The Case Against Reality | Donald Hoffman

#133 My awesome guest this week is Donald Hoffman with a mind-bending conversation.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist and popular science author, and in this episode, he talks about our perceptions of reality and then makes us question it. Do we see the world as it truly is? How can we understand the relationship between the physical world and consciousness?

Drawing from his inspirations and his own books and papers, Don teaches us about evolutionary theory and how it shapes our perceptions into illusions. In short, how has evolution made our brains perceive reality the way we do? Cool right? I definitely thought so. I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I did!

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like: Exploring Consciousness & The Essence Of Life | Tom Campbell

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About Prof. Donald: Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California Irvine, and he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and color, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem.

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Donald’s Twitter: twitter.com/donalddhoffman
Donald’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/donald-hoffman-8b92b613

Read more about Donald Hoffman and his work here:

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TRANSCRIPT

Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Guy:
0:07
Hello awesome people. This is guy Of course and welcome to another stellar episode of my show, my podcast, where of course have conversations that go well beyond conventional health, wealth and wisdom to inspire change in our lives. And I am very, very excited to be bringing you today’s guest, Mr. Donald Hoffman. It was another mind blowing, bending conversation. That’s just I love it. I love it. I feel like a kid in a candy store. And I’m so proud and happy to be bringing this show to you and this episode to today. So if you’re enjoying the new shows, like this is I think what now my fourth episode back in into the new series. If you haven’t checked out some of the others. Check them out. Last week’s was Peter Panagore. Oh my god. I’ve been getting some great feedback from that one. You haven’t checked that one out with his ice climbing adventure. I definitely recommend it. But on to today what an episode What can I say? So, if you’re unfamiliar with Donald’s work, he is an American cognitive psychologist and Popular Science author, Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments I can just about pronounce the words. What I love about the show is that I got to be honest, when you get somebody of Don Hoffman’s caliber on the show, always extremely intelligent man, very academically studied, you know, I’m not going to try and keep up with him. I mean, and, and for me, it’s about how can we have a conversation and just try and simplify some of his teachings and findings over the last 30 years and I thought we did An amazing job of that today is a super nice guy. I really connected with him. And we had a bloody brilliant conversation about it because he’s written a book called The Case Against Reality. It’s doing exceptionally well, I definitely recommend you check it out, which is a ground-breaking examination of human perception reality, and the evolutionary schism between the two, essentially. So do we see the world as it truly is? So Don says, No, our visual perceptions are not a window on reality, but our interfaces constructed by natural selection. Let me think about that. And then think about this. Think about the file icon we see on our desktops is shaped like a small page on our screens. The file itself is made of a series of numbers of ones and zeros stored in an intangible way, yet we still see the icon. So this is what it’s all about, and using 30 years of his own research, as well as others work in the evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, computer science, information theory, and philosophy, Hoffman proves that evolution has shaped our perceptions into illusions. This is deep stuff, man. And of course, this is how I want the podcast to go. But don’t be put off by a lot of that technical jargon because like I said, it truly is a wonderful conversation. It might be something you need to listen to a few times. I know I’m gonna really listen to this show myself. Just to make sure I could read it was just when everywhere and like I said, I loved it. I might be biased, but you’re gonna love it too. And I just want to continue giving some reviews and shout outs before we go on to dance or this shout out is five stars must listen on an iTunes review by Annabel Blakelock and Annabel Hey Annabel and I’ve been listening to guy’s podcast for the last couple of years, and they are brilliant, always so informative and keeps me captivated. He really knows how to ask the right questions. You won’t be disappointed. I will. I do work at that. That’s for sure. I appreciate the reviews guys please keep them coming in. It really helps distinguish podcasts from others and helps other people find me and because if you tune in every week and enjoy it would be awesome if you could pay forward in some small way I’d be greatly appreciated and just let me know DM me, tag me on Instagram Stories @guyhlawrence follow me over there if you want to see me jump in an ice bath and all the rest of it. And

Guy:
4:30
yeah, that’s not what’s going on.

Guy:
4:33
lots going on, you know the www.guylawrence.com.au or www.liveinflow.co if you want to make this work, become more of a reality and meet us in person. Anyway, let’s go over to Donald Hoffman. This one is awesome. Enjoy.

Guy:
4:49
Don, welcome to the podcast.

Don:
4:51
Thank you guys. Thanks for having me.

Guy:
4:53
I love asking everyone on the show and I’m interested to know your answer to this. But if you were on an airplane and you sat next to a complete stranger and they asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?

Don:
5:04
I would say that I’ve just retired. I’m a professor emeritus at the University of California, at Irvine in the cognitive sciences department. So I’m still, you know, part of the faculty there, but I’m Emeritus and so I would say, I do research into visual perception and consciousness and the evolution of perceptual systems. And now trying to understand the relationship between the physical world and consciousness. So the hard problem of consciousness, I would say, that kind of thing, and then their eyes would glaze over.

Guy:
5:45
Hopefully people’s eyes glaze over today, that’s for sure. It’s, look, I’ve been diving into your work and it’s absolutely fascinating and it is wonderful to hear a language and the science come into these things. The bigger questions, it’s wonderful, and I guess my first question to you was is Why are you so passionate about this work? And the hard questions on consciousness?

