We Live in a Simulation. The evidence is everywhere. All you have to do is look. | Donald Hoffman

what we are are avatars of the one the one awareness is exploring all of its possibilities through different avatars so somehow there is this field of awareness that is in some sense deeply and fundamentally who you really are what do you think about the AI scientists that signed the paper saying that we need to slow AI down because and I had one of them on the show because it passed a touring test faster than they thought it's just moving faster than they expected and they're very worried do you think that AI will ever become conscious I'm actually not too worried about AI right now myself so I'm not one of the alarmists that says we need to stop and worry about it the thing that would alarm me more would be if there were some kind of law that criminalized most people from doing it to let a few people do it a few companies do it that that alarms me so if there's going to be any kind of laws they should be Universal and no one should be excluded is that but why aren't you worried about AI it's pretty easy even with chat GPT to to give it questions that can't answer right now it's it's basically a good statistical analyzer it's not deeply intelligent it will find things that we humans won't find in in medical searches you know and so forth but that's because it just can't handle more data and do more statistical analysis than we can but it's not deeply intelligent and the the founders would tell you that it's it's fairly straightforward kinds of algorithms so and in terms of Consciousness there is no Theory right now of any kind that can start with physical systems like circuits software and explain even one specific conscious experience how it arises so I'll be very very clear there's no theory on the planet today that can start with an artificial intelligence and a description of some kind of circuit or some kind of software pattern of activity and can give you a specific conscious experience like the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic where you would say this pattern of activity must be identical must be the taste of chocolate it could not be the smell of of a rose there's nothing on the table and there's nothing even close so if AIS can be conscious there are no theories right now at all that could explain how that could possibly be and nothing that makes it even plausible so so I'm not too too worried about AIS being conscious I think that they will eventually outperform humans in in most everyday activities but simply because they'll have more compute power and can search more deeply than we can Will so for people that don't know you I'm going to give a super brief synopsis and by all means put in where I go awry here but you believe that this is all a simulation we are living in a simulation none of this is real space time itself is not real we are effectively living inside of what you call the headset that everything you've ever known or ever experienced is all effectively an illusion it is a computer video game by way of analogy right given that and an audience listening at home you'll notice he did not say no so um and this is something I've I have forever just dismissed out of hand that we're living in a simulation and I say dismissed out of hand because I don't have any evidence to back it up and I've heard all the arguments uh from a mathematical perspective that if you believe that humans are capable of creating um photorealistic simulations and you give any rate of progress whatsoever we will eventually create a simulation we certainly with AI and how rapidly it's been advancing I think people now really have a sense of whoa we really are going to be able to do this apple Vision Pro certainly gives an indication like you will really be able to create some very compelling very realistic um things inside of a visor so I think people more now more than ever could see how we could get into a simulation a simulated world that's convincing I'll leave it at that and if that's true then why would we then once we create that simulation not create another simulation and I will just tell you as somebody the t-shirt that I'm wearing is literally about this we're building a a game that we hope over time will be a truly simulated world that people will go in they will have an identity inside that game okay so if we know that Loop exists then once the game inside the game gets powerful enough it will do another simulation once the game inside that game inside that game gets powerful enough it will do a simulation and so you end up in this point where just mathematically it would make more sense to believe that you're in one of those you know conceivably infinite recursive Loops of a simulation then that you're in base reality but it just always seemed weird to me to say no no we're in one of the simulations but the more I research you the more I'm like maybe we really are in a simulation and to that point you talk about Consciousness as being fundamental and so I'll need you to explain that for people that that will be so jarring it will take them a while to really grock that but that Consciousness is fundamental so couldn't AI ever become a window into what you call a conscious agent in the same way that a human child is or a dog is or whatever that I think is possible absolutely so if you don't mind walk walk people through how it could be possible that physicality everything they see touch taste the loves that they have all of that is a simulation and not fundamental meaning it it arises out of something else but Consciousness is the fundamental yeah the foundation well there are two arguments for the idea that what we see is not an objective reality that exists independent of us and is there prior to when we look at it so in physics the Nobel Prize last December was given to three physicists for the experimental testing of a clean prediction of quantum theory that something called local realism is false local realism is the claim that physical objects like electrons have definite so realism is the claim that electron has a definite value of position momentum and spin when it's not observed and locality is the claim that those properties have influences that propagate through space-time no faster than the speed of light and the conjunction of those two claims the properties exist even when they're not perceived even when they're not measured and they have influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light that's local realism and local realism is false how did they prove it so that's why you get a Nobel Prize so John Klaus or Anton zeilinger and and um over decades there's a string of experiments that were Tighter and Tighter each experiment closed loopholes in the previous ones so the experiments have to deal with their complicated experiments I mean zeilinger was actually using photons from outer space to get entangled um particles that they could use that you could couldn't argue that they were somehow you know being connected or correlated some in some deep way but basically the the experiments are set up to show that properties like position or momentum or spin typically they like to use spin um in principle could not have definite values until you actually measured them so one way that they do this mathematically are there these Bell inequalities and so if if the statistics of the correlations between the particle spins you have two different particles that you're measuring those spins axis for example and if they had definite values even when you weren't observing you'd have certain pattern of correlation And if quantum mechanics is right and those values don't exist until you measure them then you have a different pattern of correlation and so that's what they they do they have to look at a bunch of different measurements look at the correlations and the correlations come out to be with with quantum theory predicts and not what our classical intuitions would tell us and so the this was done by clauser decades ago but it's so counterintuitive that people are going okay well there must be a loophole here so then they close a series of loopholes and finally they started getting photons from like distant galaxies where the photons couldn't possibly have certain within space-time causal connections and close that loophole and um so that's one One Direction so physicists tell us that local realism at least for microscopic you know subatomic particles recently they've gotten up to groups of 700 um atoms I believe so it's starting to they're they're showing that these effects of these superposition effects of quantum theory are not just at the very very small end of things so local realism is false now one can still try to say well but that's for really tiny things but at the macroscopic level maybe look local realism is true and that leads to a problem because there's no principle distinction in quantum theory between the microscopic and the Mac you can't say it 10 to the minus you know 20 centimeters that's you know that's that's the limit there's there's no boundary between micro and macro so and this is a well-known open problem so that's One Direction I'll just go with that now the um the the other direction of argument is from evolution of a natural selection where you can ask a technical question evolution shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive Behavior so that means to keep your life along long enough to reproduce right so you you have vision and touch and hearing and smell and they've been shaped so that um you're able to get the food you need mate and stay alive at least long enough to reproduce and pass your genes On to the Next Generation that's the standard story of evolution many theorists also think that Evolution shapes our sensory systems to tell us truths about objective reality like when I see an apple that's because there really is an apple and the red color and the shape really exist even when they're not perceived and so that's notice that's a step Beyond just saying that our senses evolved to guide adaptive Behavior they want to say more than that they want to say that if you guide adaptive Behavior you're going to see the truth so so I decided with my colleagues caitan prakash and Manish Singh and Robert pretner and others um my graduate students Justin Mark and Brian Marion to to test this you know evolution is a mathematically precise Theory we have evolutionary Game Theory so there's a technical question what is the probability that evolution of a natural selection would shape any sensory system to see truths about objective reality the structure of objective reality and it's straightforward to prove um what we do is we look at various kinds of so-called Fitness payoff functions maybe payoff functions that are that are and we can ask do these payoff functions preserve certain kinds of structures in the world like um orders a total order or or a partial order or a metric or topology or measurable structure so we can say we don't know what objective reality is but suppose it had this structure what is the probability that Fitness payoffs which govern our Evolution would actually have information about that structure in the world so that we could actually be evolved to have some insight into that structure of objective reality and in case after case the answer is um the probability is zero the there are payoff functions that would preserve the structure but those payoff functions have probability zero in the set of all payoff functions so so that means if you're a betting man um you would bet long odds against it so it doesn't mean that it can't happen it's just that the probability is is zero and so I take this as a convergence between two of our big theories in science evolution of a natural selection and quantum theory Quantum field Theory both are telling us that local realism is false and so so I think a good metaphor then is as you were saying um like a user interface or a video game where you render on the Fly what you need so I'm looking at you I'm rendering a Tom face and I look away and I'm not rendering it someone else might be looking at you and they're rendering their Tom face but but their time face is not the same as mine it's going to be at a different angle and so forth so we render on the Fly and that's what physics is telling us basically that local realism is false we render on the Fly and so the where you're taking that from is the Quantum uncertainty principle basically everything has a probability of being in a given State and the reason that it's just a big question mark is because nothing's looking at it so it does not need to render that it doesn't need to decide the system which is the simulation which people think of as space-time but they're almost certainly I've interviewed you so many times and I know how hard it is to escape this Matrix but they're thinking of things within space time being real but once you start looking at space time as purely a simulation and that the then rendering only happens when you look at something so that to me makes a hypothesis that I think your data backs up which if that were really the case then um I understand why big things would adhere to what seem like a different set of rules where things are static and small things would not because it you're far less likely to observe A first order consequence of something microscopic you may be observing a second or third order consequence which raises questions for me that I'm sure we will get to at some point but just to close the loop on that so first sort of consequence I can look up and see the moon I see planets I see stars and so for that to be persistent which is going to be a big thing in in our discussion today this is like the prime thing I want to talk to you about is persistence and what that means but big things will need to be persistent and therefore there has to be there is a constant collapsing of its probabilities uh because there are so many things that require even if it's just its effects on gravity there's so many things quote unquote witnessing that or measuring that so I get why those would be stable but then things where they're so small that there's very little that hinges on that that that would need to be directly rendered that would need to because you can get away with sort of the probabilistic rendering of the big things and their influence by these smaller things but you don't need a direct representation of the spin for instance of a particle that that all things that will quote unquote measure it don't see don't interact with or whatever because nobody's effectively looking at it it does not need to be rendered right so a good so it also feel right just uh no that's a great question and so great question I was not asking a question I was stating a hypothesis or no I think does that make sense at the macro to the micro level well it it it does but I think a good analogy here that might help clarify the issue is is so in say Grand Theft Auto right I look over I'm playing with somebody who's you know in Canada and somebody else is in Europe and someone else is in China we're all playing a remote version of it and virtual reality and I look over and I see a red Porsche to my right and so I say is there a red portion of my right and the guy in China says oh yeah I see a red portion and the guy in Canada agrees and the guy in Europe agrees as well so of course each of them is rendering their own red Porsche so there is some reality that's coordinating all of these perceptions right so the guy in Canada didn't see a red Porsche until he looked but when he looked um there was this whole world you know of circuits and software that you don't see there's some super computer that's coordinating the whole thing how's it coordinating in that particular metaphor right the there's a super computer that's that's taking the inputs from like your headset what direction are you looking with your headset maybe you've got a body suit so it's looking at your arm movements and so forth and is feeding all that into a supercomputer where it's got a model of the game and in that model there's some red portion model of course there's no red portion in the computer and it knows then how to coordinate and send the photons to your headset in Canada and my headset and Irvine and someone else's headset in in China so that we have this notion of a persistent reality of a Porsche even though individually for each one of us um local realism is false the Porsche doesn't even exist until I render it and there's no red Porsche inside the super computer so that's sort of the idea is that's that space time he is just a headset and there's behind space-time there's going to be an incredibly complicated now realm to explore that's as least as complicated more complicated as like the super computer is to my little headset the headset is sophisticated as beautiful technology but the super computer is you know really really powerful thing the same thing will be true of space-time it's just our headset but if we look beyond that headset we're going to you know be finding a realm that's far more complicated so in some sense science up till now has only studied our headset we've studied inside space and time we're taking our first baby steps to start to explore we've we've cut our teeth in science on studying our headset we learned the tools in the last three or four hundred years about experiments and clean mathematical theories and the loot between experiments and theories but we thought we were studying objective reality we were studying our headset but now we have the tools to actually take a First Step Beyond space-time and start to find structures Beyond space-time and their projection back into space-time and so from that point of view our view that objects in space-time we've taken that to be the fundamental reality we'll look sort of parochial um hopefully in just a few decades will yeah I think the Next Generation where many people will have spent a lot of time in virtual reality My Generation didn't spend a lot of time in virtual reality so this is hard concept but if you don't I've heard you say that before I don't think that's going to get people where you think it's going to get them maybe not uh but in this episode I want to try to