heads once you know the software you can change the game pretty much any way you want to so you believe we're living in a simulation of sorts I think that we just have to bite the bullet and say no matter how smart mathematically precise you are it's going to be trivial compared to the reality Beyond I think as a scientist it's critical for me to actually spend time in utter silence that's where the true new creativity comes from what we know is one perspective out of an infinite number of

perspectives but that's who you are what you are transcends any description and that's how the infinite comes to know [Music] itself Don so good to have you back thank you Andre thanks for having me back I thought we could start with giving maybe a 10-minute overview kind of a high level view of both your work our conversation last time which I absolutely loved and our audience Lov and then we can dive into deeper into some new terrain here on this conversation today which I'm very much looking forward to so starting with how Fitness beats truth

okay and how the chance that Evolution has shape sensory systems to see objective reality is precisely zero in the work that you share could you elaborate on that a little bit in terms of how Evolution shapes our sensory systems to be able to navigate it effectively for survival purposes but not to see reality uh as it is objectively right so so Darwin's theory is very clear that evolution shap sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior and that's true according to Darwin's the that is in fact true most of us think intuitively that to do that Evolution

must shape us to see the truth because clearly if you see the truth that will be much more adaptive than if you don't see the truth so to guide adaptive Behavior Evolution must also shape us to see the truth and it turns out that that extra assumption which isn't In Darwin's theory um shouldn't be in Darwin's theory now it the mathematics of it is is very very simple the payoff functions the guide Evolution like if you play a game you have payoffs if you make certain moves on on the board game or in a video

game you get certain number of points and if you get enough points you can get to the next level of the game if you don't get enough points in time you die so forth same thing like an evolution there's The evolutionary Game Theory you have payoffs that guide adaptive um evolution and what happens with those payoffs they're they're basically not telling you whether you you know you go to the next level of the game but whether your genes your Offspring go to the next level the game so when you analyze those Fitness payoffs and ask

um do those Fitness payoffs contain information about the true structure of objective reality right if if they're going to shape you if the payoff functions that guide Evolution are going to shape your sensory systems for you to see the truth then they have to know a little bit about the truth themselves or they can't they can't shape you and what we've proven and this is again work with um not just me but chayan pros and um Man Singh Robert prenner and and uh Brian Maran and Justin marks a number of other people not just me

but we've shown is is uh in a number of ways that the payoff functions basically don't have the information almost surely don't have the information about the structure of the world so you can actually prove the probability is precisely zero that any payoff function has that information and therefore it's precisely zero probability that we've been shaped to see reality as it is now I should mention just two quick objections that people have about this um one is I've shot myself in the foot logically right I've used evolutionary Game Theory which is supposed to capture Darwin's

theory of evolution it's the mathematics of Darwin's theory and I've used it to actually show that certain basic concept In Darwin's theory like real physical animals competing for real physical resources in a real space and time I'm I'm saying that all of that is you know space and time aren't fundamental we're not seeing reality as it is objects in space time are Just an Illusion or a headset so the argument from philosophers some philosophers has been well uh Hoffman unfortunately has shot himself in the foot logically he's used evolutionary Game Theory mathematics to show that

the very Concepts that were gave rise to evolutionary Game Theory um aren't true so so either the math Faithfully represents Darwin's ideas and captures it and is is a is a good representation of those ideas or it's not if it's not Hoffman couldn't use it for what he's using it for and if it does if it is a good faithful representation of Darwin's Central ideas then it couldn't possibly contradict them so either way Hoffman is messed up right and his and his team and and the answer is this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of scientific theories

every Theory makes assumptions they're the Miracles of the theory and then it says if you grant me those assumptions I'll will show I'll then prove all this or or explain all this other wonderful stuff but it never explains its assumptions and you can get a new Theory a deeper theory that explains those assumptions but it'll have its own new assumptions at infinum so every theory has if it's good enough has a scope but every Theory no matter how good it is has its limits if none else its assumptions are showing you what its limits are

so the only question is when you have a mathematical representation of the theory is the mathematics if it's a good theory the mathematics will help you explore the scope that's you and but if it's a great Theory the mathematics will actually show you precisely what the limits are and in case of Einstein's theory of SpaceTime for example um here's mathematics is of course fantastic and GPS and everything else is based on Einstein's Ma so wonderful scope but his theory also the same mathematics that captures his theory and shows it scope also tells us its limits

and the limits are in in Einstein's case 10us 33 cm SpaceTime ceases to have any um operational meaning 10 the- 33 cm 10- 43 seconds and so here we have the case where the mathematics that Einstein came up with is the very mathematics that comes back and says your fundamental concept of space and time fail at 10- 33 cm and 10- 43 seconds so that's how science good science really works the mathematics that's intended to capture the fundamental concepts of your theory if it's great mathematics and a great Theory will come back and show you

exactly what the limits are of those fundamental concepts so that's not self-refutation in in fact that's why science is so powerful when we just use informal discussion and you know know talking about ideas over you beer and so forth that's one thing but you can never find out the the limit of your of your ideas and the limits of your theories when you have just an informal Theory and as a result it's easy to become dogmatic and to think that you're you're getting close to the theory of everything that I know the truth and you

don't and and so forth what science does is it puts a a big dose of humility in there on even even a big Theory like Einstein theory of SpaceTime it tells you that theory is and it stops at 10us 33 cm game over so you need New Concept so that's so it's an anti-dogmatic kind of thing so so that's sort of just a little the kind of push back I've gotten on this and you can see why it would be some strong push back because what I'm saying is very very uncomfortable that we don't see

reality as it is yeah and we'll Circle back to the value of discovering the limits of different theories um because I'm excited to dive into that to continue to you know put a bow on the uh high level overview of this work that understanding that you just shared in conjunction with local realism being proved false leads us to explore the headset analogy yes and so uh when you know the Noble Prize for local realism being proved false explains how objects in SpaceTime cease to exist when they're not perceived like they get rendered on the fly

when they're perceived why does that become an important reflection when we start to dis manle this notion that reality is as it seems well again I should say that um you local realism is is is false the the Nobel Prize was granted for it um for that experimental verification there are some who still want to maintain some kind of realism through Multiverse kinds of explanations and so forth I think that we just have to bite the bullet and say space and time aren't fundamental yeah and the properties of objects in space and time aren't fundamental

so so so that's the direction I'm going but I just wanted to point out that there are very very bright physicists who who would disagree um now the the theory of evolution by natural selection and my work on that is in some sense um it it suggests that space time is an interface right so it does it strongly suggests that what evolution gave us was not a window on the truth but a headset that lets us play the game of life and and so that's why I think it does fit in with the the modern

results in physics I think it's very a very reasonable interpretation of modern quantum theory and and it's actually part of for example um a big interpretation the so-called cubism interpretation of quantum theory that uh Chris FES and and uh and others are are espousing that that the quantum state is just The Observers statement of their degrees of belief of what they will experience if they make certain kinds of observ ations and it's it's not you know Quantum states are not descriptions of objective reality they're descriptions of your degrees of subjective belief so so I think

that that that fits very very well with with the work I'm saying that so here's a case where physics this interpretation of physics the Cubist interpretation of physics the non-local realist uh uh interpretation of of quantum physics works very very well with what evolution is suggesting that that we evolve not to see the truth but to have a headset so so yeah I think that the two actually dovetail quite well truth to be hidden but allowing us to control it in a way that we need that that's that's exactly right and and I should mention

that uh since the last time we talked there's been a big Push by the European research Council the ERC they have a 10 million euro new Initiative for finding there there are these new structures outside of SpaceTime like edrin like the amplitud hedrin right yeah that's right so they're called positive geometries but and so they it's just started is it a CO it's a cosmological polytope is that correct that's right that's right an associahedra and so forth so there're so there are these positive geometries and and they could have billions of Dimensions SpaceTime has four

maybe 11 in string theory or something like that but but they could have billions of dimensions in other words our our headset is pretty cheap yeah it's a a really really low dimensional we got the you know the cheap model the phys the high energy theoretical physicists are now looking at at structures like the amplitud hedrin in which one of the parameters is the dimension of your SpaceTime so in our case m equals 4 m is the parameter of the and ours is four but they could have a billion M could be any number any

m is one of the you know four is one of the smaller numbers you could have so so that's already a parameter in the positive geometry is that oh yeah your headset you know your SpaceTime could be as many dimensions as you want and and we have about as cheap of one as you could get away with so so instead of us having a theory of everything we have a theory just of a trivial headset so just refining again the understanding that objects cease to exist in the form we think they do when they're not

perceived this goes for the chair that you're sitting on the moon any any object that the quantum theory is works at all scales then this would apply to to that at all scales can you just share a little bit more about the headset analogy and how that helps us kind of wrap our head around things exist in objective reality in a way that is analogous like we explored to last time like a computer where there's Gates of electricity moving um but the display of the screen is set to hide the truth of reality so we

can control it in a way that is useful CU otherwise if we didn't have the display of a computer screen like how would we actually effectively navigate it um so could you elaborate on that a little bit more so we can wrap our header on that that's right so an obvious question is if we don't see the truth then what has Evolution done how does it allow us to survive yeah when we're ignorant of what reality is but if you think about it it actually makes a lot of sense if if you have someone say

Grand Theft Auto and it is a virtual reality version of Grand Theft Auto in multiplayer and uh there's some supercomputer somewhere that's that's running it and but you don't know you don't see supercomputer you don't need to know about the software and so forth all all I know is I've got a steering wheel in front of me I've got a dashboard I got uh you know gas pedal and so forth and I can see over to my right I can see a green Ferrari or something like that that I'm racing against well of course if

you looked inside the supercomputer there's no green Ferrari anywhere inside the supercomputer and there's no steering wheel and and none of that the reality that I'm interacting with and what I'm really doing in this metaphor in that reality is toggling millions of voltages in a precise order very it has to be you get one toggle wrong and the and the thing can crash so you have to get this precise toggling of M millions of voltages that's what you're really doing in in the reality but if you had to do that to play the game if

you actually had to go in there and know what sequence of voltages to put in at what time good luck I I'm going to win the game if I'm just turning my steering wheel and slamming on the brakes and the gas and what I'm I'm going to win the game so here's the case where it's very very clear that knowing the reality and having to interface directly with the reality to play the game is going to make you lose as opposed to just having a a dumb dumb down user interface that hides the truth but

gives you just the controls you need so that's sort of the the point of view of evolution um from the from the evolutionary point of view Darwin's idea then is basically that Evolution shaped us with sensory systems that hi all the truth that we don't need and all the Gory details just give us the the levers that we need to to control reality without actually knowing what those lovers do so because if you had all the stuff that you know you're going to have to pay for you know more energy for all the neurons you're

going to need to store that information understand that stuff it's just too expensive so so that's sort of an an intuition where where it starts to make it seem not so much crazy but of course of course you don't want to see the truth it's just too too complicated yeah so this starts to I think be a little destabilizing for some people when you say we're living in a matrix simulation reality isn't real and so this understanding that this headset this our sensory system allows us to navigate The Game of Life like uh you know

the game in GTA 6 or whatever that comes out there if we have like a VR headset like the Apple headset will allow us to navigate and play in there for example and that SpaceTime is a very limited scope of reality and within that limited scope of reality we are perceiving less than 0.1% of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see with visible light the sensory experience of life is extremely limited to the vastness of what existence actually is that's right and even the very notion of the electromagnet electromagnetic spectrum itself is an artifact of