Don:
6:08
That’s a good question. I think it’s fundamentally because I’m a geek. And so I’m very interested in our perceptual systems, how we see why do we see in three dimensions? Why do we see the way that we see why, from an evolutionary point of view, do our perceptual systems work the way they work? But I guess the thing that really gets me fascinated is when there’s a question in science, that no one can answer when, with all the advances that science has made, and all the remarkable insight that we have into nature, when there’s a question that we haven’t got a single theory that has made headway on a problem, and everybody is flummoxed. That’s really interesting. And usually that’s Where the new revolution is going to come from? If you look at those problems that science cannot answer with all of the current theories and technology, that’s where you’re going to get the next breakthrough. And so problem that one problem that we can’t answer right now there, there are a couple that we can’t in science, big, big problems that we can’t answer, but the one that has caught my attention is the relationship between consciousness and the brain, or, or the physical world more generally. You know, it’s been assumed that somehow brain activity causes not only our behaviors, but also our conscious experiences. The question is to take that beyond a mere statement, you know, of course, the brain does it too. Okay, precisely, how is it that a specific kind of brain activity could cause or be my experience of the taste of coffee, right, no hand wave, which neural activity and why with that particular neural activity and no other class of neural activity be the cause of the taste of coffee. What is the principal reason why that pattern of neural activity couldn’t be the smell of a rose? So and the questions I’ve just asked, cannot be answered, No one can tell you. For any conscious experience, I’m picking coffee in the smell of a rose, but anything an itch, a headache, the color red, the sound of a trumpet, any conscious experience you want to name or allow them to study. There’s not one conscious experience where we can say here is the pattern of neural activity or the the functional properties of neural activity. Maybe it’s a program, not the neurons per se are interesting or important. Maybe it’s the program that the neurons instantiate, okay, what program has to be the taste of chocolate and could not be the smell of garlic, and why? So we’re completely flummoxed, so 99% of my colleagues in this area, believe that brain activity is or causes our conscious experiences. And despite brilliant people, and by the way, these are my colleagues, these are my friends. These are smart people. These are not dumb people. They’re very, very smart. And they’re giving it their level best shot. So, you know, hats off to them. I’m glad they’re doing it. But they would do a person agree that we can’t explain one single conscious experience. And so that makes it really interesting. And that’s why a lot of bright people including Nobel Prize winners are looking at this because they know that there’s a problem that’s really halting us that strongly. There’s some new insights to be gained here. So it’s because I’m a geek, but also because this problem is really, really central and could blow things up in terms of our conceptions of who we are and of our world.

Guy:
9:53
It’s incredible, isn’t it? And do you think we’re getting closer to finding out the answers?

Don:
10:00
I hope so, but I think that we have to have this radical change in our worldview to make it happen. So, the might my good friends and colleagues who are studying this problem, all assume that space and time are fundamental or space time the combining of space and time into space time is fundamental that particles and objects in space time like anything from quarks and gluons all the way up to neurons and brains and so forth, that these are the fundamental elements of reality, these are the things that have causal powers in reality, and therefore, somehow neural activity or abstract properties of neural activity, certain functional properties of neural activity are going to cause our conscious experiences or be our conscious experiences. And I think that we can solve this problem if we let go of that deeply held assumption. But letting go of that assumption that spacetime is fundamental, and that objects in space time are fundamental and have causal powers. That’s a big thing to let go of. That’s the entire foundation of modern science. That’s what physicalism is. And so to let go of that means a radical restructuring of our scientific worldview.

Guy:
11:19
Wow, yeah. The whole thing just fascinates me. Do you? The question that occurred to me then, coming into that is like if I stopped people on the street, or have a conversation, nobody’s even question and reality. You know, we just go about our day most of the time, and we don’t think about it. In your mind. How important do you think it is? And what do you think it will mean to us, as individuals like myself, worry about the bills to humanity? Then the bigger picture if what you’re saying is leading into this new science?

Don:
11:57
Well, you’re absolutely right. Most of us don’t question our process. We don’t question much of this stuff at all. And, and so those of us who you know, are studying neural activity, its relationship to consciousness and it’s sort of geeky, it’s, it’s, it’s, and it’s not really clear to the average person why you’d want to do them and, you know, what’s the profitability for doing something like that and, but I would also point, back I don’t know century and half ago Michael Faraday in England was doing these weird experiments with wires and magnets and electricity and frog legs and so forth. And he just did dozens and dozens maybe hundreds of experiments with iron filings just looking at and really writing down carefully all these really interesting experiments. It’s just it for most people go like no, you know, this is playing with weird stuff in the lab, you know, so who cares about these magnets and iron filings and, and wires and so forth. But no Faraday to his credit, really was careful and wrote down all these experiments and then a guy named James Clark Maxwell looked at all of these results and realized he could write down a series of questions called Maxwell’s equations, which captured everything that Faraday had done. So Faraday did this geeky, careful stuff that, you know most people wouldn’t care about is just a, you know, a novelty. Then Maxwell comes along and says, Well, here’s these equations that completely model everything you’ve seen that Maxwell’s equations are the foundation of modern electronics. They, they were critical in understanding and you know, they’re critical to understanding relativity theory they are critical to quantum mechanics. In some sense, from Farraday, playing with iron filings and magnets, and so forth. We’re talking today by Zoom because of what Faraday did back there. So when we start to look at these fundamental geeky things, that right now it’s not really clear how frog legs twitching could be of any value to anybody down the line. Later on, it turns out to be a game changer. And I think this is this problem will be far more influential than electromagnetism then. Because what we’re dealing with is, is there a reality that science can study with all the rigorous tools of science, mathematics and experiment, experimental testing, that’s beyond space time, that gives rise to space time. If we can actually get a science of a reality beyond space time, the technologies that will come out of that will make everything that we’ve seen so far seem trivial, including nuclear bombs and modern electronics, we conceivably could play with the very nature of space time itself.