explain why I think that and and get um your take so here's what I think we need to do first and then we'll go even deeper there's two things we need to do in the near term um one I think we we need to in in our previous um interviews we spent a lot of time dealing with the headset So for anybody that's sort of confused on that idea of you're living in a simulation everything that you know and love and touch and have ever experienced it is all a simulation you have never existed outside of the headset so if right there your brain breaks go watch the other episodes we spend a tremendous amount of time building that up but for now what I want to do is say okay I'm going to assume that you get it that your whole life is basically Grand Theft Auto okay and and people understand it you've been in there playing the game and they understand the difference between playing the game and the computer rules and things that give birth to that game and so that's that's the difference what I want to do now is map that one layer back so I want to take that idea of your life is Grand Theft Auto but there's this thing called space time that's outside of it and gets what you're actually saying which is that same relationship but move back one very profound level because what it does is it inverts everything and what it says is that the universe the universe space time is an emergent phenomenon from Consciousness that Consciousness is in this to use that analogy just to map it back that Consciousness is the quote unquote computer and rules of the system and then the simulation is what we all think of as real life okay so that's where we're mapping so one does does that track for you that we can move that analogy sort of one rung deeper is probably the word you'd be most comfortable with right so absolutely a model in which we take Consciousness is fundamental and we have a mathematical model of Consciousness and we then try to show how space-time gets rendered from that absolutely perfect you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today so now in this interview instead of making our references to Grand Theft Auto unless we need to for whatever for an anchor point I want to talk about space-time okay like a simulation okay I want to talk about space-time like it is Grand Theft Auto because researching you this time I I want to sit with it for a while before I start saying I'm 100 behind it I mentioned one of our previous interviews that I do revert to the mean after I spend time with you but each time you're shifting me farther where my mean is sort of closer to you this time at least in the research I had a real sense of he's right I don't know about the the Consciousness is the only part that we may disagree sure but that I you really gave me an internally consistent set of logic points for why space time is the simulation and when I grant you a few base assumptions that we'll go through my own world view makes more sense okay and so I realized for the first time again fully acknowledging that I may revert to the mean once I've interviewed three or four other people on totally different topics and this is sort of cleared my system but right now as we do this I really felt like you improved what I consider a prediction engine I think of the human mind as a prediction engine and the closer you get to Baseline truth the more you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors what I'm watching happening with AI which is why I wanted to start there I can't make sense I don't when I think about a hallucinating AI I'm like I don't understand when I think about AI pulling patterns out of noise I don't understand when persistence is difficult for AI I don't understand and then I research you and click click click those pieces fall into place when I assume that it's all already a simulation and that AI is simply revealing to me how the simulation works and so but the fact that we disagree or maybe we don't I think AI will be Windows into Consciousness I think AI is leveraging your own theories to create AI right now as we're talking about it I think I'm a lay person everybody needs to take this with a huge grain of salt trust me I am well aware of my limitations but I think right now that what we're witnessing with things like stable diffusion where AI is creating an image out of the infinite possibilities that exist within this the the possibility space of Noise Okay for people that don't understand how stable diffusion works that's how it works is it dips into the noise to find a pattern and then solidifies that pattern to reveal is this what you wanted and what I'm saying is when I research you I realize oh my God that's precisely what your theory predicts in the idea of girdles incompleteness theorem which I have struggled with so hard in the previous interviews I feel bad for everybody that has to watch me go through that but the more I feel like I can grasp why you keep coming back to it and why this sort of infinite possibility space is so important to understand when I watch AI pull a static image out of infinite possibility I'm like oh my God that's exactly what you've been trying to describe okay put a pin in that okay because what I want to talk about now is consciousness as fundamental because this is the part if people are really paying attention this is the part that will change your world view to to get into the the um space time as a as a construct as a simulation you first have to understand that you think that's born of the as born of Consciousness itself and I please dear audience stick with this because this point is going to be very important as we piece together the predictions that your own model is going to make but they have to understand this first so how is it possible that Consciousness the thing that I think everybody intuits comes from stacking neurons neurons neurons neurons neurons and you pass through a cricket an ant a mouse a cat a dog a dolphin a gorilla and humans it just feels like a just stack more neurons and then you're ultimately going to get these more sophisticated neurons which give you a more sophisticated Consciousness that seems so self-evident and you're to me but you're saying nope no and and by the way I'll just on the pin I'll just mention that I agree with you that AIS could actually give us a window into consciousness but they won't create Consciousness that was that was all I was saying interesting so I think we disagree about that okay so we can go into thoughtful oh it's so much farther ahead when we get there absolutely ignorant perspective so on Consciousness being fundamental um meaning that's all there is that that's right so the idea would be um and this is by the way in some sense not new leibniz in his monendology had the same idea so I really appreciate that you assume I know what that means and from Context I can tease it out but can you tell us what that means oh so so liveness was this genius now contemporary of Newton sort of a antagonistic they they both invented calculus roughly the same time there was a question about who was first and so forth and they they they were you know sort of at each other but but they were so they were contemporaries but leibniz um had this idea that that Consciousness couldn't emerge from physical systems he has a famous argument of the mill where he he in one paragraph basically dismisses the idea that objects inside space and time like neurons for example could create Consciousness for him it was so obvious that he spent a paragraph on it and moved on and then he's got a book called The monodology where he was proposing uh essentially that Consciousness perceiving entities are the fundamental reality and that they were interacting right if I break down the words monodology monad so m-o-n-a-d is a technical term for him it was he it was a new term for him monodology is then the books name monodology and it was basically it was a Dynamics it was a strange Dynamics we called a pre-established Harmony where God so he had he brought God in on on his thing I believe to to sort of coordinate Nate all the the perceptions of these so meaning God was the first mover the fun yeah the fundamental right okay but he saw it as a creator uh touching things with like a Divine spark of Consciousness yeah but his ontology was that that um the fundamental reality Beyond space-time was these monads the these perceiving entities basically and but but God I think was that that was the deepest reality for for lightness um there I'm less secure I'm not sure exactly what his thoughts were on God but I believe that's what he said um so I just brought that up just to say that you know we're not the first to have this kind of idea centuries ago uh leibniz with this modern knowledge he had an idea that perceiving entities experiencing entities could be more fundamental than than the physical space-time world all right you talk about conscious agents right do you mean exactly that same thing that's right so conscious agents are a mathematically precise statement of what we mean by Consciousness right so as a scientist it's it's not enough for me just to say okay there's Consciousness Beyond space-time and it's fundamental I have to write down a mathematical description of what I mean by that so what aspect of Consciousness do I take to be fundamental and and what's the mathematical description so if I was if you think about it think about Consciousness there's of course experiences um there's learning memory problem solving intelligence maybe free will there's lots of things the notion of a self all these things that you might think a theory of Consciousness needs to to incorporate I'm so sorry and I should have done this before and that apology goes to the audience if you're new to Donald it's probably worth just a quick sentence about what Consciousness is oh well so I would say consciousness is um the ability to have experiences like the taste of chocolate a headache emotions so this thing feels like something yeah the way a lot of philosophers will talk about is it's is to have a conscious experience there's something it's like to be a conscious entity it's something there's something that's like to have a headache there's something that's like to have your um you know to eat to have a nice cup of coffee or something like that okay and so let's call that qualia again you're stealing directly from you but just so we have words because quality is going to become very important as we get into your paper and all of that okay so back to conscious agents so what we decided to do was uh we don't want to throw the kitchen sink in our mathematical definition so we took what we thought was the bare minimum starting point there are experiences like the taste of chocolate smell of garlic and so forth and those experiences affect the probabilities of other experiences occurring so there are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences that's it so we're not bringing in the notion of a self learning memory problem solving intelligence none of that what we're saying is yeah all that stuff is important but we have to prove how it arises from just experiences and probabilistic relationships and long experiences so that's as a scientist you try it's what we call outcomes razor you want to have the minimum number of assumptions at the start of your theory every theory has assumptions there are the Miracles of the theory we want as few Miracles as possible right so our only Miracles are there well it's a big miracle there are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences and we formalize that the experiences we just write down what's called probability spaces we can if you want we can talk about probability spaces and the relationships among experiences are what we call markovian kernels and we get what's called Markov chains so it's very simple Dynamics so we'll we'll explain what markovian Dynamics are in a second I don't now that I finally have at least a tiny bit of a grasp I don't know how important it is that people understand that sure but I do want to know how important is it that uh one bit of qualia impacts other qualia like does that does that relationship play heavily into the idea of Consciousness as a fundamental agent yes we we stipulate that there's a fundamental property that that experiences art in a vacuum experiences probabilistically lead to other experiences okay it's very interesting that you said uh not in a vacuum because that my whole thesis is that the construct of space-time this simulation let's just be very clear the simulation that is this real world sorry that's a terrible use the word real this simulation that everybody lives in and experiences is required this is this is my pitch uh the simulation is a required constraint in order to give context that something can be like anything but that for Consciousness to explore the possibility space of qualia you have to have a rule set and the rule set that we're all in which may be one of a gazillion headsets but the rule set that we're all in creates the possibility for the subset of qualia that we as human beings or Lizards or whatever experience but without that rule set that is space time right we would not have enough limitations to give us the context in order to feel a certain way exactly that's that's a very good way to put it so that um a lizard presumably sees things very very differently than I do pigeons have four color receptors we only have three pigeons have four yeah that's right so they see more color than we do and birds and I feel cheated now I knew 15 of women do I did not know pigeons yeah the mantis shrimp has more than 10. photoreceptors yes that's right different kinds of or or pigments that are that are used for for the photoreception process so so we're we're we may be cheated in in many many ways that's for sure so so yeah we uh and we don't for example perceive um polarization of light and birds and baby bees do is they they can perceive the polarization of light um we can't directly experience electric Fields And there are there are animals in the water that can do that so some to see infrared some of the sea ultraviolet that we can't so so we're we have a very very small window and other animals are not restricted to the windows in which we we see so I like your idea that there there's an infinite space of conscious experiences to explore and when we look at different animals we're seeing different Explorations with different headsets and and different as you say different constraints and it's it's um in some sense consciousness exploring all of its possibilities all the possible ways that uh to explore so in some sense we're here for the ride and we should enjoy the ride we're we're you know we're exploring um we thought this was the final reality no this is just one of countless possible headsets just one of countless and um we'll enjoy this right and then Consciousness will then it's looking through other headsets so I like your idea yeah that it's you know there's some kind of consistency some kind of coherence but it's a subset of the experiences there's an infinite number of experiences to explore so um this ride never ends okay so when I think about Consciousness as fundamental I cannot help but imagine a blob that then takes shape in the form of a human or a lizard or an avocado whatever um help me understand what do you have an image in your head of what the what Consciousness is is it just completely non-physical well maybe the closest I can get that would be the way that we communicate to people would be um if you go into an entirely quiet room shut off all the lights close your eyes and get very very still and don't think good luck that's right usually letting go of thought is not easy but but if you can go for a few seconds or a minute with absolutely no thought and now you're just aware you realize yeah I can be aware without being aware of anything in particular I I am fundamentally awareness and into that awareness right now are coming a cup a microphone a table I can close my eyes and those are those are gone from awareness so somehow there is this field of awareness that is in some sense deeply and fundamentally who you really are that so that it seems like your theory would say that's false well it's going to say that the con so the reason why I talk about this awareness is that when we talk about all these specific conscious experiences we have to write down something that's called a probability space first required mathematically to do this so we write down a probability space in which probability of qualia that's right probability of qualia so you have to write down the space of all the potential quality of that this particular conscious agent could experience so here is this space and it's it there's the mathematical structure it's just sitting there prior to any particular experience happening it's just sitting there and it took me a few years to ask myself the question what is that space I had to write it down I couldn't do the math I couldn't write down my markovian Dynamics until I wrote down the probability spaces but as you know the way we do it is we just of course have to write that down so you don't even think about you write down the probability space and you go on to the fun stuff you you write down now the Dynamics and so forth stars but a few years later I came back and go well wait a minute I went too quickly on this first part I had to write down a probability space what does that mean because this is a space prior to any specific conscious experiences happening and so the best I can say right now is that perhaps is the mathematical counterpart to what I was just describing which is the awareness that you can experience prior to having any particular specific conscious experience arise in that awareness so that's that's why I talk about it in in that way can I just restate that to make sure that I understand and Linger on it for a second for the audience so you're using words that I know you know are dangerous that Annika Harris has warned you about letting people carry the sense of self into all this because you said you are the awareness but really Consciousness is the awareness that animates me in some way or it needs my constraints in order for it to experience the qualia I think that's the right way