Evidence We're Living In A SIMULATION - How Evolution Hid The TRUTH | Donald Hoffman

[Music] What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with somebody I think you guys are going to find deeply fascinating, Donald Hoffman. Um, Donald, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Tom. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Of course, man. Dude, after so I did an interview with Anukica Harris. She introduced me to some of the concepts that we'll be talking about today, which are uh one crazier than the next, but super interesting. But before we dive into that, give people a super quick synopsis of who you are, your background, all that good stuff. Uh, I'm a professor at the University of California at Irvine in the cognitive science department. I've been there since 1983. And, uh, so I study visual perception, um, perception of objects and their their colors and their shapes and their motions. And then for the last uh 20 30 years I've been studying consciousness as well and trying to develop a mathematical model of consciousness and then studying evolution and asking does evolution shape our senses to see reality as it is or not. So those are sort of the big topics I've been studying. Yeah, it a lot of this seems to go back to vision and the way that we literally see things. And by the way, don't and I don't know how much you know about me or my obsessions, but I'm obsessed with the movie The Matrix. Yes. And in your dedication, you I forget the names of the three people, but you said I offer you the red pill, which I thought was pretty interesting. So, what in your world, what is the red pill? What is the red pill waking us up to? Right. Most of us believe that we see reality as it is. 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 spacetime is fundamental and objects are fundamental, taking that intuition seriously. And I decide to to side with this science on this one. All right. So this a lot of this stuff is going to be really difficult to tease out, but I think we have to sort of break it into points. I don't want to spend our whole time um describing the theory. We may get lost for a fair amount of time in that, but I what I hope we can do is sort of lay out the thinking and then get into some of the implications, why it matters and all that good stuff. Um, so if I guess let's back up. So tell me how natural selection gives us the mathematical model that invalidates all that. That's probably the right place to start, right? Most of us think of natural selection and evolution as a biological theory that that's that's sort of intuitive, right? you know, if you are better adapted to the environment, you're more likely to pass on your genes and so forth. And but it it turns out that in the 1970s, uh, a brilliant guy named John Maynard Smith was able to use the ideas of evolution by natural selection and the tools of mathematics in spec particular, uh, game theory to create a new field, evolutionary game theory. Can you can you explain game theory? So the when I was diving into your world when I was reading the book when you talk about miracles and I don't want to do this out of order but you talk about like every theory has sort of a base assumption and it's like we can't we can't explain that one so just please accept that this is the the miracle as you call it and then from here the rest of my argument is going to make sense because I don't understand the math well enough. The math every time you mention this and nobody pushes you on it. I don't understand the math well enough it feels like the miracle to me but it isn't to you. So what actually what is the math if we can sort of say it at a at a lay person's level? What is the math? How does it show that there's a zero probability that we're describing reality as it actually exists? Right? So so the intuition behind using game theory for evolution is very much like if you play a video game, right? If you're playing a video game, you have to focus on getting points as fast as you can. If you get enough in a short enough time, you get to the next level, otherwise you die. And an evolution is very much like that. There's points, they're called fitness payoffs, and you have to gather them as quickly as you can. And if you get enough roughly in a short enough period of time, you don't go to the next level, but your genes in your children go to the next level. And so it's that's roughly why we want to think about game theoretic kinds of things. But it's of course it's more detailed than what I game theory is literally that what survives to the next round. Yeah. So game theory is literally a mathematical theory of strategies in games and how different strategies may be better or worse in certain circumstances. So for example, if if you one game that our species plays is a social cooperation game. And we were hunter gatherers. If we all went out and cooperated, I went out and hunted wilderbeasts and you went out and hunted wilderbeasts and others gathered berries and so forth. We all worked hard and came back at the end of the day. If I didn't get enough and you got more, then you might share with me and tomorrow I might share with you. So that's cooperation. But and so that works very very well. That's that's a strategy that works very well. How would we define this game? So I was tempted to say, okay, so it's about the people who have the strategy to win this game called life. But I'm not sure that's actually how you define it. Would would it be the game called procreation or Okay. So in evolution, fitness is all all about procreation. In fact, basically that's how it's defined. It's almost um it almost sounds like it's a tutology that fitness being more fit means that you're having more offspring. So whatever you do that lets you have more offspring is by definition giving you greater fitness. And so so in the case of cooperation, I mean that's not the only strategy by which a species could be successful at having offspring in the next generation. But for homo sapiens, that was a strategy that we did use. And and many social species do that. Ants and bees and so forth. But as soon as you have that strategy of cooperation, then it turns out there's another strategy that could be very fit, and that's cheating. So I could pretend I'm I'm a loafer now. I don't want to go out there and put my life on the line in front of a wilderbeast. And so I just go down to the river. I hide out and relax and take it easy and come back and go, "Oh, I worked really hard today. I couldn't find and think I share some of yours." Well, and and so it turns out that that strategy is very very fit in the sense that I didn't put my life on the line. If you're willing to share with me, I'm going to survive. So I'm going to have So that strategy will actually proliferate. I'll have kids. I'll have more loafers. And so, but it turns out if you if have too many loafers, too many cheaters, then no one's bringing home the bacon and the whole thing collapses. And so you get the idea that the the the the fitness of a strategy depends on the other strategies that are around. If everybody else is cooperating, then being a cheater is very very effective. It's a it's a fit strategy. If everybody's a cheater, then it's not fit to be a cheater because everybody's going to die. And so that's what we call frequency dependent selection. that the frequency of a different of a strategy um will affect its fitness. And so that makes it more complicated and that's why we have to do mathematics. It's you can actually with mathematical precision predict exactly what proportion of the population will be cheaters and what proportion will be cooperators once you know certain things about the strategies and and their payoffs. And so it's that's why we use evolutionary game theory. allows us to go away from just intuitive notions of evolution and selection and so forth to precise definitions of strategies of their fitness, how they interact. When h when three or four or five or n strategies interact, what happens? It gets very very complicated. Then our intuitions just give up. But the math can still carry on where our intuitions give up. Okay. So you partner with a mathematician and did you have a theory that you wanted to see if he could write the the sort of algorithm for or how did that work? How did we end up focusing on math? Right. So in about 2008 I decided I really wanted to go after this because I I had a suspicion that evolution would not favor creatures that see reality as it is. I figured that it would be too complicated and take too much time. And it turned out that was correct, but but it was more interesting. So I got a couple of my graduate students working on this. I worked with them. We learned evolutionary game theory and we started they they wrote simulations. And so we just simulated creatures with different strategies and we let them see all of the reality or none of the reality. We let them just see fitness payoffs. Give me some of the data points. So one of them is going to be fitness payoffs, right? when you're writing the math, um, like are you making this from a human perspective? Are you taking this from an ants perspective? I've got to imagine the math looks differently depending on the species strategy that's already evolved sort of over evolutionary time. So, oh god, I can only imagine how complicated this is, but give me a give me a couple of the variables so that this stops being one of the miracles for me and I can really start to understand. Sure. So, one kind of game that we had them play was a foraging game. So you could think of big a big checkerboard or a big chessboard and you had them play. What do you mean them? The So so my graduate students then had these simulated creatures and we just plop them down at random in this big huge checkerboard. Okay. And we had also planted resources around on the checkerboard. And did you have to give them incentives? Well, in in some cases we would just we would either allow them to evolve incentives. So that was what we called a genetic algorithm. So we started off and they were all stupid. They they all um had random genes for how they moved and how they would try to feed and how they would perceive. But there had to be some sense of score, right? So if we're using game theory, there has to be some sense of you have an objective, that objective is to gobble the resources or whatever. Yeah. So certain resources that were just randomly distributed on the checkerboard gave you high fitness payoffs, some gave you low fitness payoffs and and so forth. So we just place So it's just defined as fitness payoff without anything beyond that. Exactly. They had they had a a a driver, if you will, to put it in human terms, they had a drive to acquire fitness payoffs. Right. Right. Got it. Um, at least in when we when we programmed them now, when we just had the genetic algorithm, there was no drive at all. They they they just what would make them move? So, they they had to do something, but the genes were random. So, they they would do stupid stuff like they would stay in one spot and try to eat and and they would get nothing and they just keep trying to eat there the whole time until that whole and they would just die off, right? So in the first generation, right, we did they have the desire to eat and procreate? Like were they looking to mate or how did you all the only the only desire was we we told them they had to do something every step of the game? That's all we did. And was there a list of items for them to choose from? Eat, move. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Eat and move. And that was pretty much it. And and step. Yeah, eat and move. That's right. And then you had something on the back end that said if they score this many number of points then they essentially procreate and they move on to the next generation. If they don't they're dead. That's exactly. Okay. Got it. So the first generation pretty much all of them just acted very stupidly. They didn't get any fitness points or very very few. Some bumped against walls and just kept bumping into the walls. And so we would just breed the ones that were a little bit less stupid than the rest and then make a new generation of them. And we did that for four or 500 generations. And then by the time we'd done that 500 generations, we had creatures that looked very purposeful. They were foraging in an almost optimal p pattern. They weren't wasting any time and they were getting high fitness payoffs. And we could look at their perceptions. And we found that they evolved perceptions that didn't show them the truth. It showed them only fitness payoffs, which was no surprise to me. But but what was a surprise was the reason why. It wasn't just that it was too expensive to to see the truth. It was that seeing the truth and seeing what you need to survive are very very different things. And and so so I went to a mathematicians on once I had the simulations and I realized that this looked like it was a real result and and I gotten some new ideas about what was really going on. So the simulations really taught me it wasn't just that it was too time and and resource expensive to see the truth. It was that in some sense the truth is completely irrelevant that that it's and and also that the fitness payoffs themselves don't tell you anything about the truth. They're they're just independent. So I went and and worked with a mathematician named Chayon Pash and um we've worked together. He's the mathematician. I'm I'm not. And we have and I've gotten some other collaborators as well, some very very good collaborators. And we have a couple papers that we've now written where with two different angles on on the theorem. And the bottom line is is this. Um it's it's straightforward to prove that well straightforward if you have a mathematician working with you. Um but to prove that the an organism that sees reality as it is in whole or in part is never more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality whose senses actually don't have the right language to see reality and is just instead tuned to the fitness payoffs. Okay, so this is sort of the first thing that I trip over. So, um, I get where I could see that it is more advantageous to be optimized for fitness payoffs than it is for reality. And this might be a good time to give people your sort of VR explanation so that we we can bring this into something they can visualize. But first, let me finish what I'm bumping on. So, I get how if you're optimized for fitness payoffs, that makes more sense than being optimized for reality. Reality could have too much just complexity. The processing power that it would take to understand is crazy. which is exactly why I think your desktop analogy is probably the better one to hit right now. Um, but what I don't understand is why it is necessarily true that you need to hide reality like why that would be part of it. That seems sort of a bridge too far for my my simplistic mind. So that is a bit technical but I but the top level idea is um that fitness payoffs depend on the state of the world. Right? So to be concrete and the organism, right? organism, right? They depend on the world and the organism and the state of the organism and the action. So, I mean, one example is, you know, if I have a t-bone steak and you know, the fitness payoff of that t-bone steak for a hungry lion is pretty high. But for the same lion that wants to mate, it's very, very low. And for, you know, a cow in any state and for any action, the T-bone steak offers no fitness payoffs. And and another example is if I'm 5,000 meters underwater, that's pretty bad for me. But for a benthic fish, that's it's perfect for a benthic fish, right? So so evolution by natural selection has this idea that there is an objective reality. And fitness payoffs do depend on that reality. But the payoff for the same state of reality could be very very different for a benthic fish than for me. For a benthic fish, 5,000 meters underwater is the same state of reality as it would be for me. But the payoff is very very different for the benthic fish. It would kill me. this this may