Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion - How Evolution Hid the Truth | Lex Fridman Podcast #293
What this covers
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine and author of The Case Against Reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Calm: https://calm.com/lex to get 40% off - LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit
EPISODE LINKS: Donald's Twitter: https://twitter.com/donalddhoffman Donald's Website: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ Documents & Articles: 1. Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 2. Conscious Agent Networks: https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/CA-circuits-CSR-rev2.pdf 3. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument in Quantum Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-epr/ Books: 1. The Case Against Reality: https://amzn.to/3MhW4Wt 2. Vision: https://amzn.to/3Q4ibTm
PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41
OUTLINE: 0:00 - Introduction 1:12 - Case against reality 12:40 - Spacetime 37:04 - Reductionism 57:30 - Evolutionary game theory 1:25:53 - Consciousness 2:21:13 - Visualizing reality 2:33:48 - Immanuel Kant 2:36:30 - Ephemerality of life 2:44:56 - Simulation theory 2:50:37 - Difficult ideas 3:05:39 - Love 3:09:14 - Advice for young people 3:11:33 - Meaning of life
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Hoffman argues that evolutionary theory and quantum physics both demonstrate that spacetime is not fundamental to reality; rather, consciousness is fundamental, and spacetime is a user interface constructed by conscious agents to guide adaptive behavior, not to reveal truth.
- Natural selection optimizes for fitness/adaptive behavior, not truth—the probability that evolution shaped sensory systems to see objective reality is mathematically zero
- Quantum mechanics and gravity together entail spacetime cannot be fundamental; physicists are discovering deeper mathematical structures (amplituhedron, cosmological polytopes) beyond spacetime
- Conscious experiences are the fundamental building blocks from which spacetime, neurons, brains, and physical objects are constructed via projection, not the reverse
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Natural selection mathematically demonstrates that the probability is precisely zero that evolution shaped any sensory system to see true properties of objective reality for any generic structure the world might have (total order, topology, metric), with only one exception related to probability measures that must preserve the mathematical relationship between reality and perceptions
“the technical question that I and my team asked was what is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to see true properties of objective reality and to our surprise we found that the answer is precisely zero except for one one kind of structure”
Love is fundamental, not derived; spiritual traditions that emphasize 'love your neighbor as yourself' are pointing to a deep truth that at bottom, consciousness is non-dual and separation is illusory, making others not truly separate from you
“the deeper sense right so of course married you're my love my wife in a sexual sense but there is a deeper sense as well that when I was saying goodbye to her there was a there was a deeper much deeper love that was really at play there that's one place where I think that the mixed bag from spiritual Traditions has something right when they say you know love your neighbor as yourself that that some in some sense Love Is Fundamental”
Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to scientific theories: any sufficiently sophisticated mathematical theory will have assumptions that cannot be proven from within the theory and true statements that cannot be derived from the axioms; therefore there will never be a final theory of everything and reality will always transcend any conceptual framework
“my my own take is for what it's worth is that girdle's incompleteness theorem sort of points Us in that direction that even with mathematics uh any finite atiz that's sophisticated enough to be able to do arithmetic it's easy to show that there'll be um statements that are true that can't be proven can't be deduced from within that framework”
David Marr's three-level theory of understanding (computational theory: what is being computed and why; algorithm: how is it computed; implementation: how is it physically instantiated) is crucial for neuroscience; without knowing what the brain computes and why, examining its architecture and chemistry cannot yield understanding
“he said he had this three-level approach that really grabbed my attention so I when I was an undergrad at UCLA I read one of his papers in a in a class and said who is this guy because he said you have to have a computational theory what is being computed and why an algorithm how is it being computed what what are the prec pro algorithms and then the hardware how does it get instantiated in the hardware”
The Park-Taylor formula discovered in 1986 reduced billions of terms in gluon scattering amplitude calculations to nine terms, and later to one term, revealing that spacetime-based calculations are fundamentally inefficient compared to geometric structures beyond spacetime
“park and Taylor took the billions of terms hundreds of pages and miraculously turned it into nine and then a little bit later they guessed one term expression that turned out to be equivalent so billions of terms reduced to one term the so-called famous Park Taylor formula 1986”
Humans evolved sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior in ancestral environments; our perception of 3D space, color, time progression, and object permanence are all tuned to reproductive success in those environments, not to perceiving the structure of reality beyond that niche
“the evolutionary process the process that took us from the origin of life on Earth to the humans that we are today that process does not maximize for truth it maximizes for Fitness as you say Fitness beats truth and fitness does not have to be connected to truth”