the headset it's not a deep insight into the reality so when we talk about that we're using headset language is not the truth yeah but even in the headset we have hints inside the headset even the part that we see inside the headset is Trivial compared to what's out there so you believe we're living in a simulation of sorts is that right yeah I would say that this is that SpaceTime is not fundamental objective reality and therefore something else is and so I should be careful though and say when most people talk about simulation Theory

like Nick Bostrom and and people in that camp their point of view is very very different from mine and I should be very very clear about the difference and also the similarities so the similarities are that what you see around you is not the truth it's in some sense a simulation or a headset but what Nick and Bost and others think is that um SpaceTime and physicalist ideas are still fundamental and they think that computer programs properly programmed can actually create Consciousness so the the idea is that there's some computer programmer in a different world

that has created this simulation and and the the simulation is sophisticated enough that the algorithms are actually creating creatures like us with Consciousness but it's Consciousness that's emerging from the computational prowess of the programmer and the and the power of the computer of course then the possibility is that that programmer and their computer is in fact just a simulation from a deeper programmer and so forth all many many levels of that and you know but at the bottom the bottom level is presumably again A physicalist Spacetime um programmer in in and in a world that's

physical and SpaceTime and so the idea is so they're making two assumptions that SpaceTime physics is fundamental and second that properly programmed computers can create Consciousness and I'm disagreeing with both points so the two critical points of their simulation hypothesis I think are false I think there's no evidence in any theory of how computer programs could create Consciousness I'll put it this way there's not a single Theory out there right now and there have been lots of attempts that says that Consciousness is created by some kind of algorithm some kind of computational process some kind

of neural network that can none of those theories can explain even one specific conscious experience when you look at all the theories that are out there and they've been at for for decades and many of these people are my friends and they're brilliant people but what I always ask them when I speak at conferences they say okay we can experience roughly a trillion specific conscious experiences Taste of garlic smell of chocolate the sound of a trumpet there's about a trillion things that we experience should be shooting fish in a barrel to pick one and give

us a theory and say how this computational process must be the taste of mint so how many of you guys got how many have you done zero and that's the way it's been and that's the way it's going to be so so there's a lot of talk about these computational approaches and or neurobiological approaches for for coming up with conscious experiences and there's not a single specific conscious experience that they can explain zero and I predict that that's going to continue because it's not possible in principle to to do that so so I disagree with

these simulation theorists that are saying that your Consciousness is due to some programmer writing up a program that created your conscience show me the beef yeah there there there's nothing there there's all sorts of ideas and handwaves but I have not seen anybody plop down and say here is for example an integrated information Theory here is the causal Matrix an N byn Matrix n must be 5,000 and these are the 5,000 by 5,000 ENT these are the exact numbers that must be in The Matrix for this to be the taste of Min nothing right and

and if you think about it how in the world could a 5,000 by 5,000 Matrix of number be the taste of men you've got some explaining to do so so so that's where I dis I disagree on two things right the idea that space time is fundamental and that computational processes or neural processes could create conscious experiences and I'll just mention when you when I give up local realism and when I say that space time isn't fundamental and objects in space time aren't fundamental that means neurons don't exist when they're not perceived that means none

of my behavior is caused by neural activity now I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and I think we need more money for for Neuroscience not less so so let me be very very clear I am not denigrating Neuroscience research I'm a cognitive neuroscientist I love that research and we but it's going to be much harder than we thought the 86 billion neurons of the brain and roughly the same number of gal cells are complicated but they're trivial they're just a headset projection of the real thing that's behind them outside of space and time that and so Neuroscience

is going to have to reverse engineer the 86 billion neurons and and look at the much more complicated reality behind that so so I that's why I say we need more money for Neuroscience not less and we're going to f up our game because we haven't actually started the hard work yet in Neuroscience so let's just lay the the foundation too for for people that start to explore the hard problem of consciousness of why any collection of matter from the materialist view would have an experience of itself is very baffling and so when you look

at Consciousness in the many different theories of how it could come to be there is a materialist view which is like you just explained which is along you know analogous the uh understanding that space time is real and uh after a certain amount of unconscious complexity in your neuronal structure Consciousness starts to appear as you turn that Di forward now we're exploring a little bit more of a originally thought of as panych view which is the understanding that Consciousness is actually fundamental could you explain the difference between Consciousness being fundamental or psychism versus idealism sure

that's right so I'm good friends with Philip Goff um who's one of the principal proponents of of the modern psychist kind of theory and so there I'll talk about one specific version of it I think that that Philip may have thought about it that way but I think he's not necessarily committed to this so what I'm saying right now I'm not pinning Philip with this okay but the one kind of pan psychism takes SpaceTime as fundamental and it says that in addition to these Elementary particles the leptons bosons and quirks of the standard model of

physics um so we have these fundamental particles um and and their phys phical properties in addition let's let's posit that these bons leptons and corks also have in addition a fundamental unit of Consciousness so that they and in some sense the Consciousness is what is the reality behind the mathematics and and that certainly is is interesting but there's a couple problems with it first is why should we assume that the laws of Consciousness are tied to the laws of oper particular headset this is just the Mal equals 4 version of of a projection of a

something that's much more complicated it it fails to understand how trivial SpaceTime is spacetime is just a trivial headset and so if we're going to pin our Theory Of Consciousness such that the equations of that little headset are in some sense dictating how these consciousnesses interact um that that's just way too limit we have to think outside of that box and and and second um it actually does no work as a scientist I would like I mean philosophy is important and and so I'm not denigrating philosophy but as a scientist I would like my theory

of Consciousness to actually do some work for me not just to say I the laws of physics you can leave them alone nothing to see here but we can tag on Consciousness I'm very very unhappy with that I would like a theory of Consciousness that shows me where the laws of physics come out as a special case of the more more general laws of Consciousness so I would like to show that the headset is a trivial headset and Consciousness is the more the more fundament so you can see it's a very very different Spirit now

now having said that there are many different versions of pan psychism so I could easily imagine um and and and I may have already influenced Philip in this direction we'll see a pany psychism that's not tied to SpaceTime in that case as a scientist I still want then fundamental mathematical principles I want this partly because as a scientist here here's here's the attitude that I think hardn physicalists should have toward this they they can say look in our assumption that space and time are fundamental and doing the mathematics of of physics is fundamental we can

explain all this stuff your your GPS is due to us the Science and Technology that's allowing us to do this podcast is all due to the physical science what kind of scientific equipment has come out of your theory of Consciousness oh none oh well I I think that that sort of tells us how important your ideas are Visa our physical and what can I say they've got me and they've got anybody who says Consciousness is fundamental and then says and they say well what kind of Technology can you give us what none well then either

that whole approach is not strong enough or you haven't done your work and I think it is we haven't done our work I think the approach is strong enough but we now those who of us who take Consciousness as fundamental need to have fundamentally new mathematical theories of Consciousness qua Consciousness with rigorous mathematics that shows how precisely SpaceTime comes out as a projection of this where we actually get the standard model of partical physics and the generalization of it so that we can actually predict new technologies so that that's where I'm headed so so the

pans cist approach has not at all been taken in a direction by philosophers that could ever lead to brand new mathematics that would lead to new technology so that's one one problem I've got with it the approach that I'm taking is I call it conscious realism but but you mentioned idealism strictly speaking what I'm doing is is philosophically idealism it's probably the closest would be Bernardo Castro's analytical idealism um so so yeah yes it is what I'm doing is idealism which just so I can understand like pansy's view would be that Consciousness is fundamental so

essentially Consciousness yeah it's a fundamental constituent and idealism would be perceiving Consciousness is all there is but projecting down essentially as like reality is a shadow of in a sense yeah the idea that's what we call physical SpaceTime is just ideas in the mind it's just a headset ideas in the mind of God what mind of of of that's right of Consciousness absolutely so and the idea would be then that this is what quantum mechanics is telling us the the fact that local realism is false means that the moon or whatever You observe has a

value of position momentum and spin and so forth When You observe and when you don't observe you can't assert those things because in fact they're they're not true and and this is quite nice this um non non-contextual realism and there's a some wonderful work on this the coocon specker theor and so forth there there are cases where you can actually set up these Quantum measurements where you can show a sequence of measurements where you can predict with probability one what the outcome of an experiment will be one of the measurements will be probability one and

you can prove that the mathematics of quantum mechanics entails that there could not possibly have been a value until you made the measurement so these are these are like knockdown drag out kinds of arguments um that that non-contextual realism is false so all measurements are contextual and that to put that in in normal language it means that in some sense the consciousness of the Observer although I shouldn't put that on Chris fuks right so so I think that he he's going to be agnostic about consciousness and all this stuff he's just saying whatever quantum mechanics

is it's just describing the degrees of belief of the ancient that's making the measurements so when I talk about Consciousness I'm not putting that on Chris I'm I'm that's me so now as we start to explore a little bit more beyond the headset what role do you feel like Evolution could be playing as a projection down from Consciousness that's a great question and it does raise the issue that I'm going to be talking about Consciousness beyond space and strictly speaking that's an independent hypothesis from the whole business about Evolution um leading us to have evolved

a headset okay so so we have to be very careful about how how the science goes here in the first step I'm just taking Darwin's theory and the mathematics of and say let me just take that as my game dar's theory and the mathematics of it what does it tell us about our perceptions oh it's just a headset it's not the truth that's what Darwin's theory entails now it's a separate step okay now that Darwin has told us that we need to look outside of SpaceTime um but Darwin doesn't tell us what's outside of SpaceTime

right so it's really so when I do the next step and say okay I'm going to propose that there's this social network of conscious agents I'm leaping Way Way Beyond Darwin and there's nothing in Darwin that says that's the leap you have to take so I should be very very clear nothing in in my work in evolutionary theory is saying You must go to conscious agents however I have to go the other way if I'm going to propose conscious agents this social network the Twitter verse of conscious agents uh as the fundamental reality then it's

my responsibility to show that I can first project it back into something that I would call space time Create A Spacetime and that when I do that projection in that SpaceTime I would see what looks like nature red and tooth and Claw as Darin predicts so so so it's not that Darwin predicts conscious agents it's rather that Darwin says there's something Beyond SpaceTime and and then I go okay well what is it Darwin can't tell me I need to make my own leap so I am going to propose conscious agents because at least that way