to think about it and so in those moments where either through meditation I get to True where I am simply aware of the qualia of being aware but when it's not aware of anything in particular so I'm not aware that my foot hurts I'm not aware that my um my stomach is churning on food I'm not aware of something I need to do later in that day I am just the the potential to point that awareness at something is the thing that I'm sitting in that that's who we really are so that that feels right but I know it's re-trapping me in my sense of self that I am a real thing your whole thing clicks into place for me when I realize that according to your theory and this makes a lot of things make sense in my own life I am simply one instantiation right that creates a set of what I call biological limitations right that then once I have those constraints now the fundamental element of Consciousness can begin to explore its qualia the the different things that like oh in this human form I can experience these things with all the context that this person has he responds to this thing in this way right um agreed there are some deep complexities with that but we'll push those off for later okay so if if that's where we're at my fundamental question is why does Consciousness why is it compelled to explore these qualia States that's the sixty four thousand dollar question that's so I don't know but I can I'm of course that's the very natural question to ask and I agree with what you just said I said I mean I don't want to reify the self what what we are are avatars of the one effectively and the one Consciousness is the one awareness is exploring all of its possibilities through different avatars why there I you know I think there may be some deep mathematical reasons so it may be that I mean there's there are theorems to the effect that no system can completely know itself it's impossible so it feels for example if I if I have a computer and I want the computer to explore itself how is it going to know itself well it's going to have to build a model of itself and write down what well in the very process of building a model of itself and writing into its memory things about itself it's becoming more complicated it's changing itself so now to really understand yourself after now describe what it just did and now to so you get this infinite Loop um and so there are there are problems with self understanding it's not possible in many cases provably not possible to have a complete understanding of yourself you get into this infinite Loop of now I have to be more complicated to understand myself after I just understood myself right and so that's one direction of this another direction is um there are there's a whole hierarchy of Infinities um so the the integers like so one two three up to Infinity that's an infinite number of integers we call that accountable infinity or alef0 the Hebrew letter l f and zero just meaning the smallest Infinity but there are other infinities so the next if you take um the set of all subsets of integers so like one two and one five and two three four look at all the possible subsets of integers and ask how many subsets are there how many subsets of integers can you come up with it turns out that of course there's an infinite number of of these subsets because every number is divisible by an infinite number of no we're just grouping them together so I'm saying think about the group one and two so that's a group now one in five got it so we can group an infinite number that's an infinite number of times so those are called all the different possible subsets of the integers got it and there's of course an infinite number of them because one is a group two is a group three so we already know there's an infinite number but there's more than that how much more it turns out it's a bigger infinity so the it's a bigger infinity it's a bigger say what that well that's what mathematicians said when Cantor the mathematician who first came up with this um when he first proved this feels a bit like my speaker goes to 11. why not just take make 10 louder but this one goes this one goes it's actually a different size for infinity and so possible I literally can't wrap my head around that there there's something um called a cantor's diagonal argument so it so there's a simple diagonal argument where you can actually show on on paper pen and paper that um it's impossible um to capture all the power set this bigger infinity um with the smaller Infinity so he gives what's called a cantor's diagonal so if people want to you know check me on this you just look up Cantor and cantor's diagonal argument for a proof that there are these bigger Infinities um and you can actually I think most people can actually follow the proof I mean it's it's mind-bending but um you can follow it well there's not just one bigger infinity that's a left one this is the bigger infinity now take the power set so by the way taking the set of all subsets is called taking the power set so the power set is all the possible subsets so now I've got alif1 which is the bigger infinity which is the power all the power sets available but now I can take all the power set the power set of lf1 that gives me a lift two take the power set again at alif3 L4 and this goes forever so there so Infinity is not one thing there's an infinite unending hierarchy of ever larger infinities so we have to on my my view take this into account in our Theory Of Consciousness that this this oh all of these different infinities are valid directions for projection of this one deeper Consciousness and so we're going to so the answer to your question may again be because cantor's hierarchy never ends this exploration never ends the exploration of the possibilities of consciousness of qualia is in principle never ending I would just say um I'm in deep water here and I'm maybe over my head fair enough uh this is the the fun part of exploring this is how what are the predictions that are made based on the hypothesis right so every hypothesis makes a prediction and then you have something you can test and it becomes verifiable so this is where it gets very interesting to me is what the predictions are that it makes so going back to um the hypothesis that I have that okay maybe this really is all a simulation because as we go to build the next simulation it actually tells us more it it gives me a better way to understand what's already happening now again I'm a lay person so I may be way out of my own depth here but I think people will be able to follow the internal logic so this is what I was stating earlier about AI so the way that AI works is there is an infinite possibility space in noise so you can just think of it as a screen and that screen can have think of every conceivable pixel that's there and depending on what color you make any one of those pixels if you have like a grand enough resolution meaning enough pixels in the finite space that you can recreate any image that's ever been seen or created or even just what's possible so if anybody's seen what they call an AI hallucination where the AI will just continually like push into itself and every time it pushes in and a pattern begins to emerge it then crystallizes that pattern and basically says the most likely shape to emerge out of this would be a staircase but as you push in the most likely shape to emerge out of that would be a cathedral and and it just keeps going and going and going and going and it never runs out of sort of most likely things to emerge out of this pattern is because it's looked at all of these things and so it will create things that it's seen before so the Mona Lisa would be one representation that is very predictable especially given how many times a Mona Lisa has been replicated so one of the things in the possibility space is the Mona Lisa is a rembrand is David is you looking at your wife this morning is one of the possibility spaces that it could eventually draw out of this thing so it's it's constantly searching for what is the next potential pattern now my whole thing is what really starts to make this interesting and the reason that I think that the simulation isn't something to be brushed aside as being trivial but is critically important if you're right that what the what Consciousness is doing is it has some motivation for some reason that neither of us know why but that it is cycling through all of its permutations if that's what's really happening then to do that you need a set of rules and so what I realize is I'm building the going back to the Grand Theft Auto so we're building a simulated world and I realize as we build it all I'm doing is making the most detailed if this than that statements and so I'm trying to create these algorithms that then not trick you but they give you a set of rules by which you now must adhere but by doing that by actually limiting the possibility space I can make a game that's quote unquote fun so it is in the limitation it's in the setting of rules that this becomes a useful space so what I want to know is you you talk a lot about like hey we want to get out of the headset do you really do you want to get out of the headset or do you want to manipulate the headset well when I say we want to get out of the headset that's as a scientist trying to look for a deeper Theory so as a scientist I mean we've Sciences let me ask you so the reason that Einstein his breakthroughs were so useful is within the headset they let us do something are you trying to do something in the headset or so if you understand how the headset works you can either manipulate the like Einstein Bend space time right you can create GPS which if you didn't understand relativity you would not be able to do and that made the atom bomb possible I mean nuclear energy possible made GPS possible his breakthroughs are you trying to do a breakthrough that has headset implications or are you searching a breakthrough that has get out of the headset implications both so what I want to do is is get a theory of what's beyond at least a baby Step Beyond the headset presumably as I mentioned there's a cantor's hierarchy of infinity so we have infinite job security going beyond the headset that's it's literally an unending job but to take a step entirely outside of the headset then as as you point out as a scientist I need to make predictions back in the headset because that's the only place we can do experiments to prove that you're to get right well to to I don't you can never prove that you're right but but to to sort of what we say science would say to to get confirmation of your theories which is not proof but to to say um you're not stupid you you seem to be on the person that's the things that we already understand that's what hopefully makes novel predictions about things that we don't currently understand that's right we should be able to get Quantum field Theory back as a special case we'll get Einstein's theory of general relativity as a special case uh evolution of a natural selection as a special case we should or generalizations of these theories within space time so so yes we're we're going for the first baby step outside of space-time in terms of a scientific theory but of course we have to project it back into space-time where we can do experiments in a better look um like evolution of natural selection and your Quantum field Theory or understandable generalizations of those theories um or we're wrong right so so you might say Well yeah if you go outside of space-time you can do anything you have all the fun you're watching do anything you want to um no you can't you can you need to tie it back to what we can perceive inside our headset um so that that's where we're headed but but as I said there's infinite job security and and so I view myself as as just looking for a first baby step outside of the headset science for for centuries has only studied our headset because space time is our headset but in the last 10 years physics has gone beyond we've talked before about the amplitohedron and decorative permutations that other other structures that physicists are finding these are not the final word again these are the first baby steps outside of our headset and they will be of course refined and eventually superseded all right so there's one of these things that I think I've I've grasped enough that I can present it to people as one of the first baby steps so in physics one of the things they're constantly doing is smashing particles together to try to see what happens when those particles Collide in the hopes that it will reveal smaller and smaller elements of the building blocks of the universe which will then help us understand what the the sort of fundamental makeup of space-time is and as they look at this data what they found is uh that there are patterns in that data that replicate endlessly and you smash these together and the the collisions there's so much data at first it seems impossible just uh so much data to Wade through will never understand anything and then all of a sudden you realize wait there's only so many patterns once you take those like once you group those shatters like if you think of it this way if every time you broke a mirror it broke into the same pattern you'd be like wait a second and am I understanding it correctly that that's what happens when you Collide particles statistics yes right so it's not exactly but but you you can use statistics to show that there are these statistical commonalities to the interactions absolutely okay walk us through that and why does that matter well for physicists of course this is some of their most fundamental data so there what are particles particles Eugene vigner taught us are what he called you know irreducible representations unitary representations of the group of symmetries of space-time what they call the point Correa group is essentially particles are like the the simplest things allowed by the symmetries of space-time the simplest entities allowed and so in some sense by studying these particles we're really studying the nature of space-time itself in the structure of space-time and so when they for example in the Large Hadron Collider they will smash protons together or they will um they're they'll also you know sometimes have an electron and smash it into a proton at high energies and when you do that at high enough energies you destroy the proton it actually falls apart and you see all these particles scattering up things like quarks and gluons and mesons and so forth and so you can look at the angles that these particles are spraying out at and look at for example do they have you know a spin a magnetic charge what's their do they have a mass so you can sort of you can look at all the and then when when you start looking at all the data you begin to see patterns in the data and and so we see you know for example it was a big surprise to physicists that inside the proton there were these things that they now call quarks but the quarks in some sense at least at the energies that are available to us can't be on their own you can't have like quarks flying out on their own there's something called Quark confinement that was a big big Discovery so quarks like in in a proton there are three quarks two up and one down a neutron has two down and one up and but if if you if the quark escapes it was trying to get away um the force of attraction between two quarks grows with the distance and the energy this well the the force doesn't grow the energy so the force doesn't normally we think of the force the force so the force doesn't grow the force remains constant and so the energy that can the potential energy it keeps growing and growing as you as you move these particles apart and so so at some point they snap and you you create all that energy goes and creates a new Quirk say so so then they pair off so it's very very strange um this court confinement thing so one reason we do experiments is because I mean who ordered them we we wouldn't have like guessed uh you know poor confinement and so but we we found core confinement and is still being studied I mean trying to understand that there's a theory that if we get that really really high energies um they won't be confined but but those are energies that um we currently are nowhere near and we have no analytic proof right now of Court confinement for what are called non-abelian gauge theories so so one of the big open questions in physics is to actually prove this analytically um that that so they they have lattice gauge models that that of this that show it and and and and they they have other cases where they the experiments and the theory convince them it's the truth but we don't actually have the final analytic proof of this in what's called non-ably engaged theories so so that's still an interesting open question but that's why physicists are doing these particles are really probing in some sense the fundamental nature of space-time itself and so they look at at patterns they look at that the um the cross sections for interactions so this was for example way back um in the early studying of the atom so there was a plum pudding model of the atom right so there was electrons where these negative Point particles inside a um a positive field and then this one experimenter started shooting particles at atoms and the plum model would say that most of these particles would just go go straight through and most of them did but every once in a while one would bounce back a very very small percentage of the time and so that that gave them the idea okay there are point-like particles we now would call them protons and and neutrons these particles that were that they were hitting that but they were a very very small space within the the atom so the atom was mostly empty space the electrons were way far away so to speak from the the much smaller protons and neutrons and so but then we look inside the protons we find that the proton itself and the neutrons are composed of even smaller particles quarks and gluons and and so forth and who knows even the quarks and gluons might be you know composed of smaller particles but we don't have the resolution in our colliders right now to test that we can only go to you know a thousand through ten thousandth the the diameter of a proton I think and at that