Are We Living In the MATRIX? This Scientist Might Have An Answer ONCE and For ALL | Donald Hoffman

Honestly, man, trying to wrap my head around your take on consciousness and we're living in a constructed reality that we're essentially in the Matrix whether we want to be or not. Evolution gave us this headset and it's no surprise. I see the moon, I render a moon. I turn away, I don't render a moon so the moon doesn't exist. Your life and my life right now is we're in a simulator, a space-time simulator. This may also be an answer to a very, very deep question about um alien intelligences. What where are they? Well, we're looking in our headset. Of course we can't see them. When we look up and see the moon, it's because there really is a moon and it would exist even if there were no observers to see the moon. It would still exist. And we don't believe that we see all of reality. No one thinks that we see everything that there is to see, but we do believe that we've been shaped by natural selection to see those aspects of the truth that we need to see to stay alive. And so that our perceptions of space and time are giving us a genuine insight into a real space and time that would be there even if there were no observers to perceive it. And also our perception of objects like tables and chairs, the moon, quarks and leptons and so forth, that these things would also exist and have roughly the properties that we see even if there were no creatures, no observers to see them at all. And the red pill that I'm offering is to say that if you believe evolution by natural selection, then the mathematics of natural selection makes it very, very clear that the probability is zero that any of the language that we use in our perceptions, the language of space and time, the language of shapes and objects and position and momentum and colors and so forth, is the wrong language to describe objective reality, whatever that reality might be. It's not that we're getting the shape of this table a little bit wrong or the colors a little bit off, it's that no description in the language of space and time and objects and colors could ever be be true. Reality, whatever it is, can't be described in that language if we buy evolution by natural selection. So, we have a choice between taking one of our best confirmed scientific theories seriously, namely evolution by natural selection, or taking our intuitions that space-time is fundamental and objects are fundamental. Taking that intuition seriously. And I decided to to side with this science on this one. Uh Umwelt is your senses taking the world in a certain way and we have different senses in a bat, so a bat can do echolocation, we cannot, and therefore the way that a bat interprets the world is very different than the way that we interpret the world and every sort of species has a different Umwelt. You can even have humans that have a different slightly different Umwelt, one that's color blind. Um there's a million other examples, but you you get these variations that are massive between species. Um you get like a dog, the the amount that they can smell is crazy. They can smell a seizure coming, which is absolutely bananas. Whereas of course you're not going to get a human that does that because of the number of um scent receptors in the nasal canal and so cool. All right, that that's an Umwelt. Every creature you know, Homo sapiens has one Umwelt, one user interface. We have the Apple interface and someone else you know, some other creatures have the Mac or the PC interface or or whatever. Yeah. And and and there's going to be a wide variety of interfaces that evolution evolves. Every species has its own class of interfaces. Um and in each case the interface never shows any species the truth at all, according to evolution. But there are selection the selection pressures that erase information about the structure of the world in perception do not also apply to math and logic. The reason is that we do have to have some elementary ability to reason about fitness payoffs. Two bites of an apple give me roughly twice the fitness payoffs of one. So, not reasoning about objective reality, just reasoning about fitness payoffs and the logic of fitness payoffs, right? So, that's why there's no selection pressures necessarily to be geniuses in math and logic. But, at least the selection pressures are not uniformly against any capacity in math and logic. Whereas, in the case of perception, it's one can show the the pressures are uniformly against any access to the structure of the world. Um in in terms of the structure of what we perceive in in our senses. So, that's why we have to be very, very careful. So, certain, for example, Christian philosophers, Alvin Plantinga, for example, has argued from not mathematically, but informally from evolution saying that it would make all of our cognitive capacities unreliable and therefore evolution by itself was unreliable theory and therefore we should not, you know, not believe it. And I'm not saying anything like that at all. I'm saying that the theory of evolution has a core that John Maynard Smith found, the evolutionary game theory. When we look at that core, we find that there are certain peripheral assumptions, like