I might be able to understand Consciousness then okay then as a scientist no BS give me back SpaceTime give me back the standard model of particle physics every bit of it with new predictions and give me back evolution of natural selection otherwise my theory of conscious agents you shouldn't pay attention to it at all so unless I can do that bye-bye so so that's the hard-nosed itude that that we have to have for these an idealist Theory Of Consciousness Beyond SpaceTime for as a scient again I'm not putting down philosophy philosophy is wonderful and I

learn a lot from philosophers but I'm talking about science here scientists who are idealist have to do this hard work and give us back a theory of SpaceTime that that that gives us new technologies and new insights so that's what what what I'm up to right now is working with my my colleagues it's a mathematically precise theory of consciousness it's think of it as again like a social network like the Twitter verse there's an infinite number of these conscious agents and we have a mathematics it's a markovian so-called a marvian dynamical system it's trivial to

show that it's computationally Universal so our network of conscious agents can do anything that a neural network could do chat GPT geminy Bard all all these these all these AI programs that that are based on neural Nets conscious agent networks can do all of that so our conscious agent Nets um only assume that there are agents that have a range of experiences like the taste of chocolate the smell of garlic so that's one of our Miracles every scientific theory has a miracle here's my Miracles there are conscious experiences and second Miracle is that there are

probabilistic relationships some unconscious experiences that first one though doesn't necessarily require an assumption right so how could you say it's in well most cuz our conscious experience is probably the one thing that is self-evident right you well I would agree that space and time and what we call physics is an extrapolation from our experiences my experiences are all I know directly so I would agree with you on that but when I say it's a miracle for my theory what I'm saying is my theory will not try to explain the origin of conscious expr experiences mhm

so it's sense it's a miracle got it so it's going and and some people might say well that's why I like physicalism because I'm just going to start off with uh the standard model of particle physics and I don't need to assume the taste of mint and all these experiences just of particle particles of and their properties and I'm going to show you where those conscious experiences come from and then I win and and I would say if they could do that but as I that would be very very impressive if they if they could

do that right now they're batting zero and I predict that they're going to bat zero but they would have their own Miracle which is the laws of the standard model of particle physics and and and the quirks and gluons and bons and and leptons that they that they so it's not like they don't have any Miracles they they have their own Miracles it's just not my Miracles so every every theory is going to have its Miracles now one thing about taking Consciousness is fundamental is there's a wide variety of conscious experiences right I said there's

a trillion specific ones that we have so that's in some sense it's assuming a lot right but it's one category of of assumption it's a category of conscious experiences and the reason why right now I think it's a good step as a scientist to move in that direction is when you look at my co my good friends and colleagues who are doing the physicalist theories they're having to assume all those SpaceTime physics the standard model and so forth and then when they get to the step of explaining conscious experiences they can't and so what they're

effectively having to do is also they have to stipulate the conscious experiences they stipulate the physics and they stipulate the conscious experiences and that's actually the word that Steven Pinker used as he describes like the global workspace Global neuron workspace Theory he's saying it yeah it stipulates all the the physics but then it also has to stipulate the conscious experiences and so my attitude is well if the physicalist theories are stipulating the conscious experiences as well as the physics and I'm only stipulating the conscious experiences and I'm going to show where the physics comes out

I'm going to explain the physics I'm not going to stipulate the physics I'm going to explain it and hopefully get a deeper model with new technologies that you couldn't get with SpaceTime then you win that that approach will win because I've stipulated less than the physical theories so that's why I think I want to go ahead with this even though it's a big give to to take all these conscious experiences is fundamental but what I'm not taking is other things like learning memory problem solving intelligence the self there's all these other things that we would

we would expect to have from a theory of Consciousness and I'm not assuming those that I'm going to explain the only thing I'm assuming are the raw conscious experiences themselves and probabilistic relationships among them that's all that's all I'm giving myself this very very spare starting point this spare as I could make it it was literally the minimal thing that I thought I could get away with and then there's no notion of self learning memory intelligence all that other stuff we have to build that but the fact that it's computationally Universal means um it doesn't

mean it's easy but it means yeah we can do it so we mentioned a little bit earlier the amplitud hedrin which is this Jewel shaped geometric structure that challenges our notion of space and time how would you explain what that is to somebody that is not a physicist or mathematician like in simplistic terms what does that represent for the possibility and challenging Notions of space and time yeah it's an an interesting short story I'll tell this short story when you try to understand how particles interact in SpaceTime like you might smash two gluons into each

other and four gluons go spraying out and you want to look at the probabilities of various kinds of interactions that particles can have they call them scattering amplitudes but probabilities of interactions when you do the mathematics in SpaceTime using Quantum field Theory the math is very difficult that little two in four gluons out hundreds of pages of algebra hundreds of pages of algebra for one interaction millions of terms and that makes it really hard when you have to look at millions or even billions of these interactions per second to to try to figure out what

are the what's the new stuff so there was some serious pressure to try to make the mathematics easier easier the experimentalists were saying come on guys this you've got to give us something a little bit easier to work with here on the mathematics and so some mathematicians in the 80s discovered they could get it down to 133 pages instead of several hundred Pages like oh thank you it holy smoke down to like 13 or something and and then they guessed a single formula like just a few terms you could write it down by hand and

it was right for that par one particular and it's was like what there's something going on here there's like some magic going on here maybe it's a one-off but then they found other examples and then in 2005 2006 Ed Whitten and his postto discovered something called it's now called the bcfw recursion relations that allowed them for many many kinds of interactions technically it's called n equals 4 super Yang Mills but anyway particular particular class they could compute them with this very very simple recursive formula that collapsed all this stuff and some guy named hajes then

brilliant physicist in England said in one case a few cases it looks like this formula is putting together pieces of a volume of some object maybe maybe there's some general thing here and then Nema and his team said well that's that's an interesting idea so they went after that and in 20 14 they 2013 they published the archive but 2014 the the actual publication came out so just 10 years ago the official publication came out of the amplitud hedrin which confirmed what Hodges had proposed but there was some geometric object that um bcfw recursion relations

were gluing pieces together to make this object and that object was encoding in its volumes the scattering probabilities and the structure it turned out of this object the structure was encoding the probabilities well the volumes are encoding the probabilities but the structure like the edges the all the edges and so forth are we're encoding um properties of of um locality and unitarity effectively SpaceTime properties Quantum unitarity and SpaceTime locality you know relativistic locality and so but this was not an object inside SpaceTime and it was actually entirely Beyond SpaceTime and also Beyond quantum theory so

some people have said said well yeah space time isn't fundamental but we'll use entanglement for example of of quantum theory to boot up SpaceTime and they're saying no no no no SpaceTime and quantum theory are emerging together from something far deeper such as the amplitud hedrin and and then more generally these positive geometry so the amplitud hedin is sort of like the first but positive geometri is more generally so so the idea is there's we have assumed in science for hundreds of years that SpaceTime is fundamental reality in the last 10 years for the first

time scientists have taken off the space-time headset and we said we can look outside SpaceTime what are we going to find we're looking outside of SpaceTime the first paper in some sense that was going outside space time is in say in the last 10 years give so we've been looking outside of SpaceTime for 10 years and what do we find what you what what you take off the what's obelisks geometric structures not a Dynamics just sitting there here I am big geometric could be millions of Dimensions it could be hundreds of Dimensions trillions of Dimensions

it's they're just sitting there and and and so here it's very much like 2001 Space Odyssey where the Obelisk is there yeah and all apes are pounding and hooting and they know it's important yeah it's it's clearly and they have no clue right and and that's where we are we've taken off the headset there's these obelisks sitting there smiling at us quiet they're not moving they're telling us something really really important and we and but it's it's so tantalizing that as I mentioned the European research Council just put out 10 million doll initiative the it's

called the universe plus initiative February they brought together like aund um mathematicians and high energy theoretical physicists to launch this whole thing and We're Off to the Races we've taken off the headset we found these Obelisk we want to find out who put those obelis there and why you know what is this telling us right so race is on and what I'm what I'm proposing is we need a Dynamics physics always wants something dynamical we need a dynamics that will give rise to these obelisks the positive geometries and so that's what I'm working on with

this theory of conscious agents what the paper I'm working on right now and and the paper I published last year is we're taking the theory of conscious agents in this dynamical system and we're showing how to get the new objects that the physicists have found outside of SpaceTime from them so I didn't mention in addition to the positive geometries there are combinatorial objects in particular something called decorated permutations that classify these structures classify the objects and we've done that we've actually mapped our Consciousness Dynamics onto the decorated permutations that's then giving us the that helped

us Gro how to then mesh our theory of conscious agent Dynamics the markup Dynamics with these positive geometries and the paper we're work working on right now we're planning to actually take in the simple case n equals 4 super young males to go all the way from Consciousness all the way into space time time to predict a scattering amplitude so so the idea and that is just a first baby step but the idea is we start with the theory of Consciousness mathematically precise outside of SpaceTime and show precisely where these decorated permutations and the positive

geometries come from and then show how SpaceTime and its properties emerg as as as a trivial projection of this um social dynamics of conscious agents so that's sort of the big picture of where we're headed hm okay there's like four tangents that just SP off that I wanted to explore there is this Sufi Master actually that I believe has a quote roughly saying this whole universe was made so that God may know himself the seed wished to know what it was and what is in it and so it became a tree and it seems like

structures like these geometric structures that exist out of SpaceTime that were discovering um point to projecting know like projecting down into this real it to create almost analogous to like we discover certain crystals or rocks that Earth for whatever reason the Dynamics create these mathematically precise structures that are extremely beautiful um that we're looking down projecting down into there are these higher dimensional structures that are projecting down and so I'm just curious what implications do you feel like is uh comes about as we start discovering these higher like obelisks that for some reason are there

we don't know why but that yeah that again like we mentioned challenges our Notions of space time but then also begs the question of what are they doing how are how are they there right right well and first I should clarify one thing I mean I I probably sound very excited about these ideas about conscious agents outside of SpaceTime and I'm playing it up it's because that's the current research I'm doing it's a lot of fun um but frankly it's just a baby step right it's not the truth I I there is no such thing

as a theory of everything and that includes Hoffman's Theory so I'm not claiming I've got the final word I'm just saying that here's a very interesting for those of us who think something like Consciousness is fundamental here is a first scientific theory outside of SpaceTime but it's not the final theory of everything and and I'll be very very happy when someone comes and overthrows my theory and get something deeper but my guess is that the deeper thing will be a much deeper understanding of Consciousness than than one that that my theory is proposing so so

humble pies is required right away right this isn't I'm Not The Theory of Everything I'm it's okay to be excited and be fun but don't mistake that for me thinking it's the truth it's not the truth it's just an an interesting baby step in terms of for example what you were saying about the what the Sufi Master said MH I think something like that is really right it's a again it's a good pointer again not when I say right not the truth but again a pointer in in an interesting Direction I think that so I

should be very very clear on this point this is really critical I talked earlier about scientific theories always making assumptions and therefore there could never be a scientific the of everything that means there's an infinite number of scientific theories that we could create because there's an infinite number of deeper and deeper assumptions we could make and reality whatever it is is transcends even that infinite sequence of scientific theories and that's that's really an important point and it's and it's coming from a very simple fact about scientific theories every scientific theory must make assumptions and it

doesn't explain its assumptions those are miracles for the scientific theory there's no way around it you cannot give me a scientific theory that doesn't have Miracles at the starting point we call them assumptions that's a very sobering fact about science and one that we should really look at closely it means infinite job security for science which is good but that's also very very humbling it means that even if we gave infinite effort had a billion Einstein working for a billion years we wouldn't scratch the surface of whatever objective reality is so when when spiritual Traditions

many spiritual Traditions have made it very very clear like the da Ching says the da that can be spoken of is not the true da they're they're saying something that's truly truly important and that is all of our Concepts fail ultimately they're pointers to the reality but they're not the reality in in the following very very simple sense the word mint versus the experience of mint of course the word mint is nothing like the experience of mint and the word mint doesn't explain the experience of mint and it's not a theory of the experience of

mint if you want to know mint the experience of mint you have to taste it yourself you have to know it firsthand then someone else can say that is what I mean by the word mint so you have to have the experience yourself and then the words can point to it this is not yes this is the way and this is all of our Concepts the the color red the smell of garlic the sound of a trumpet you have to have the if you don't have the experience yourself good luck me giving it to you

by by talking so my words aren't going to do it and so that's so what the spiritual Traditions have been saying is extremely important here it's not just SCH mystical nonsense I'm saying that scientists have to really understand that our scientific we I'm a scientist I love scientific theories they beat handwaves by a long shot so I I I'm I'm sort of impatient with hand handwaves scientific theories are wonderful because they're precise and they tell you their limits and so they tell you when that theory is done that's beautiful but many scientists still have the