not be the thing to dive into, but I'm going to push on this a little bit and see if we get somewhere fruitful. Um, what where I sort of come to in your theory is that there lurking under this is is a reality, right? The moon is there to describe something. It's my shorthand. It's not It is not a meaningless shortorthhand. It is a shortand to help me get my um my fitness payoffs fair, but it it represents something, right? Okay. So if that is true, understanding that I am 5,000 ft underwater still seems relevant even though it's not it doesn't have a fitness payoff. So obscuring that or obfuscating that for me so that I can't understand that I'm 5,000 ft underwater is not helpful. Okay, I can tell that if we chase that, we won't get where we want to go. But if you give us the desktop analogy, right, because this I think will will give us the anchor that we need to keep exploring, right? So, so if evolution didn't shape us to see the truth, what did it shape us to see? And the I think the the good analogy is that it gave us like a desktop interface. So, if you're um writing an email and the icon for the email you're writing is blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen, does that mean the email in your computer is blue rectangular in the middle of the screen? Middle of the computer? Of course not. That I mean, anybody who thought that misunderstands the point of the interface. is there not to show you the truth, which in this metaphor would be the circuits and software, the diodes and resistors, magnetic fields. You don't want to deal with that. If you if you had to deal with magnetic fields to write an email, good luck. You would never no one would hear from you. And so that's what evolution did for us. It gave us a desktop interface that's there to hide the truth, right? The desktop interface on your computer is there explicitly to hide the circuits and software. You don't want to see that stuff. That would seeing the truth would get in the way. But isn't evolution somewhat of a blind watchmaker? I mean to just steal from from my man Mr. Dawkins. So if it is blind, it's not hiding anything. So it's just it's optimizing you for something. So that's where I get into the like the the punchline of your theory, not to get too far ahead, but for people to understand why I'm stopping you. So the the punch line of the theory is we are so the far like so far off from what is real as to like not even be able to to conceive of what our world really is. And we will definitely get into spaceime is doomed. It's one of the most fascinating things to come out of um your theory. But it's like I it doesn't feel like a blind watch maker is going to hide something from me. It it just it it has no sense of it. It's just here is the shortest path across the checkerboard to get to this thing. It's not trying to trick me into thinking that there is no checkerboard. It's just like take this path, go that way. It's the shortest path. I'm essentially lazy, right? If you think about um caloric realities, right? So, the way that I look at a a human um I I want to write a book called The Physics of Being Human. And to do that, I would really it's the like you write the book that you need. So, to understand in myself why I am both driven and lazy is so [ __ ] weird. So, I both have these huge ambitions. I want to do this crazy [ __ ] but I also want to sit on the couch and eat chips, right? So, it's like, and they're both real, man. I am not like when people think that like I'm being humble or whatever. No, no, no. I really have like a hardcore drive to sit around and do nothing, but I have this like sort of weird balancing thing. So, for me to understand it from a a caloric utilization standpoint, right, as humans, we have these massive brains that are calorically just ravenous. And so for me not to have to forage all the time, I take a strategy where I'm conserving calories. Again, blind watchmaker, not not somebody going, hey, you know, it'd be really smart. It just realized the ones that didn't conserve calories [ __ ] died. And you know, they didn't survive a famine or whatever. And the ones that sort of balanced this like, I'm going to go down and I'm going to face the will of the beast and I'm not going to hide all the time. You know, I'm going to put myself at risk and and all that stuff. The the ones that found that balance, they were the ones that procreate and they pass on their genes. Okay. So part of the physics of being human is to both be adventurous and lazy at the same time. Where where I'm trying to like figure all this out then is okay, I have this layer. I have my interface, but it doesn't feel like it's that like radically far from the the truth. So I'll I'll give you my example. So all right, it's mapping this room. You're going to tell me, "Fuck, dude, you don't even understand. Like spaceime isn't real. None of this [ __ ] is real." I look away, the moon doesn't even exist. Right. Right. That seems like it would be more problematic for me to navigate the world if all of that were true. So, what I want to understand is how much of of what you say about the computer interface is really that divorced from reality, right? Oh, man. Stick with me. I'm going to see if I can actually articulate this. So, the the computer analogy is super profound. It's easy for me to understand. I don't want to have to deal with electrical fields and all the other things, the diodes or whatever, all that stuff. But when I think about whacking into a rock, that seems like a way closer thing to my reality. I've mapped something over that. Same with the moon. I've mapped something over it. It isn't actually that thing, right? But it feels like it would be mapping over some gravitational object that rotates around the Earth. But I think you're going to say that's not true. Right. So, what analogy because it our intuitions rebel at the idea we're not seeing the truth because it's what we're doing here works so well. Right. And I'm open to that. We're not seeing the truth. Where where I get lost is how [ __ ] divorced can it really be and still be useful. Right. Well, so there's two aspects to that. One one is just that you know the mathematics of evolution is quite clear. Meaning the probability that you see the truth is zero. Is zero. That's right. And and that we have a paper that we just submitted on Monday um where we we show that the fitness payoffs erase all evidence of world structure almost surely with what the [ __ ] does that mean? When you say world structure, what do you mean? So the world presumably there is some world some reality. Yes. Like atoms. Uh well, you don't need to postulate exactly what that word. I need to know what you mean by the word the word structure. So it could be and what we show is it doesn't matter what the structure is pretty much the result holds. So it could be for example a structure like uh a distance relationship a metric what we call a metric or a topology or a measurable structure okay or a total order like one is smaller than two is smaller than three that that's a total order right so whatever the so what what you can show is that no matter what structure you might think the world has you can prove that the fitness payoff functions that govern our evolution so you're right there's no of course goal right it's not a goal-directed kind of thing, right? You know, evolution is not trying to do anything. And but the point is that the fitness payoffs which govern evolution, the probability that they will actually preserve the structure in the world. So that by being tuned to the fitness, you're tuned to the structure in the world. Yeah, that probability is precisely zero. That's what we prove. So the only thing that we know is what you think is real is the only thing we know is not real. Is that accurate? Well, I would say according to theory of evolution. Now, we can step back and ask ourselves what the theory of, you know, what we think about the theory of evolution, right? But before we get to that, because you you do you have a pretty deaf challenge to how cuz my first literally the first note I took about you was my whole problem is you're laying out, hey, evolution mathematically proves that essentially evolution isn't true. So, I was like, if if every I think evolution is true, how can it also be true that everything I know and think is false? Right? which is essentially what I just heard you say. So mathematically I can prove this the quote unquote structure of everything I think is absolutely not true and yet I'm using evolution to base that math on. Right. Walk people through how that isn't a contradiction. Right. So it's it's what we show is that the fitness payoff functions erase any information about the structure of the world. So that the structure of our perceptions is just unrelated to the structure in the objective world. But the argument that I just gave does not apply to our math and logic. So so just perception just perceptions. So you have to be very very we have to look at all of our cognitive capacities one. Is this whole thing anvelt problem? Well, it what it's saying is that uh your envelope that every creature, you know, homo sapiens has onevel, 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. Y 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 at 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 uni 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. 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. is saying that the theory of evolution has a core that John Maynard Smith found 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 you 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 is we have to be very very careful. That's why you when you do this you know it's it's not just handwave anymore. You really have to look at the replicator equation. You really have to look at the fitness payoff functions and do cominatorial 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 their equations and say okay if the equation entails the probability 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. So, spacetime though and you're you're ready to ditch that one. Sure. So, um okay. So I'm I'm getting I think what you're saying about p our unvelt and uh because we haven't defined that I'll define that. So uh is your senses take in the world in a certain way and uh 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 enovelt. You can even have humans that have a diff a slightly different oovelt. One that's colorb 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 unvelt. So I get perception. I get that this is a a problem of perception. I think I understand the math part. I pro because I'm going to I am making a layman's assumption that math is a universal language. I've heard that repeated a million times. I am so bad at math. I don't even understand that. Uh but I accept it out of ignorance. uh the logic part. Let me define logic based on what I think you're saying and you tell me if I'm getting it correct. So logic the way that I understand it from the way that you just use it because I would have said it's human reasoning. So I would have gotten tripped up um on like natural selection or oh god the one you just used it as an example and you said that that we think spacetime a great example right we have in my layman's view we have logicked our way to spacetime but that's failed me so um tying it back to fitness payoffs I think is is your definition of logic that we have to be able to reason that one bite of an apple is not as good as two bites of an apple. Is it really that basic that it's it is entirely tied to fitness payoffs? That's well from an from the evolutionary arguments that I'm giving. Right. So the arguments that that but do you think that logic reaches deeper than that when you say that it's untouched by this um false interpretation. Oh god I'm putting words in your mouth. Well, right. So so that gets to the bigger picture of what I'm up to here. Right. So and this is how science progresses. What we do um is we take our current best theories and we try to push them to their limits and find out where they break, where they fall apart. And when we do that, that's when we break out the champagne. Because the whole point in science is to push our best theories to the limit to find out where they break down and then get some clue about a deeper theoretical framework. And the constraint on that deeper theoretical framework is it better agree with our current theory where our current theory is right. But only if you're saying that that theory is logic. This is another one of those times where I bumped against what you're saying. So and and this may be that simple. Is that what you mean? That like where we are using true logic as you define it tied to fitness payoffs I think. Um then it must agree because you've said if you work backwards I'm not trying to get rid of evolution. I'm not trying to get rid of the things that we know like we can launch a satellite into space and geo target you but that requires relativity. So whatever we um get to whatever answer we come to better be backwards compatible with the ideas that essentially work. Can you give me a definition though of work and is it tied to logic as you define it and thusly fitness payoffs. Right. So, so the idea would be that scientists are doing reasoning, right? Science is about reasoning. Is reasoning a synonym for logic to you? Pretty much. That's right. And if we um we can't logic is in some sense non-negotiable in the sense that if I let go of reason and logic then there's nothing left. Right? Is that true? Because all we can do if we if we're having a conversation Mhm. we can talk informally but we can't make very good progress unless we are absolutely precise in what we say. That but let me tell you how that struck me. So does somebody who's schizophrenic do they have reason and logic? Well, in the sense that if we're trying to understand our situation in the universe, humans will make stories. Yes, if the stories are internally self-contradicting, you can be pretty sure you're going to be in trouble, right? So, any internal contradictions are going to destroy your theory. So the first thing you have to do is make sure that what you're saying doesn't contradict what you're saying. If you because that just means you're saying nonsense. So one one reason we we use math and logic is to make sure that what we're saying isn't just flatout nonsense. But once we're past that criterion and and much of what we've said is nonsense, but once we get past that criterion, then it turns out we may have been using our terms very imprecisely. We might use the word space. We might use the word time. and we think we know what we're talking about, but when you actually push, you find out, oh no, I I would say this in this situation, that in that situation. Oh, and they contradict. I've contradicted myself again. So, once again, we find that if we're we just use intuitive concepts, we get trapped in self-contradiction, namely nonsense. So, the whole point of being mathematically precise, one point is to make sure that we're not doing nonsense. The second is to take our ideas and force us to put our ideas very very precisely so we know exactly what we're saying. I get the math part though, the part that I'm really trying to wrap my head around and maybe we should just move the [ __ ] off this, but I'll take one more swing at it. Um, math I get. If if math truly is a universal language that just sort of gets at the substrate of what this whatever this is, it actually gets to that. Cool. I can see how um the fact that we that uh chasing fitness payoffs manipulates our envelopics think they're being logical, right? What on earth makes us think that we are not? just the way that our our um reality is essentially this total abstraction, right, in your own theory and and I would agree, man. I I routinely think in myself and and express other people. Your brain is creating a virtual reality. Now, I never ever ever conceived of it as sort of radically different as you, but um I get that we're in sort of this this huge abstraction, but what makes us think that that our