DNA exists whether or not it's perceived. Space and time exist. Those peripheral assumptions turn out to contradict the mathematical core of the theory. And it's and one can prove that. But, math and logic, our ability with math and logic does not contradict the evolutionary the core of evolutionary theory. So, this we have to be very, very careful. That's why you when you do this, you know, it's it's not just hand waving anymore. You really have to look at the replicator equation. You really have to look at the fitness payoff functions and do combinatorial analyses and so forth. This is very, very careful work. But, that's what we do with our best scientific theories. We take them very, very seriously. We look at the equations and say, "Okay, if the equation entails the probability is zero that we see reality as it is, then we've we've got a choice. We can agree that we don't see reality as it is, or we can say we need to revise the theory. Now, we don't have an alternative to evolution by natural selection. So, if someone wants to propose one, they've got a lot of work to do because evolution by natural selection is an incredibly successful theory. For anybody who's spent time in VR, what I'm saying will be obvious, right? If you're playing a VR game of like race cars, you see a red Corvette when you turn your headset that way, you know that you're only seeing a Corvette that you're creating when you turn your head that way. You turn your head to the other side, now you're seeing a blue Mustang. The red Corvette is gone. It doesn't exist. There's no red Corvette in the computer that's running the game. The red Corvette is only in your mind when you look over there. Now, you're seeing a blue Mustang because you're making that. And so, you you're rendering these things and then destroying them. There is a reality, but it's not Corvettes and it's not Mustangs. It's the supercomputer that's running the game. And that's what I'm all I'm saying is evolution gave us this headset, and it's no surprise. I see the moon, I render a moon. I turn away, I don't render a moon, so the moon doesn't exist. There is something, but it's just not like it's not the moon, it's nothing like the moon. Just like there's something there's a super supercomputer in the the VR analogy, but in the supercomputer, if you looked, you'll never find any, you know, green Mustangs or or red Corvettes. You give an example in your book that is so powerful. If you would take a second Sure. you describe what's happening in your eye when you look at a scene that includes a red apple, and the way you describe it at the photoreceptor level, I was like, "Oh my god." It gave me such an understanding of how terrifyingly complicated things actually are. Do you remember the part that I'm talking about? Right. So, this is now just normal physiology. And so, for the moment, I'll be talking as though, you know, I believe in brain science and and neuro and and and we have to do that, right? Right. Right. So, we have to bracket Everything is within the framework of a theory. So, what I'm now using neurophysiology and and physics right now for this to describe this. So, when you look at a red apple, and suppose there really is a red apple just for sake of this argument, it's got a real shape and light rays hit it and they have a certain frequencies and they pass through the lens of your eye, which focuses it on the back of your eye, just like a camera would. And on the back of your eye, you've got a piece of brain called the retina. It's a It's nervous tissue. So, it's a piece of nervous tissue. It has 120 million photoreceptors. It's like a 120 mega megapixel camera. And each photoreceptor is just reporting how many quanta of light, how many photons, it catches. So, I caught three, I caught 10, I caught 50. That's all you've got a bunch of numbers. So, you have 120 million numbers. There are no colors. There are no shapes. There are no motions. There's just 120 million colors. Uh uh numbers, not not not even colors. It's like if you look at the the the digital output from a video camera, you'll just see a stream of numbers. If you look at the stream of numbers, you'll see the problem that vision has. You can't tell from the stream of numbers what's going on. You have to create three-dimensional objects and shapes and colors and so forth from all those numbers. And so, that's the problem that we have in vision. You have all these photon counts, 120 million photon counts in each eye. And from that, you have to then create objects, see that it's a boy on a bicycle eating a hot dog, you know. All of that is you. And that comes That's not just theory, it becomes really an important problem when you're trying to build computer vision systems, right? You're trying to build a self-driving car, say, with with passive vision systems. Well, so the vision systems are cameras, the video cameras, say, they're taking in video. Maybe they have, you know, a few million pixels that they come in that each each, you know, maybe 70 times second or something like that. Well, those pixels are just numbers. You got millions and millions of numbers coming in every second. There's nothing in there that says that's a boy, that's a car, don't, you