hope that they're going to get a theory of everything no chance there is no Theory of Everything so so the spiritual Traditions are telling us the right thing when they say any word is a pointer the same thing is true of science ific theories they're all at best pointers but our pointers in science tell us their limits the SpaceTime pointer stops at 10 Theus 33 cm thank you after that space time is not worthwhile it doesn't work at 10us 43 seconds that's the anti-dogmatic Cure that we get from science that's really really powerful so so

the I'm all on board with the spiritual Traditions saying in in some sense that whatever reality is you can only make pointers to it and even our scientific theories will only be pointers to it and they're only pointers to a perspective yep on it so the idea that the the infinite one that you were saying from the Sufi master that the infinite needs to look at itself from different perspectives I I agree and maybe what science does is it gives us rigorous the most rigorous descriptions we can give pointers from a perspective and the fact

that we can do technology doesn't mean that we know the truth it means that we have a good description of this perspective and the and so the match of the scientific description to a perspective not the ultimate the the ultimate truth transcends but the perspective description getting that right does allow technology and so that's where we can see most of our theories are not even right about our perspective right we're we're just so just so wrong that we don't even get our perspective correct so so so so that's how humbling this is and words are

frustratingly inadequate for describing these things and like much like what you were saying it's it's so puzzling because our words are meant to communicate our inner experience and yet our inner experience inherently transcends Linguistics that's right and I'm excited to dive also into Kurt godo's incompleteness theorem because this points that that there are truths that can't be proven and so we we'll dive into that in a moment but just any further thoughts on how the the limits of language is a very real thing and you know it's a thing on this podcast that we can

talk about many different things forever and yet you won't have the experience of mint until you until you taste it until you taste it that that's right and in spiritual the big one in spirituality is that the ultimate unconditioned Consciousness transcends any description you can only know it by letting go of thought and right and and and actually being face Toof face no thought with that unconditional infinite intelligence that you are now for for many scientists that's sounds very SCH mystical it sounds very very this is so scientific it's so we want rigorous terms that

we can verify and and and and and experiments and and what I'm my my point earlier was is no this is not different than what's going on in science at all all of the basic concepts that we have we how do we know the tast aent I if you've never tasted it I can't the word is only a pointer SpaceTime if you've never experienced SpaceTime the mathematics is only a pointer so this is not something some deficit of spiritual Traditions that they say uh well we're pointing to this this sh mytical thing that's infinite intelligence

that you are but but you know no words and and most of my colleagues in Sciences would go that's kind of nonsense we don't need to deal with here in science and I'm saying no no no that's the kind of nonsense you deal with all the time almost every term that you use is only known by what we call ostensive definition ostensive definition means um someone has to point and then give you the word like when you're when you have a a baby 18 months and there's time for them to learn some words and mom

and dad there's a rabbit on the on the carpet and at the right age you can just point and say rabbit and you know Chris gets it you know baby Chris gets that now when you think about it that's a miracle there's an infinite number of hypotheses that Chris could entertain it could be the fur the texture of the fur the color it could be the ear and the the left foot it could be the tail and the chair behind the rabbit there's an infinite number so how is it that all Mom and Dad have

to do at the right age is to point and say to Chris rabbit and Chris gets it it's often in one or just one or two trials that's ostensive definition and that means that Chris already has to have that experience and Mom and Dad don't teach them the experience they assume the experience and they give a pointer which is Trivial compared to the experience of the rabbit rabbit is nothing the the word rabbit is just a trivial pointer and this is how we know basically everything every visual experience that you have every every smell experience

you have every tactile experience you have the fact you you get the name people just tell you um the experiences you're having that I'm assuming that you're having we call that you know hot or we call that cold we call that rough we call that smooth we call that satin what whatever you have to have the experience and that's almost any Century experience is all by ostensive definition we don't teach people anything if they don't have the experience you can't teach them so so this this kind of thing it's easy for scientists to dismiss the

claim that language fails to capture this deep Consciousness that's unconditioned that that's infinite and and that ultimately is the core of who you are that that sounds social mystical to them and I'm saying no no no this is ubiquitous and all the terms that we know basically are by ensive definition from things that transcend the words then can't be reduced to the words and and I should just just it's humorous but when you're pointing to the rabbit and saying rabbit at the right age with what you don't do is point and say quadraped you'll be

messing up your kid if you said quadruped or or um you know a mammal something like that's just just the wrong thing to do so we actually have rules that are wired into us we know intuitively you don't have to go to class you just know that when you're going to say rabbit you're not going to say quadruped or mammal or anything like that it's reducing it down to its function or parts instead of what its Essence is yeah that's right so they're and and the kid is also pre-programmed to know that Mom and Dad

know this intely so they're going to give me what we call the basic level object category name first and then they'll maybe give me some superordinate or subordinate um pointers later on but right now I'm going to just get the the basic level and so there's we're actually wired up with the right way of pointing out so the pointing that you get in the in the spiritual traditions and these are dis pointers I I'm just pointing out that that's how we learn everything it's pointing out all the time this is not some just SCH mystical

weird stuff that this these people are it's all over the place and it's it's essential in science and I think that the pointing out of things doesn't absolve us of the mystery of what it is because often times you like give a bird a name right you discover a new species or whatever and you name it and it's like okay now we know what that is like you know there is a level of grandiosity just labeling something as in that's a rabbit and okay yeah there's just now there now I just know that rabbits look

like that or a tree is just a tree and you don't get to I guess be surprised by the mystery of what the essence of that thing is which is like the one in the many different ancient wisdom Traditions that have talked about this immaterial realm that pre-exists space time in the quantum foam from uh cabalistic Origins talking about uh inof which is literally Without End or Buddhism talking about emptiness or adva Vidant talking about this nonu reality that the Consciousness is ex like extremely vast and differentiating itself into all these different experiences which I

find so fascinating I've heard you talk to uh how you know as humans we have three channels of color with red green and blue the Mantis shrip has 10 11 or more channels of color what do that experience like exactly no I agree with all the points that you're you're making here and and what it's just really critical as you were talking about the spiritual Traditions do tell us that the word is just the word and the reality transcends the word the word is just a pointer and and so they often will recommend that you

spend time letting go of the words so that's meditation so if you want to not be trapped in the trivial world of Concepts which is Trivial compared to reality then spend time in meditation where you literally let your mind not dwell on the concepts you just have no you let go of any concept and when you actually look at the when you walk around in the world look at trees look at the ocean where you just literally say I'm um my mind can be quiet for a while just no no thoughts I'm just going to

be here in thoughtless pure awareness then the world comes alive and you begin to realize most of the time you've killed the world it's deadened you you see the dead world of your Concepts and you don't see the living world that's around you and I can put this so that's what spiritual tradition I'll put this in scientific language b b inference we talk about our prior understandings our prior probabilities as you know in basian Prior so we have this prior probability of of for for example you know maybe belief in the standard model of particle

physics and and the particular laws and that and those prop that's my my my prayer before that maybe with Newton we had you know Newton's theory of um physics and so forth that that would be our prayer and once you have a prior once you have the prior probability any new data that you get will be interpreted in terms of your prior understanding there's this so whole basian inference kind of thing and you get a posterior distribution which is so given that you have this prior belief and you get this new data coming in then

you compute what your posterior distribution will be walking around without Concepts letting go of thought is saying I need to let go of my prior if I don't let go of my prior I'm condemned to only see my posterior in in both funny senses that right you can only see your posterior both in the technical sense and in in this more metaphorical sense if you don't let go of your priors you will only see your posterior and and so if you don't want to just be seeing your own posterior um you want to be open

up to novelty then you actually have to spend time I think as a scientist it's critical for me to actually spend time in of course thought and Mathematics and hard NOS so no substitute do your hard work and then let go of it completely sit there in utter silence that's where the true new creativity comes from and then go back and try to translate it if you can into the the math and symbols that that you have and that way you're not stuck with your priors you if you want creativity you actually have to get

outside your priors altogether so I so I would suggest that um again there's not some kind of mystical nasty terrible silly stuff that's going on you know in in spiritual Traditions that that's anathema to science I I think there's a way to understand what the spiritual Traditions are are telling us that makes sense from a basian inference point of view from the SC from the scientist if you don't let go of your priors you're condemned to only see your posterior so let go of your priors what does that mean of course do your homework but

then at some point step back and let go of all your concepts for a while and see what comes out yeah it really seems like the parable of the Blind Men in the L elephant where Blind Men come and you know touch the tail of the elephant think it's a whips another touches the leg thinks it's a tree trunk another touches the trunk of the elephant and thinks it's a you know a snake another touches the belly thinks it's a wall and they're all experiencing parts of something and not understanding the whole of what it

is and I just find it very interesting to explore the overlap and consilience of what The Cutting Edge science saying with the ancient wisdom traditions and philosophy and metaphysics and if we can touch all the different parts of that metaphorical elephant to see uh and talk to each other about what our experience is of that thing that it points us closer to the direction of the experience of what it actually you know what it actually is and what reality actually is yes I think that the idea of the elephant being looked at from different various

perspectives is is is apt here and science gives us rigorous tools to do that palpating of different parts of the with more Precision than we might otherwise palpate it and when I say that there's infinite job security in science I mean that's really truly humbling it means that we with all the palpation we've done we have 0% of the elephant underneath us 0% and that's I honestly believe that I think that we've palpated 0% of it what we know is is one perspective out of an infinite number of perspectives not like there's five perspectives and

we got one of them no there's an infinite number of different perspectives um and whatever but that's who you are what you are transcends any description in an infinite number of descriptions and so it's truly truly a remarkable claim that spiritual Traditions are making and that you and I are just avatars Andre and or avatars being used by an infinite Consciousness that transcends an infinite number of different descriptions and would transcend an infinite study by science it's talking to itself through through two different avatars um and looking at itself right now through a particular humble

perspective only a four-dimensional space-time headset perspective on itself and and it's doing that um and who knows how many there's an infinite number of these the things going on all the time but what's what's interesting about it is as well from a social perspective is once I understand that Andre and Don are just really the same Consciousness talking to itself through two different avatars that's the real foundation for social interaction and and social justice love your neighbor as yourself is true and right because your neighbor is yourself it's interesting the the the infinite Consciousness that

we are has chosen to forget itself to to plunge itself into a perspective so thoroughly that it's lost in the perspective and it actually views its other avatars as enemies in some cases and slowly wakes up to and so somehow it's really important when you look at yourself from a perspective that you really look at yourself from that perspective you take it really really seriously and you get lost in it and then very very painfully wake up and then you realize oh as interesting and complicated and wonderful as that perspective was I infinitely transcend that

and that's how the infinite comes to know itself it's beautiful and it's why I love talking to you so much too it's because you're able to navigate both terrains of the scientific understanding which is rigorous and uh the philosophical and uh inner experience side of things you know if if Consciousness really is this unifying field then us as individuals in parenthesis having this individual experience are much like waves of an ocean we're not actually separate but we have the experience in a certain amount of time in a certain amount of space that Andre and Don

exist just like a wave exists in an ocean for a certain amount of time and for a certain amount of space and it has its own experience that is unique unlike any other wave that has probably ever come before and after that time and space it inhabited as over then it joins back the ocean but the kicker is that it was never separate from the ocean in the first place in the first place that's right but there is value in the ocean having the wave in us as individuals that are Connected To Source or the