Guy:
14:44
Wow. So I’m just trying I’m certainly not a science brain. I’m trying to break down the last bit what you said and about giving rise to space time because obviously we have in reality right now, in space and time and when you say give rise to space time, does that mean there’s something behind fundamentally that’s creating the space time that’s then creating experiences that we’re having?

Don:
15:08
That’s exactly right. So the end and by the way, this is not just me, a cognitive scientist, that’s saying we need to find a reality deeper than space time that gives rise to space time. It’s physicists very, very first brank physicists who are saying this in particular, I’ll mention three, three names Nima Arkani-Hamed, who’s a physicist, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Also, Ed Witten has said this, he’s also a professor of mathematical physics at Princeton, his different Advanced Study, and David gross, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum theory. So these guys have all said, and this is a quote, space time is doomed. They’re saying, the idea that space time is the fundamental nature of reality that physics should start with space time, it had a great run, it’s since at least Newton, it’s been a wonderful and powerful framework and most of our science and technology, our modern standard of living is due to that. So hats off to space time. And that assumption has been wonderful. But it’s reached its limits. There’s got to be something deeper and and Nima Arkani-Hamed, for example, is proposing things called positive geometries, something called an amplitude hedron, Associate hedron, and other things like that, that are these specific mathematical structures that are not space and time. They have symmetries that are deeper than space time. They have properties outside of space time, symmetries. And yet there’s mathematics that shows exactly how to map from these deeper geometries with these deeper symmetries into space time in a way that we can actually predict. For example, what happens in the Large Hadron Collider when photons smash into each other like to gluons hit. And four gluons go spraying out the so called scattering amplitudes, can be predicted by this deeper level of reality that they’re discovering. They don’t know what this deeper level is about by the way. All they have is mathematics. They’re saying, look, there’s this thing called the amplitude hedron. And its volume. I don’t know what this thing is it we know mathematically what it is. But what it’s about we don’t know. But its volume actually gives us the probabilities that what they call the amplitudes of these scattering events in this the world, one of the world’s biggest experiments, the Large Hadron Collider in CERN in Geneva. So this large Hadron Collider, right is 27 kilometer round. That’s right. Then you can put protons in opposite directions through that thing that near the speed light and have them smashed into each other. You’re doing that millions of times a second, hundreds of I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of times a second and you’re smashing stuff together. You can explain those smashes and what comes out of them, the probabilities, with this new structure nice new structures beyond space time with symmetries that are beyond space time. And by the way, when you do it with these deeper structures, the math gets simple. When you try to do it in space time, you can get hundreds or thousands of pages you have to compute for each collision. With this deeper structure, not only do you see new symmetries, but the computation becomes literally trivia. Wow, it’s a big pointer that there’s a deeper reality. We’re getting mathematical hints about us we’re using Think about it. We’ve got mathematics, as our flashlight into the dark, behind space time. And we’re seeing these unbelievable, simple structures that can make everything simple that have symmetries that we couldn’t see in space time that predict the data accurately. But we don’t know what these structures are about. So you can imagine as a scientist, this is like exciting. We’re getting our first glimpse in the dark with our flashlight of mathematics. What is this about what is this new realm with these new symmetries? Where things get simpler. And we can and it gives rise to spacetime in ways that we can write down. So that’s pretty exciting for scientists, because it’s a revolution. It’s something that’s been fundamental space time is fundamental for centuries, is about to be overthrown. And that’s where the next generation of scientists have a wide-open field to explore. What’s next. What’s deeper.

Guy:
19:24
fascinating stuff. It’s incredible. There’s so it’s so great to hear you saying all these things because I was speaking to, you know, slightly off air before about some of my experiences and being in a meditation retreat. About five years ago, I had an experience where there was so much energy move through me, it I became something larger than myself. And I felt like I actually went beyond space time. And I was as conscious as I am now. And, and it was, I can’t even put into words. I still can’t to this day, really but, but once I had an experience like that, it came back and made me actually question everything reality. What makes it up? What the hell just happened? What is all this about? It was mind blowing. And that’s why I’m so passionate about this work today and being able to when I saw you and your book the Case Against Reality, and bringing in actual science behind the thing, so it’s like, well, actually, there’s probably validity into my own experience, even though it was my own experience from my own perceptions. And I can’t bring evidence to that because it’s only my experience at the end of the day.