resolution the quarks and gluons still look like point-like particles what's up guys it's Tom bilyu and if you're anything like me you're always looking for ways to level up your mindset your business and your life in general that's exactly why I started impact Theory a podcast that brings together the world's most successful and inspiring people to share their stories and most importantly strategies for success and now it's easier than ever to listen to impact theory on Amazon music whether you're on the go or chilling at home you can simply open up the Amazon music app and search for impact Theory with Tom bilyu to start listening right away if you really want to take things to the next level just ask Alexa hey Alexa play impact Theory with Tom bilyeu on Amazon music now playing impact Theory with Tom bilyeu on Amazon music and boom you're instantly plugged into the latest and greatest conversations on mindset Health finances and Entrepreneurship get inspired get motivated and be legendary with impact theory on Amazon music let's do this it doesn't seem self-evident to me that just because again I'm granting you the conceit that Consciousness is the fundamental thing but it does not seem self-evident to me that even if Consciousness is the fundamental thing that gives rise to this constricting rule set as I describe it that we call space time that you couldn't have a theory of everything regarding space time why do you think we have failed to get a Theory of Everything in space-time in space-time knowing that it's the simulation but going back to Grand Theft Auto feels like even if I just said oh all I can tell you is cause and effect that when this pixel goes here it has this effect and so now I can play everything's forwards or backwards and you could in Grand Theft Auto it has a set of rules and it adheres to those rules right right period plain and simple and so even though it is the um the it is the headset a computer program assuming that a simulation acts like a computer program space-time in this case uh it it adheres to rules and so when you get a quote over a bug it is what the program is programmed to do you just didn't intend to program it that way well I I in that framework yes I agree with you that I think we could get a complete theory of space-time not a complete Theory of Everything But a complete theory of space-time so that's so the theory of everything for me would be you know space time was a trivial aspect of everything right so but but absolutely I think we can get a complete theory of space-time and we'll see its limits it it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to minus 43 seconds so we'll we'll see that we'll understand that yeah so it's it's quite quite possible I would say though and I like your idea about the the program and the rules and setting up a framework in which you can explore um experiences I'll throw in a little wrinkle you're writing computer programs and um so Alan Turing you know is sort of one of the fathers of modern computer science and and turing machine it was like the first like really good theoretical framework for computer science and the universal turing machine that that Turing described in some of his papers um is sort of our our notion of a universal computer but but there's a a well-known limit to what Turing machines can do take again all the integers you know one two three up to Infinity also minus one minus two and so forth and ask think about all the functions from the integers to the integers for example the square function so you know the square of two is four the square of four is 16 and so forth how many functions are there it turns out it's a big it's a bigger infinity it's it's it's a it's not accountable and it's not it's a bigger infinity than the integers but Turing proved that the set of computable functions is countable so when you're programming you're using only computable functions but they're um they're a much smaller Infinity than all the possible functions so right now in our current technology we're when we build these computer simulations we should know that we're using a probability zero subset of all the functions that are actually available and maybe later on we'll figure out how to do something more interesting with all these other functions but then as we go again counters hierarchy I think that in other words the the kinds of rules they're gonna are going to be very very um hard for our heads to understand you can write down if you take a class in theoretical computer science you can study non-computable functions so that you and almost every function is non-computable okay because as I just said the computable functions are probability zero the set of all functions is is most most of those functions are not computable but in a theoretical computer science class you will you will actually spend some time actually studying you know how to construct and prove that a certain function is not not computable like the halting problem is not is not a computable is it's not a computable function it doesn't and so but it's really hard for us even though almost every function is not computable almost every function we can think of is computable so here we are stuck with the limitations of our headset and and so thinking out of the box in the simulation idea is is is really going to be mind-numbing because to really think out of the box you can have to learn how to think about non-computable functions and that is not trivial that's not but that's so I just wanted to throw that out there to just open up how complicated this this could be and and why the execution to get a theory of even just the everything of space-time we have to get into non-computable functions I don't know if we will or not that's an open question but we should be open to that possibility hmm very interesting and certainly to explore Consciousness I see no reason why we should a priori I would say this if someone claimed that the computable functions were all we need I would say the burden of proof is on you [Music] talk about something I have not even considered I don't know that I can wrap my head around that one yeah I have a hard time I mean I took a class and I looked at that non-computable funding the halting problem and you have to really I mean you have to be sober you have to be well rested and you have to think really hard at least with my apparatus you have to think really really hard to to even grasp it it's not trivial intense okay so when we have a hypothesis it makes predictions we need to be able to solve we're talking about this a few minutes ago we need to be able to solve problems or our hypothesis needs to predict outcomes of things we can observe but not yet explain um in I can't remember if you mentioned this in your paper but I've heard you talk about this so dark matter Dark Energy we don't know what the hell it is but we know that the Universe would not hold together if it wasn't for that or it wouldn't be racing apart at the way that is Raising whatever it wouldn't function the way that it functions now um what does your Consciousness as fundamental agent tell us about Dark Energy well nothing specifically right so that's that's a big open question in fact one one of the um my collaborators is a student working right now on Dark Energy um experiments um um a brilliant student named Ben nepper because he thinks it will yield results tied to Consciousness is fundamental uh no I think it's just because it's a good thing to do at this stage in your career to get that kind of experience and you know actually spend time hunting with real experiments for dark matter so you learn the ropes um I think it's it was very and so he's doing that um and who knows you know our current techniques may or may not find dark matter we we just don't know but it's no surprise from a point of view that says that space-time is not fundamental to say that there could be influences um on our headset that are not explicitly represented by the headset itself they're only seeing as influences on the headset but and so one way that we're going after this in our own mathematics is we have this markovian dynamics of these conscious agents can you take a second to explain to people what markovian Dynamics are yeah markovian Dynamics is is fairly simple in in concept it says that um what you do next so suppose I'm um suppose I'm a on just say a sidewalk and it has there are different I could either step one step to the right or one step to the left and and there's some probability maybe I I choose to step to the right with probability of you know two-thirds and to the left probability of one-third and so you can see where where would I go over time but the key thing about it is that my the step I'm going to take now only depends on where I am now so where I'm going to end up next only depends on where I am now so there's a finite memory I don't have to know everything I've done in the past to know what's going to happen next I only need to know where I am now and that's the key Markov property that you only need to really know the current state don't have to know the whole history to have all the problem all the information about the probabilities for what's going to happen nextology that I heard that I it was really helpful in understanding is if you think of it as airports some airports have more connections to other cities than other airports you're so if you're asking let's say that there's five airports in question one is isolated and one is a hub to all the rest and then the other ones only have one or two links whatever um going back to your idea of if I'm on the isolated uh airport there's only one option so you don't need to know where I was before all of that if you know I'm in the isolated one you know I'm flying back to the only thing it's connected to which is the other Hub right now when I'm at that Hub that has let's say five options right now it's just a probability curve of which one I'm going to go to but since I go to another one of those airports then it's like okay well I could go you know to um Cincinnati I could go to New York I could go to LA or I could go um let's say those are the only connections but when I'm in Hawaii if Hawaii forces me to route through La then you know where you're going to go I was like okay that that at least gives a simple understanding of oh this is a relatively simple concept that sets aside all the history and so from a computational standpoint that becomes very important because when people talk about booting up a simulation of the universe you very quickly to track every element that could possibly interact with every if everything could interact with everything becomes impossible and you would have to have a computer the size of the universe itself in order to track like a one for one atom basically um but I think I'm understanding this right that markovian Dynamics eliminates a lot of that computational need because I don't have to there there is a small set of things and once I know the probability distribution over time it completely stabilizes and so when I I know if I'm at airport C I know the exact probability of where they're going to go next that's right so markovian Dynamics is help simplify things um by demanding only a finite memory instead of an infinite memory of the past history of what what you've been doing but you can make the memory as big as you want so it's really not too much of a limitation either with like so it's a nice why do we care about it um well most of us don't have to deal with infinity anyway in terms of past history so we can only we can just use finite histories and and that's and that's quite good and it another reason um to be interested in Markov Dynamics is we talked about computable functions well markovian kernels are computationally Universal so anything that can be computed with a neural net or with the Turing Universal turing machine can be computed with markovian kernels so they form a they gives a nice Network kind of modeling for Dynamics but they also give us Universal computational abilities and they're not limited to computable functions because the sets on which the probabilities are defined need not be computable sets so they actually give us a window toward going Beyond computation I'm not there right now but but that window is there in the future if we need to go there hopefully that will go there but but so our our current model is a markovian model of conscious agents and then what we have to do is is we can then show that space time is just a projection of this Dynamics and so you only there's a lot of States really fast before you move on so just re-anchoring people that these conscious agents the states that they can be in are coffee alation right desire headache so when we're talking markovian Dynamics we're talking about moving from one of those qualia states to another a human headache versus a dolphin headache et cetera Etc so uh uh help me understand why that's important that I can like if I'm in the state of blissed out coffee taste uh that I have a certain probability of going somewhere else that that feels counterintuitive it feels like my wants and desires are really what's going to drive the next state not the state that I'm currently in that's right so so now we're just talking about the Consciousness not about space-time for for this question yes right so there um when we write down a markovian kernel and say okay whatever your conscious experiences are now this markovian just Colonel describes what your next conscious experiences will be probabilistically and also um what how you're influencing the conscious experience of others so so now we can ask the kind of question you're asking so if that's happening outside the headset this is all outside the headset right this is all this is so the probability of what I do next is determined outside the headset by markovian Dynamics that's why we're gonna get to this dark energy and dark matter stuff you are breaking my brain right now that's so that's that's why I brought this up is because your question was about dark energy and dark matter so what we have to to to get at that from this point of view what we're going to say is look most of the states of this Dynamics are states that are not represented in space-time they're dark so there are these influences that you're not going to see when you count up all the matter and all the energy that you can see inside Space time you're going to be missing all the stuff that didn't project into space-time so in fact probably the dark energy and dark matter is much more than we've discovered so far so so that's why it's important but so okay hold on this all really does start to feel weird when I remind myself that this is about qualia right the sense of it being like something and so I'm gonna make something up uh dark energy is the energy created this is why I don't understand how it could be energy but uh dark energy is the energy of a qualia that I will never be able to experience so it's something like an alien drinking blood wine uh making that up but it has to be qualia so it's got to be something to be like that thing is that right it's it's even more complicated than that it's it's not just one qualia it's probably who knows how many countless Infinity is like that exactly right that are interacting and affecting the Dynamics that we perceive inside of our space-time headset but notice that among the qualia are for example the quality that you are about four feet from me so your position so position there's a quality I mean it's very very different to experience you four feet from me than four inches from Max those are very very so so depth and space is quality and in fact um our quality of there sort of compresses if I look at the like a distant Mountain and the moon rising over that mountain the Moon looks a little further than the mountain but not much right yeah the moon's a little further but if you were to you know that mountain might be you know 20 miles from me the Moon is a quarter million miles right so that means you have no idea that it's like orders of magnitude further away so so our qualia space of depth is quite compressed compared to what we would might call the measured world so like when you actually and and you see that in in your you know like a Grand Theft Auto when you're actually looking around you only see the roads around you in a little bit but the Grand Theft Auto World you might be able to drive thousands of miles in a really complicated simulation you don't see thousands of miles in any one time you only see a little bit that your headset allows you to see but but because you use that same headset and you're you're not stuck in that world you're at there's actually a super computer that has a much bigger world than your headset right then what you see right now in your headset but it's rendering a little bit in your headset right now so that's why the the mountain and the Moon look about the same because their headset we can now of course when we go to the moon on a rocket now it's like going through Grand Theft Auto with your headset on and going places that you couldn't see because they were too far away in your current headset view but you can get there eventually and and so that also is pointing to a world outside of your headset your headset is just what little bit of that world that you're rendering at any one time now dark energy and darkness you're not really getting outside of your headset to go to Mars you're getting outside of what you rendered previously well so at any moment you're only seeing in your headset right but if I go to Mars I'm still seeing in my headset yeah and in Grand Theft Auto for example there might be a you know a Porsche that's you know a thousand miles away and you're gonna have to drive like three hours in the game to get there so you're not going to see it so it's in the it's in the simulation outside of your headset right now to get it in your headset you're gonna have to do all this work to get it inside your headset but it already existed in the software and the computer prior to that you just don't see it in your in your headset understood so so that so all the stuff inside Space time the galaxies that we see that are far away from us and so forth but that's not dark matter dark