one kind of losing ourselves discovering ourselves waking up because that somehow provides a unique new Nuance experience and perspective of the one that otherwise wouldn't have been previously available I I completely agree I think that's that that's right and the one thing that we're trying to do with the mathematics we're working on right now is to actually take that idea and make it mathematical again the mathematics will always just be a baby step but still to to take those ideas that what you were saying is I think been part of the wisdom traditions for for

for Millennia that kind of idea to turn it into mathematically precise things so what we're doing right now for example we have with this Marian dynamics of conscious agents and the way the wisdom ideas get cashed out is that the the model again it's just a model but here's the what the model says we can write down dynamics of this infinite conscious agent that's so-called stationary Dynamics there's the there there is no entropic Arrow of time so it's a dynamical system but the entropy is not increasing well if it is then also CP is increas

is is moving in the other direction would you say um for I'd have to look for stationary Dynamics that's a technical thing I'd have to ask about the I'll have to look sidebar that's right but but but the entropy is constant in in in in the stationary Dynamics but it's a theorem that if I take this Dynamics in which there's no entropic Arrow of time and I look at it from any perspective by conditional probability for example then the the Dynamics that I'll see will be a projected Dynamics and that projected Dynamics will have an

arrow of time the entropy will will be increasing so here we are with an entropic arrow of time my the the model I'm working on is there's a Consciousness has no entropic Arrow of time it's Timeless and it's also spaceless but when I look at it from this perspective so we been talking about perspectives but now we can deal with mathematical Precision we can say when we take this perspective then by the math the mathematics tells us we're going to get an arrow of time so we will get a big bang and and and by

the way there's no it's all one the Consciousness is all one but when you get inside of the projection now all of a sudden there are these artificial boundaries so you get what what we call predictive processing and Mark out blankets and um inference and so forth all of the stuff which is sort of modern state-of-the-art Neuroscience kinds of things that we're looking to and and other in computer science looking at ways of you know modeling thing all of that breaking into units with markof blankets separating things and so forth active inference predictive processing to

maintain our boundaries all of that is not an insight into the deep nature of reality all of that is an artifact of loss of information in the projection as is Darwin's theory of natural selection nature red and tooth and cl what is the fundamental limited resource in evolution time if I don't eat in time I die if I don't m in time I don't reproduce if I don't breathe in time I die time is the fundamental limited resource so I love Darwin's theory inside SpaceTime talking about biology inside our SpaceTime there's no better Theory than

Darwin's having said that wonderful thing about Darwin every aspect of his theory is an artifact of the projection from SpaceTime none of it it translates to anything about the reality Beyond none of it so so that's a real warning sign to us to be very very humble about our theories Darwin's theory is is a beautiful Theory inside SpaceTime it has no traction outside whatsoever it's all of it is an artifact and and so that so we're not moving towards the theory of everything we should be very very humble I'm curious do you think that there

are levels of fundamental Al reality that are simply inconceivable to the human mind and understanding like we wouldn't expect a monkey to understand quantum mechanics or entanglement or have even the uh Baseline ingredients to be able to have any semblance of anything regarding quantum mechanics are there things that you think that are simply beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand and deeper levels of reality that that's I I do I think that the human mind uh has great capacities and fundamental limitations and when spiritual Traditions tell us to set aside the human mind

now and then spend time on meditation and put the the human mind apart you you be of course then when you try to reconceptualize what you experienced you can only reconceptualize it inside the human mind that's that's the tool you've got but in fact you infinitely transcend the human mind so so you aren't the human mind you when you talk to me through these avatars we're having to use the human mind and therefore all of a sudden the bandwidth goes down to a straw a little tiny straw of of information that goes back and forth

but you and I are in fact the infinite intelligence looking at itself through this particular little straw so yeah the human mind has this incredibly write that down but but but you are not the human mind you transcend infinitely the human mind but in as as long as you're in this Avatar you can only have a human mind appreciation of that Transcendence I love that so I mean right now we're exploring you know the uh the boundaries or limitations of our possible understanding and I know that you've talked to the value of discovering the limitations

of our mathematical theorems and uh because they show us what's possible and how we can invent GPS and so much of things that we use and take for granted um in our convenient modern society and it also shows us where it fails right and so what what is the value of discovering the limitations do you feel like be um and how it redirects us in our energy and search well I think it it's valuable for a couple reasons one reason is simply that it's true that the mathematics as powerful as mathematics is and I love

mathematics uh all the thms that you can prove are trivial subset of the thms that are out there and all the thms that are entailed by any set of AXS you write down um are trivial subset of all the thms that that are true so it's really important to to know that that's a once again I think it's one way we think about is that it's the infinite intelligence giving itself a wakeup call giving its avatars its projections a wakeup call right it it's it's plunging itself in all the way with both feet it's losing

it self in there but it's giving itself a little hint from the mathematics that says no matter how smart mathematically precise you are it's going to be trivial compared to the reality Beyond wake up call wake up call you aren't your projection you aren't the Avatar reality transcends infinitely transcends anything that you can do in your science and your mathematics which is not to say don't do your science do your I'm a scientist I'm not a mathematician I wish but I wish I were I work with mathematicians but I am a Scientist and so I'm

I'm all for the science and the mathematics but and I it's wonderful to get a better appreciation of this projection of of of these avatars But ultimately that's a a big hint to oursel from girdle's incompleteness ter for example that uh there's infinite infinite exploration beyond what you could even do with your science and your mathematics so that's that's a very important wake up come so let's explore that incompleteness theorem I've been geeking out diving deeper into kuro's the uh incomp incompleteness theorem also his life and who he was as an individual very very interesting

regarded as one of the most brilliant magicians to possibly have ever lived and I recall um Einstein referring to him as kind of like the smart one like he would like love to come back and go on long walks with him and uh very interesting individual also had had these metaphysical practices of laying down and intuiting mathematical objects and different things like that which I want to I want to talk to you about in a little bit but for people that don't know what the incompleteness theorem is how would you break it down in describing

truths that are truths but can't be proven well what what girdle showed was that if I write down a certain set of aums like for arithmetic certain you know every number has a successor and things like that if if my axioms are enough rigorous and enough complicated so substantial enough to actually be able to formulate all of arithmetic to formulate arithmetic then girdle showed that he could write down a sentence that was true and could not be proven from your axioms and that's pretty stunning right so that was the Brilliance was to actually used the

language of mathematics to to write down a sentence that says I'm true but can't be proven and he so he did that and which you can you can say well okay well no problem I'll just take that and add that to my aim so now now I'm good I've got so this this statement wasn't provable so I I won't I'll just throw it in as an aiom but then girdle's thing is recursive he can then show you another one and this goes on at infinum what what this means is girle showed that that basically um

you can't just write down a finite set of axioms and and then a set of rules and grind out all the truths truth transcends proof there's the bottom you know in three words yeah that's what that that's girdle in in three words truth transcends proof and that's along the lines of what I was saying earlier that truth transcends any scientific theory because every scientific theory is going to have a mathematical set of assumptions the aums and it will have mathematical derivation rules that are of course usually at least is good enough for doing arithmetic so

every scientific theory is subject to girdles incompleteness theorem which means that as many truths as you can crank out with your scientific theory I'm sorry as many proofs about reality as you can crank out the truth infinitely Transcendent so this is another bit of humble pie and again my my my take- home message is not don't do science absolutely do science because science does crank out a lot of interesting proofs that seem to be useful but it also to its credit tells you that it can't give you the whole truth that's wonderful so he ascribed

binary I believe different numbers to certain equations and theorems to be able to prove this a random example that's just coming to mind right now I don't even know if it's accurate but I'd love to hear is if I say this statement all men are liars and I'm a man if if I am lying then that kind of eats itself because is that statement true or false if I if I'm lying that all men are liars but that that entails that I'm telling the truth about all men are liars but I am also so so

it's like it's it kind of eats itself in a really confusing way that's right the Liar's Paradox is is is an important Point yeah it's I even know it was like a thing the it's it's a very very big thing in mathematics and it's um there's also the um Barber of Seville which is a similar The Barber of sevil um shaves all and only those who don't shave themselves who shaves The Barber of ceville right you get yourself into so so that's where this turns out to be non-trivial in in mathematics because you you get

things that beron Russell discovered this this issue of in set theory so a lot of of mathematics have set on set theory um you know the set of all integers for example or or the set of all um prime numbers we have all the sets are very very important but vir Russell pointed out that what about the set of all sets that don't contain themselves does that set contain itself or not and you get this Liars Paradox kind of thing coming out so so that and that's that's still a a big I mean so what

they have often done is is reduce set theory to what they call class Theory to try to avoid these kind of paradoxes but my my take is that this is really not really resolved I mean there there is this liar Paradox kind of thing that that goes on to mathematics and so so yeah it's it's pretty deep but I would I would say that the big the big one though is that truth transcends proof and that you kind of in a way have to be you have to go outside of a system to like fully

understand it um and that Consciousness is not a morphous but structured and that structuredness I guess goes to Infinity I I would agree up to a point um I would say that when you say Consciousness is structured I would say as a scientist I'm I'm limited to describing Consciousness as structured and having that structure go into Infinity that's and that's what I'm doing so what you're describing is what I'm trying to do but but I actually think that Consciousness transcends structure infinitely transcends structure but it can be structured just like a nice projection of sure

like like we're structures of Consciousness in a in a way that's right but what you are literally does transcend any words or any mathematics period um but any but there's an infinite number of perspectives that we could take on on the true Consciousness and in in those in many of those perspectives then you could have infinite mathematical description that I'm working on the paper I'm working on right now is is one so I'm working on a paper right now where you want to share a little bit about just a little just Just a Touch I'd

love I'd love to hear yeah so so it's we have this markovian Dynamics so marov chains describing a big social network of interacting conscious agents an infinite number of them in principle so it's just like like you were talking about I mean an infinite structure description of of the one Consciousness and I'm doing that because that's the best I can do as a scientist but I as I said earlier I think that Consciousness transcends that completely so so so I'm putting the Humble Pie right up front on this but now with the Humble Pie there

now let's look at the fun fun part of this this this perspective it turns out that we discovered just in this year a a New Order on marov chains that no one had ever discovered before and it's way of saying when one marov chain in some sense is less than another or entails another for those who know Marco there I'll just say it real briefly if you can take a Markov kernel and if you take a trace of it of that Markov chain on a subset of Estates like the first three states or something like

that you'll get a new markovian kernel called the trace chain so you can take a big Mar kernel trace it on a subset of it states and you get a new Marian kernel that's called the trace chain of it and I can go into an intuition on that if you want I can say a little bit more intuitively about what that means but what this logic is is we discover that um if you say one markovian kernel entails another or observes another if and only if it's a trace of the other so it's a trace

chain of the other then you get a complete logic all consciousnesses are are now tied together in this one big logic you can talk about when they can actually it tells you how to combine consciousnesses when they can combine into new higher consciousnesses and when they can't it's a non-boolean logic and what it it it shows that Consciousness can go infinitely far in complexity in infinitely many directions there's no there's no one top Consciousness in this ma this model so even this mathematics is already comp Lex enough to say whatever Consciousness is there's not just

a single little guy at the top there's an infinite number of directions you can go infinitely far and and so what we'll be publishing it this year this paper so there's this whole logic of all the the the little consciousnesses and bigger and bigger Consciousness how they combine to to um ultimately point to the one Consciousness which transcends our logic but with this with this logic we're this is going to be part of the key for us making the map into SpaceTime and and the physics um and giving a theory of observation because we we