Don:
20:40
But so yeah, what this is suggesting is that your experience is could be a genuine insight in the following sense that most of us think of ourselves as little tiny chunks of matter. Inside this vast spacetime. And that’s the story that were brought up on, right? The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. At that point, space and energy were created. And it was just space, time, and energy and matter. That’s all that existed, there was no life, then of course, there was no consciousness for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years. And consciousness is a late comer and you and I are tiny, little bit players. So spacetime is the big 13 point 8 billion year old stage. Our species has been around for an eyeblink compared to the history of the universe, and we’ll be gone and an eyeblink. So where are these insignificant bits, bit players on the vast stage of space time. And what seems to be the new revolution in science that is suggesting that we need to turn that around at least the work that I’m working on in consciousness, the saying no, spacetime is not fundamental, and we’re a little bit players. It’s just the opposite. Space Time is something that you create on the fly. It’s your data structure to use a computer science metaphor, Space Time is just a data structure that you use. But you create space time, you’re not the creation of space time after 13.8 billion years, you create space time on the fly. So, when you had a feeling like you had gone outside space time, that’s because according to the theory I’m working on you are outside space time, you’re not stuck in space time. Space Time is something inside you that you make.

Guy:
22:33
Wow… So just to just to deepen that to help make people land because I’ve heard you speak about different analogies as well because I joke as well and say, well, my toilets not in the bathroom right now. It’s only there when I walk in. Is that what’s happening at the end of the day? Could you talk about if we were to imagine wearing a VR headset or virtual reality head kit for a moment and that’s been programmed even though it’s not actually there.

Don:
23:02
Right? So yeah, that’s a good analogy, I think for this, this new point of view. So when we both look up and see the moon, it’s natural for us to assume that first there’s just one moon. And it really exists and is really there no matter what, whether we look or not. And that the moon you see is the same moon that I see. And we do little experiments like okay, I’ll close my eyes. And you can look, is the moon still there? Yep. Right. Oh, and we could send a man to the moon or a person to the moon and have them send signals back so I close my eyes. So you know, am I getting the signal from somebody on the moon yet? Well, still, the moon is still there. We could do these kinds of experiments. But you could do the same thing in virtual reality. So suppose you’re playing a virtual reality tennis game with a friend so you have your headset and bodysuit on and your friend does too and you see yourself on a tennis court with a green tennis ball and tennis racquets and you can say look, I’ve got the tennis ball. Then you said your friend do you see the tennis ball? And he says, Oh, yeah, I see the tennis ball. But then you say, Okay, I’m gonna close my eyes and look away. And I’m gonna drop the tennis ball. Is it still there? And you can say, Yeah, I still see it. It’s still there. And you can say, Now I know where to look, I’ll look down there. And sure enough, when I look down where I expect it to be, I see the tennis ball there. So we do all those experiments does that means that there’s a real tennis ball? Of course not. You only create the tennis ball. When you look, all you’re getting is pixels in your headset, right. And when you get the right pixels, then you will create a tennis ball. The reality that you’re interacting with when you play the VR tennis game is a supercomputer somewhere that you don’t see. There is no tennis ball, there’s nothing green and soft and squishy inside that computer. You’d better hope not. It’s just circuits and then software in there, the voltages and magnetic fields. That’s in this example, that’s the reality. And you have the simplified version of that supercomputer that you see in terms of this little green felt tennis ball that you are hitting back and forth with your friend with these virtual racquets. If you’re controlling the supercomputer to play the game, without even knowing, no, you don’t have to know anything about computer science or voltages, you don’t have to believe in voltages, you can control the voltages. Even if you’re completely ignorant about voltages in the computer, you do it with this virtual reality. And the idea is that that’s what our senses are. We create space time, just like you create the three-dimensional space you see in the virtual reality tennis game. And you create all the objects like look at the tennis ball, and I create it when I look. Now I look over there and I’m creating the net on the court. Now I’m looking over there and I’m seeing the avatar of my friend. Of course, the avatar of my friend is not my friend, clearly. And if I close my eyes and the avatar disappears, my friend still exists in his consciousness still exists. my avatar sees but his consciousness still is there. Same thing with you, right? I talked with you now. I look away I don’t see your avatar on my screen. I fully believe that your consciousness exists, but what I see which is something in space and time, namely my picture of your body, that’s my creation. So your consciousness is outside of space time. I don’t see your consciousness, I just see my little projection of you like I see your face. But you know firsthand. If you look at your, and we can all do this, if you look at your own face in the mirror, what you see directly is just skin, hair and eyes. But you know that what you don’t see your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your love of music, your angers, all of your emotions, all of that, which is your real you, the rich world of your conscious experiences, you don’t see that here. I mean, if you smile, I can get a hint that maybe you’re happy. But that’s not the same thing as happiness. A smile is not happiness, a smile is just a twist of the face. Happiness is a conscious experience. So what we see when you look in the mirror, you know firsthand that what you see is just skin deep behind that little symbol of your face is the whole rich world of your conscious experiences. And that’s what I’m saying is going on here. Everything that you see in space and time is your VR headset. On the other side of that headset is this rich world of conscious experiences.