energy that's that's more like the headset stuff that you see in Grand Theft Auto if you go far enough within the game but then there's this deeper notion that there are some states in the computer that you'll never see in in Grand Theft Auto but they could uh you know subtly influence what you are seeing in Grand Theft Auto doesn't your thesis necessarily no you're not going to say yes to this but I'm going to finish doesn't your thesis necessarily mean that that is some element of uh the I like to think of it as a blob that is consciousness cycling through [Music] um why would it be in the same simulation cycling through different qualia uh but then I don't understand why it would be in the same simulation if it's going to be something that could never possibly interact with right I mean almost everything that the real Consciousness is doing is not in our in our headset we have this what we're perceiving is probabilities zero of what's going on it's it's basically if you ask of all the things that are being experienced in Consciousness what percent of it do we experience zero percent zero percent yes understood but I I am in a way experiencing Dark Energy because it is the thing that makes the universe the way that it is now so I'm just trying to understand so the thing that I that I'm sort of debating in my own head is okay when I grant you that Consciousness is fundamental then there's all this internal logic to um the space-time Continuum that I know and love right but I don't know that it's the only way for me to apply the sort of same ration now that you use of whether it's markovian Dynamics girdle's incompleteness theorem is probably the more important because that's the one that really helps me understand Ai and what AI is doing um so I'm wondering okay if I for a second say you you have touched on something that's really important which is that space time is the simulation but I don't need to draw the conclusion that Consciousness is the fundamental thing that just becomes a debate about whether Consciousness can emerge or not um it could be that there and this feels more right to me when I try to imagine it but I fully admit what I'm about to say simply pushes God farther down it it kicks the can so what feels intuitive to me because it's what I'm doing is that I exist in somebody else's simulation that exists in the real world and that person they still need God or something I have not in any way shape or form explain that I've clicked again but then all the sort of there's a set of rules they seem like they're a little too perfect they're a little too finely tuned you've got the Fermi Paradox which I'll probably ask you about later like all these things are like this is a little sus the way that this whole space time is trying to hang together just doesn't really quite complete the circle including the so much of the energy that makes the universe work is as dark stuff don't worry about that feels like a 13 year old programmer hand waving it away telling the teacher like ah I just needed something in order to you know make all of this work and when I do that everything also falls into place where I'm like oh wow okay so I get how they're rendering all this in real time using the same principles and I'm now seeing AI use pulling things out of the possibility space because as somebody developing a video game I'll just tell you the hardest thing is creating the art assets so they need something that can render this stuff on the Fly and and creating the art assets that look good but are also optimized for the rendering engine because the rendering engine just gobbles resources so it's like when I take that view and instead of going there's this magical thing called Consciousness I'm like I'm still dealing with God there's a God somewhere doing something whatever there's a thing I don't understand but space-time being born of a 13 year old just trying to like you could literally go to the Unreal Engine store and be like give me Einstein's physics right and you plunk them in and it would work he wouldn't even have to know how to program it right he just took it well you know whatever give me what they understood in 2023 and I was driving in right you know we'll see what happens like that still works so I agree what is it that gives you the confidence that the thing that is giving birth to all of this is consciousness itself oh I'm not confident at all so everything is your leading theory it's just my leading theory why is it your leading theory um first I would agree with you that we could just say that there are some kind of dynamical entities outside of space-time and and B agnostic about the nature of those entities just write down their Dynamics and then show how it projection to space time and we could be good absolutely the reason I'm going after Consciousness is um two things very personal first I mean we all have headaches and we have conscious experiences um and so we want to understand what Consciousness is right and and the standard view right now among my colleagues in the neurosciences is that Consciousness is um something that's created by brain activity or embodied brains or perhaps if we're lucky ai's and so forth but physics is fundamental physical stuff is fundamental and Consciousness is a late car if space-time is doomed if space-time is not fundamental that whole story of Consciousness is out the window is it is does physicality go out the window let me see if I can answer my own question using your words to see if I understand this is physicality out the window if space time is doomed you would say yes because local realism is proven that it isn't there is no local realism that all of this is fake everything you see in experience it's all just quote unquote rendered in real time right as you engage with it therefore at least in what we experience because local realism isn't true physicality cannot be true that's that's right to put it very simply I don't have neurons right now if you looked inside my skull you would see neurons you would render them but there are no neurons right so neurons do not exist when they're not perceived so neurons couldn't create Consciousness because they're not even there to do it and NorCal particles you know particles don't exist when they're not perceived here's where limited Minds like mine get tripped up because your analogy is so profound and feels so right and for this to be a simulation I say to myself something has to be running the simulation and I can't get myself outside of that something somewhere is going to be physical that's a hard one for me too by the way I have all the same knee-jerk emotional reactions that everybody else has to this stuff even stronger um so maybe that's why it's good for someone like me to be doing this because you know I don't my emotions don't believe any of this they don't believe it at all it's literally only the mathematics pushing me kicking and screaming at each step to decide you have to go with mathematics and what what the theories are saying but I don't find it that intuitive maybe I will at some point um but I don't find it that intuitive so so yeah you could say you know we don't need to talk about Consciousness there's just some dynamical entities outside of space-time but can't Consciousness be a part of the simulation it may you know for all I know it it may be I mean so maybe there's things I called awareness for this prior to any particular conscious experiences now now there I'm completely in over my head I have no idea what to say about that thing right I literally have nothing intelligent to say what if awareness is just the qualia of being rendered of your process being run by the Central Computer that's as good an ideas as I've ever had but but I don't feel very confident in this area at all I mean the closest we can personally get is the kind of thing I suggested you know go into a quiet room turn off the light let go of thought which is not easy let go of everything and try to just be aware of awareness be aware of being aware and and try to sit there with that and what you find is it's a it's a profound experience the war you just sit there being aware of awareness without without thinking about you know you're not see the whole point about not thinking is thinking you're back into this small computational Realm you're back into this really tiny out of all the infinities you're you're back in this little tiny Infinity so letting go so this is not we know the headset is computation though right well we don't know for sure our current models are but but we haven't proven local realism not being real mean that it has to be computational no it doesn't tell I mean so it doesn't entail that at all no huh now I'm broken again how to make sense of that right so so um how can anything how this is interesting here's my base where I realize I don't know how to escape this uh I feel like for qualia 2 exist it must be processed I will even grant that the processing is simply the markovial Dynamics of markovian dynamics of moving from one thing to another the switching of States fine but it it is moving from one state to another which I will call that processing right yes just not a physical process it's it's it's go and it doesn't have to be a computational process even it could be functions that are not computational yeah so I try not to kill the audience with the things I just can't remember well it hurts me too I'm telling you these things but not because it's easy for me my my head hurts too thinking about this do you have an example of something that that's non-computational I think you gave one earlier but I forget well so um the the standard story that you if you take a computer science class and exist study the theory of computation they'll tell you about something called the halting problems so this is the like one of the big problems that entering I believe posed it and and and showed that it was not computational the question is this if you your turing machine is like a a universal turing machine is is like a universal computer you can give it a program during thought about putting a tape with with some punches on it essentially so you have this tape reader and the turing machine would look at one square in the tape and read that symbol and then it would change State and then move left to right and write a symbol and that's that's all the universal training machine could do and and so the question that Turing asked was um suppose we asked the question um will the turing machine stop after a finite number of moves will it halt um on the arbitrary sets of these tapes that you're giving it new programs that's called the halting problem will the question is is there a turing machine that can decide so is there an algorithm that can decide whether this turing machine will halt or not for any particular given input so can you tell the touring machine to stop is that the well well no so so I should say one more thing about Turing machines so a turing machine is going back and forth and changing at State and when it's done when it actually is like computed the square of a number or whatever it is that it's doing it it halts it goes into what's called a halt statement so that when it goes into a whole state that means it's done it it did the computation so but but there are some computations that go on arbitrarily long like I don't understand why you they you never come to the end you you'd never come to the end of it there's some sort of recursive Loop yeah that's why it's nature in fact probably most so the question is so when you say non-computationally you mean something that ends up in that Loop yeah where you where the turing machine never halts you give it an input whatever things it's done and it never thinks it's done so the halting problem most things are like that yeah I would guess um that yeah most tapes are are probably you wouldn't halt be my guess but but that's that's not an important Point here I think that's the case but it's not a central point that the fact is that many won't halt and so the so the question that during race was something like this so is there a turing machine that can tell you if it says give them given this turing machine and all these inputs whether this turing machine which on which one of these inputs will it halt okay and it turns out that there's no turing machine that can do that so it's not a computer machine that will know which one is going to Halt that there's no turing machine that can tell you that whether this other turing machine will halt or not on all these inputs interesting so it can never understand it without running the calculation itself well and the turing machine itself would never halt the one that was trying to do this would never halt so it's called the halting problem and and it's it's so when you take a computer science class you'll get a much better explanation that I've just given you but basically it's it you'll see that um there's no algorithm that will tell you whether a particular turing machine will halt or not on any particular any possible inputs is so when somebody says it's touring complete does it mean that it halts appropriately or is that something else entirely that's something else entirely got it okay that's uh that's crazy um persistence yes so this is I think I I think a key part of my thesis which is persistence is the hard problem for AI right now and when I look at the thing that holds AI back from being something that people can Implement into their workflows today it's because it can give you really amazing stuff but it cannot give you really amazing stuff over and over from different angles and different setups people are working on it and you know by the time this comes out I'm sure it'll be even better and a year from now it'll it'll be a solved problem but that feels like part of the rule set that you need inside of the headset is to create this sense of persistence um so I wonder if again going back to the idea of the headset becomes necessary because you have to create persistence in order for the qualia to be explored you have to have that do you agree with that sense of persistence being a necessary tool of Consciousness to explore qualia um well first I'll just say I think the concrete example of the persistence is like I look up at the Moon and then I look away and I say is the moon still there and you look up and you say oh yeah the Moon is still there and then then you look away and I look and then so every time I look back I still see the moon where I expect to see it that's that's what we mean by persistence here and I don't think that we need to have that kind of persistence to have a headset I think we do we have that but for example um there's E coli bacteria do I understand what I've read is that it swims along and um there's some amino acid or something that is eating and as long as there's a good gradient of that thing it keeps going in the direction it's going and eating the stuff but all if things start going South and it's not getting the amino acid or whatever it is it's eating um it's it's flagellum that it's using to to move forward it turns it in the other direction it which makes it it's like a random turn so it just rotates the other way and it gives it like a random new so it's like a random orientation generator it orients is a completely new generation a new Direction and then it starts going and if it's good then it goes and so that's a search it's a very stupid but it works for the E coli now does it have what does E coli necessarily have persistence I don't know you yeah 100 okay must okay so um right before we started rolling I had the very good fortune of introducing you to another one of my favorite people Eric Weinstein and um one of the things that he said to you was that um you said I don't have neurons and he was like what and he had earlier made a statement that you couldn't because you had never met him before there's no way for you to render him upon entrance because he remained consistent to himself to me and that's what I mean by persistence so if I look at E coli let's say I'm the first person to discover it it will look a certain way if somebody else without knowing I discovered it also discovers it it will look the same way if a person well I agree with you on that my question was different from E coli's perspective I was thinking through the headset of E coli what so E coli has its own headset and I'm just wondering for E coli see it may not need to have this persistence notion because all it needs to know I'm happy I'm eating wow so this is the importance of uh defining terms so what I mean by persistence is that you will look the same so when you look up at the moon and then look away and it gets trash Bend and your headset and then you ask me is this still there and I look up and I'm like yeah it's still there every time I look at the moon it's going to be the same every time you look at the moon it's going to be the same and if somebody were to take a photo of that we would both recognize that photo as being accurate no I I completely agree with all that if I'm building out a simulation I don't go uh here is marker for Moon represented differently to you but consistently represented differently for me but consistently I go make the moon persistent the moon will always look like this and that way no matter who discovers it they would describe it the same they would see it the same like rather than me have to be like oh you're calling it red and I have to remember the red is different for this guy and so it's like how do you know that red is the same if this is all simulation it's obviously the same because otherwise you would have to like program the like a thousand different ways now you may experience uh like additional layer of sentiment about a thing that makes the qualia different and this sort of gets into your hierarchies of infinity that fine but going back to neurons ones if I smash somebody's head a million years ago maybe that's too far because the brains change a hundred thousand years ago neurons would look the same even though I don't know what they are I'm just like meh that's when you smash ahead this is what you see if I smash that same head today I'm going to see the same thing because even if this is all a simulation there is a level of persistence