now have a the what does it mean for one Consciousness to observe another it's if it's a trace of of the other and that's going to be we're thinking it's going to be a big big help in in physics because in quantum theory they don't have a theory of observation they they they don't The Observer so when you don't observe something there's a unitary linear evolution of the system but when you observe whatever process is whatever system is doing the observation is nonlinear it's non-unitary and so for quantum theory has been out for almost 100

years 1926 to now it's so 98 years and no theory of observation because you can't reduce a non-unitary process to a unary one you just can't do it so we're we're proposing a theory of observation for for physics with what you just described is it is it possible that it could be linked to what someone some would regard as a kind of contentious uh Exploration with James lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is itself a living organism and I'm curious if this cuz it sounds like you're exploring the inter how Consciousness is kind like link

together do you feel like conscious agents such as Don Andre everybody that lives on earth and the organisms that live here um like conscious agents could kind of stacked create a bigger one for example Gaia do you see that as a possibility well yes but it's a completely different framework from from the Gaia kind of hypothesis so so let me sort of explain the difference in perspective um from the theory of conscious agents it's saying that Consciousness is fundamental and SpaceTime and its objects are just a headset so to make it really radical and how

radical that is um most of us think of ourselves as little 100 to 200 pound tiny objects inside of an infinite SpaceTime with trillions of galaxies and so forth on this tiny little 200 pound object in this massive universe that's been there for almost 14 billion years and so and what I'm saying is that's that's completely wrong what whatever you are SpaceTime is a trivial data structure inside you so you're not this trivial 200 pound object inside this vast SpaceTime that vast SpaceTime is a trivial data structure inside you so that so that that's how

radical what I'm I'm saying is much more more radical than the gay hypothesis so if if you're looking for who's the bigger nut I'm the bigger nut right this that's but but but then the idea is that our what we view we look around us we see what we think are is a distinction between animate and inanimate objects you know I mean I I'm not worried about hitting this whereas I'd be worried about hitting you if I hit the microphone um you know it might mess up the audio a little bit but it's not I'm

I'm not worried about causing any pain on anybody whereas if I heit you I would be causing pain so we have this distinction between animate and inanimate objects and the Gail hypothesis is starting to sort of play with that say well you know maybe the difference between living and non-living isn't as as tight as we thought well I I think that that's right in the following sense the distinction we make between animate and inanimate objects I claim is completely unprincipled there's no princip distinction between animate and inanimate at all when I the the in this

point of view the only reality is consciousness that is the reality so I'm always interacting with my headset SpaceTime headset I'm always interacting with Consciousness but my Consciousness my my headset is dumbing things down right that's what headsets do they they're simplifying things right now so I have some insight into your ious experiences through my headset but but when I look at an a mouse I'll get much less Insight but some when I look at an amoeba much less when I virus much less and then when I look at you know at protons neutrons none

um or rocks none but think about it this way suppose I'm talking with you on a zoom screen and there's a bunch of pixels on my screen some of the pixels are pixels of your face and those pixels provide me with a portal into you into what you're thinking I mean like if you smile I can you know he must be happier or or or frown he doesn't like what I just said so I get some insight from those pixels about your conscious experiences but the pixels of the wall behind you no no insight into

Consciousness whatsoever now I wouldn't want to say ah so there is a distinction between animate and inanimate pixels those are the living pixels and those are the not that's dumb pixels are pixels they're part of an interface a headset or a desktop and and and some of them some pixels provide a portal into the Consciousness you and others don't and so this is the way I think about why there's no distinction between animate and inanimate objects SpaceTime is just a headset the headset sometimes gives me insight into Consciousness and sometimes it doesn't that's what headsets

do they dumb things down that's a limit of the headset not an insight into reality so when I look at a ro I am interacting with Consciousness but my interface is so impoverished that all I get is a rock yeah now I hope that the back and forth goes both ways that just as the Consciousness on the other side can't really affect me too much um directly I can't affect the Consciousness too much through the rock if I smash the rock as I might have to do as I'm building house or something like that I

would hate to to think that I was causing pain on the other side but I I don't know I mean that's there's no portal into the conscious experience of a rock that's right but I mean we could assume that objects with no central nervous system would not be able to feel pain in that way but I'm curious so you think you believe that all inanimate objects have a degree of sentience like having a a sliver a type a scale somewhere of a conscious experience I I I don't and I don't think the human body has

any sentience either because body is just an interface description it has nothing your your body the the the the the body that I see that I call Andre only exists when I perceive that body is now gone it only exists in the inst so rocks don't have a slver of Consciousness because rocks don't even exist when they're not perceived and the human body the human brain doesn't exist when it's not perceive I have no neurons right now yeah so so as see this is when we say local realism is false yeah we have to be

completely thorough local realism is absolutely false and that means the human body only exists when it's perceived and it doesn't contain Consciousness however when I see a human body I know my interface is telling me don't do certain things because my interface is given me a way that could affect Consciousness so I just want to clarify here are you saying that when you look away from me I cease to be rendered in your experience so in a way I cease to exist that's right but the fundamental constituents of my Consciousness although not rendered in real

space time still do exist but but completely detached from the way our sensory system would perceive it that's right you're not in SpaceTime yeah SpaceTime is in you completely yeah so so you're in outside of SpaceTime and your body is literally just a pixel description when I take my camera and point it those the pixels for for Andre will light up and I now I have Andre pixels as soon as I turn the camera those pixels are gone there is no and your body is just as ephemeral as that even to myself right right now

I have no brain there literally no neurons there's no neurons now if you did a scan you would find neurons but but that's because right you're intervening and looking so you get a picture that's you You' got your now you got your pixels that you've sort of said now I've got my pixels making neurons okay fine but neurons only exist in the act in the act of observation and not you don't have neurons when they're not perceived but you do have what neurons are connected to would you say that like nothing in SpaceTime exists when

it's not perceived nothing SpaceTime itself doesn't exist when it's not perceived but the go Way Beyond the gay hypothesis I know I know but the objects in SpaceTime they are connected to the structure of reality just like the pixels on the desktop are a portal to back and forth that when we're talking to each other so so there but so yeah like a a folder on your desktop screen doesn't exist when it's not perceived but the the electrical Gates and things that are happening within the computer system those do exist in that metaphor they do

but when I when I let go of when I then step back and apply that metaphor to all SpaceTime then then they don't exist anymore yeah so I I I use that metaphor just to get people to understand the ideas so so for sake of argument let's assume the computer's real yeah the circuits are real for people will grant me that and once they understand okay oh yeah no there's no blue rectangular icon inside the computer you won't find that so my file on the on the desktop is not there's nothing on the computer looks

like once you get that then you have to kick that ladder away that includes kicking away the computer itself it doesn't exist when it's not perceived all right so yeah I I mean it's I feel like no matter how many conversations I have uh with you there is still some more uh head wrapping I have to like I need to wrap my head around this even further and I feel like our audience does too it takes many times of talking about this and exposure to it to like rabbit hole goes deeper it does it keeps

going it just seems to keep going I'm as uncomfortable As You Are by the way I mean I have gone through this Kicking and Screaming myself just grasping onto SpaceTime as it as a rug fully gets pulled underneath you well and and emotionally I don't believe it one bit Yeah I can see when I do meditation and so forth I I realize the amount that this is penetrated into my emotional belief in in is is 1% m yeah but the logic I mean I I just can't argue with the logic and who knows when my

emotions will come along for the ride there seems to be various uh enlightened beings masters of meditation that have emotionally embraced it what they would say is close to 100% yes where they have literally no fear of the body cuz they clearly have the perception that it is not thumb right where if somebody comes up to you God forbid on the Street and puts a gun to your head I'd be scared scared to death right it seems like in the metaphysical practices and and the contemplative Sciences you can arrive at the place experientially emotionally where

you truly perceive the source of that which you are and there that which you are not does not have the grip over you which is interesting because it require it requires both the rigorous science and logic to be able to explore these things and explain it with the limited capacity we have for language with language and then the contemplative practices that allow us to arrive there experientially to become closer in uh intimate and become one with that which we truthfully are I I I completely agree and I think that there are spiritual Masters who who

are there ca for example I suspect um it truly doesn't fear death and and and and so and I intellectually I think that well this is interesting think to think about it this way think about a video game in which you jump into the video game and you could be in the game identified with the Avatar that's me so if it's a shoot them up game and you you think you are your avatar you're going to be scared to death and you're going to be really alert and and and and suppose that I mean I

I'm I'm Navy SEALS or something like I'm trying to get you ready so I I'm putting you in this game I so I want to somehow drug you so that when you get in the simulation you think it's real because I want you to be scared to death and I want you to learn how to fight in that thing so I'm going to make you identifi so here's a drug that makes you identified with your avatar in this VR game and and boy you really you and then well slowly let you disidentify from that Avatar

and that's what I think is going on here is we're in this emotionally I'm still identified with the Avatar but part of me is recognize oh Don that's just an avatar it's not you but the emotional part of me is still plugged into you are an avatar The Meditation process is slowly waking me up to the truth that an avatar is just an avatar relax yeah just relax it's just your avatar you are the infinite intelligence of which this whole simulation is a trivial little game that you it's no effort for you whatever it's it's

literally nothing and all the wealth and all the possessions you could possibly have you could be the richest man on earth n it's nothing it's absolutely nothing it's just little game in you and and you could make a billion other much better games than that so that's but see emotionally I'm still it's very very interesting to know that I am the infinite intelligence I've woken up a little bit but not completely so I'm still halfway between identifying with the Avatar and halfway dis disidentifying with the Avatar and I agree that there are spiritual Masters who

have completely disidentified and I would love to disidentify because it's it's no fun to be afraid yeah I find it so interesting how I think largely like around the time of the Vienna Circle and the like 19th 20th century there was kind of this big divorce between the simultaneous contemplative practices and metaphysical practices alongside the scientific Explorations and like most people don't understand to the degree in which Newton himself had just as much exploration into Alchemy than than the sciences and it makes sense that they're kind of they're one and the same in the source

and then there there's the experiential side and there's The Logical side there's the particle there's the wave you know there's two ways to come at something from the top down from the bottom up you know in in the way that it's processed yeah I I'm curious because I know you meditate for like roughly like two hours a day at least you sit in silence and Kurt godell was somebody who uh very very viscerally felt that you could lay down and he would say he would lay down for hours and um get rid of all of

his senses so hearing tasting touching smelling he would feel that you could int it directly mathematical objects that since we're connected to it there shouldn't be any reason that by abiding in the place in which we are connected to it that you that you shouldn't be able to uh have intuitions around it that then come into your mind or your thought that you could then channel into his work and he said that he did that very you know and he's one of the most brilliant magicians to ever exist and he was doing that so I

would just be so curious to see what would happen if the most Brilliant Minds in today's stage had those practices to support them on the practices as well so how do you feel like your practice has personally benefited you on that Journey well I think that it's absolutely essential the I I didn't start meditating for that reason I started meditating for the very pedestrian reason that I was having hard time sleeping and I didn't want to take drugs and so I said well I'll meditate but then I realized later on well there's a lot more

to this meditation than just helping me with my sleep this is pretty profound transformation that's going on here so so I can't take credit or anything like that I just was doing it for my own little silly reasons but then I stumbled on to this is pretty important and now I use it explicitly as a tool I need new ideas go into silence I mean when you realize that you are that infinite intelligence that's what you are but if you don't let go of yourasian priors you'll only see your posterior so I have to to