Guy:
27:15
Wow. That’s fantastic. So I’m just thinking as well. And you know, I’d like I just imagined myself looking in the mirror. And like you said, only you can feel those feelings of the love of music, the joys, the pains, the highs, the highs, the lows of everything. So is that seeing them that’s not in me, that’s actually beyond me. But allow me to have the experience within me.

Don:
27:39
Is that Well, yeah, there’s a deep question that you’re raising to about what do I mean by me? Who am I? In this right? The, what I can say is one answer that most of us have believed but seems to be deeply false. For the question of who am I the answer is usually I’m some physical system that weighs, you know, between 100 and 200 pounds, maybe 300 pounds, that’s, you know, in Irvine or London or Australia or wherever it might be. So I am this physical body that has a certain location. And that’s, that’s what I am. And I’m saying that that’s not that can’t be right because space time itself is not fundamental. So whatever I am, is not something in space time, whatever I am is something outside of space time, that’s creating space time. But it may also whatever that thing is, may also not only does it create my body, right, because my body is just a little avatar in this little space time headset simulation that I’m making, but the very notion of myself may also be another construction, there may not be what I am deeply may go beyond deeply beyond this notion of a Self because self is, maybe a very limiting symbol just like my body is a very limiting symbol.

Guy:
29:05
Yeah, got it. You know in your in everything that you share myself my business partner Matt we invested in a VR kit a couple of months back. And there’s a game in there where you have to walk a plank office to a building. That’s 30 stories up. And we actually put a plank bar on the floor, just as the normal scaffolding plank on the floor where you would fold one inch if you stepped off the plank. And I put this thing on and I was sweating. My heart rate went through the roof. It took me literally five minutes of just breathing through trying to slow my nervous system down to walk out on this plank and then Matt, he put a fan on. So you could feel the breeze because you could hear that The wind up there on this building. So then all of a sudden, he opened all the doors in the house and, and I was in it, I was absolutely in it and and I managed to get to the plank, and I couldn’t turn around. I just couldn’t turn around to walk back. And then I ripped off the headset there was like, Oh my god, that was incredible. And it just really makes me question the interpretation and the meaning that we give to information that’s coming in without any thought to it first, and that’s dictating the way we respond to the world in any given moment.

Don:
30:36
That’s right. So we take this virtual reality very, very seriously. We’re programmed to take it very, very seriously. And, you know, the, as a scientist, my attitude is that we have to use the best scientific theories that we have so far, right? To try to explain these kinds of events and these kinds of data. Not I think that our current scientific theories are necessarily the right answer, the final answer, but it’s rather, these are the best tools that we have so far. So to try to address the kind of thing you’re talking about, the best tool we have so far is evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology and the evolutionary models of perception and, you know, there are these ultimate and proximate answers that we can have to questions about why is it that we sweat when we stand out over empty space, you know, so there’s the ultimate questions about why we evolved that there’s the proximate questions, what are the neural patterns of activity that now give rise to that right? Now I’m taking the neural attitude, right, even though I just talked a minute ago about why neurons don’t do anything. Nevertheless, it’s a useful language to talk about here. But with a blink, in some sense. So as a scientist, what we do is to try to address the questions you’re asking using the best tools, we have an evolutionary theory does provide some really interesting tools for explaining why we’ve evolved these kinds of sensory systems, and also why we have to take them seriously. But it also, by the way, predicts evolutionary theory predicts and this is a theorem that I just published with a collaborator, Chetan Prakash and several other of our collaborators. It’s a theorem of evolutionary theory that our senses have not evolved to show us reality as it is. It’s a theorem. Space is in other words, evolutionary theory says that the structures that we see in our perceptions of space and time and objects, the probability that that resembles reality is precisely zero. So whatever reality is, is nothing like what we see and that’s a theorem of evolutionary theory. And for those who are interested, we published the paper you want to read it, It’s called Fact, Fiction and Fitness. It was published in the journal Entropy. It just came out a few weeks ago. And anybody who wants to read the math can read the math. It’s a theorem of evolution. Now, I’m not saying that evolutionary evolution and evolutionary theory is correct. We may find later on some genius may come along and come up with a deeper theory. I’m hoping to do that. But right now, that’s the best tool we have. And so that’s what that tool tells us. But we can start to get at the questions you raise, which is no, I’m sweating, my heart is pounding. I’m taking this all very, very seriously why we do have tools and evolutionary theory to explain why our senses evolved to do that to us.

Guy:
33:37
Yeah. Wow. I have so many questions to keep sparking here. Why do you think that the truth is hidden from us then? Because I’ve had this experience myself and it’s actually if anything is enhanced my life in a huge way. Huge. I can’t even explain and yet it we completely closed off from it. Really in some respects.