and I completely agree with you on that I was just raising the question could we come up with a game that was so simple it was so trivial that in some sense persistence was irrelevant I mean you you either are you're told bad or good that's all you're told bad or good and you do something random that's that's what I'm saying the E coli you're talking now about Behavior okay which is right so if if we're in agreement on persistence no I agree on the persistence the um just to say it another way the simulation is a set of rules descriptions assets like art assets for just an easy way to explain it and so there's going to be uniformity across everything that uses the headset they're all going to be the same because I don't have to like create all these individual things I agree yeah then you have a very separate notion which is the behaviors we were talking about this earlier this still really um I don't know how to understand it in your paper and it's probably a good time to now get into the paper so the paper felt like as a layperson who's interacted with you in an interview format but never having um I had your book but again that was more inviting people into uh Popular Science whereas the paper was like deep mathematics uh felt like a step forward in your guys's certainty of at least how to explain what you think um but one of the ideas in the paper is this action potential I don't I can't remember if that's how you described it but um so I want to go back to this idea of the and this is where I sort of started thinking this makes more sense to me as a 13 year old programming set of rules than it does uh Consciousness giving birth to a set of limitations in order to experience qualia because then every computation has to be about qualia which I may have said earlier but I want to I want to say something that I think you actually state in the paper okay if this really is consciousness is the fundamental layer and all Consciousness is trying to do is run the girdles in completeness serum against all of the qualia that it could experience and that the headset and our biological experience which is really just the thing inside the headset are simply constraints for it to express qualia all math is all math is is the representation of the different elements of qualia so whether that's probability of given Behavior likelihood of moving from one thing to another one state to another that's all math is here to compute and in the paper you touch on I'm calling action potential but that could be my poor memory yeah um I feel like I have free will I think it's an illusion but I feel like I have free will but all of this qualia if it is true that that's what's really happening and this is just Consciousness running through all the different qualia doesn't feel like that to me so there's some element of uh the simulation that makes it feel like I'm living a life and that the quality is born out of me living a life not born out of I don't live a life so that I can experience qualia but your hypothesis I think mandates that my life is the consequence of cycling through qualia and not the other way around and that's the markovian Dynamics of the likelihood of me going from this state to that state that dictates that that forces my life is that accurate well not quite so it's it's there's this complicated dynamics of Consciousness going on and and the coin of the realm of our experiences and and that's that's the hypothesis so the experiences are are being shared and triggered think like the twitterverse right you know but what you're tweeting our experience is what you're receiving our experiences the Consciousness must break into a just metric ton of separate entities for this to work that's right so and so we're gonna have this it's like um the Twitter versus is huge millions of users and so forth if you look at my Twitter page right there's only a small number of people following me into a small number that I'm following so I'm getting a tiny picture of Twitter I'm pretty so the there there's a big social network a lot going on if you look at the projection onto Hoffman's little things it's just a small little and if you if that's all you saw you wouldn't get a feel for what's everything that's going on in twitterverse because I have very specific interests I mean you'd think that everybody likes Consciousness and Mathematics and is a geek and and they're not so so you'd get the wrong picture about what really is is the twitterverse and so I would think that all the headsets are just projections like taking the twitterverse onto one person's Twitter account their projections onto you know a consistent as you point out the the to keep persistence you might want to have a whole group of them that see the same thing and and can both agree that you all agree that there's a red Porsche or something like that in the game so so you could have a bunch of them that have similar projections of of the one bigger conscious Dynamics um oh maybe I should just stop there and see if that's addressed your question or it has not yet so what I'm trying to figure out is about action so I feel like I'm living my life oh am I actually making a choice yeah like what what do you think does my life arise out of um me taking action and having wants and Desires in fact that's probably the base way I would predict based on how it feels that the 13 year old because I I probably make that my things fit better for me if I just assume that you've got a 13 year old who pulled um Einstein physics off the shelf to put into the program and and they're just running it based on a set of rules but it doesn't really matter but we get to here's here's how it feels that I was given a set of wants and desires and here's where Evolution comes in so I want to survive long enough to have kids that have kids and then everything in my life is just an echo of that it's like a hilariously limited amount of rules that you have to give to me uh sort of Base around how I stay alive the desire to stay alive um what I want to quench hunger thirst sexual desire so on and so forth uh and then you just let me go and when you when you think of like a human as as a character in a video game has certain stats so you marry those wants and desires with those stats and then you just let them go and you see who they bump into and oh you're a childhood trauma and so that's gonna that's gonna change your stats but it's like you just watch how all that plays out and so you get and I think this is why people are really going to struggle with this isn't an emergent phenomenon because all like when I think about building the game I'm just beating it into the head of the team we want the community to create emerging phenomena that rises out of the nature of the rule set and the Technologies right so I'm not trying to create the emerging phenomena and then hope that the technology is born of that which is basically what you're pitching I think and so I can get behind it when I think oh this is just uh girdles incompleteness theorem so there's an infinite number of things to cycle through and as long as I grant you that Consciousness for whatever reason has a desire to cycle through all of that then everything does make sense it plugs in and it works but then I'm like wait the only part of that that then I don't know how to conceptualize because it could just be that I'm trapped in my headset and I just I'm not thinking about it right but what I don't know how to conceptualize is that I am living a life and so to your point that whatever exists outside of the headset has got to explain what's in the headset and I am living my life I'm not just cycling from random qualia to qualia to qualia the qualia that I experience seem mapped so perfectly to the actions that I take which are clearly influenced by how I feel that I get but it manifests as I'm feeling tired therefore I go to bed therefore I have the experience of the softness of the sheets uh versus the Consciousness saying to itself I would like to cycle through the softness of sheets now so either this is the Consciousness has like an agenda and it knows how to create the simulation in a way that's going to yield the best outcome and so it like sat there like oh what would be the best way like how it creates humans in the way that it creates humans it creates life in the way that creates life it creates day night cycle which already creates like so many limitations on us and shapes our fundamental Evolution and all of that I'm just like do you really believe that's Consciousness that all that in motion or is that emergent phenomena out of a simpler thing that Consciousness like if Consciousness just gave birth to the laws of physics then I'd be like word this all makes sense Consciousness just becomes God fair enough um but if Consciousness in your explanation is anything other than God I think I'm confused so great great question on the Free Will and then the nature of the origin of this headset and is it just all pre-programmed or is there room for exploration that's not quite what I'm saying what I'm saying is I know it's pre-programmed because the headset which you have agreed with has a set of rules right well yeah that it does have a well a set of probabilistic rules yes but to get there you need rules you need rules of a probability you need to add a minimum math absolutely right so something somewhere either math is fundamental or Consciousness created math as a way to create a set of rules in order to experience qualia which that is hard to wrap your head around but right so that is that assumption correct that assertion I think is a better way is that assertion correct I'm not sure this is these are deep Waters now so that's why I'm myself now having some difficult trouble so I would say the the Free Will question first I when I look at our mathematics I could interpret the markovian kernel for a given agent as representing the free will choice of that agent I could I could interpret it that way and it but if I do that I look at all the others and it's being affected by all the other conscious agents and you can so my probability space is being impacted by the other conscious agents that's right but but you could say this is my just my quality are being com but my free will is not but but here's the the trick is that groups of conscious agents that satisfy certain conditions are also a conscious agent so so that means if I think about all the individual smaller agents as having free will then this new agent also has if I think about having free will I would need to have a new notion of free will that that's really quite an interesting one it's going to be a scale in some sense a scale free notion of free will that can go for for what is a scale free to be true at all scales no matter how many conscious agents I put together to make a big conscious agent I would still be able to talk about this agent has free will but all of the constituents also have their own free will my guess is that that might be able to be made to work so that the question is you know if I say is it only the one big Consciousness that has free will and we're all puppets or do all the little consciousnesses have free will the answer might be both but but you're going to have to but there'll be this new mathematics that that shows in some sense that the Free Will of the one is made of all the genuine Free Will choices of the individuals and and so it's not like I I autocratic God saying You must do this it's it's it's rather a god exploring all of its own possibilities so to speak freely um through all of the components that which are also freely act interacting but their free interactions are all part of the one freedom of of the one in other words I think that there could be a mathematically consistent notion of free will that doesn't say either or but both and so we get this scale-free notion but I haven't written it down yet but that's why I'm I'm saying that these are deep Waters and and this is where we're going to have to to answer your question we're gonna have to go after some deep mathematical theories of what we mean by by free will my guess is that it's possible but but we'll have to see that we could have genuine Free Will at the smaller agent level um and that's not incompatible with Free Will at higher levels and even the Free Will of of whatever the super I mean I can't even describe the the one agent it transcends any mathematical description um so we could we could never actually get this mathematical model in the final limit that I'm describing but could we get it in in smaller Infinities that we can deal with and and show that it works there we can't get to alef Infinity but we can go maybe in smaller Infinities and see if it works there and get some hint ultimately I mean the reason why I said I'm in deep Waters is because I know that ultimately I can't answer you ultimately I can't get to a final description of the one agent I mean it literally our mathematics says it transcends in the description so I have to Halt and say I can't tell you I can only tell you about projections of that one and the from the projections the mathematics points to the one but I our analytical tools fail us we can't actually go there can you walk me through how the data how the projections point to the one and the one being like a the one God Consciousness it's like a thing yes well again I that's a good question because I mean I'm not saying that the data we have uniquely determined this Theory right absolutely not so I would say they Point me as a scientific theorist toward this this hypothesis here I am with conscious experiences interacting with others that I think have conscious experiences my physicalist framework can't explain them at all and so I'm proposing that there are these conscious experiences that give rise to space-time as a interface and when I write down the most simple mathematical model that I can do for that all of a sudden that mathematics I wasn't intending it but the mathematics points to a single major Consciousness that I can never describe so so that's the sense in which I say it was sort of pointed pointed to that and I would guess that other conscious agents with either interfaces that are not even like our space-time interface but but have mathematical skills um and are looking coming up against the limits of their own interface and starting to realize Oh I thought this was real but this is just the interface might under the hypothesis the Consciousness is fundamental might run into the same thing and then get pointed by their own mathematics to to a universal Consciousness um like but but again this is these are deep Waters and I'm not secure here at all but I would say that the free I mean I've have good discussions like with Annika Harris and so forth about about Free Will and uh Free Will is a standardly understood probably not but free will in this new sense in which I'm saying that there could be a scale-free notion and a new mathematical model of free will to scale free quite possibly there and to your point about um it's not dictated there's exploration real exploration going on I I would again agree that there's real to the extent that I'm talking about all these little agents having their genuine free will there's there's genuine real exploration going on even though it's not contradiction to say as well that the one has has the free will see in other words in some cases when we think about things we think it has to be this or that but when we look at it more closely we realize that there's a deeper way of thinking about it in which both can be true and we hadn't thought about it that way okay so if those are deep Waters I'm going to drag you to the bottom of the Marianas Trench click on this one um does Consciousness have a form um I would say awareness has no form but assumes all sorts of conscious forms does I'm trying to sneak up on an idea here and I'm not sure the right way to ask this but it's like when you talk about the headset is a simulation born of the born of Consciousness itself it is emergent from Consciousness right because the headset is so specific and acts in a very specific way and as I think about Ai and the way it pulls images forth out of the possibility space it does it in a certain way and you can create different kinds of AI that do it in slightly different ways and they yield different outcomes and so for the headset that we all experience to be the way that it is it requires Consciousness to be a certain way and so what I'm trying to get to is when there is no physicality how does it ever become a certain way because the way that Consciousness could act would have to pull from a probability space but if I'm right about that then math comes before consciousness and if I'm wrong about that I don't understand what sets Consciousness moving in a specific Direction well I think that there are countless ways that Consciousness can can create headsets and it does them all and so one thing that we have to do to to answer your question and I'm very interested to do this but it's going to be hard work is to actually use the markovian framework of conscious agents and actually write down a dynamical system of conscious agents that constructs our space-time framework our space-time headset right so that's how would you because if there is an infinite number of potential headsets how would you begin to narrow it down to the headset we actually well so what we're going to have to do is is is think about a a really large dynamical system of conscious agents which will never be close to the big one that we really need to get to so we're all we'll always be starting with a system that's big for us but trivial compared to the one but that's all we can do as scientists so I'll have to start with something that's big for me and and then show that it has its own Dynamics which is quite complicated now I'm going to make a smaller headset projection of it using part of the agents that are available in it to to create that so there'll be maybe maybe I'll have like a trillion agents the interacting but I arranged for the Dynamics of say a billion of them to be creating a particular space-time headset and then what I would do so so I know because markovian kernels are computationally Universal I can do that I can use the