the way that we reason, the way that we logic outside of math, the way that we reason and logic outside of math isn't the same as a schizophrenic where it is it is so delusional. Is it just the internal consistency or and couldn't that itself be a delusion that our fear of internal um contradiction is problematic? Is is actually a delusion in and of itself? Oh, very very good. So I see your question now. So yes, there are deep issues here in terms of of logic and there is something called Girdle's incompleteness theorem that basically Give it to me. You familiar with that? No, not at all. So So Girdle is probably arguably one of the most profound results ever in human thought. Girdle proved it's called Girdle's incompleteness theorem and he proved that any axiomatic logical or mathematical system that's rich enough to do arithmetic um there will be statements that are true but can't be proven within that system unprovable truths the notion of truth goes deeper than the notion of proof in that system you might say well okay I'll take that truth and put it into my axioms then he said well but then there'll be new truths that you can't prove and this goes on forever what he showed was that the exploration of mathematical structure is in principle endless. It's unbounded. And in fact, if we get get to it later on, my theory of consciousness, I'll argue that that's what consciousness is up to. This unbounded exploration of all the possibilities of consciousness that comes from Girdle's theorem. But you're you're absolutely right. We can choose. Give me Girdle's theorem one more time. Right. Right. As simply as you can. The the simple bottom line is there is no end to the exploration of mathematical structure. It's turtles all the way down. All the way. And in principle, you can never know at all. Okay. Interesting. And I definitely get how this ties into your theory of consciousness. So, let's spend a minute on turtles all the way down. Uh super cool story. It I I don't remember where this started, so if you do, by all means, jump in. But it uh woman was claiming that the earth is flat. And so somebody said, "Okay, if it's flat, then what is it sitting on?" And the story goes that it's sitting on a giant turtle. And so the person asked her, "What is the turtle sitting on?" And she said, "Don't be ridiculous. It's turtles all the way down." And of course, you get into this. Eventually, one of those turtles is on something. So, and that's that same human like visceral reaction is how I react to your theory of consciousness. So, why don't you give it to us and then we're going to start playing around with the brain. Okay. Um, but what is your theory of consciousness? Right. So, I'm saying that space and time aren't fundamental because evolution by natural selection entails that. Not only not fundamental, but not real. Right. That's right. They're they're only real as forms of our experience. They're not That's right. They're our own. They're not real. They're part of the virtual reality desktop abstraction. That's right. Okay. But they're not real in the sense of an objective reality in the sense that they would be there even if no creature were around to perceive them. So it's again like a virtual reality. Every time like if you're playing a a game of uh you know fast race cars in in virtual reality, I see a red Corvette. Sorry. I'm so sorry to interrupt, but uh would another way to say that be because you say when I look at the moon and then I look away that I you haven't said this in this interview, but I've heard you say it many times that you you trash bin it or something like that. You're no longer rendering it as garbage collector. Garbage collector. Um would another way to say that the moon doesn't exist quote unquote if there were no species to perceive it. It's really that there the moon wouldn't be um created essentially. It's like it it it is requiring an oovelt of a particular species to create that shortorthhand over evolution to say whatever that thing is that the moon is meant to represent. Um it has been created by humans as a moon. Maybe bats see it entirely differently and fish don't have any sense that it's real at all. Who knows? Um it's really that we we evolution maybe is is a better way to say it. that evolution has created this virtual reality and therefore if that species ceased to exist, its version of virtual reality would obviously cease to exist because it's being created. Exactly. Oh, but I'm going to say it's being created by the brain. You're going to say the brain's not real. Uh is that true? Right. The brain. Okay. Yeah. This is where the [ __ ] gets so complicated. Okay. So, I'm going to shut up now. Uh back to your theory of consciousness. Right. So, but I just point your your VR thing is is I think a a good example 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 supercomput 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 it's not the moon. It's nothing like the moon. Just like there's something there's a super supercomput 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, 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 photo receptor level, I was like, "Oh my god, it gave me such an understanding of how terrifyingly complicated things actually." 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 if right so we have to bracket everything is within the framework of a theory so I'm now using neurohysiology 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 certain frequencies and they pass through the lens of your eye which focuses it on the back of your eye just like 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 photo receptors. It's like a 120 mega megapixel camera. And each photo receptor 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 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. Numb numbers. Not not not even colors. It's like if you look at 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 on 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, 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 a 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 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 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 a 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. Of course, now I'm going to resend the brain part, right? So the brain itself is part of the space-time interface. So the brain itself is just our VR symbol for something deeper that's doing the real work. And so the question will be what deeper theory can we come up with, right? It's going to be a theory outside of space and and time. But this gets back to what we have to do in science all the time. We push our current theories to the limits till they break. And then we have to actually take a creative leap. We can't necessarily just use the language of our theories that we just broke. We have to come up with a deeper language. And that is a leap. When Einstein went past Newton, he took a deep leap. And when quantum mechanics went past Einstein and Newton, it took an even deeper leap. And the language was entirely different. But you can show for example that if you start with Einstein you get back Newton roughly as the speed of light goes to infinity. The way Newton talks about space and time and matter you mass those terms actually mean something different than what they mean in Einstein. In Newton mass is mass and you have the same mass period. In Einstein your mass depends on your velocity. Your length depends on your velocity. Distances depend on your velocity. None of that. Space and time and mass don't behave that way at all in Newton. We use the same words, but they mean something very radically different in Einstein. And in quantum mechanics, it's it's even a deeper leap. But with quantum mechanics, you get back Newton as something called Planck's constant goes to zero again roughly. I mean, this is for first approximation. So what we so the leap I need to make here now is evolution by natural selection is telling us that the language of space and time and then objects in space and time is the wrong language to describe objective reality. So the leap I need to make is to say is there a deeper theoretical framework that I can come up with such that when I look at the dynamics of that deeper framework and project it back into our VR interface which I'm which is space and time. So I've got this VR headset of space and time. That's what evolution has told us. This thing is just a headset. You've got to guess, right? I'm not telling you what's outside the headset. I just told you all I can tell you. It's a headset. Now, it's up to you to take a stab at what's behind the headset. So, that's what I'm up to. So, I'm probably wrong, right? I mean, we weren't evolved. Evolution by itself doesn't say anything that makes me think I'm evolved to see the truth. But it it at least is telling me that whatever the truth is out there, you're only seeing a headset. It's good enough to tell us that, but it's not good enough to tell us what's outside. that takes a leap outside of the theory of evolution. But the constraint on that theory is we need to show how our deeper theory could lead to me having a headset and in that headset it looks like things are evolving according to evolution but natural selection. In other words, my deeper theory has a strong constraint on it. It better look like Einstein's theory of spaceime. It better look like quantum field theory. And it better look like evolution by natural selection. the three big pillars of modern science. If I can't do that, then I know I'm wrong. So, even though all of those things exist in the headset. That's right. Okay. This is [ __ ] fascinating. Uh, so now tall order. Do you have that idea? I have a proposal. Let's hear it. I'm probably wrong. Can Before you give us your proposal, I have I want to acknowledge you, dude. The way that you talk like that, I love so much. I can't remember if it was Plank or Bore that said um anybody, this is a terrible paraphrase. Anybody that thinks that science advances because objective truth is presented is absolutely wrong. Science advances because the old guard dies and the new people grow up just believing it to be self-evident. I [ __ ] hate that so much. The fact that people are not willing to be wrong drives me crazy. Makes me want to choke half the world out. So the fact that you talk from the perspective of, hey, look, I've got a theory. It's probably wrong. Like, oh, dude, I love that so much. I wish more people were were as hardcore as you to present you. You Oh, god. You call it bold and precise. I I present an a theory hypothesis that's both bold and precise. Right. Right. Love that. And that you're willing to be wrong. So anyway, I just had to take a second. Every time I hear you say that, I want to stand up and clap because so few people are willing to own that they're probably wrong, but they're not afraid to make a bold and precise prediction. So, bravo. And and the the thing about that is I just want to understand. And so if I'm stuck on my ideas and won't let go of them, then if I'm wrong, I'm gonna not understand. So it's really stupid to think that you're you have to have enough hope that your ideas have some promise that you pursue them, but not be dogmatic about them. That's that's a it's a fine balance. Very much so. All right. So now our bold and precise claim is so I'm proposing and I I'll say what I'm proposing and then I'll say why I went that direction. So I'm proposing that reality is a vast social network of interacting conscious agents. So that consciousness is fundamental and think of it like the Twitter verse, right? There's tens of millions of Twitter users, billions of tweets, lots of stuff trending. It's a Twitter users are tweeting and following and so it's all a big social interaction, right? So I'm proposing and this is a mathematically precise proposal that there are things called conscious agents. So conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic are fundamental and limited choices based on those experiences. That's part of the whole structure. So experiences that inform choices. That's going to be the fundamental idea in a vast social network. And the idea then about our headset is is follows. If you are a Twitter user and you want to understand deeply what's going on in the Twitter verse, well, you can't engage with all 10 million users and the billion tweets. It's just overwhelming. You would die before you could even read all the stuff. So, what do you do? Well, whenever we have big social media data, we have to have visualization tools. Those tools will necessarily ignore most of the data. And the part that they don't ignore, they're going to compress it down. They're going to digest it and compress it into some eye candy that we can understand. Some objects in three dimensions that have nice colors and move in certain ways. And using that visualization tool, I can maybe see what's trending in New York, what's happening in all, you know, so the big scale of Europe, what's happening in little scale in Irvine and so forth. So I'll have a tool that lets me zoom in and out and and it'll be ignoring most of the stuff. And that's what I'm claiming spaceime is and physical objects. It's our headset. It's a visualization tool that certain conscious agents use to interact with this vast social network that would otherwise be completely overwhelming. And so we've made the rookie mistake. The finish that the rookie mistake rookie mistake of taking our headset for the final reality. Okay, we have a tool and we thought it was the thing we were visualizing. Amazing. Very clear. Now, let's back up and break these down part by part because conscious agent, I'm familiar enough with your work that I kind of know what you mean, but I don't think people understand that like how small you take that down cuz you're not talking that there, oh, hey, this is all a bunch of people, which is probably what somebody hearing this for the first time thinks that you think there are invisible people that make up this social network. Um, how far like, so turtles all the way down, boys and girls, so we're talking about consciousness all the way down, right? How like are um nutrinos like are they conscious? Right. So no. So this is very different from is that because it's in the the headset? That's right. Nutrinos are particles inside spaceime. Okay. Sorry. Damn it. Nothing inside is I fell for rookie mistake. Uh okay. So out outside it. Uh so do you delineate between uh advanced cognition and consciousness? Not in principle. No. Interesting. So do you I'm really trying to get you to use other words. So define agent. Right. So we're conscious. We're this is a collection of conscious agents having a social ex did you say social media specifically? No you did not. Social network. Social network. They're like a vast social network. Got it. Okay. So, uh, give me what a conscious agent is. The simplest example, the most trivial agent that the mathematics allows is an agent that has only maybe two experiences. Maybe like red and green. Okay, that's all it experiences. Why does it have to be two? Well, it could be even just none. You could have an an agent that has none or one. But I I tend to think about what I call a one bid agent as sort of fundamental. But I could have an agent that has only one experience like nothing or red has an experience makes me feel like I'm not I'm not interpreting what you say in the same way that you mean it. So you you said something and it went by so fast. Okay. Uh which was the taste of garlic and chocolate are fundamental if I remember correctly. Experiences. That's right. Okay. So literally the taste of garlic is a conscious agent. No, it's an experience. Okay. So that thing it's not like, "Hey Bob, you're the taste of garlic." No. No. Okay. So, sorry to use overly crass language, but that sort of that was my initial interpretation of what you said. Okay. So, that makes sense. So, uh, I will then push and say if that's the case, is this not would not garlic and, um, chocolate be tied to the envel? Absolutely. So certain agents will, but does that mean