Don:
34:03
That’s it. That’s a really good question. I mean, that makes sense, right? If having this personal experience outside of space time seeing and experiencing yourself as something not trapped in space time, but something beyond space time, that’s that can be so transformative. And if it’s closer to the truth, then what we mostly believe then why is it that most of us are trapped in this? And but of course, the first answer is, I don’t know. So, I honestly don’t know. I’m thinking about it. I can propose some kinds of answers, but they’re very, very provisional. And the kind of answer I’m thinking about is I’m working with again, my colleagues, Chetan and Chris Fields, and{….} and others Federico Faggin and so forth, to build mathematical models of what we call a theory of conscious agents are conscious units outside of space and time. So the idea is that reality outside of space time, this deeper reality that I was talking about earlier, is like a vast social network, like the twitterverse. Right? The twitterverse, right? You have literally millions of Twitter users. literally billions of tweets, lots of stuff trending. It’s overwhelming. Because with that many users and tweets, it’s overwhelming. You could never read all the tweets interact with all the users. In that case, if you want to just get a picture what’s happening in the twitterverse in, you know, Australia versus the US, you know, Sydney versus Los Angeles, or you know, in a particular neighbourhood or a particular house, but you want a visualization tool, maybe a VR visualization tool, the simple icandy that does certain things that you can grasp, that lets you understand, okay, here’s what’s trending in Sydney. Here’s the new stuff is trending in, you know, New York. Here’s what’s happening in London. Now I can zoom out to all of the United States. Here’s the big picture. And now I want to zoom into Irvine has tiny little town. That’s, that’s a good visualization tool, right? So that’s what space time and physical objects are. That’s our visualization tool. It’s this vast network of conscious agents. That’s the reality. And we’ve made a rookie mistake. We’ve mistaken our visualization tool for the realm that it was a visualization of, we just deny the existence of this realm that we’re actually trying to visualize. And we just take the headset as the final reality. So science has only been a study of our headset pretty much so far. Now, but that doesn’t quite get to your question, which is why have we made this rookie mistake? Why should we make this rookie mistake? And, and I don’t know the answer to that. So it’s going to I think the answer to that is going to be come from this other deep question, which is, if consciousness is fundamental, and all this network of conscious agents is, is what the reality is? Why, what are they up to? What is their…what is the dynamics of consciousness about? And the answer is, I don’t know, but the only idea I’ve ever run across so far, that’s plausible. That’s deep enough. comes from something called Goedel’s Incompleteness, though, okay? This so this genius named Kurt Goedel when he was only 25 years old, back in 1931, did what’s you know, arguably one of the greatest if not the greatest intellectual achievements in all of human history. He proved that, I’m not going to go into this thing in detail. Just say What does proof means it means that no matter how much mathematical structure you discover, you’ve only begun There’s always going to be unbounded extra mathematical structure that you that you that’s not entailed by the math you already know, it’s true. But beyond the math that you already have right now, the math that you have right now could never reach it. So you actually need new fundamental new insights and new ideas. And that will go on forever. So the idea then is that if consciousness is all that there is consciousness is fundamental, then this mathematical structure is just about the possibilities of consciousness. And what Goedel’s theorem is saying is that there’s endless possible kinds of conscious experiences and conscious entities to explore and in principle,
no agent can ever understand all of it. There is no infinite God who could ever understand all of it, in principle, the most powerful God possible, could not understand all that’s available. always going to be an open-ended exploration. And that’s what this is about every new step of the exploration, you perhaps get lost because you’re in the brand-new unknown. It’s always unknown and, and so that’s an interesting idea that consciousness is, I call this Goedel’s candy store. There’s endless varieties of hunches experiences yet to be tasted, yet to be sampled yet to be explored. So there’s this infinite Goedel’s candy store, and it in some sense, it doesn’t exist, they’re ahead of us. We’re creating it as we explore. So consciousness is creating all the new goodies as it explores, but it’s both exhilarating and it’s a scary as hell, right? Because we’re going into the unknown and so there that might be part of the answer to your question. It’s scary to go into the unknown and so we retreat into our headset. That might be the answer.

Guy:
39:58
Wow. I love it. You know what, that’s Such a great metaphor for life because there’s two things that that really resonated with me there is that if we bring in humility, the fact that we don’t know it all, first of all into our daily life, and then curiosity to keep exploring, you know, because quite often we get so content we shut down, we distract ourselves, and we stunt that, that expansion of ourselves in our life.