how do you let go of your Basi and PR there's only one way to do it that's literally to let go no thoughts how can you get into the unknown if you don't leave the known that that's exactly right you so I think this is absolutely essential for scientists and I think that the very best creative ones whether or not they're they know it they go into a moment of silence when the the real deep intuitions come of course you have to do your homework you've studied your math you see there's no there's no substitute

for doing hard work it's just like a a powerful brilliant musician without understanding and practicing their skills then they can throw it out the window and it's a part of their unconscious competence and then they sit down listen and something beautiful the next Masterpiece comes through that's right you had to do your homework but then yeah then is when you sort of let go of what you know that the new originality comes through and and Einstein did talk about that he he he said that his his big Ideas came to him in vague images and

so forth um and and for me too it's it I'm no Einstein by a long shot but but my ideas when they do come um come from moments of Silence where I've done my homework I have a problem I'm trying to solve and then all of a sudden I found myself just going deep silence and then all of a sudden I see something coming so I think for scientists to actually take advantage of that to realize you are that infinite intelligence let go of your of course build your priers that's what science is build these

really good prior but but then let go of them if you need to transcend Newton you have to let go of Newton for a while before you can go to you know Quantum and and general relativity and so forth you have to let go of of Newtonian ideas and so going into the silence Beyond any concept is is really critical so it's again an interesting back and forth and we're getting a little picture perhaps of what the one is doing all the time and is is that back and forth between I've got this perspective on

myself I got the Newtonian perspective that was fun let me go let me go deeper oh oh now that I got relativity oh now I've got quantum mechanics and that's still trivial compared to what I am but but Bo well that was an interesting New Perspective and so even these perspectives as fun as they are are trivial compared to what you are what do you say to people that would comment on this podcast like somebody did the last time saying what difference does it make if reality is an illusion the pain I feel is real

to me the joy I feel is real to me we are having an experience that is obviously incredibly valuable and it feels real to us so I guess how would you respond to somebody that says what why does it matter if reality is an illusion which it might seem like uh trit kind of after our whole conversation you know it seems silly to ask that question um because it has very real implications but how how would you respond to to that well i' would say a couple things I think all of us are inquisitive who

am I why am I here what is this all about I mean maybe some people are not but but I think most of us are and and then most of us when we start hearing the very stories that people tell find them that's probably not good enough that's that story is probably not good enough so and and so I think it's it's really important because we are inquisitive and that may be what we're here for in fact is why does the one plunge itself into avatars is because it's answering the question who am I and

it's taking it's taking an infinite number of different perspectives and looking and saying oh from this perspective I could talk about myself this way and from so there's and so that so to find out that that this is just a perspective is important that this is an illusion this is just a perspective so using those two things together here and it's it's it's it's a perspective therefore it's not the truth therefore it's it's in that sense ucer is perhaps as best language can use be used to describe it what we're here for in the first

place we're we're we're here to learn that this is an illusion but it was an interesting illusion and look how complicated we are from this point of view and yet we transcend all of all of that so that would be I mean one answer on on the other hand I think if someone persisted in saying that I'd say well that would be another perspective that the one takes on itself from from from your avatar and and maybe that's what the one needed to see from that perspective as well that hey relax and in some sense

yeah relax you are you there's nothing that needs to be completed about you you are already the infinite so maybe this is just really about enjoy all their perspectives including the perspective who gives it yeah yeah no I love that I'm curious what you think as we've been exploring like alternative views from the conventional notion of our understanding of reality what do you think starts to open into otherwise like contentious fields of understanding of out of- body experiences precognition remote viewing near-death experiences with this understanding that that we've been exploring with Consciousness what uh what

implications do you feel like it has in those Realms well if you're a physicalist these things can't happen right if if like me you're a conscious realist um I can't rule them out now as a hard no scientist I'm not happy just to say I can't rule them out therefore I'm going to say that these things are all real absolutely not I I'm going to be hardn still about what I'm not going to do is rule them out a priori but but I'm more than 100% sure that most of these are probably confabulations right probably

most things are confabulations but there is for example the near-death experiences that that seem to be there's some systematic experiences of the the tunnel the light the Life review maybe decision to come back that seems pretty consistent so I I wouldn't rule that out I at all but here's here's where I get hard nosed about it as a scientist I want a theory right so and I'm working on it so we'll see but if SpaceTime is just a headset then what does and and and in some sense my experience of me is just an avatar

and that and now we have these experiences of an avatar going through a tunnel and seeing a white light and review uh I want my theory of conscious agents to be able to show how we make a headset and then show me precisely when that headset is coming to an end for a particular Avatar um why or how I could get this tunnel with a light experience in in in other words until I have a scientifically precise theory of this and then can make predictions that areest tble um all we have are informal accounts hints

in other words a pre-scientific kind of approach and what we found throughout human history is of course you can do great things without science and you get Geniuses who just have good intuitions and do things but when you actually get the systematic science stuff you find out that most of what you believed was nonsense most of things that people did were just plain nonsense not all sometimes you know indigenous people have some really deep insights that you can't explain how they got that but most of the time there's just PL plenty of nonsense so so

my guess is if I were a physicalist I'd say all nonsense no nothing to be saved here this is all just Illusions caused by the brain activity and so forth so I'm not saying that whatsoever so I'm not saying it's all nonsense I'm saying it's at least in principles not nonsense I'm I'm saying in practice probably most of it 99% of the reports are probably just not accurate but that doesn't mean that there there's something deeper that that isn't true I think that life does not end with the death of the body that's just the

taking off the Avatar so so so I think that you're that maybe Hoffman as Hoffman doesn't exist anymore but the Consciousness that was the true thing behind Hoffman will continue to exist because it's the infite Consciousness so I may lose everything that that I'm attached to in terms of the Hoffman egole all of that has to go and and spiritual teachers tell us to die before you die and and that's I think that's right in some sense if I can die to everything about Hoffman and don't care about Hoffman yeah because Hoffman's just an avatar

then when when there's time for the the Avatar to go goodbye it be just like in the video you know the the VR game once I've not ident with the Avatar when when this game over I don't care that was just my avatar that died it's not me it's my avatar that died and then shut down that game so so so I so so I guess I'll I'll summarize what I'm saying I cannot dismiss any of these you know the near-death experiences or any of these kinds of things I can't dismiss them out of hand

but I I think that those who take Consciousness as fundamental owe it to everybody to give absolutely rigorous scientific accounts of these things and to hold the high standards in terms of the data that we try to collect and so forth um so so this is not you know saying Consciousness fundamental is is not an invitation to just accept any hypothesis and say oh yeah yeah yeah it means I'm open to them but I'm going to be hard-nosed about them um and and that's what we should do because if there is something real there then

we want to understand really what it is yeah I'm curious what if you had to give your best guess if when we die Consciousness still exists in regards to reincarnation which there's been some interesting studies about kids that come in and have actual memories that you can verify in the real world of of people who have lived that they claim as themb um from where they live to people that were uh they were relationship to to favorite objects that they had if it isn't the case that somehow this Consciousness leaves and then does take another

form how could it possibly be done where I guess memory is stored in Consciousness and could take on another Avatar right well that's is quite interesting because uh I was approached by a team of um brilliant researchers one one of the head of the team is a research scientist at calac and most of them are Ian so they're I think more Hindu and philosop they're very interested in reincarnation and and uh I actually gave a talk in their workshop at the science of Consciousness conference in Tucson back in April and they found out about this

Trace logic that I've mentioned yeah Trace chains of marov chain and they realized that that might actually give them the tools they need for understanding reincarnation so so I've been collaborating with them and they're going to actually be implementing that logic and trying to start to make predictions from it out of of reincarnation now I'm I'm just giving them help to understand the basic logic I'm not actually part of their their their research team but I will I'll I'll help them so you know I have no acts to grind on this I I mean I

know very little about the theory of reincarnation and so forth but but they do they're they're quite immersed in it so I'll be very interested to see um but but this seemed to be this Trace logic of conscious agents seemed to be the first mathematical framework they'd ever seen that had the potential to begin to address these these kinds of questions rigorously mathematical rigor so so we'll they'll be doing some big simulations big big matrices with millions of entries and so forth to to to try to to get out this and kind of question you

asked is going to be the kind of question we'll try to answer how could the memories of one life one Avatar sort of be stored in the network and then downloaded into another headset and so forth right yeah be very interesting yeah but so finally we have a mathematical framework that's rigorous enough and and can be implemented in in computers to test it which is fun I mean at least with science you can actually test things oh most of the time you realize your ideas are just wrong that's just wrong whereas if you don't have

the mathematics you can you can believe for many many years that you're on the right track when you're deeply wrong yeah you mentioned how our understanding of SpaceTime and Newtonian physics has Beed many fruits and technologies that we use in every day in the everyday world what do you think could be some possible practical applications of this new understanding of Consciousness and how it would change how we live in the Practical world tactically I think that you can't think big enough on what it's going to do quantum mechanics opened up incredible technologies that are mindblowing

what are some Fields perhaps that you think would be like revolutionized well transportation for example so right now there are billions or maybe even trillions but at least billions of galaxies that would be fun to explore the nearest one is more than 2 million light years away that's the nearest one well even if we're traveling through space near the speed of light that's a long long time I mean if you if you put a Some Humans on the spaceship the great great great great great great grandkids won't be alive so so that you can see

that's our nearest G so going through SpaceTime and seeing any of the real estate is just not possible with our current ways of think but what if you realize that SpaceTime is just a headset and you know the code so in some sense so think about someone who's again a real wizard at Grand Theft Auto they know how to drive their car faster than anybody else and they know all the they know that the terrain and they can beat everybody that's great but if you're the software engineer who wrote the code well you can do

things that are magic to the wizard you can give him a flat tire anytime you want to you can take the gas out of his tank you can CH change the geometry of the roads you can take his car and move it from one side of the game to the other instantly just like that by changing a pointer well when we're this theory of conscious agents is really the first layer of software outside of our SpaceTime headset we're starting to learn how the game is rigged how do we play how what is a software that's

playing the SpaceTime game once we understand that I don't think we'll have to go through SpaceTime to the Andromeda galaxy we can go around SpaceTime we can just be there so we're going to so and that's just one I think you just can't think big enough once you once you know the software you can change the game pretty much any way you want to it feels like there's not an area of life that it wouldn't revolutionize you think about like healing if you understand the deeper dynamics of how the projection of like all of ourselves

work together um what we maybe would have spent decades trying to heal physiologically or travel to um within the limits of the speed of light all of a sudden like miraculously cease to exist because you're working with Dynamics outside of the headset that that's right so I think you know in medicine probably there'll be all sorts of remarkable things as I mentioned earlier the the 86 billion neurons and roughly the same number of gal cells make the brain is really complicated but we're going to be going to the even more complex software outside of it

we we'll actually be able to understand and maybe rewire the brain outside of SpaceTime and then rewi also understand systems in the body at a much deeper level and then rewire them so yeah I think that the revolution medicine will will will be remarkable what do you think it will take for the brilliant physicists that are currently out there to Pivot their intelligence to exploring realities Beyond SpaceTime beyond the headset well the universe plus project that the European research Council has funded already has over 100 scientists doing that right so they they're funding um the

look for these new positive and understanding these positive geometries beyond space time for that's very different than saying that they're after Consciousness but they're not I mean maybe individual are but that's not what the ERC is is is up to my my hope I'm I'm actually trying to um get one of these um trying to recruit one of them trying to recruit I've got money for so i' I've got money for a postto for two posts so if someone's got what I need is someone with a recent PhD in algebraic geometry specific branch of mathematics