whole language of of conscious agent Dynamics to create a projection into it like a space-time headset I know that is their computational Universal so I can do that now the question is once I've got that dynamical system and I have some of the agents creating this headset what happens when I turn that headset and have it look at the whole agent system and in particular the part of the system that creates that headset so I'm taking a bunch of agents in their Dynamics is creating a space-time interface but now I use the interface to look back at the only thing that's available which are agents that's all that's available to look at but I want to look at the agents that were particularly interested that were involved in the creation of the interface what will that set of Agents look like they'll look like neurons and brains in other words why would they need to look like neurons and brains well for us for for that's another in other words I'm saying I thought they didn't map like that um remember neurons are just artifacts of the of the interface they're symbols in the interface yeah but pulling from our earlier interviews and so we definitely haven't talked about it this time but maybe your thinking has changed or maybe I misunderstood your thinking previously but it was my understanding I think I was asking you specifically about the moon and I was like but there's gravitational concerns it can't not represent something underlying and you said Tom you're you're making a mistake this is all a simulation gravity is a simulation the Moon is a simulation you don't need the moon there to simulate gravity to move Tides or whatever they can just be program rules and that's just how it happens and I was like whoa so why then would the the things that create Consciousness and thinking look like neurons in my brain it doesn't seem like they would need to map like that well right so the moon doesn't need to exist but but there's going to be a systematic relationship between the symbols in your headset and whatever the software is right there's going to be a systematic relationship between them so that tells me God I'm really trying to guess are you going to say this that tells me I know this is wrong because I know you don't believe in this but that tells me that there is physicality to uh Consciousness that wherever it is that there is some parallel representation but that for there to be a physical God am I help I I can keep making guesses but I know that I'm hitting dead ends of things that you disagree with so what am I getting wrong right now yeah I'm not sure yet um so keep guessing then so okay um what I'm trying to figure out is for the for there to be a corollary of producing Consciousness to actually look like neurons or that I'm hung up on the word look like okay will it actually look like neurons well so Consciousness won't look like neurons but the uh one could bill put it this way you could build an interesting interface such that when the interface looks back at the whole conscious agent Network that created it it would see that as as if it were neurons and brains in projection I mean so I'm not saying that's all projection it's all projection so I'm not saying it's necessary but I'm saying I could easily see making that happen so when we look when we in the headset smash a brain look at neurons we are seeing the representation of what is going on at a deeper level outside of space-time or a deeper deeper level of the simulation outside of space-time which is a deeper level of the simulation right it's it's in I hope we're using language the same way probably not but you're much more comfortable with that it's that things are not physical even outside the outside of space-time I see it as it's a maybe different set of rules or something but that it's still physical but I accept that well there are rules so I'm there there are there are going to be rules uh maybe physical I mean you know made out of matter inside space and time that's what I mean by physical something that's you know made out of particles in space and time yeah why hypothesis the conscious agents are not inside space and time at all so they're not physical in that sense they are rule governed and I can say that they exist even if I don't perceive them I could say that they they exist whereas stuff in the headset is only there when I render it um some maybe we're not disagreeing I I and I'm not saying it's necessary that when you look use your headset to look at the agents that create the headset that you will necessarily see neurons I'm saying that we could easily set up a situation or with some effort we could set up a situation in which that was the case um in other cases you might see only a single neuron for example if you're a very simple thing or or some some other structure um depends on the nature of your interface but for for an interface like ours so another way to put it is here's what I think neurons are neurons are our interface looking at the conscious agents that are constructing our interface that's what neurons are they're the interface symbols headset symbols that our headset gets when it looks at the conscious agents that are constructing the headset hmm that's what's up okay so I asked a variant of this question earlier but I don't think we ever got to the answer so if as we make all these breakthroughs um would you stay inside the headset if you if you could you there were two paths before you path number one is you completely exit the headset and uh inside the the game World the simulation you your avatar Falls over and basically appears Dead uh but you are now like out chilling with the Consciousness or you return to the Consciousness is maybe you become aware of your Oneness with the consciousness that feels like the right way to sum up the way you see it yes yeah I think that that ideas is um can't be dismissed out of hand I think it's a very interesting idea and I don't have a better one right now so so yes it the it feels to me like um I'm not my body my body is just an avatar if you're in virtual reality you do feel that no I would well I think that I'll say that I'm very much attached to my body and if something hurt my body I would I would be panicked and so forth so so I don't feel like I'm not my body absolutely but but when I'm you know thinking intellectually and coolly about things if something actually happens to me if I'm in a car wreck it's a different story but but just thinking intellectually about it and maybe if I meditated more I would actually feel that way but but I don't um but just intellectually it seems I don't know I'll have to I'll just leave it that then yeah so I I asked that part of it because what I'm really trying to get to is if you could return to Oneness with Consciousness or stay in The Matrix but be like Neo where now you know how to bend it to your will would I which which would you prefer well my my guess is at death we take off the headset and maybe we lose a lot of stuff that was in the headset but we don't but we're still aware we're but we're we're just not tacked into the headset anymore um that's my my best guess uh and so there I'm completely open to being wrong deeply wrong but you know there are near-death experiences that that may or may not point to that kind of thing that people have I'm going to be doing being part of a um I'm part of a film where they discuss near-death experiences and so I talk about that possibility in the film from from this point of view um and and so so if I were a physicalist it's real clear they're you know if the brain is somehow creating Consciousness then when the brain is dead there's no consciousness this other view that says consciousness creates space-time and brains as just headsets has opened to it that um my Consciousness where I put mine quotes the Consciousness that's looking through this Avatar um does not perish when the Avatar perishes that that's certainly open to this point of view that's not what motivated the point of view but it but it certainly is um open to it so intellectually I'm open to that point of view emotionally I fear death so even though the intellectually it seems quite reasonable um I have the darwinian fear of death that's this wired into me and me that's part of the part of the game so there's two buttons before you one rejoin the constant and let's say for now that really is what happens so you would maintain a sense of awareness but all of your sense of self is gone forever um or you stay in The Matrix knowing that it's fake knowing that you're in the headset but you have special powers which button do you press um I I would probably go for the new stuff I would probably three dimensions of space one dimension of time feels quite confining to me I feel like we got a cheap headset and then this is a fairly cheap simulation that we're in and I would love to see what else is on offer for example when I'm trying to solve these some mathematical problems I can imagine a three-dimensional shape but I can't imagine a four-dimensional shape and we had to do some of the problems we're solving we have to look at the geometries of things in six or nine or more dimensions and we can't just sort of imagine it and and figure out what's going on we we have to crawl our way up to the geometry by theorem proof theorem proof we actually have to prove our way one so we're like Blind Men filling the elephant with theorems and proofs to understand the geometry I would love to have a headset where I could just see in a glance everything about nine-dimensional space and you can't do that with our current headset and why stop at nine Dimensions why not be able to just see in 30 or a thousand or a billion Dimensions do you though think that inherent in the way that you think about that it still requires you to be you because I'll think about this a lot if you've ever seen the movie Freaky Friday all right uh I think about this a lot with my wife like I really really want to change bodies with her for 24 hours so that she can see what it's like to be me and I can see what it's like to be her I think I'd be a much better husband if I really understood probably slowly but the reality is the second you change bodies I would be her right and she would be me there wouldn't be her as me me as her right and so I my even if you're right here's what I think would happen if you when you take off the headset the headset is everything you think of as you and that even if you're right that you can meditate your way to moments like that where you're just pure awareness um one if you're right all that the Consciousness lives to do is cycle through other qualias so you would either be reincarnated meaning that you would just pop back up in a new headset because that's what the Consciousness is meant to do is cycle through all this qualia and so you would re-fragment yourself back off you would pop up you'd be reincarnated you'd live life again or you would return to the Borg The Beehive the ant colony however you want to think about it you would be reinstantiated as just pure awareness and all of that loving and clinging and hating and attachment and Precious Moments and distance and all that poof gone and I find that when people explore these ideas from a religious perspective they are forgetting that they're mired in the gruesome reality of The Human Experience and that to transcend that and be in heaven for instance and never experience pain again or whatever you would be so different you wouldn't recognize or relate to anybody in the same way and so I have yet to hear any Theory whatsoever other than um regrowing your biological organs where you actually end up cheating death everything else is you die all of the things you love poof go away maybe you're exchanging them for something better but make no mistake everything goes away well these are deep Waters again but here's here's another take on it and that is that if you and I are just the one looking at itself through avatars the one is learning whatever it needs to learn through these avatars and that's not lost on the one it is now part of the one that that's in some sense eternal and so the reason I would in given the choice that you're asking me to make here uh um my own predilection would be to say let's go for something entirely different now because in some sense that that partly partly because I'm inquisitive and I would like to what is it like to live in a five-dimensional world what is it like to have um 20 dimensions of color and in and a thousand dimensions of emotion instead of just a few that we have what what what is it like um my feeling is that we have the training wheel set version right now of this stuff really really small um and and so my guess is I one possibility is that look you and I really are this infinite intelligence this infinite Consciousness that's what we really are we're peering through in this case a very very simple avatars with very very simple interfaces and maybe it's the one saying this is fun but when I answer your question this way maybe was the one saying yeah this is greatness is fun but but there's so much more to explore in different dimensions now I haven't lost whatever I learned in this little interface and I'm happy for the relationships and the friends and you know I'll you know and all the things I learned about war and hate and and religion and and all that all that other stuff you know all the things that go on here um but that's only a mere in some sense trivial projection of this entire cantor's hierarchy of Infinities of potential this is trivial and the potential is mind-bogglingly infinite and so my attitude let's get on with it we nothing is lost by moving on and everything has to be gained this Maya you can see but again these are very very deep Waters I'm not talking theorem and proof here I'm now speaking very intuitively based on the science says as it is in the very um initial steps I should be very very clear I mean all of science has been about the space-time interface until the last 20 years or so we're taking our very very first baby steps outside of space-time and so almost surely all of the ideas that we're having are going to look very naive you know a century or two from now they'll look back and go yeah great generation they were the generation that stepped outside of the space-time interface hats off to them but boy were their ideas so parochial they they were shedding the interface but boy they didn't really understand what they were really doing that's my guess all right I actually want to spend more time in the intuitive but is there anything from the paper or any sort of grounded mathematics that you think will ground people in your theory more in a way that will keep the intuitive exploration from just spinning off into La La Land well yeah so I'll just say in the paper I gave you and it'll come out on June 24th it's going to be made in all all tweeted if you made it this far in the interview read the paper yeah so it'll be available June 24th and I'll tweet it when it um comes out it might be a couple days before that I would say one one of the interesting things we're doing in that paper is we're showing how specific properties of the markovian dynamic subconscious agents mapped to specific properties of particles like Mass spin momentum and energy and so I'm not saying we're right but we now have mathematically precise proposals so I mean for example these are words that won't make sense but mass is the entropy rate of recurrent communicating classes of conscious agents and just to be clear what you're saying you can predict now is particle scattering this is going to be for for particle scattering and and by the way the reason I'm going after particle scattering is is not because I have some fetish for you know high energy physics or something like that it's that's the simplest place that we can make our first connections with the interface particles are the most Elementary things that our interface has that's why I'm going there they're the simplest thing I'm not going for brains first because those are countless quadrillions trillions whatever of of particles and and so that's not the place to start let's see if we can get the mathematics and and the experimental data for individual particles so so our paper is proposing and maybe just so the people can show that we're wrong we'll see but we have you know we say that mass is so-called entropy rate of the recurrent communicating classes and that has that then tells us what our massless particles and what our massive particles and and and so we're getting very specific predictions that we're going to be making about momentum and spin and and energy and mass so so that's why so this is where rubber hits the road right I'm talking all this High flute and stuff about Consciousness leading to the interface well the writing the right questions are so what is the what is the mass of an electron what part of your conscious agent Dynamics is going to map into what we call Mass what is the spin in um why is there a hyperfine structure in the energy levels of the orbitals of electrons and so forth we're getting hints at answers to those kinds of questions about like the hyperfine structure so it's it's really quite interesting so so again I would be stunned if we're right but at least we're precise so that we can now begin the the whole um process of of saying okay at least these hypothesis hypotheses are precise so now we can try to show their limits try to prove where they reach their limits and then move on or to show that you know this is just fundamentally wrong-headed there's nothing worthwhile maybe our definition of mass is just plain wrong we'll see um but it's it's intriguing it's intriguing enough that um I have a particle physicist who put his name on the paper with us doesn't mean it's right it doesn't mean that he's convinced that we're right but we have a real particle physicist who who thinks that um it's it's if it's wrong it's not obviously wrong and it's worth pushing on right yeah I mean I hope anybody listening to this understands how the scientific method works I am constantly trying to tell my team hey you need to be Fearless in the predictions that you make because you shouldn't hold yourself accountable to always being right you should hold yourself