Don:
40:25
Yes, I absolutely agree. And you see that in the meditative experience, right, that if you it’s can be very scary to go into pure silence, genuine pure silence in which you let go of all thoughts. You when you when you let yourself do that, I find that I look at those thoughts, all those ideas as almost like a life raft or I want to go back into the world of thought, that’s safe. I mean, that’s the world. I know. Getting out there where it’s completely unknown. There’s no thoughts and being good with that is an acquired taste, right. So it’s for most of us. We want noise, want music, we want television, we want social interaction, we want some distraction. But going into the unknown, where we literally are naked, even without any thoughts to protect us, is what happens in meditation. And for most of us, that’s a really acquired taste that takes a while to get used to that. So it’s both exhilarating to explore. But well, at least my personal experience, and from a lot of people I’ve talked with, it’s also quite scary. And it a fundamental change in us when we explore that way in meditation. I think what happens is a complete restructuring of our personality. This is not just a little bit of relaxation. I mean, to really go into the unknown and to begin to be able to see new things, fundamentally new things is not a minor trend. transformation. It’s more like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Right? And you know when the caterpillar makes a chrysalis it’s not all love inside that chrysalis what happens, right? The immune cells of the caterpillar attack and try to kill the cells inside that are responsible for transforming the caterpillar into a butterfly. Part of it is liquefying. Almost all of the structures of the caterpillar it’s a death. So the immune system of the caterpillar is fighting this tooth and nail until it gets overwhelmed. It fights until it just can’t fight anymore. It turns into this puddle of liquid mostly, and then it gets restructured into a butterfly. Well, I mean from the point of view of the caterpillar. This is horrific. It’s the end of everything that’s known from the point of view of the butterfly. This is a birth. But you can see why you in meditation would have both experiences both. This is horrible. It’s scary. It’s a restructuring of my personality, but it’s more than restructuring, like the dissolving of everything that I know and love and hold dear. And yet on the other side, you start to see Well, no wait. There’s the caterpillar, the caterpillar into a butterfly where they’re in, but most of them I’m identifying with the caterpillar a little bit with the butterfly, but maybe later on identify more and more with the butterfly that’s emerging. That’s how deep I think the meditative process is. It’s a complete restructuring, not a magic carpet to bliss.

Guy:
43:43
Yeah, totally. I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. With you having a regular meditation practice. How much has it affected your life do you think then on a personal level and how much is it lent into the work that you do?

Don:
43:59
It has affected my life dramatically because it really is one thing to talk about not knowing everything. It’s another thing to sit there in silence and sort of experience being naked without the protection of my thoughts and my, the science that I know. And so just sitting there and facing the unknown, and then realizing that what I know, as a scientist, what all of science together knows all scientists together is trivial compared to what we don’t know. That’s, that’s truly humbling. And it’s very, very different from an attitude that we’re about to get a theory of everything, right, where we know everything, it’s, it’s quite the opposite. It’s saying that there is no such thing as a theory of everything. All that we could ever know, is just not even a maybe beginning to what’s yet to be explored. So that’s very, very humbling. But it’s a kind of humbling that’s not just like a false humility. It’s it’s more profound Goedel is saying, you better take this quite seriously. Because this is the nature, this incompleteness theorem is fundamental, even, there is no God that could know everything. It’s impossible, that that’s truly, truly stunning. So, so there’s a deep humility that… that’s the nice thing about science is discovered that there are all sorts of grounds for us to be deeply, deeply humbled. And meditation does play into that when you face the end of your concepts, and you face the unknown and then realize begin to realize how vast that unknown is.

Guy:
45:42
Totally. How has your book been received? The Case Against Reality, in the science world itself?

Don:
45:49
Mixed… I have a theorem. So, and no one has been able to take down the theorem. And so there’s no one out there who’s saying, you know, you’re wrong and I can disprove that. So that’s not what’s going on and I you know, I do get invited to give to So I gave a talk, for example, at UC Davis to the neurosciences Research Institute there with, there were dozens and dozens of professors and postdocs in the neurosciences. And they invited me to come up and tell them that neurons don’t exist when they’re not perceived, and brains cause none of our behaviors. That is a useful fiction in everyday neuroscience to talk that way. And I talked that way. And I’ll say that area V4 of the brain causes color perception and area MT causes motion perception, and all is perfectly fine casually talk that way. But Strictly speaking, it’s false. And brains don’t even exist when they’re not perceived. And so they mean, that’s the nice thing about science. It would be one thing for me to say this, if I had no theorem, right, absolutely. And in fact, I published a book called Visual Intelligence back in 1998, where I said this at the end of my book, but I didn’t have a theorem, and no one paid attention. It was sort of, you know, great book except for that last chapter. He goes off the rails. And, and that’s perfectly, that’s… I perfectly respect that, that’s the right attitude for scientists. It took me a couple years to… almost 10 years to go, okay, for me to get my colleagues to take this seriously, I need to, I need a theorem. so I had to learn evolutionary game theory. So I got my graduate students. Justin Mark, Brian Marion, we learned evolutionary game theory, they ran simulations. And then I worked with mathematicians. And we proved a theorem. And now now that I’ve got the theorem, I get invited to give a talk because this is different mow. This is not someone just saying, Oh, I think it’s, it’s not a lot of handwave. It’s a theorem based on our best biological theory of evolution by natural selection. So to their credit scientists, when they’re faced with an implication of one of their best scientific theories, then they do take it seriously. Now, I’m not saying that they immediately jump on board. There’s of course, the natural Okay, well, let me see if I can think of a in different way, maybe I can find some limitation to your theorem. That’s perfectly fine. And in fact, that’s what I want is that hard nosed, give and take, but it is, you know, it is the kind of attitude I like is not a dogmatism. It’s an openness to saying, Well, right now, I still believe in space time, but you got a theorem, so I need to think about it.