it's in the headset then? Um, well, those experiences, so the headset is created out of your experiences. Uhhuh. You So what an agent does is uses some of its experiences as a format for a headset. But Okay. So what I'm trying to get to and I think this is what you were proposing is hey we take the headset off and we see like what do we see and I get that we have the problem of perception and that's ah the that's all back to the envelope see is a standin for obviously I don't know how we would be interpreting this world in the movie the matrix it is green code right so when he explodes the agents they explode into code so code is their fundamental element Um, what is your fundamental element? Consciousness. I get that. But now I'm trying to understand like how if it's consciousness all the way down, what is consciousness? Like is it a physical substrate or is it not? And we have to let go of the very notion of physicality. Yeah, we're I'm letting go of physicality in the sense I'm completely letting go of space and time and and particles, electrons, protons, and neutrons. Those are only headset entities. But is it fair to say that you have no idea then exactly what consciousness is? You just Well, so so what we do so here's this gets at the fundamental way we build scientific theories and this is what we talked about a little bit earlier which is about every theory has miracles, right? So every scientific theory has certain assumptions that it makes that we just have to grant you. We just have to grant. No, there's no theory of everything. We we hear about a theory of everything. There is none. So your miracle is consciousness. That's right. Okay. So there So I'm saying that there are entities that I'll call conscious agents. These agents themselves are not conscious experiences. Why do they have to beworked? Well, it it it turns out that when agents interact, they form new agents. So when and I didn't know this when I wrote down the math. I was just writing down what what could I possibly mean by consciousness being fundamental. And I wrote down the minimal structure I could think of that could have some set of experiences. So there's some set of experiences that this creature, this entity could have and a small set of actions that it could take. And that was all I wanted to write down. But then when I had them interact with other agents, right? Because the actions are to affect the experiences of other agents. It turned out the interactions satisfy the definition of a conscious agent. So when agents interact, they form new agents. Let me ask a question that I think is going to um explode this apart and help us all understand what you mean. Do I exist? Um yes. In what way? So you your conscious experiences exist. So all I can see is your skin, hair, and eyes. Yep. I see. But that's just my interface symbol. If you look at yourself in the mirror, all you see in the mirror is skin, hair, and eyes. But you know firsthand that what you don't see in the mirror, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your headache, all the rich world of your conscious experiences, that is not visible in the headset. So my conscious experience is both in the headset and outside of the headset. That's right. That's right. So it exists outside of space and time. That's right. In fact, this is where the [ __ ] starts to get real weird. It's pretty interesting because all I can see of you are the experiences in my own headset. Mhm. And so my headset is made up of my own experiences that I've put in a particular format of space and time. And so so it's just a format. In a VR, for example, you have a certain format in which the VR is presented. that 3D VR format has nothing to do with the shape of the supercomputer. It's just the format of of of that. And so this what I see of Tom right here is just what my headset allows me. But I believe and you know firsthand that what I can't see in my headset is this rich world of your conscious experiences. When I look at my cat, my headset only shows me fur and something really cute. And I believe that behind that cute little icon in my my interface, my headset, there is a real consciousness, but I have less insight into the consciousness than I have into a human. With a mouse, even less. With an ant, even less. And then when I get to things that I call rocks and, you know, protons and neutrons, I have no insight at all. No surprise. The whole point of a headset is to simplify things. Does this conscious entity need to eat? Very interesting because that gets to what? So, this is now outside of space and time. It's not evolution. It's not food and so forth. So, the question is what are these agents up to? What are they doing? What's the why are they having any kind of actions at all? And the answer is I don't know yet. I've got a ba mathematical definition of conscious agent. were starting to play with dynamical systems of them and as to the question of why they would have any dynamic why would consciousness do something as opposed to nothing. What what kind of answer could be deep enough or at least what what kind of proposal could be deep enough? And I I've only had one idea ever that I've heard that seems deep enough to at least be on the table. And that's consciousness all the way down. Well, no. I'm saying if we assume it's consciousness all the way down, what what are all those consciousnesses up to? What is the social network doing and why? Okay, so the idea is the social network. What's what's the one idea? So So the one idea is the girdle is incompleteness theorem, right? So if consciousness is all there is, conscious agents are all there is. Yep. Then mathematical structure is only about consciousness and conscious agents because that's all there is. And that means girdle telling us that there's endless exploration of mathematical structure means there's endless exploration of the possible kinds and varieties of consciousness and conscious agents. And what consciousness is up to is is what I call the kid in the candy store theory. Girdle tells us there's an infinite candy store of exploration of possible conscious structures. And the candy is all the variations of conscious exper consciousness and conscious experiences. That's right. And that's I'm not saying it's right, but at least it's deep enough that it could be, you know, it's on the table. Okay. So, here's the good news. I I am the guy that's uh dumb enough to like need everything explained and hopefully that will be useful to the audience. Uh, okay. So, I've got this infinite candy store of consciousness. The thing I cannot get past is there's some there is utility in creating the headset. Otherwise, why the [ __ ] would it exist? So, if there is utility in the creation of the headset, first of all, I get it probably begs questions that you you don't know and it's beyond the the scope and you've already asked me to just accept that the miracle is consciousness and you're not going to tell me anything beyond that because nobody has a theory of everything. Respect. Get that. Uh but I want to poke in the spirit of fun partly and then just to see like where the sort of edge cases are. All right. So we don't know if conscious entities need to eat. And the reason that I asked that question was because all of this starts with you looking at fitness and so if there is fitness into taking multiple bites of the apple therefore logic is going to be born out of that so that I know to keep eating the apple. Um but then it begs a question of well what am I underneath the visor underneath the headset just just to keep our nomenclature consistent. What am I beneath the headset? And why does it matter that I have a representation that that is based in the idea of fitness of eating an apple? Right? So that's where I'm like what what is that a representation of? Why does this representation need to exist? like I'm sure you've daydreamed about this even those are the fun questions right that's that's what we're really interested is answering those questions and so we're going at it in two different directions one is you know sitting back in our armchairs and trying to think like girdle's incompleteness theorem and so forth and saying could this be and can I repeat what girdle's incompleteness theorem is it's the one part of this I'm nodding and smiling but I'm like the [ __ ] is he talking about uh so it goes something like this and you will tell me where I'm wrong. So, uh, in fact, God, can I even articulate what I think? I'm I'm going to fumble through this. Okay, I I don't even I feel like I understand a middle piece of it. I don't know where it begins or where it ends, but that we have some sort of mathematical equation that says you're never going to find the limit to which you can uh explore one thing. But I don't get why that thing is Girdle's incompleteness serum has nothing to do specifically with consciousness, right? somebody leveraging that to explain why is it then that consciousness is the only thing that you've seen put on the table that uh ties into that. Oh well so okay the reason I went after consciousness was I' I've been trying to solve what's called the hard problem of consciousness. How is consciousness related to brain activity? Yes. And so people have been trying to show how consciousness can be booted up from brain activity and we've utterly failed to do that. or how the illusion of consciousness could be booted up from brain activity. And there are no mathemat absolutely no mathematically precise theories after decades of effort that could explain even one specific conscious experience or one specific illusion of conscious experience like the taste of vanilla or why we why this kind of brain activity must be the illusion of the taste of vanilla. Why it could not be the illusion of the taste of chocolate. There's nothing on the table. I mean there's no science that can predict even one specific conscious experience or one specific illusion of conscious experience. And so the reason I went after consciousness being fundamental the reason I went after that that's different from girdles incompleteness there was that I didn't want to be a dualist right so when as scientists we try to create a theory based on as few assumptions as possible and we only want one kind of assumption we don't want to have like I want this physical stuff and I want this consciousness stuff you you you have to choose pick either physical stuff that's unconscious or pick consciousness stuff that's not physical, but don't don't do both. If you do both, that's dualism and and that's not is not as clean. Maybe we'll have to, but we don't want to go there. So So maybe dualism will end up being where we have to go. But I'm not going to start there. I'm going to start with physicalism doesn't seem to be working out. It seems to be principled. Physicalism is that you can stack enough neurons together that they suddenly become conscious. That's right. And space and time are fundamental. And that's where this what evolution is basically saying. Physicalism is false. That's why I went after evolution. Natural selection says the language of space and time is not the language of objective reality. That means physicalism as we currently conceive of it is false. We can't boot up consciousness from neural activity because neural activity is just a data structure in your headset. Neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. They couldn't possibly create consciousness. They're not even there. Consciousness, I'm proposing, creates neurons when we look inside skulls. But neurons could not possibly create consciousness. And I was forced to that by looking at natural selection. So I'm proposing that if I believe that I really do have headaches and I really do taste chocolate and I really do have conscious experience. And again, I could be wrong about that. It could be an illusion. And just to be clear, in fact, we never finish this because I'm still I'm just paralyzed by Girdle's incompleteness theorem. But we're going to move on from that to not browbeat the poor audience. Um, so going back to uh this network of conscious agents you're saying and and this gets into the part about the brain I wanted to talk about. So split brain patients can have an experience of being literally two separate people. So you go in, you cut the corpus colossum. So everybody to your point for a minute I'm going to assume that the brain actually exists. Sure. Uh so you go in, you cut the corpus colossum which allows for communication between the two hemispheres of the brain and suddenly you realize that two personalities will emerge within the same head. Um do they they don't both have internal dialogue do they? They have different likes and dislikes. But do they have an internal because one side handles language. So they both do have they both have language. Actually the right hemisphere is very adept at language. Fascinating. So they both have language. One could be an atheist, the other devout, which is so crazy. And that's a real example right from the literature. There was my friend VS Ramondrin has a video online. You can even Google that and say, you know, split brain patient Ramicondrin. This patient has, you know, believe atheist and a believer. And one, you know, I think in his case, the right hemisphere didn't believe and the left hemisphere was a believer. It's crazy. I've never seen the video, but that's Oh, it's great. One case, the right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver. The left hemisphere wants to be a draftsman. They have just completely different personalities. They can play 20 questions with each other. You can give a word to the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere will will sometimes fail in 20 questions. They can't figure out what's in the right hemisphere's head. Whoa. So there so there are separate contents of consciousness. So separate that you can lose at the game of 20 questions with your other hemisphere. That's insane. Right. So you're that would be a very sort of simplistic example of two different conscious agents that have come together. That's right. That's and that's the idea. So you are one conscious agent. I Well, the way that I perceive myself is as one conscious agent, but aren't secretly I just a whole bunch of conscious agents. Well, that's that's that's the thing. You are it's both are true. So you are one conscious agent, but you're also two. And you're also probably a huge lattice of interacting conscious agents. You know the microbiome. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Okay. So in your gut, you have like trillions of bacteria. It's crazy. You have more foreign cells in your body than you have your own cells. Uh would they be conscious agents? Nothing in spacetime, strictly speaking, is a conscious agent. Do they not represent something? That's another thing I've resisted asking you this question because I think I know how you will answer it. The very like no one knew the microbiome existed, right? So if this is all in my headset, how is something so detailed that once somebody looks it's like oh my god it's proliferating? It there's all this stuff. How can we discover something new if it's literally just made up? Like the first time that somebody cracked open a skull, why did everyone look at it and see the same brain? The first time we looked into the microbiome, why do we all see the same thing? Shouldn't a novel thing that evolution did not prepare us to see and understand, like how do we all see the same thing? Now, I think I actually know how you're going to answer it, right? Because once you have a good visualization tool, it depends on where you take it. So, I could take my visualization tool for the Twitterverse, right? And I can zoom in on Irvine to look very, very close. And I can zoom back and look at the whole United States and see what that looks like. So, a good visualization tool for a social network lets you zoom in and out. Doesn't that assume that everything Oh, god. Let's see if I can articulate this. Doesn't that assume that tweets are a substrate that is universal? So, that uh the the first image that came to mind was why the hell the first time somebody got their head bashed open did everyone see brain the same way? And I thought, okay, well, he's going to say that the reason they did is because you have a faximile in the headset for um tissue that's made from atoms. And so like that that visual structure, it doesn't care like what it is. It's photo receptors taking in. I see this much uh light on this receptor, this on that, all that. So it's like, hey, I have a system for dealing with visuals and therefore when photons bounce off of this thing, it's going to construct something. And I understand things about 3D and mushiness and texture and all that. And so my brain is programmed for that. So no matter what you put in front of it, it's it's going to see that. I assume that is correct roughly. But this is the it's more like if you are trying to look at the Twitter verse and you have a you if you design a really good tool and it let you zoom in what's happening just in your block versus in your city versus in your county versus in your state versus your country versus the whole world versus Europe and so forth. If the tool is really good, it's going to let you you will see different kinds of structures as you move in. Maybe it's very very all the same in my block where you know we all have similar ideas and we do the same thing or in my my county but it'll be very different and so so the reason we see right when you look inside of a brain you are not just and you see all these neurons and so forth you're not just one agent you're two you're a whole lattice of conscious agents what we're doing is using our visualization tool to look at the whole list of conscious agents that are together forming you. So we're using that visualization tool to look in finer and finer detail at agents that perhaps are having smaller and smaller sets of conscious conscious experience, but we don't really know that it's a onetoone relationship between a cell or whatever and what else? Yeah, it's going to be many to one. That's right. So for example, I mean I see someone I call Tom in front of me, but that's I see one Tom, but I my theory is proposing that that there are countless conscious agents that I'm interacting with. There's one highest level conscious agent, but immediately below it there are two that I associate with what I call the left and right hemisphere. And then below each of those, there's countless more. And there's more than one personality in Tom. The right and left hemisphere agents probably have very very different personalities. It seems to be a general trend. They're they're very very different. And who knows what goes among all those agents all the way down. So my visualization tool, of course, all I see right now is skin, hair, and eyes. That is pretty simple compared to what I'm claiming you are. Really good-looking skin, very good. And it's a really complicated and intelligent the network of conscious agents, but I see just very very little. But when I look in when someone looks inside and sees a brain, the 86 billion neurons they're seeing there is my visualization tool telling me there is a lot of conscious agents in a really complex social network going on here. That's what I'm seeing as 86 billion neurons. Then when we get down to chemistry which is you know explode that's even more more complicated now you know saying well my interface is starting to give up because you're not seeing much about consciousness with with neurons you might be getting some notion of networking and exchanging information maybe at the you know biochemistry you're not seeing that quite as well when you get down to you know quarks and gluons you may be giving up but there's tons and tons of quirks and gluons and that's my interface telling me look I can I'm showing showing you a lot about Tom. I'm not showing you too much about his two hemispheres, you know, the two agents. I'm showing you very very little, but you know, I'll show it to you what you call, you know, 86 billion neurons. And then and eventually my interface is going to have to just give up because I mean, the whole point of the interface is the network of conscious agents is too complicated for you to gro. You can't gro it. So we I'll give it to you one agent at a time. Here's Tom. Not even Tom's left and right hemisphere, just Tom. And then all the agents if you want to you know you can get out you know if Tom will let you he we can go in there and look in his brain and we can Tom will not let you. Yeah I don't think he will. That's right. I wouldn't. That's right. So that's why the tool is showing us more complexity all the way down. It's it's a vast social network and each agent isn't just a standalone. We're we're a combination of many many other agents. That's going to be one part of the theory that's really interesting is mathematically precisely looking at all the ways that agents can combine. But agents do combine. Uh we'll be going to some new mathematics I think something called um infinite categories and topo where infinite categories what infinite category theory and it's called infinity categories and also to theory. Some tollo to oi. Right. What the hell is that? It's some fairly abstract mathematics that allows you to economically start to describe countless other ways of interaction. And so what I want to I mean I have a few ways that my current mathematical model which just uses things called marovian kernels and measurable spaces obviously plotting for what I mean most most mathematicians would would say it's it's fairly plotting but but it's it's it's it's it works and it's it's real math. we can start with that and then go to these, you know, category theories and so forth to actually get the full richness of all the kinds of ways that they could could connect and interact. And so I I want to go after that. Um, but the the one question you asked earlier was why does it look like we have to eat and do the conscious agents themselves have to eat and what are they up to and how can we know? And here's here's my answer to that. First, I don't know the answer. So, so here's how I'm going to go after it. First, I I am thinking like girdle is incomplete and certain. We can come back to it. That might be a deep motivation for the whole dynamics. But suppose I'm that's wrong and I realize it's wrong and I realize I'm just not smart enough and my team is just not smart enough to figure out what conscious agents are up to and why they're doing it and so forth. What the Here's what we're going to have to do. We're going to have to propose a mathematical projection from the dynamics of conscious agents into space and time and propose how that dynamics gets represented in terms of for example quarks and gluons interacting. Right now I'm studying scattering amplitudes at the large collider. I want to show how I can predict scattering amplitudes when two gluons hit four gluons go spraying out from the dynamics of consciousness. The the reason for doing that is that if I'm not well a couple reasons, but one is if I'm not smart enough to figure out what consciousness is about, what I'll then do is say, "Here's a mapping in that gives me back spaceime." Now, now that I know what what's happening in spaceime, I'm going to pull it backwards and say, "What does that tell me about the dynamics of consciousness?" And I'll go, "Oh, I never thought about that." So, so conscious agents have to be interacting this way for it to look like this in my headset. So if I'm too stupid to figure it out and it's very very likely I will have to take my theory of conscious agents projected into my headset and say what would it look like? Oh I'm getting the wrong answer. Okay so I need to change my dynamics of consciousness this way so it really looks like the scattering amplitudes of quarks and gluons in the large hadron glider. And when I get that match then I go okay this is at least one dynamics of consciousness that gives me the right answer in my headset. Now, what is it telling me about what consciousness is up to? So if I'm not if we're not smart enough to do it from first principles and I want to do it from first principles but if I can't I'll try to reverse engineer relativity theory evolution by natural selection quantum mechanics reverse engineer all of those pull them back to the realm of conscious agents look what they're saying about the social dynamics and then try to get a clue about what that's about and answer questions like am I forced to think that they need to eat or is there some deeper principle is is it for example that I can only send an experience to another agent if an agent sends an experience to me. Is there is there that kind of dynamics that and and is it going to be like um the small world networks we see for example in the internet where you get big hubs like Google and Apple which get lots of hits and then tiny little guys like Kaufman who gets almost no hits and then a few in between but but but you get this and and there's in some sense the number of social connections you have is some sense your notion of fitness is the creators of Google are billionaires. Hoffman's not a billionaire. There's a correlation between the number of hits that Google had gets, the number of hits Hoffman gets and the difference in richness. Now, is that a deep property of these conscious agent networks or not? See, these are the and this is what is fun about science. I don't know the answer. Evolution by natural selection has told me it's not in space and time. It's saying it's not. This is all a headset. You're gonna have to think as a scientist out of the headset, but I I can't tell you what's outside the headset. So, we have to be very imaginative and we have to choose what we're going to go after because of course we're probably going to be wrong. So, you need to choose what you think is going to be interesting. I'm going after consciousness because I'm trying to solve this hard problem of how is consciousness related to our brain activity. And I'm the mathematics is forcing me to see this vast social network. If I bring it to consciousness, there's this whole network, but I don't know what it's about. All the science that we've ever done, all the science that's ever been done so far has only been in our headset. Quantum field theory assumes spacetime. The fields are defined over spacetime. Relativity is spacetime and evolution by natural selection has been about what evolves in spaceime. All of our science, which is very, very good science, has been in our headset. We've never really stepped out of our headset, but science has the tools. There is some initial work. There's a guy named Nema Arani Hamemed at Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, who I think is taking some really important steps beyond the headset because he's he's already realized spaceime is doomed. And so he is already being very adventurous and stepping outside of spaceime looking for mathematical structures in which space and time and quantum mechanics do not appear. All right, I'm there's something I find super interesting in this whole concept of spacetime is doomed. Right? If we abandon spaceime, it begs a question about causality. So, right now, I cannot believe this is true, but this is true. On Monday, I have two memorials to go to. Young people, crazy. I'm literally heartbroken. And the fact that they both have memorials on the same day is too weird to even contemplate. So, that got me thinking about the very nature of death. But if time doesn't exist, is there like so causality requires time? It requires you to be moving through time for something to happen first that then creates another knock on effect, another knock on effect, so on and so forth. But if time doesn't exist, and I mean admittedly, we don't know what it's being replaced with, but theoretically we know that it isn't going to be like we perceive it now. So if time doesn't exist then like where is that notion of entering the the time stream of breaking out of seeing this as a a linear equation and obviously tying it to death being I would love to think that there's some way to once again interact with these people if I can just take the headset off. Um do you have any intuitions or is there any math around like if it if it isn't for let me just ask one question. Is cause and effect real outside of the headset? I think inside the head inside the headset, no. So, we have a useful fiction inside the headset. You don't think there's cause and effect? Right. Well, we have the appearance of cause and effect, right? So, if I hit the the Q ball Mhm. and it hits the eightball into the corner pocket, it looks like the Q ball caused the eightball to the corner pocket. Yes. And that all works, but it's a fiction of causality. In the old video game of Pong, you have these little paddles and this ball and you hit and it looks like the paddle is causing the ball and and the fiction of causality is good enough that you can play a game. You can actually figure out how to put maybe a little spin on it and so forth. Or in you know more more advanced games like you know virtual reality or games or you know like Grand Theft Auto, you have a nice fiction of causality. I turn the wheel to the left, my car goes to the left, turn the wheel to the right, but it's all a fiction. The wheel has no causal powers. The gas pedal has no causal powers, but it's a useful fiction. Evolution gave us a usefulction. I don't know that that's true. So, think about a system was created. Let's let's take the analogy of Grand Theft Auto. So, a system is created such that it awaits input from your your control pad, whatever that control pad may be. Now, admittedly, my control pad, I press it, an electrical signal is sent to something that you turns on or off or opens or closes or whatever, and then a whole cascade of things happens. But it it is I mean you could even trace back the causality to I ate something that gave me the ability to create ATP which gave me the ability to generate electricity which gave me the ability to fire a muscle which gave me the ability to press a button which triggered this electrical chain reaction that caused something to happen on the screen. But it it there is a chain of causality in the headset. There is a chain of causality in the headset. like even even though it is the perception is that you know I'm uh turning and the act of actually just moving that thing makes it turn. So I get that that isn't happening but it does create this chain reaction that can be in the headset understood. Right. And so there I disagree. So if you look for example in a a VR version of it where you see your virtual hands holding a virtual steering wheel Yep. There's no feedback from the screen to the computer. Uh there's no feedback from the screen to the computer, but there is feedback like if you think about VR. So, but so there is a there is a real cause and effect, but it's not what we see in the headset. It in the headset it looks like the wheel that I'm seeing in the headset in the VR headset is what's causing the car. Yes. But I am typically in VR I would be mapping my real hands either by holding a controller or by having cameras. Absolutely. So, I'm mapping my hands. My hands do a movement and this program is programmed to wait for the input from the movement of my hands to then trigger that sequence that I just listed before. So, there is a cause and effect. Yep. But but notice it's not from the things that you're literally seeing in the headset. I agree with that. But I'm saying but there there still is a chain of cause and effect. Because when you say that it is an illusion of the eightball hitting the thing, it's like that doesn't seem true within the construct of the headset. I'm saying right. Right. Well, so so maybe another example might help on this. So when you like drag your icon, you you've written a email and it's the icon is blue in the middle of your screen, you drag it to the trash can. Yep. You you are using say a mouse or a touchpad and and in so in this analogy that would be like the real cause and effect. But if you said, "But it's really the motion of the icon on the screen to the trash can that's