know, that's a stop sign. There's nothing in there that says that. You have to you have to have megabytes of software that's really intelligent that takes all those numbers and starts computing with them to figure out three-dimensional shapes, to figure out what the objects are, to and then to figure out, "Oh, I'm about to hit a boy. I need to hit the brakes." and so forth. So so this is not just abstract. Self-driving cars have to solve the problem of starting with numbers that are in unintelligent in some sense, just a bunch of numbers, and giving you an intelligent assay of what's happening in the world. And so that's why a third of the brain, literally a third of the cerebral cortex, the higher part of of our brain, is involved just in visual perception. When you add the other senses, it's it's more like half the brain is involved in sensory perception. Because the senses are doing an incredibly complicated job. But from my point of view, what they're doing is they're building a VR world. And it takes a lot of processing power. You need supercomputers, you know, what would have been considered supercomputers to do VR in real time. And that's what we're doing. We open our eyes and it looks like we're just seeing a 3D world with objects and shapes and colors. It seems so real and so just we're seeing the truth. But because you have billions of neurons, trillions of synapses that are doing it all within about 100 milliseconds. And so you're so fast at it that you just think you're opening your eyes and seeing the truth. You're seeing a VR world that you're projecting out there in real time. Hey guys, hope you enjoyed the episode brought to you by our sponsors at Blue Blocks. Go to blueblocks.com/impacttheory for 15% off your order or just use discount code impacttheory at checkout. All right, enjoy the episode. When you think about what's really going on is a computer programmer is trying to make this game called Grand Theft Auto. You're dealing with algorithms and mathematics and moving electrical currents around a Xbox or whatever. What you're saying is what you see when you walk around the room and interact with stuff and you think about space-time and Einstein and relativity is as divorced from reality as the computer programmer is from the gamer who plays this game. That's that's exactly right. And And so one way to think about it is science for all of its incredible breakthroughs and wonderful theories has only been studying our headset. Science has not yet been studying objective reality outside of our space-time virtual reality that from an evolutionary point of view was just evolved as a way for us to play the game of life and stay alive long enough to reproduce, not to show us the truth. So, we have really in the in the last four or five centuries really gotten to be wizards of our headset, wizards of the Grand Theft Auto game. But just because you're a wizard of Grand Theft Auto does not mean that you know anything about the circuits and software that are running the game. And for someone who thinks that they know everything when all they know is Grand Theft Auto means they they're still stuck in the headset. Science, I want to claim, has the tools. We have learned the right tools as we've studied our headset. We are ready to use those same tools to venture outside the headset, outside of space and time. So, science has the right tools, we just have to open up, you know, open our minds to the fact that we're just playing a game inside space-time. It's just a virtual reality. Your life and my life right now is we're in a simulator, a space-time simulator. And we've been given like an AI system, we've been given certain intrinsic desires that we then find. And so so So my my wife is an artist. That's how she's exploring. I I am still stuck at third grade stick figures. So that's not how I'm exploring. I'm exploring in a different way. So so So there's billions of humans and there are billions of different ways that we explore in music and art and literature and science, various kinds of science, meditation. So we're in sports. There there are all sorts of ways that consciousness is exploring um through through us. And there is not like one is the best or that makes consciousness want to go to all the asset to create this VR experience, to run each of us as sort of an individual experience in consciousness? The idea would be that that is what consciousness is about is the exploration of all of its possibilities. So is that just the miracle? Like I've now hit the part where you're like, I don't [ __ ] know. This is the miracle. Well Well, yeah. And And when we when we say that um that's something that we have to say is true of any explanation, right? Any explanation at some point we say, if you grant me these assumptions then with those assumptions I can explain everything else. Well So and I totally buy into that. Here Here is the base assumption I've always made about the miracle, that the whole point is to say, "Hey everybody, I've got this theory. Here's my miracle. Check it out. Theory works, right? Yeah yeah yeah. Wow, this is better than everything." Okay, the only reason I've told you about this thing is so you can tell me how to move the miracle