Guy:
48:29
Yeah, beautiful. Fair enough. Yeah, that’s great. Well, science is certainly, and I’m certainly no scientist, but listening to these conversations and being able to have them as certainly helped me have a, like a non biased language that really helps to validity things, you know, so I’m very grateful for that. I have a few questions on the show. I ask everyone. And one is what’s your morning routine look like?

Don:
48:56
When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is… I have a cat named Fozie. And he insists that the First thing I do is let him rub on my slippers. So, he rubs on my slippers. I pet him and he purrs, and he turns over and I rub his belly. And I rub and rub, and we do this for a few minutes. And when he’s happy that I go get him a couple treats and give them some cat food. And then he’s very, very happy. So that’s my morning. The start of every morning is with Fozzie and my other cat Kermit then gets crazy, but he’s, he’s, he knows that Fozie is going to be the one that…So I do that. And then I usually… Well my wife tends to sleep in a little bit later than me. She’s a little bit more of a night owl a little bit more of a morning person. So, I’ll usually just go down there and get my breakfast and clean things up so that she’ll have it open for her. So, I do breakfast, and then I try to get into… I study a lot of mathematics and physics. I’m working on the math. My goal right now is working on this mathematical model that starts with conscious agents. shows that the long-term behavior of these conscious agents and their dynamics leads to these positive geometries that the physicists are finding beside behind space time. That then lead to space time. My goal right now is to get a theory that goes starts with consciousness and its dynamics and leads to predictions of gluon, gluon scattering and Large Hadron Collider. That’s my goal.

Guy:
50:30
Wow. Okay, fair enough. If you could have dinner with anyone from any timeframe in the world, or even with a few people. Who do you think it would be? And why?

Don:
50:44
Oh, well, um, well. I think maybe it would be… I’ll probably choose…Maybe Leibniz. It’s Gottfried Leibniz… Because his Monodalogy idea is very, very similar to what I’m pursuing right now. He understood he understood in the early 1700s. He understood this hard problem of consciousness. He wrote about it in Monodalogy he understood it. And of course, it mean, he has at least 100 IQ points more than me. So I would love to not just have dinner, but let’s say, you know, I’d like to have dinner with you. I’d like to have you around for a couple years. Because here’s the mathematics and you can learn this math much more quickly than me your genius. He invented calculus independent of Newton. So he invented so I would love to have Leibniz. I think Leibniz would have a kick, he would just pick up this math, I he leaves me in the dust after about two days. You know, I just want him to then he just leave on the desk, and then I could read his papers and I wouldn’t have to do this stuff. He would just do it. So, I that’s what I’d like to have dinner but I need him for you know, a few weeks so he can solve the problem. For me, it’s gonna take years but but Leibniz could knock it off in a few weeks, I think.

Guy:
52:03
Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. And then last question or last thing to say about with everything that we’ve covered today, what would you like to leave the listeners to ponder on?

Don:
52:14
I would say…the thing to ponder on is you are, is it possible that you are not merely a little insignificant 100 to 200 pound piece of matter, on a little planet in some insignificant part of the universe? Is it possible that you create space and time? That your potential is far greater than you imagine? And it’s going to be scary to find out who you are, but also exhilarating.

Guy:
52:57
The greatest adventure of all… Donald thank you so much for coming on the show today. If anybody wants to grab your book or find out more about you where’s the best place to send them?

Don:
53:10
If you just Google The Case Against Reality, it’s on Amazon, for example, or it’s on Apple books and so forth. So, The Case Against Reality gives a nice introduction to these ideas for a broad audience. I didn’t write it for a technical audience. If you’re if you’re technical, and you want to see the math, I’ve got a number of publications. If you just Google Donald Hoffman H.O.F.F.M.A.N, on my homepage, at the University of California comes up. And I’ve got my Vita, it’s listed on my homepage. As it saysVita on there. If you just click on that, I’ve got 120 papers, published papers or so toward the end of the list are the more recent papers, and I’ve got links hot links to the online papers, you can read papers, you know that I’ve got a paper called Objects of Consciousness, that gives the mathematical model of consciousness and so forth.

Guy:
54:02
So there’s plenty of plenty for people to chew on this for sure. I just want to want to thank you for coming on the show today and I’ll let you do and I’ll let you put out there to the world you’ve certainly been an influence on myself personally with your work and I just want you to know I greatly appreciate it.

Don:
54:19
So thank you Guy, thanks for this kind invitation too.

Guy:
54:22
Beautiful guys. If you made it this far that means you definitely enjoyed the show as much as I did with Donald today. And of course, stay connected reach out to me Follow me on Instagram @guyhlawrence, you can connect me through there. I’m pretty, pretty active on Instagram, Facebook, sign up to our newsletter if you want to find out our latest offerings for now next retreats are, the workshops and of course our coaching program as well which is doing phenomenally well. And yeah, you know where to go: Liveinflow.co or guylawrence.co.au. Both has everything you need. Anyway, have a magnificent week. Much love from me and I shall see you soon.


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