causing the file to be deleted." That's just an illusion of causality, right? The there's no feedback from the pixels of the screen into the computer. And that's what I mean. Everything inside space and time is like seeing the icons on your desktop. Things move around on your desktop, but it's due to something like your, you know, joystick or something else. But the headset, since the headset is all of space and time, what that means is that I'm saying that everything inside spaceime is part of that fictional causality. I now get what you're saying. So in the in the headset, that perception is illusion. And I was dragging us sort of back and forth between But it's good. I mean, that's very very good. Now take me outside. Does cause and effect exist if time doesn't exist? So So two answers and I'll get to the death question. Um I think in the realm of conscious agents there is a notion of cause and effect but it it boils down to a notion of free will. That seems to be one of the key notions of cause in in in this in quantum mechanics. By the way I should point out that they when you do quantum computations normally in normal computations there's a causal order. If you do this multiply and then an add that order is important. If you do the add and then the multiply you get a different answer right the order the causal order but it turns out in quantum mechanics you can do a you can get rid of causal order when you do your computation you can have a superposition of you know multiply followed by add with add followed by multiply both orders so you have a superposition of the causal order and it's a theorem that in general you'll be faster you'll be more efficient if you let go of causality in spacetime and it turns out that's actually been done. When you build these things and let go of causality and spacetime, you tap you tap into a greater efficiency. So when you let go of spacetime, you're also letting go when what when spaceime is doomed means also that everything that we believed to be causality in spacetime was just a very useful fiction in our headset. Just like the fictions in various VR games that we play, it's a useful fiction. Lets us play the game. um there is an underlying causal order and we're arbitrarily ignorant about what that causal order is. Now, about death, I don't know. But here's an here's an interesting idea. Suppose you go to a VR arcade with some friends to play virtual volleyball and you put on your headset and bodysuit and you're on a, you know, a like a beach volleyball scene, palm trees and sand and the net and you're playing VR volleyball for a while and then one of your friends, you know, says, "I'm thirsty. I need a drink." He takes off his headset and body 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 Gauge problem. Okay. So, once So, Phineas gauge, for those that don't know, it was a railroad worker. One of the most famous examples in neuroscience. He's hitting a tamping rod. It's like a three-foot 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 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, right? So I will say that's that is the so using this notion of the headset or the envel. It's like once you alter the way that his brain works and I'm fully willing to accept that this is a problem only inside of the headset. But once you alter that function within the headset he's fundamentally different. Now, if the headset is is what I'll call the unvelt, it's our interpretation of the stimuli. Once he goes takes the headset off, the inter now we're into transistors, diodes, electrical, gravity, or oh god, I may have tripped up with gravity, but everything shy of that one. Um, now you have he the experience of that person would be fundamentally different. I would be fundamentally different because I'm no longer experiencing things through the lens of my brain essentially, right? So while I it would seem to me that there's no way around the fact that in the game homie is dead and so or lifeless to use your example. So since that's the only thing the I want to relate to that person through my headset, right? That's what I'm used to. That's where the emotion lies. And then now once I step outside even emotion would be called into question almost certainly in fact definitively in your explanation the way that I process emotions it would just be unrecognizable outside because I no longer have the brain I no longer have all of those things. Interesting. You said quite possibly. Right. So there is a possibility to you that outside the headset it's close to what we experience inside. Right. See so for me um it's going to be a matter of following the math on this. So the theory of conscious agents itself doesn't require an agent to have a self. So meaning it can shatter into a bunch of little pieces. Well, that that a self is something that a network of conscious agents has to construct. Mhm. So are we the Borg? It would be like an interface representation. Okay. So my what I call myself is on this kind of view no less a construction than space and time and so it's not clear to me how much of that construction will survive death will meaning taking off the headset taking off two possibly very different things. Well, it looks for for people who still had the headset on, it would be indicated. It looks to them like death, but for the person who's actually having the headset taken off, maybe it looks like what some people describe with psychedelic experiences or near-death experiences and and so forth or or you know, like really extreme five DMT MODMT experiences and so forth. Like the these are things I want to explore. So at this point I I'll have to say you know not only you know I'm likely to be wrong I'm still trying to figure out what the ideas are that I would want to put on the table that are wrong. So but the theory of consciousness that I have right now doesn't require conscious agents to have a self to have memories to have the ability to learn or anything like that. So networks of conscious agents construct selves, they construct memories, they construct emo, you know, patterns of logics of emotions and so forth. It's going to be very interesting to to ask the question about how much when you know I my parents died recently, right? So, you know, it's very very it's very very difficult, right? You and so we all would like to think that there is some way to have contact with a person anyway. If you're a physicist, of course, that's out of the question, right? If your consciousness is nothing above and beyond brain activity, then when brain activity ceases, there's no consciousness. End of story. It's very, very clear. In the theory of conscious agents, it's quite possible that that yourself dissolves. But the conscious agents, it seems to me, will still be conscious agents. they've just maybe dissolved a particular data structure that they created a space-time data structure with a particular personality and memories and so forth. So basically you're saying uh if I can just put different words around that to make sure that I understand the the conscious agents coming together to form a person are a data structure that well they form the person as a data structure. So everything that I believe about me is very different than what I believed when I was five. Mhm. and and I didn't believe anything when I was maybe one. And so I've over the years, the decades of my life, I've put together this story of I'm myself. This is sort of an idea that some of my physicalist colleagues have said like Dan Dennett, a self is a story that we weave. It's a narrative that that we give. Maybe there's something to that. Whereas where I wouldn't go with Dan on, you know, and he's a wonderful guy. He's he's brilliant, but you know, we we are it's okay to disagree, right? He would say that, you know, there's nothing but the brain activity and the narratives that it creates. And I'm saying, well, I like the idea of the narratives, but but the consciousness is the fundamental reality. I have to let go of physicalism because of evolution of natural selection. And so maybe consciousnesses won't keep the narratives. Maybe they will. I have some of my colleagues who are working with me who think um you know that we will keep the narratives that we will keep that sense of self. But my colleague who thinks that doesn't have any mathematics to support it. And so for for me on the one hand of course I'm really open to all the different ideas but as a scientist if I can't put it precisely in math I don't know what I'm talking about yet. I mean you and that's what you find is unless you can make it absolutely pre precise most of the time we think we know what we're talking about and when we make it precise we realize oh okay no I was maybe in the neighborhood but I didn't really know what I was talking about. That's what mathematics really comes back and teaches you. And that's the thing about a really good scientific theory. Once you write it down, you become a student of your theory. Like so Einstein when he wrote down the equation of general relativity. He had the big idea falling in an elevator you would feel weightless. Big big idea. If it was free falling elevator and he took him eight years to take that idea and what he called the equivalence principle and turned it into the equation of general relativity. He wrote it down. Took him eight years. hard hard work to take your intuition and go oh no my intuition what is what do I really mean by that took him eight years and he was Einstein right right for the rest of us I mean if Einstein's ideas aren't that quite precise it take him eight years to get it so precise that he knows exactly what he meant that's what that's what I'm talking about so he writes down the equation a year later a guy named Schwarzild who's in the front lines in World War I is solving Einstein's equation on the front lines and he solves equations and he discovers black holes and he writes back to Einstein and says your theory says there are black holes. Einstein didn't know that. He didn't believe it. He spent decades dis disbelieving it. His equations were right. Einstein was wrong. The equations become smarter than the genius who wrote them down. And that's another reason why we do these mathematical models of science. We take our intuitions. It might take us a decade to take our intuitions and actually figure out what we really were thinking and get them so precise that we say, "Oh, that's the only logically consistent way of stating what I thought I was trying to think." And once you've put it down there, then all of a sudden you become a student. That thing that you've written down is going to teach you. And that's what I have with this theory of conscious agents. When I wrote it down, I had no idea about a number of things. I didn't know that agents could combine it. It was a friend of mine who pointed that out to me. Said agents can combine. And also that that a weird thing that it predicts is that 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? Well, it's it's really quite interesting. you can experience like if if 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 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 conscious agents. How does all of this play out in your real life? And I' 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. It's 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 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 do it when you're young enough, it just is obvious that that Yeah, I'm just seeing a VR headset, too. By the way, here's one way to think about it. If you close your eyes, you just see sort of gray, right? Modeled gray in front of you. So it looks it doesn't look like nothing. It looks like modeled gray. But what is it like backwards back through your head when you close your eyes? Well, it's not modeled 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. Sort of modeled gray. What is it like behind me? Absolutely nothing. That's the headset. You only have a headset of spaceime in front. There is no headset behind. Now you have a not a visual headset. Now you have this set. I can put my hands back there and do stuff. So So I have this but it's all a creation. It's all so I do get glimpses of that once in a while but there were no put on the natural selection language. Right. So I have to pick the language of the science that I want to use you know because 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 spaceime as the truth. And so we do. Pay tells us you know when we begin to take objects as real as 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 PJ 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 just doesn't exist. It doesn't exist, KJ said. And then but at 18 months now, they go and crawl around and try to get the object, 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. I took it for the reality. It was only because I couldn't solve certain problems like the problem of consciousness. And it was only because when I looked at evolution, it began to tell me spaceime is not the reality. It cannot be. It's the wrong language. It must be only like a headset that I was going holy. I mean, I still remember the first time I realized this must be just a headset. I had to sit down. It was such I mean, I was a grown adult. I was like I I was around 30 years old or something like that. The first time I realized this, it was such a shock. I had to sit down. Everything that I believed all of a sudden disappeared. But of course, the next moment I was again visually believing I'm in reality. I'm seeing the truth. So the programming is there, but ever since that that moment when the ma it was the math that that did it to me. So who do you think created math? Very interesting question. my own thinking in terms of this idea that consciousness is fundamental and conscious agents are fundamental when we actually study consciousness and there's been a scientific study of consciousness since 1860 it's called the field of psychopysics there's a guy named Gustaf Fner who started the whole field and a lot of my research has been in psychophysics where we literally get mathematical models of conscious experiences and we test people very very carefully in the We find that mathematical exper that conscious experiences are mathematically structured. My experience of this water bottle the mathematics is unbelievable. There are you can write down differential geometry you reflectance functions. I mean the mathematics is incredible. It's true of all of our conscious experience of everywhere we look. Conscious experience we it seems so squishy goes through your fingers. How can you? There's mathematics. So the way I think about math and experience is that mathematics is like the bones of the living conscious experience. They're not they can't be divorced from each other. There's more to experience than just math, but there's not less than math. There's math and more. And so that mathematics and conscious experiences have a deep intimate relationship that I'm still trying to understand. But but but the empirical evidence is quite strong. I mean all the psychophysics that people have done, we just find mathematical structure everywhere. And that's why I came back to this girdle's incompleteness theorem where where where that theorem is just saying no matter how many mathematical structures you discover, you haven't started. There will be endless more structure come from. Girdle figured out how to do this. So it came from and can I let me maybe now I'm understanding it. So we once thought the atom was the smallest structure and then we discovered there's something below that and something below that and something below that. Are you saying outside of the headset there's just no end to the something below that? That's right. Interesting. That's right. that and and this is what Girdle's result is that there is no end to the mathematical structure. So is the incompleteness theorem that you will never be able to complete it. You'll never be able to get to sort of ba oh god I'm going to put words in your mouth base reality. I don't know another way to say it. That's right. That's right. That