back even farther. Or are you just like, "Cool, I'm good with that miracle." And now I just want to explore within that where that miracle is or Well, so I want to do both. So so this this miracle is so new that I you know I need to just explore it a little bit, right? So so I want to push on this one, but the but the the miracles I'm proposing are consciousness is fundamental. So experiences themselves don't come from physics. They are fundamental. So that's a miracle. And second, um this other miracle that that Gödel proved. Well, he proved it, but it's still a miracle, right? The the incompleteness of mathematics that you can that there's endless exploit That's just a fact, which is remarkable. I mean, we proved it, but it's nevertheless this Why should the universe be that way? Why should logic demand it? That's So that's the but it's a satisfying kind of endpoint where we say that's the way the world is. Here's the theorem that says that's the way the universe is, and that that one theorem tells us why if you're up to exploration then have fun because you will always There's no getting there. That's the key. There's no arriving. All right, my friends, let's talk about Blue Blocks. Blue blocker glasses have been a game-changer in my life. If you're someone like me who is sensitive to artificial lighting and extra sensitive to artificial blue light from a cell phone or a computer screen, then you need to try Blue Blocker lenses. They are going to improve your sleep. Blue Blocks is all about science, quality, and style. Their products are made under optics laboratory conditions in Australia and come in prescription, non-prescription, and readers. Blue Blocks is offering a special discount exclusive for Impact Theory listeners. Go to blueblocks.com/impacttheory for 15% off your order or use discount code impacttheory at checkout. Once again, that's blueblocks, which is b l u b l o x dot com/impacttheory for 15% off your order or use the discount code impacttheory at checkout. All right, my friends, give these a shot. I use them all the time. Take care and be legendary. Suppose you go to a VR arcade with some friends to play virtual volleyball. And you put on your headset and body suit and you're on a you know, a like a beach volleyball scene, palm trees and sand and then that. And you're playing VR volleyball for a while and then one of your friends, you know, says I'm thirsty, I need to drink. He takes off his headset and body suit to go to go get a drink. His avatar sits lifeless on the sand. It collapses on the sand. It looks within the VR headset, within the game, as though he's dead. But he's his consciousness has not ceased. He's merely stepped out of that interface. All right, now we're in what I'll call the Phineas Gage problem. Okay. So, once So, Phineas Gage, for those that don't know, it was railroad worker, one of the most famous examples in neuroscience. He's hitting a tamping rod. It's like a 3-ft rod, thicker than your thumb, and it shoots up through his jaw and out the top of his head, taking, if I remember right, a teacup's worth of brain matter, which seems impossible, but never loses consciousness, but they say he's forever different. Right. Different. Right. And he used to be like super sweet, and he was one of the best workers, and then he becomes this belligerent [ __ ] and he can't hold a job. So, I will say that's that is the So, using this notion of the headset or the umwelt, it's like once you alter the way that his brain works, and I'm fully willing to accept that that this is a problem only inside of the headset, but once you alter that function within the headset, he's fundamentally different. Our free choices are not part of our conscious experiences. You can't directly experience your own free choices. You can experience that you chose, but you can never actually experience yourself choosing. Why? It's the Well, well, it's it's really quite interesting. You can experience like if you if I go you know here's there's chocolate and vanilla. I'm going to choose between chocolate and vanilla. Well, I I just chose chocolate. But how did I do that? Well, I had some deliberation process. But when I finally it it I can all I can do is see myself reaching for the chocolate or the vanilla. I can see my cogitation processes. But but the But isn't that all in the headset? All that I'm seeing is in the headset. That's right. So, I'm seeing So, by the way, I only know my actions through my headset. I actually don't know what I'm doing. When I reach out and grab something, I don't know what I'm doing in objective reality in the realm of consciousness. How does all of this play out in your real life? And I've I've heard you talk about that there are moments where you have I'm sort of putting words in your mouth, but almost a meditative experience where you transcend the notion of self. Um how so? How do you stay so enthusiastic about this for so long when it seems like I mean, really really at a deep [ __ ] level, man. As a human experience, this just all feels so real. Right. Right. Well, I wouldn't say that I transcend the self. But I what I do get it once in a while is a glimpse that oh, this is just a headset. I I actually feel it that I'm just rendering