accountable to always learning and getting a little bit better so the fact that you're willing to make a precise prediction uh your paper is full of mathematics and it's there for anybody to check so people will be able to help you find the edges which is something I've heard you talk about and I really respect about you is that one you obviously approach everything with humility but two you actively want people to find the edges of your hypothesis your theory so that you know where it's wrong so you can adjust and get more right Which is far more interesting especially if you sincerely want to understand what's outside of that headset it's like well I would rather realize I'm wrong right find out how to get right so that I can actually begin to explore that possibility Space versus think I'm right but really I'm wrong and nobody ever helps me come to understand why um I I really I really like that and I hope everybody listening takes that on in their own life I think that that's really important okay so I wanted to to make sure that you had a second to lay out the grounding there that this is something that you're seeing in particle physics that there really is there there to pursue because the intuitive space for somebody like me who's not a mathematician who while I use the scientific method in business I definitely do not consider myself a scientist but pursuing the intuitive things pursuing the thought experiments feels true to Einstein's encouragement to all of us lay people to focus more on imagination than um knowledge right to to really understand how to begin to think through these things so one of his famous thought experiments was that that in a falling elevator you would feel like you were weightless right and that ends up being it took him years but he ends up finally putting that together with some other um ideas that he had intuited including if you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn on a flashlight what happens and in that Spirit you said something as you were describing the Consciousness and you as an instantiation of that only to go back to the one and you said well the one is still learning what it needs to learn and I am like a dog with a bone with that idea what do you mean needs to learn what like when I think about a human right it needs to learn things two stay alive because it's been given these Drives By Evolution but what has set up the uh the the Consciousness that isn't physical right right to need anything my guess again we're weighing over my head but Mike here we are might as well thank you um the joy of exploration it's just pre-programmed how it is it's just yeah that the the one is the only thing that there is but it's infinitely changing infinitely there is self-exploration it's really infinite self-exploration and looking and and enjoying and ever expanding it's it's uh understanding of itself it's it's that would be my my so you conceptualize it as still moving towards pleasure well that that that pleasure is just in some sense um it's it's different than an evolutionary thing so so an evolution and I should say also concretely wise different this dynamics of conscious agents does not need to have an arrow of time so there's that's really interesting why because that doesn't seem true okay the the entropy one can write down a markovian Dynamics in which the entropy does not grow straightforward but it's a theorem three-line proof trivial trivial proof that any projection of that marketing dynamics that has no error of time any projection of it that loses information Say by conditional probability it will give you new Dynamics it'll be a projected dynamics of the original Dynamics and that new Dynamics will have a narrow of time because of the loss of information so the arrow of time so here's my view our experience right now of an arrow of time and of the universe with the big bang and then maybe a big crunch or whatever or entropy death at the end that whole Arrow of time is not an Insight at all into what lies Beyond space-time it's an artifact of the projection and from an evolutionary point of view right time is the fundamental limited resource right if I run out of time before I get my next meal if it takes much time to get my next meal it's over if I if it takes much time to get my next drink of water it's over for me time is my most fundamental limited resource so that limited resource of time is not an incident to reality that's an artifact of projection from a Timeless conscious agent Dynamics and that also suggests all the other limited resources that's all artifacts so evolution of natural selection is a beautiful Theory but it's the theory of all the artifacts that you see when you do a projection from a realm in which there are no limit to resources there is no competition but what looks like evolution of a natural selection in this projection it looks like there's an arrow of time so all of our intuitions right now about learning new stuff is going to be very hard for us because our intuitions are deeply shaped right now by our interface where there's an entropy Arrow and in this realm Beyond there is need not be an entropy Arrow and so wrapping our heads around what it's like in in to to have the notion of exploration where there's no entropy Arrow now I'm not saying I'm wrap my head around it but I do know that the mathematics is there that the convenience does not have to have an arrow of time in the in the sense of an arrow of increasing entropy so so and that's again one of the points of doing science with precise mathematics I get emails quite often from people that I think are are very very bright and have really good ideas and they don't know how to take them and make them precise and as a result you can never surprise yourself you can never like like Einstein when he had his idea about you you mentioned the falling elevator and so forth and and so he had that one 1907 or something like that 1906 and it wasn't he worked for years to take that idea and make it mathematically precise 1915. and he had he learned tons and tons of what at the time was state of the art new fairly new math it was hard for him sleepless nights pulling his hair out really working hard to take his good intuition and turn so he finally wrote down in mathematics in 1915. and a year later um a guy named schwartsfield wrote back to Einstein and said here's a solution to your questions and they predict what we now call black holes now Einstein didn't foresee that he didn't like it he didn't believe it he disbelieved in black holes he wanted to get rid of them so Einstein's theory came back and surprised him and that's why it's so important for us to do science because what we do is we take our best ideas that we have right now and then we we make them mathematically precise and then the mathematics comes back and it slaps us in the face and says here are the implications of your of the ideas that you started with the implications that you simply couldn't think deeply enough about on your own but the mathematics can take you where your own you know just Consciousness wouldn't necessarily go and so so here's one of those directions with this notion of conscious agents the Dynamics need not have increasing entropy and so our whole intuition about an arrow of time need not hold in this realm so when we talk about the notion of explore Consciousness exploring for the joy of it we're going to have to re-jig how we think about the notion of for us exploration is something that happens in an era of time what is what does it mean for us can we wrap our heads around the notion of exploration where we let go of an increasing entropy kind of thing I'm not I don't know if we can maybe you just have to let go of this headset altogether to really get that but is it possible while we're under the limits of this headset to to wrap our minds around it we can at least get pointers to that idea our mathematics led to this pointer um and I would never even gone there unless the mathematics took me there so so that's so so I would say that it's just like you know um the amateur astronomer with a pair of binoculars can could be brighter than the guy with the James Webb Space Telescope but he's never going to beat the guy with the James Webb Space Telescope because the guys got better tools and that's what science does for you you may be smarter than Einstein but if you don't actually put yourself using the tools of mathematics and so forth that genius will never actually flower in the sense of reaching all the potential implications of what it means and so that's why we do science the way we do with mathematical Precision because for two reasons if our ideas are good we probably don't understand all their implications and so the math will come back and it'll be our teacher and second certainly our ideas have their limits and it's hard for us to understand what the limits are and in good cases the math will come back and tell us what those limits are so for example Einstein's theory of gravity together with Quantum field Theory tell us 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and space time is over it has no operational meaning who could have guessed could you have guessed you know could Einstein have guessed oh yeah I have this idea about space time but at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters is going to follow her not even an Einstein could guess that that would only come um through taking your ideas making them doing the travail I mean Einstein really it was a birthing process it was very apparently very very hard um to give birth to general relativity and many mathematicians working in physics and so forth say the same thing you're working in the dark it's hard you're you're struggling and then all of a sudden if you're lucky you get that breakthrough and and you see things but then it comes back and you learn the limits of the basic concepts that you started with and then you reboot from a new set of assumptions it's interesting that you say about the set of assumptions so as we explore this topic I realize that um I think we still have we each have slightly different assumptions though I think that we're talking well about the topic but take the arrow of time for instance so the thing that I find fascinating about the hypothesis that you put forward is for me anyway I don't have the math to back it up this is definitely land of intuition but what I find fascinating is if you're correct and it's just Consciousness is the singular thing it is for whatever reason Joy need to pursue desire to learn whatever it's running through all of this qualia um and that the tool it uses to do so is this headset there's an infinite array of headsets but the one we're in has learned that there's only certain qualia that can be achieved when there is an arrow of time and that's why I'm saying when you first said that I was like I don't know that that's true meaning inside the headset for at least certain types of qualia it is clear in fact we we the only thing we know is that the quality that we have access to requires the arrow of time we presume that there are infinite headsets that provide just unimaginable unknown types of qualia but the type that we have directly experienced all require the arrow of time that's right and that that's we've been shaped basically by our headset to to think that way and if I ask you to imagine a new color that you've never seen before hmm you can't do it I mean again it's not because there aren't I mean pigeons have four color receptors presumably pigeons are experiencing colors that that no human has could even imagine and maybe the mantis shrimp is seeing stuff that the the pigeon can't you know and and then the birds that see polarization of light I mean they're seeing something that I I what is it like to see polarization of light I don't know it what is it like to have infrared vision like certain Pit Vipers what is it like to actually experience an electric field to sense some electric field for some fish or creatures and underwater I mean I have no what is it like to be a bad doing echolocation I I don't know I literally have no idea so so these are Pointers to me that's I mean in the headset we get all these hints of Realms of qualia utterly outside anything that I can completely imagine so talk to me about near-death experiences and then I want to get into um psychedelics and whether they are simply another form of quality of what it's like to be a human who's having that experience or whether that's actually melting the human away and revealing something closer to being the one again but what can we learn from near-death experiences do you think it's a like a a sort of half return to the one or is it just well that's what happens in the headset to the brain when you deprive it of oxygen well from a physicalist framework clearly the latter is the case right so from a physicalist framework space time is fundamental and Consciousness is a product of the brain and so any experiences of transcendence so things going beyond the headset have to be just the brain malfunctioning in its final throws of death something like that but if space-time is doomed does the physicist tell us and it's not fundamental then that leaves open the possibility doesn't dictate that near-death experiences are genuine insights into some ex conscious experiences that transcends our space-time interface but it certainly is is compatible with that point of view and so I think it's worth on on that framework to explore the possibility um that there are some insights and I would take any of those reports like we take any kind of eyewitness testimony right with a grain of salt and you try to get corroboration and and um and discount it but but but on the other hand you don't want to just ignore the data either right so there's the the fine line to to be opened to get the insights but but not to um to jump on anything just because it sort of fits your preconceived conceptions most of our preconceived conceptions are deeply wrong we thought the Earth was flat we thought the Earth was the center of the universe we thought space and time were fundamental wrong wrong wrong wrong so so we're betting poorly so so anything that even for if we think that consciousness Will Survive death well we think about that the way we think about it is probably wrong and so what we what we have to do is again be so that's why I'm being when I say we're in deep Waters here and I'm being very very careful it's these are things that my theory our Theory um suggests but but I don't want to be at all doctrinaire I think what I should do is make bold proposals but they're just proposals and the goal is to be precise so we can figure out where the proposals are wrong so so yeah so in that Spirit yeah the near-death experiences may have some good data about transitions out of this interface um in that in that spirit and there's probably modalities of what people bring back yeah there are there are some commonalities um there's a lot of reports of you know going through a tunnel a light tunnel some like a review I think Ray Moody or something like that um is famous for for um categorizing a lot of the similarities in in near-death experiences uh a Life review and then of course the reports we have are people who came back so then they they came back and so forth so so there are um there are but but there are also some that report you know horrific you know it's just not all not all reports are are great so um someone that that we know personally had a near the death experience and was very very um pleasurable and came back and has no fear she claims to have no fear of death now um um so I so I don't know so yeah uh be part of the film that's exploring these near-death experiences there it's put out um the the I think it's the langone Medical Center in New York there are there are some cardiologists who are you know they they work with patients who die but with with new Cardiology techniques they can keep the heart and the body in from deteriorating for quite a long time now you know an hour or something or maybe longer and then they can bring these people back and so this film is partly directed by a cardiologist or who who was seeing so many of these experiences that that he wanted to document what he's seeing in the ER you know and and um again you know I'm not going to be a doctrinaire about it but I think it's data that shouldn't be ignored and how we should interpret it we should be very careful so if that stuff is real the prediction that that seems to make is that not only is there a sense of Consciousness that remains but that there is sensory perception that holds out for quite a while because at least from the things I've heard people come back with a sense of either it's peaceful or whatever but that means that they were able to experience that and retain it that's right that's right yeah this is quite fascinating yeah that again this is exactly the right scientific way to think about that that's this is data Maybe if it is Data what does it entail about um letting go of the headset and and what kind of experience we might expect have afterwards and is that just a transitional thing or is it more permanent and so forth right right dude that is so fascinating everything that we've talked about today the research all of it has has really made me start to question um my own thoughts around this idea the paper is amazing where can people follow along with you as you continue this journey well yeah so I do post on Twitter that my handle is at Donald D Hoffman h-o-f-f-m-a-n all one word lowercase and every time I publish a paper I put a link to the actual Journal article and then also talks like this you podcast anything that comes up I will post those so there I you can also um if you if you're a scientist of course you can just go to Google Scholar and type in my name if you just dollyhofen Google Scholar you can get directly to I have roughly 120 Publications awesome all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want to really go deep into this theme check out this compilation of my best moments with Donald Hoffman this gives us possibly a chance to have a language which for the first time ever we might be able to formulate a precise hypothesis about what we mean by the word god