that's what that girdle theorem seems to be telling us is that no matter how complicated the mathematics is that you know effectively you haven't even begun yet. When you say theorem, I assume that means that this is a math equation that Girdle put forward and not it's not Girdle's theory. It's Girdle's theorem. It's a theorem. In other words, it's true that we can't ever know all mathematical truths. Interesting. I don't understand math well enough to even know what to ask beyond that. So, to me, we're my my ignorance makes this a miracle. I'm willing to accept it just to not be abusive to I'll just give you a clue about the kind of thing that he does right in the math in the math it's there are these things called self-referential statements that cause problems so if I say um this statement is false now was that statement true or false let's let's look if the state the statement is this statement is false well if it's false then it's true true right but but what then If it's true, then it's false. That's right. So, you get these when you have self-reference, you get these problems that that pop up. You know, the So, the the barber of Seville cuts all and only the hair of those who don't cut their own hair. Who cuts the hair of the barber of Seville? Right? All these kinds of things. So, Girdle was able to take this kind of thing and and and make mathematical statements self-referential. And he was able to create a sentence that said that that a statement in mathematics that says this sentence is true within the system but can't be proved. So he was able to construct that that's what so he actually has a theorem. He proves and and then he shows that no matter so if even if you add that sentence in there'll be a new sentence that's self-referential that and so what he shows by by this this kind of structure of course um the the the true theorem and the true proof is is incredible there's girdle numbers it's you have to be not just a mathematician you have to be a brilliant mathematician a logician to even understand it so so it's it's very very few people who actually understand but every time you quote unquote solve it it's self-referential again that's right it's the self- reference that's the key so just so there's not in complete magic. I want to let you know that based on this notion of a self-reerential statement, but but the bottom line is it shows that there's an endless in principle endless possibility of exploration of mathematical structure and and since I just mentioned so just to like almost give it a silly answer, it's the the mathematical equation is what's below math and the answer is math. It's structure all the way down forever forever forever. But if consciousness is fundamental, that means that there's endless conscious structure. Endless consciousness. I feel like that's just something that says we don't [ __ ] understand. Like that to me, quite frankly, is as sort of I just have to accept it as turtles all the way down. Saying math all the way down or consciousness all the way down is the same as saying turtles all the way down. There's literally no difference in my limited mind. Right? So, this is where we're going to have to come with every scientific theory, right? Every scientific theory will have some set of miracles and that's that bothers me as much as it bothers you. Yeah, I don't like it. But I So when I bump up against that, I take a pretty and I don't maybe this is stupid. Enlighten me, but here's here's where I come up. So I will routinely be asked if I believe in God. And the answer is no. I don't believe in God in any of the ways that people mean when they say God. But there is so obviously something that I don't understand that it is just self-evident to me you would use the language and maybe rightly so that it this is a headset and so you have an intuitive sense that there is something beyond the headset and you have no idea what it is and therefore you just say there is something I don't understand. Right? So um even here's the thing that used to [ __ ] with me as a little kid. The universe is expanding. Expanding into what? When you build a house you build it on land. Right? So the land is there. The land is on the planet. So, it's like there's this sense of um to for it to expand, it has to expand into something. Therefore, something had to exist. It was very easy for me to just go, "Yep, there's something here I don't understand." The fact that um general relativity and quantum mechanics don't play well together. Yep, there's something I don't understand. Like, I am I am very okay with just going, "Ah, there's something I don't understand." It's it's the the part that gets hard for me is the it's math all the way down where it's it's no longer an acknowledgment of this is something we just don't understand and it's saying and now believe that it's math all the way down and I don't know that it really matters to be honest but that that's where I always bump and go well yeah there are two big camps on this one is that we invent math and the other is we discover it right so when a new theorem is published, did the person discover it or did they invent it? Right? That's that's one of the big questions. If if isn't it self-evident that it has to be discovered? Well, but if if it is discovered, then Girdle Girdle's incompleteness theorem says it is math all the way down, right? So that's that's that's that's the thing. But if if it's discovered, I'm sorry, if if it's invented, then that points at us and says who who is this discoverer? Who is this inventor that's doing all this? So being so and it's really important for everybody to understand that that every scientific theory as we said earlier stops explanation stops. There's going to be some place where we say grant me this please and if you grant me this then I will explain everything else like Einstein says grant me space and time if you grant me space and time I will write down these mathematics and then it turns out there's black holes and they're all interesting stuff we can do GPS because of Einstein's theory of special relat general relativity it it gives you all this but we are granting space and time now someone else like there's a guy named Seth Ly who says okay I'm not going to grant you spaceime I'll start with quantum bits and quantum gates outside of space and time. It's just abstract quantum computational stuff. And I can show you how to boot up spacetime, general relativity from quantum bits and quantum gates. The curvature of general relativistic spacetime has to do with the action of the gates and so forth. So he's no longer assuming spaceime. He's explaining it, but now he's asking for a different miracle. Please grant grant me quantum bits and quantum gates. Now you can imagine someone going, "Well, now I'm going to do better than Seth Lloyd. I'm gonna explain I'm gonna do something deeper than quantum bits and quantum case. That's perhaps what what Eninar Aani Jimeda is doing at at you know Princeton. So maybe he'll get quantum mechanics emerging from something deeper. But he will then say grant me what he's asking for is the amplitude and some other structures like that. So if you grant me this amplitude I can give you space time and quantum mechanics and and so forth. So, so that's the nature of explanation and I don't I'm still having to come to terms with that. I would like to have a theory of everything and I can only have a theory of everything except these assumptions for my theory. And those assumptions are my miracles. And so at the foundation of every scientific theory, there's this moment of humility. Explanation stops here. It also stops one other remarkable place. Whenever in our theory we have a probability that can't be reduced by greater knowledge. Right? So in a Newtonian world if I flip a coin in principle if I knew in detail the mass of the coin and its distribution and exactly how I flipped it I could tell you heads or tails with probability one. But I don't know the initial conditions well enough. And so I have to give you a probability of a half. That's a subjective probability, epistemic probability. But suppose no matter there's a probability that no matter how much I know the probability can't completely go away, then that's no longer epistemic. There's something more interesting going on. This was the debate between Boore and Einstein about quantum mechanics. There are probabilities that come up there. Einstein was saying those probabilities are just our lack of knowledge. There's no God doesn't really play dice. There's no fundamental probability going on there. Boris said no no no. You don't tell God what to do. These are not epistemic probabilities. These probabilities cannot be reduced. Period. They're probabilities for everyone including God. Metaphorical God. Uh, one thing I wanted to ask you that came to me when I was reading is the double slit experiment is one of the weirdest thing in physics for me that it really messes with me. So, um, for people not familiar with the double slit experiment, you take a single photon, you shoot it through a slit and if you're not um, measuring it as it happens on the sort of back wall, you would see like a bullet mark, right? So, you fire a single bullet, it goes through the slit and it hits the wall. Um, if you uh sorry, that's if you watch it. If you don't measure it, then it goes through like a wave and you get an interference pattern on the back. You can put another slit and if you're watching it, it goes through one slit. If you're not watching it, then it goes through both slits like a wave. Uh, that always just seems so weird. But if we Well, in fact, I'll I'll ask does your hypothesis about consciousness address the issue of the double slit experiment? Yes. So, so it will come out, I believe, that what those experiments are showing us is that if we assume that everything is happening in space and time and that spaceime is the fundamental reality, then we're going to be confused. What we're seeing is spacetime is just a visualization tool we're using for things that are happening outside of space and time. And so, they're not constrained to travel through space and time. Absolutely not constrained. We're constrained to see them as though they're traveling through space and time. And that's why quantum mechanics looks so weird. But why does um observing or not observing change its state because we're creating reality as we render it. That's what I was wondering if this is the look at the moon not look at the moon. Exactly right. The moon does. In fact, Einstein asked one of his colleagues when they were walking said, "Do you really believe the moon doesn't exist or only exists when someone looks doesn't exist otherwise?" He was talking about quantum mechanics and my interpretation of quantum mechanics is exactly that that that spaceime itself doesn't exist when it's not observed and therefore the particles inside spaceime. I want to hear you talk about the double slit experiment. Doesn't that sort it potentially? Let me ask is that potentially like a a proof of your theory? Well, unfortunately, there are no proofs in science there. You every theory has lots of hypotheses and auxiliary facts and assumptions and so forth. And if if your theory doesn't come out quite right, you don't know what went wrong in it. And also um even if every experiment that you've done is compatible with your theory, maybe you just haven't been smart enough to think of the experiment that will take it down. So So no real serious scientist would say that any scientific theory has been proved. Does it point in the right direction though? It's like you you bring up a lot of examples, but that's not one. Is there a reason? Is there a hole in that one already that you see or cuz to me that that is some compelling [ __ ] like hey you want to wonder or you want to know if the moon exists when you look at it or if it's garbage bin uh I keep forgetting your language garbage collected garbage garbage collected when you look away boom double slit experiment well so the double slit experiment is completely compatible with what I'm saying the reason I don't take it as a proof is because there are some physicalists who have the multiverse or many worlds interpretations of many worlds interpretations So Hugh Everett um for example. So what these guys will say is that um to really understand superposition and all these weird quantum things you have to realize that whenever you make a measurement whole new universes spin off and all possible states that are allowed by the quantum state function, the wave function um are in are true in some some universe. And so many serious physicists believe in in the many worlds interpretation and related but but distinct thing of the multiverse which is a different thing. They they think that there are multiverses and so what what is what is true is that local realism is false. So local realism is the claim that objects in spaceime like say a proton have definite values of their properties like position, momentum and spin definite values um even when they're not observed and there's two parts. That's the first part and that they have influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light. We have very very good evidence to say if if we know anything, we know that local realism is false. But that leaves open whether it's the locality that's false. Things you could imagine things having influences faster than the speed of light. So guy named D balm has a theory in which things have influences faster than the speed of light or whether it's realism that's false that which is what I'm claiming that realism is false that a particle doesn't have a position or momentum or spin when it's not observed because you create it as a headset element when you observe. So that's so I say that we know that local realism is false. I claim that's the realism that's false but there are some who can claim it's the locality. Right. But this is an example of you saying you have to have a theory that can be backwards compatible essentially. That's right. Right. Right. Makes sense. I'm going to ask you a super random question because I'm so curious. You have a wedding ring, so I'm assuming you're married, so I'm assuming you love somebody. Yes. Um that's that's such a headset experience. How often are you sort of in sort of, hey, this really is real and I'm going to treat it as such. And like does your wife think this is all like does she find this decidedly unromantic? Well, my wife is an artist. She's a very talented art artist. Her name is Gerilyn. I call her Jerry. And she's, you know, she's um not a scientist and she appreciates my science and even though she can't really understand any of the math and I appreciate her art even though I'm a monkey looking at Mozart, right? You know, because I'm no artist. And so we have mutual respect for the talents, the complimentary talents, and we sort of compliment each other. And but do you just have to turn that part of your brain off that's like a lot of time with herusion? Well, with her, yes, because um she'll she's happy for me to talk with her about it um up to a point and and then we need to do something different, right? And that's that's healthy for me. But yeah, do you wanna So one thing that I find interesting is people that believe that this is all a simulation and that if we just find the right equation, we could essentially exit the simulation, right? And that's always struck me as um intuitively false that there would be no way to exit the simulation. Again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the person who takes their headset off. They would would just be so fundamentally different the way that you would be processing data. There's no sort of core you. I think like I can't conceptualize it feels to me unless the I mean God is this what you're saying in fact let me ask is this what you're saying that there is this this uh conscious agent that I in the headset I in fact no there is a conscious agent that is me and the way that I present to you right now is me with the headset on but the conscious agent could actually possibly remain intact when