this. Most of us feel like space just exists. I'm stuck inside space. There's this big stage. I'm on the stage. It's very different. I think by the way, the next generation will probably get this much easier. Those who have just been raised they spending a lot of time in VRs that are as compelling and as immersive as everyday life is going to be just sort of obvious that you take your headset off and go it's a no-brainer to think well, this is just a headset, too." And to just sort of be there. So, I think that it'll it'll be for the next generation, the fact that I'm having a hard time about it, thinking about it this way, and and and imagining it experientially, will just be sort of an artifact of the technology I grew up with. If I grew up with VRs that were really good, as opposed to the stuff that we grew up with, which is not that good, then it would just be sort of obvious. You you do it when you're young enough, it's just this obvious that the Yeah, I'm just seeing a VR headset, too, because By the way, here's one way to think about it. If you close your eyes, you just see sort of gray, right? Mottled gray in front of you. So, it looks It doesn't look like nothing, it looks like mottled gray. But, what is it like backwards, back through your head, Mhm. when you close your eyes? Well, it's not mottled gray, it's nothing. And it's really the first time you really If you close your eyes and experience that, yeah, what is it like in front of me? Yeah, it's just gray, it's sort of mottled gray. What is it like behind me? Absolutely nothing. That's the headset. You only have a headset of space-time in front. There is no headset behind. Now, you have a not a visual headset. Now, you have this set Yeah, I can put my hands back there and do stuff. So, I So, I have this But, it's all a creation. It's all And so, I do get glimpses of that once in a while. But, there were no Now, put on the natural selection language, right? So, I have to pick the language of the science that I want to use, you know, cuz I don't have a better language in some sense for for discussing this. Evolution um there were no selection pressures for us to see the truth. And so, there were no selection pressures for us to not take space-time as the truth. And so, we do. Piaget tells us, you know, when we begin to take objects as real. As the we, you know, these aren't just like little data structures that you create, that they really exist all the time. He called it object permanence. And Piaget said that, you know, when a kid is about 17 months, 16 or 17 months of age, they don't have object permanence. Permanence. You take a little baby doll, put in front of a child, they play with it. You put put it behind the pillow, if they're 16 months old, they It just doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Piaget said. And then, but at 18 months, now they go and crawl around and try to get the object you know, the baby doll out of the behind the pillow. Later experiments showed maybe down to three or four months. But the point is, these experiments show that we're programmed Now, I'm using the evolution language. We're programmed by natural selection to buy into the illusion that objects exist even when they're not perceived. Object permanence when we're three or four months old. We're not rational. It's being done to us without our permission. And so, by the time we come to the age of reason, it's it's the water that we we don't know that we're wet. It's the water we've been swimming in all of our life. We just have been programmed to take this as the reality. This may also be an answer to a very very deep question about um alien intelligences. What Where are they? Well, we're looking in our headset. Of course, we can't see them. That's interesting. They're out there. That's really interesting. We may We may I'm not saying we won't find some of them out there. Our headset may give us access to certain alien intelligences on planets around Alpha Centauri and so forth. But it's going to be trivial compared to all the consciousnesses that are out there. That's what a headset is for. It's there to hide all of the consciousnesses because it would be overwhelming to interact with them. So, that's where they are. They're all around us. It's We're We're like ants that don't see the guy with the Raid can coming at them. They can't They They They just can't see it, right? Um So, they're all around us, but we're We are stuck in our headset and we think that we're the the epitome of of advancement and knowledge and and so forth. Might it would be funny and it may be the case that every that that's a rookie mistake that every consciousness goes through in its simulator. That it thinks it because it's headset is only going to give it the best access to itself and others like it and less access to others. And so in its own eyes, it will always be the wisest in its in its environment. And so it may be a rookie mistake that every simulator that consciousness creates has. That we all have to go through this phase of going, "Oh, we're the best. We're the greatest. We're the epitome of evolution." And then we slowly realize, "Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm in a simulator and there's you