algebraic geometry which is really critical to these positive geometries or A real understanding of high energy theoretical physics and in particular the amplitud hedrin and so forth because we're in the current paper we're going to make a projection to a special case of the amplitud hedrin for but we would like to have someone who can actually help us do the real whole deal so we want to do proof of concept in this paper and show that we can actually start with conscious agents and predict scattering of gluons in SpaceTime so that we now can go

all the way so we we've got the little Bridge across now we need someone to help us build the the the whole the whole thing right a big big road across so we're looking for um new relative new phds in high theoretical physics or algebraic geometry can help us with this but ultimately once we do that if we can actually make prediction a new prediction inside SpaceTime from a dynamical system of Mark of of conscious agents we can show that these positive geometries arise from it we can actually make new predictions that are able and

then come out to be true inside SpaceTime we won't have any trouble at that point getting people now we may have trouble having them take it serious as Consciousness they might say Consciousness monness who cares about that but you got a markovian Dynamics outside of SpaceTime I'm good with that so let's just let's go with that and and so so it's it's not going to be a proof of Consciousness being fundamental but it'll be um perhaps an indication that a markovian dynamical system outside of SpaceTime is an important next step in science and and that

would be fine with me if if they dismiss the cous and stuff that's perfectly fine um I completely respect that but I would be loving to get these guys are brilliant guys in the generic sense these people are brilliant and uh much more smart in this stuff than I am and and so I'll just be able to then kick back and and try to read their papers that's what I want yeah I'm so curious to see what evolves in that space and then also globally I mean as these new Innovations discoveries come on board I'm

curious to see what happens with religious fundamentalists with um people's understanding of uh perceptions on God too would you say that the I don't I don't love the term or using it because it's so tainted but the closest thing approximating the term God would be the collective consciousness of all that is well I I I would say that the word God and then the word Collective unconsciousness or Collective Consciousness are Pointers and that that the thing itself completely transcend is not even a thing right going back to the mint yeah even to say the thing

itself is already a mistake right right so all these things are are Pointers to something that transcends and again I said something so as soon as I start using language everywhere I as soon as I say something I realize no wrong again wrong again wrong again maybe for the next podcast you should just sit here in silence for a few hours well that's right and bore people to death but Enlighten them yeah so so I think the the the the deepest rigorous thing I've seen so far is this Trace Logic on the space of conscious

of mar Co but that's but having said that then we'll immediately say it's it's it's a baby step and compared to the reality zero right so so I I think that we can go infinitely beyond what I've done what my team has done with this this marov Trace can chain thing but and even if we go infinitely Beyond it and we do that for a trillion years will be 0% of the way toward understanding what you already are completely because it's infinite and it's it's completely infinite no matter how big the number gets it's still

nothing in comparison and that puts the light of dogmatism right it's it's really dog dogmatism is really missing the point dogmatism is missing the point that what you can say about it is never it never it there's no right formulation of words and and killing people because they're formulation of words is different from yours is is really to miss the the point that you know I don't know what the word is for mint in Spanish but saying mint in Spanish versus saying in English is nothing to kill over hey we're pointing to the same thing

you're just saying it in Spanish I'm saying it in English don't let's not kill each other over it they we're pointing to the same thing which is what you are and what everybody else is you all they are that and they they are that completely already and but it's interesting that the one Consciousness chooses to put itself into avars and let it gets self gets so wrapped up that it forgets itself and it kills it has some some avatars kill others ultimately when you realize it's just an avatar some some sense nothing was really ever

lost when you with your friends and you shoot up your friend's Avatar and then you afterwards you take off your headsets laugh have a beer together and it's just your avatar it's just like the I don't know if you've seen the film Ready Player one but I love it and it gives a perfect description of what could be very real in the next 20 to 30 years if not less where you have uh a setup that you plug into with a headset and biof feedback technology that plugs you into another reality that is extremely real

and if the rise of art of Technology is at all moving forward given enough time will we we will come to the place where uh our games are we can plug into another virtual reality that seems extremely real and you take like GTA or Sims just further down the line as Ai and Technology advances it's not far off from the future reality that we could create what is like a simulation and people and what seems to be conscious beings having an experience whether or not they are is Up For Debate but then we get lost

in the sauce so to speak we think that we are the character and uh yeah you've given a lot of important pointers to uh waking up Beyond who we are in this headset yeah I think that you're right that there's going to be an infinite number of directions we can explore with different kinds of simulations and so forth and and exploring different physics right we can change the laws of physics in these new worlds and see how we adapt to them why not have instead of three dimensions of space one at four dimensions of space

actually a friend of mine Mike desura professor at UCI probably 20 years ago was already doing that with his graduate students they were they were making four-dimensional worlds and having people learn to play in these four-dimensional worlds and that one of The Graduate students claimed in their thesis that people were learning to actually experience you know actually see in four dimensions and and I didn't buy I let him get his PhD but I didn't buy that but I think if you trained in infants but I don't think you can do this for for ethical reasons

but if if you trained infants possibly possibly they might be able to develop a four-dimensional a real four-dimensional uh space-time experience so so so yeah I think that we can certainly push the parameters and and our imagination is the only limit I'm very interested to see what happens as we can within with also within the headset explore the boundaries of what our senses are capable of forgot the scientist or researcher that was anuka Harris who we just had on was referring to but um they're actually training like for example the sense of the magnetic field

of the earth and you could develop that sense to know where like North is um based off of wearing this device and you can like it's a new sense that you could develop and have the capacity for there's uh I believe it's the kogi tribe in South America where within the first seven years The Chosen Shaman children largely live in darkness which you could say is unethical we could say many different things but they are developing a completely unique relationship to their internal reality than people in the Western World just like the opposite end of

the spectrum and what that unlocks for their capacity to um navigate those Realms you know in their own Consciousness it's very interesting that that's it really is also David Eagleman has been doing this kind of research right where he's been sort of um ex augmenting our senses in various interesting ways you could even have people that could sort of have the stock market information being played onto their body and they could sort of feel when when it's time to buy and when it's time to sell and so forth they can build these these intuition so

it's it's yeah there's a lot of un untapped potential um that that we could use I think it's really fascinating and and right now we're we're doing this using just what we know about um the Neuroscience inside the headset once we actually have stepped outside the headset and we know the software behind the Neuroscience then those kind of Technologies I think we going to be even more powerful yeah do you think we will create conscious AIS so that's that's a good question U most people when they ask answer that question or or even ask it

what they're thinking about is this framework that building a conscious AI means we're starting with these conscious circuits and software physical stuff in space and time that's the fundamental reality and but if we get the the right kind of complexity in the circuit soft and the software then the the unconscious circuits and software will give rise somehow to the conscious experience so that's the way most people take your question and they try to answer it they they'll they'll say oh oh yeah sure you know of course we know that that physical systems can create Consciousness

your brain is a physical system and it creates Consciousness neurons neural circuits create Consciousness so so yeah so most people that's the kind of answer they're going to going to give my my answer is very very different I'm I say that um neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived circuits and software don't exist except as ideas in my mind so so I've got to rethink the the question entirely so here's how I rethink the question inside my headset there are certain portals to consciousness one is what I call the Andre body that's a portal

into Consciousness and and we have one technology for that we know of that works for creating new portals into Consciousness that technology is having kids so that's it's it's low Tech but it works so we actually we have a technology that opens up new portals into Consciousness so from this point of view in which Consciousness is fundamental if we can actually reverse engineer with the maybe the conation theory as the first baby step understand that technology what what are we doing when we have kids from the point of view of conscious how is a new

headset being created once we've reverse engineered that then we can ask ourselves can we do it ourselves can we just take that and do it abstractly instead of doing it through human mating can we actually do it in some sense Tech technologically and I think ultimately the answer is probably yes we'll be able to open up new portals and when we do it it may be that certain of the Technologies we use will look in our headset like artificial intelligences on on computers circuits but now notice that the answer is completely different I'm not saying

that the circuits and software are creating the technology the the the the Consciousness I'm saying that Consciousness is fundamental what looks like technology is an interface representation that only exists when you happen to see it so it it doesn't even the the the software and Hardware aren't even there when you don't look the only thing that's there are the conscious agents but through your headset it looks like a um you know a conscious robot that you're interacting with so you can see why had to give a long answer if I just said yes the ultimate

the answer is yes I think we could do it but you can see that that would have been given you entirely the wrong perspective on what I'm saying yeah yeah the first example you gave is like if you seen exmachina the movie uh where they essentially develop the this like through the wet wear and the hardware this sentient AI humanoid robots um that would be creating it essentially creating Consciousness through uh figuring out throughout like Newtonian World essentially if you assume the physicalist framework you're not going to understand really what you're doing you now it

may be that ultimately we'll find with this the which cous is fundamental we'll figure out what we have to do inside of our headset to and maybe it look like the exmachina kind of thing yeah but but what we'll realiz is that what we're really doing is rearranging this neural this this network of conscious agents we it looks like you know neurons or circuits and and software inside SpaceTime but what we're really doing is this new programming of conscious agents or whatever transcends conscious agents so so it still may work out that way but the

the the real scientific theory will be much deeper than SpaceTime and and by the way that's now that's not just a cognitive scientist saying that this is now the European research Council putting 10 million euros online saying these positive geometries outside of SpaceTime are the real deal this is the way forward let's let's do this incredible man I'm just so I I love thank you so much for your time today I'm just so uh I it brings me joy like I just feel like a giddy kid who discovered a new toy every time I get

to dive deep into this discussion that just like lights me up so much because uh starting to slowly chip away at a model of understanding the world which has so many implications of how we navigate within it and Diving deeper into the truth as like you know that's the goal with here in the know thyself podcast to discover the true nature of ourselves and the world around us and um I just putting it out there in the field I have the vision of producing these high quality Round Table discussions around specific areas of life one

being music as medicine another um being around Consciousness theories and um so I'm excited to hopefully in the next 12 months I'm just going to find the location and find you know the way we want to do it because it's a full thing to like have six date individuals fun um to start to create these conversations that can be shared um in uh in all of its Nuance in all of its many different perspectives to start to like refine each other's perspective in a way that can be perceived for the masses and for people online

to be able to watch and um Intrigue interest for people that might want to go down this path and find the way that the one uniquely wants to express itself through them and um so be on the lookout for that I'm excited to to have something like that in the future as well I think that's an excellent idea I think that actually something new could come out of it when you bring people together that are thinking roughly the same but but not exactly the same and they're and they've done a lot of work they're they're

thinking about it really really deeply then you get some new sparks that that could really light something up yeah yeah and and I know researchers obviously do that in their own accord behind closed doors and whatnot abut but it's interesting when you put it in the media you know and for people to view and it's like the parable of the blind man and the Elephant you know let's let's sit down at a round table put this elephant on the table and start talking about it absolutely absolutely sweet so amazing n is there is there anything

else you want to share with our audience um having you know the context of the conversation we just have that you would like to to wrap up on or share before we close I would just say one thing is this is the know thyself podcast it's about know thyself and I would just say that what I've learned is that whatever you are transcends any description enough said amazing thank you thank you so much everybody that's been tuning into this episode if you made it through nearly 2 and a half hours um you're you're my kind

of people I I just love to share this this joy and this conversation and dialogue so thanks for coming on this journey as always let us know in which ways this has uniquely impacted you and until next time be well thank you Don [Music]