it pulls off the headset. you addressed this a little bit earlier um but it's it's now becoming more concrete in my mind right it it seems to me quite possible that conscious agents will continue to exist even when they step out of this so I could take the headset off effectively exit the simulation be like what the [ __ ] is all this around me but still have a sense of emotion and attachment and love and dare I say vision quite possibly in the sense that that this isn't the only headset so maybe by taking this but the headset would essentially be my brain right so I'd be I'd be out of this headset and would I necessarily be putting on another Well, the headset isn't your brain. Remember, the the headset isn't your brain. The brain is just one of the symbols in your headset for what I'm using for all the agents for all the agents that are combining to form you. So, I I imagine that it's possible for an agent to go to a different headset. Could they go to no headset or would they be then existing in a realm of pure math? Well, and that that I don't know. So, in the in the following sense, so so it's it so the part that I think I'm confident about, but again, we'll see agents could get new headsets and a wide variety of them. So, we could really explore and we could and it could be very headset we can shorthand tovel. That's right. A different way of perceiving. I can jump in a bat headset. I can jump in a dolphin headset and maybe let go of space and time and do something different than than space and time. My notion of self may migrate in the process, right? I may keep some of my emotions, maybe not others. Who who who knows? I mean, do you think of taking the headset off is as an event horizon beyond which we just cannot possibly even guess? The the mathematics that I've got says that a conscious agent always can have awareness without experience. There is awareness without experience. That's right. The math is very clear about that. So when I write down the set the space of possible conscious experiences of conscious I have to write down what's called a probability space which is a set of possible conscious experiences with I think of awareness as I exist. Yeah. No I this just awareness without an eye. So this would so and by the way I make no claim to be you know expert in any like mystical spiritual traditions like Buddhism or Hinduism or so forth. But I've I've been told that they do have this notion um and so I'm not speaking as an expert, but I've heard that they have this notion of awareness without content and that certain meditators claim to to to be there. And you know, I I meditate a little bit and I might get little glimpses of of a notion of awareness without self without any particular content. That's the closest I can get conceptually to thinking about a conscious agent without a headset. It's a a field of pure awareness. But it it transcends then any emotion, any notion of self, any specific conscious experience. But you've never done psychedelics because the number one punchline that people say is, "Yo, you have no sense of self." Like you dissolve into oneness, right? Yeah. No, I I I Why don't you I haven't um I may at some point um you know where it's legal and so forth so far. Well, what's stopped me so far is well I'll put it this way. I've been reading the experiences of people. So I'm benefiting from their experiences. I talk with with people extensively actually some very very extensively about their experiences and so I've I've studied them. Um there is a price to pay. I um but only in the headset. But only in the headset. Well Well, and while I'm in the headset, see, I really I'm so eager to pursue these ideas. I think I've gotten I know people say, "Well, you if you don't do it for yourself, you can't know what it's really like to be without a self." Well, but I can look at the math and the math actually says, "Yeah, I'm seeing that in my math." So, I've gotten the insight that I need there. Did you listen? Maybe I will do at some point, you know. Did you listen to Sam Harris's podcast about taking five grams of psilocybin? I think I haven't heard him do that. Dude, it's very interesting because I know you know Sam. Um, you must listen to that podcast. It is [ __ ] fascinating. And he was talking about the fact that um, and I haven't done it either, by the way. Uh, so and I have a very clear I am a physicalist. Is that what you call? Right. Physical. Uh, so because of that I'm like I am not [ __ ] with my brain. Like I'm super paranoid. I do part of me wants to do it. So if you cut my corpus colossum, one hemisphere wants to do psychedelics really badly and the other side is like get the [ __ ] out of here. We're not doing psychedelics is a very bad idea. Absolutely. So I I'm sort of stuck in this like go no go scenario. Anyway, Sam I agree that's when I said there's a price to pay. That's exactly what I was that's that's the dialogue. I'm super paranoid. So Sam said in in the experience he had a moment where he he forgot that he did drugs. Like he had no sense of oh I have taken a drug to be in the state and I'm simply in the state. I'm going to be in this state forever and this is what life is. And he was like it it is a type of hell where it is just it's uh now I'm putting words in his mouth. The feeling I got and he may have actually said this was that it was like a form of just neverending terror, right? And so you sort of pass through that and he was like there are other moments where it's it's never ending bliss and you're like it's gonna be blissful forever and it was just the thought of where you have no concept I have done something to myself where I have taken a drug and this is a consequence of that and it will ultimately wear off. uh that it's interesting. It is interesting, man. And I get how that can really shape people's perception of what is real and like really shake you loose because as as I read this stuff and for anybody that's made it this far, first of all, congratulations. This [ __ ] is so deep and so heavy. But the more time that I've spent with your ideas, the more I actually I feel like someone is sort of filing off a callous on the bottom of my foot. And it's like, oo, whoa, we're getting to like a different sensation here. I never realized that I had uh a perception in, you know, when you've got the calluses that are like half an inch thick, it's like you just forget that that can actually feel something. So, the more time I've spent with your ideas, the more I'm like, man, there really is something here. And so I the first note I took on you was so arrogant and so aggressive and I was like dude does this guy not realize that he invalidates his own theory by saying like this is about natural selection because I didn't understand your whole thing about math and reason right so but then you like you start spending more time with like [ __ ] I can't just discredit this then you start exploring it like I definitely before I started thinking about your stuff diehard physicalist I will pro regression of the mean right so I'm going to slide back to that unless I really spend time on this because it is such a compelling illusion. But it it does I can feel things pushing me at my back to experiment with psychedelics for reasons like this where I yes I could meditate for the next 40 years and maybe get to the point where I could have one of those experiences of what it means to be aware without a sense of eye. I I literally can't imagine what that is right now. I can imagine blanking out, right? I can't imagine having a sense that there is awareness without um me being inserted somehow into that. That's right. Um so it would be really fascinating to very quickly be ejected out of you know my normal state of consciousness and into this. And part of part of what I promised myself I would do in this interview is to really figure out like why the [ __ ] does this all matter? Like you and that's why I'm like I'm dancing around this idea of like you love your wife. like there there is a realm in which you're like the headset is pretty rad and it's given me amazing [ __ ] and I'm really having a hard time like actually stepping outside of the headset and so so much of my life is predicated on the headset it may not even be possible to retain myself which I value I'm assuming right so I value myself I value this experience I [ __ ] value my wife that's the one that really scares me like I get so much out of my wife like I've imagined my wife and I actually had this conversation one time like, "Hey, a magic genie shows up. What do you wish for?" And she was like, "Please don't wish for super intelligence." And I was like, "Why?" Like, that's such a rad option, right? To be the smartest human that ever existed. She said, "If you did that, you'd no longer be in love with me." And I was like, "Fuck, you're actually right because if you're you wouldn't love any human anymore. Like, I love my dogs, but not like I love my wife because there's such a gap in in how we can relate to each other." Right? So, when I think about like stepping outside of the headset, man, you're giving up everything that you value. And that's like really, really trippy. Now, I admit if you told me, "Hey, Tom, here's like a pill you can take and it's going to give you a little peek outside the headset." I'd be like, "Right, I'd have to do it. I'd have to take a peek. I'd have to see like what it was." Because I don't believe that drugs are necessarily punching through to some truth. I don't find myself like super compelled to do it. But the idea of looking beyond is both exhilarating and terrifying because of that loss of the things that I I am so invested in. Yes. I I'm on the same page with you and and it's you know interaction with my wife is one of the greatest pleasures is you know makes life meaningful and my my daughter and I've got three grandkids and and you know my son-in-law was and you know my students son-in-law made the list. Not bad. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, Jay is a great guy and and in this case I'm interacting with other conscious agents and I'm benefiting. So I'm now going into my theory. This is now it seems impersonal but but I'm going back to the theory within the framework of the theory. There's a dynamics of conscious agents is is as conscious agents interact that they they learn they get new comprehensions and they create new agents. So what we're doing in this headset in terms like we're interacting. There's something new that's we're both growing. We're both learning from this experience. We're we come away from it different. And that seems to be part of it. If this kid in the candy store theory of consciousness is on the right track, then we're experiencing it right now. We're kids in candy stores. We're we're exploring and we're wondering what's on the what's what's on the next shelf of candy. Right? That's what we're saying here when we say, "Well, I'd love to see what if I take five or what h what happens what's going on there." So that may be you know what it's really about is that it's exploration and maybe you know in meditation one thing that does happen is that you get less and less grasping of things that you used to be grasping about. I I I find that I'm able to to let go of things that fears for example, but pictures of myself, it's it's it's really in some sense a dismantling. The the best metaphor I can come up with is I read sometime that when a caterpillar goes through metamorphosis, right, goes into a cocoon, the this the immune cells of the caterpillar try to kill and they do kill the cells that are trying to begin the process of transformation into a butterfly. And for a while the immune cells of the caterpillar there it's a battle and but eventually the immune cells of the caterpillar get overwhelmed and then much of the caterpillar liquefies. Now that can't be fun, right? I mean mean liquefaction. I mean that it all the structures that were everything that you knew as a caterpillar are turning into goo. And no wonder your immune system is fighting that tooth and nail until your immune system gets overwhelmed. But finally the immune system gets overwhelmed. Most of the structure of the caterpillar turns into goo and then the transformation happens. That's what meditation feels like to me. Which means it's it's a double-edged kind of thing. It's it's both extremely painful because everything that I know and have been connected to and addicted to is dissolving. But on the other hand, I'm realizing wait well that wasn't absolutely that essential. I thought it was essential, but it's not. And there's a new kind of structure that's being built that I have no idea. A caterpillar can't figure out what the butterfly is going to be presumably. And so maybe that's what it's like to be starting to change headsets. Maybe that's maybe meditation is a way of letting go of some of the the restrictive trappings of one headset and upgrading, right? And you're getting the 3.0 now. You just had the 2.0, now it's 3.0. I don't know. But but these are the kinds of things I do want to explore within the mathematics. And that's why I'm sort of it it all fits. It doesn't mean it's right, but it all fits. The kid in the candy store, my own kid anticipation of seeing what's next. It it does fit. Maybe that's why I like the kid in the candy store theory. Just that's just me. And you know, for other people, that's that's not what it's about. But I think all of us do wonder 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 spacetime is fundamental. Almost everybody believes that spacetime is fundamental. We all believe the earth is flat. Now a few very advanced physicists, Ed Whitten has said spaceime is doomed. David Gross has said it's and doomed. Neimar Connie Hamemed is saying spaceime is doomed. And these guys, especially Nema, 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 said, 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 a 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 a headset, that's now me ad living for them. So how space and time, which I'm calling a 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 Nemo 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 on my own. 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. I'm mathematicians. So they'll show that the long-term behavior of this dynamics of consciousness that we're working on, what we call the asmtoic behavior, will give rise to the structures he's seeing like his amplitude. And so the reason why and then the amplitude, he already shows how to build up spaceime from that. That way I'll be able to go all the way from conscious agents through the long-term behavior conscious agents through the amplitude to spaceime. 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 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 we'll we'll be able to play with the parameters of spaceime. 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 those. 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. There's literally a book called Off to Be the Wizard about somebody who realizes this is all source code and he can go in and edit the code. Wow. That is uh you should check that out. Donald, thank you so much. This has been absolutely thrilling. reading your book, listening to your interviews, and now spending time with you is amazing. I am now going to think of myself as the caterpillar fighting off the butterfly. That was amazing. I love that. Uh, you've liquefied my brain, and I hope that on the other side is a butterfly. But, uh, who knows? Thank you so much for joining us. It was a great pleasure, Tom. Thank you so much. You got it, man. All right, everybody. That was it. Thank you for joining us. Conversations with Tom. There it is. If you made it this far, you are my hero. Peace out. [Music] That's going to be the thing that opens up so much not only in terms of our ability to experience the world, to get out of the narrow, you know, viewpoint that we're in and and be able to open up to other things. Um, but it'll also teach us a lot about how the brain constructs Qualia and um how we how we have our experiences in the world.