know there's this infinite range of other possibilities of consciousness. Some so profound that I that I if I could see them, I would be you know inclined to fall down and worship them. Who knows, you know? It just So but but it's it's a really humbling position. So we go from being the top of creation, that that that the smartest you know the brain is the most incredibly complicated thing we've ever found in the entire universe. That point of view to oh, wow. Um We we we've made a rookie mistake here. Um there are consciousnesses out there that are far more, you know, mind-blowing than anything I could even concretely imagine. So it's it's a very very different kind of thing. But I think all of us do wonder and about what's next. And why are we here? And what is it about? That's why I'm I mean that's one reason I do this is it life is very very short. I want to explore. And things most of what I've believed very deeply has been very deeply wrong. Most of what humanity has believed very deeply has been very deeply wrong. We have a very good we're almost about 100% consistent in being deeply wrong. We've believed that space-time is fundamental. Almost everybody believes that space-time is fundamental. We all believe the earth is flat. Now, a few and very advanced physicists Ed Witten has said space-time is doomed. David Gross has said it's in doomed. Nima Arkani-Hamed is saying space-time is doomed. And these guys, especially Nima, are now really being adventurous, very very brave and saying let's go outside of space and time, into a world where we can't think just imagine what they're trying to do. We're trying to think entirely outside space and time. Like as you were saying as as a kid you're going what could possibly be on the other side of space and time? These guys are saying not only is there something on the other side, I need to think deeply about it and here's the mathematical structure in which space and time quantum mechanics and unitarity don't even appear in the language. And then I'll show you how our headset, they don't call it headset, that's now me ad-libbing for them. So, how space and time, which I'm calling headset, how space and time and quantum mechanics and general relativity appear from these deeper structures in which there's no space and no time. So, that fits perfectly with what what I'm saying. Now, they have no idea what this deeper structure is about. And what I'm up to is I'm actually Nima gave a a class at Harvard last fall. More than 20 lectures on for graduate students on these deeper structures outside of space and time. I am taking his class online. There's all on YouTube, so I'm just studying it. I'm transcribing his lectures, studying them because I believe that I can show with my team, but I'm a mathematician, so they'll show that the long-term behavior of this dynamics of consciousness that we're working on, what we call the asymptotic behavior, will give rise to the structures he's seeing like his amplitudehedron. And so the reason why And then the amplitude hedron, he already shows how to build up space-time from that. That way I'll be able to go all the way from conscious agents through the long-term behavior of conscious agents through the amplitude hedron to space-time. I can show you how the headset is built. That's my goal. And so I'm I'm really quite excited. Once I get you know, I know enough to be worth his time, I I may talk with him. But but I'm not going to waste his time until I know enough. So I'm trying to figure out how the headset is built. Once we if we succeed, we'll be able to reverse engineer that headset. And the technologies will will be able to play with the parameters of space-time. So it's like suppose you're, you know, a wizard at Grand Theft Auto and you can play within the game, do all sorts of things that people find amazing. That's great. But imagine someone who actually knows the source code. They can take the wizard and they can give him a flat tire. They can take all the gas out of his tank. They can make the road infinitely long. They can do whatever they want to. They can play with the very parameters of So the wizard is nothing. All of our science right now has made us wizards. We're eventually going to get the source code of the game. Where can people get your book? Tell Tell people about the book, where you want them to connect with you. Oh, yes. It's called The Case Against Reality. Um you can get it on Amazon or Apple and so forth. The Case Against Reality. Um and then I've got a Twitter feed um at Donald D. Hoffman, I think. But if you just Google my name on Twitter, you can find it. I put links to most of my to to our I'll put a link to our pod- podcast here and and so forth. But um and yeah, so on Twitter and you know, I have a website at the University of California at Irvine that lists some of my papers and has my email um ddhoff@uci.edu. So people can email me. I I, you know, I get enough that I can't respond to most of the emails, but but every once in a while I can respond, so. Nice. You know what that's like, I'm sure. I I do indeed. Right. Cool. Well, guys, check him out for sure. Hopefully you enjoyed this and if you loved it, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.