Neurons, brains, and the whole of spacetime emerge as projections of deeper conscious agent dynamics, not the other way around; therefore the hard problem of consciousness is reversed—instead of explaining how consciousness emerges from brains, the question becomes how brains emerge from consciousness
“I have no neurons if you looked you would see neurons that's a data structure that you would create on the Fly and it's a very useful one as soon as you look away you garbage collect that data structure just like that necro Cube that I was talking about on the piece of paper when you look you see a 3D cube you create it on the fly as soon as you look away that's gone”
Spacetime is doomed as a fundamental framework because Einstein's gravity theory and quantum field theory, when combined, entail that spacetime cannot be fundamental at the Planck scale (10^-33 cm, 10^-43 seconds), and physicists including Nima Arkani-Hamed, Ed Witten, and David Gross are discovering new mathematical structures (amplituhedron, cosmological polytopes) beyond spacetime
“the physicists are SpaceTime uh Skeptics we they're saying that and I can say exactly why they think it's doomed but what they're saying is that because your question was what what aspect of space time what are we talking about here it's both space and time their Union into space time as an Einstein Theory that's doomed”
Local realism (the view that properties of particles exist independently of observation and that influences cannot travel faster than light) is false according to quantum mechanics, and quantum entanglement shows that the act of observation is an act of fact creation—the measured value did not exist before the measurement
“we know from quantum theory that the act of observation is an act of fact creation and that is built into what I'm saying with this Theory Of Consciousness if Consciousness is fundamental SpaceTime itself is an act of fact creation it's it's an interface that we create Consciousness creates plus all the objects in it so local realism is not true”
The elementary particles (quarks, leptons, gluons) that physicists study are merely irreducible representations of the symmetries of spacetime, not fundamental; they are almost entirely defined by spacetime's structure, not windows into reality beyond spacetime.
“particles in space time cannot be fundamental they're just irreducible representations of the symmetries of SpaceTime that's what they are”
Women with tetrachromacy (four cone photoreceptors instead of three) apparently experience colors that people with normal trichromatic vision cannot imagine; Hoffman uses this to illustrate that consciousness can have experiences that transcend another's imagination, suggesting truly alien forms of consciousness might exist
“there apparently there are women um called Tetra um who have four color receptors not just three and Kimberly Jameson and others who studied these women have good evidence that they apparently have a new dimension of color experience that the rest of us don't have”
The historical precedent of physicists in 1890 thinking physics was done and discouraging bright young students from the field teaches that every era believes it has nearly solved everything; contemporary physicists should expect to be as wrong about current 'final' theories in 50 years as 1890 physicists were.
“it was the view I took I mean that's that's sort of what we're taught or just even assume it's just sort of like the intelligent assumption that we would all make but we don't have to just wave our hands evolution of a natural selection is a mathematically precise Theory”
Evolution by natural selection optimizes for fitness payoffs, not truth; fitness and truth are decoupled and fitness does not require accuracy about objective reality
“Fitness beats truth and fitness does not have to be connected to truth”
Reductionism—the methodology of explaining phenomena by analyzing smaller and smaller scales of spacetime to find more fundamental laws—has been useful but is now conceptually dead because spacetime itself is not fundamental; therefore claims about what is 'smaller' or 'more fundamental' in spacetime miss what is actually fundamental
“reductionism which is that as we go to smaller scales in SpaceTime we will find more and more fundamental laws and that's been very useful for space and time for centuries reductionism for centuries but but now we realize that um that's over reductionism is in fact dead as is spacetime”
Evolutionary game theory simulations show that organisms with genotypes that track fitness payoffs directly always outcompete organisms that track truth about objective reality; in the first generation, truth-seeking organisms are eliminated, not gradually suppressed but gone immediately.
“we start off with random organisms with random sensory genetics and random actions and the first generation was unbelievably they were it was a foraging situation... what he found was that uh basically you never even saw the the the truth organisms even come on the stage they they they if they came up they were gone in one generation they just they just aren't so they they came and got they came and went uh even just in one generation”
When simulations were modified to use thousands of payoff functions instead of one or two, some conditions emerged where truth-seeking organisms could be competitive; however, organisms that create data structures called 'objects' by clustering similar payoff functions outcompeted the truth-seekers, suggesting objects are evolutionary constructs for encoding fitness payoffs rather than perceptions of objective reality
“the best push back we've gotten is from a team at Yale and uh they suggested that um if you use thousands of payoff functions so we in our simulations we just use a couple mhm one or two because it was the first simulations right so that would be a limit we had one or two payoff functions we showed the result in those at least for the genetic algorithms and they said if you have 20,000 of them then we can find these conditions in which um truth see seeing organisms would be the ones that that evolved and survived”
Probability zero events can happen infinitely often in continuous spaces; for example, a curve in a unit square has measure zero (probability zero under the area measure) but contains infinitely many points, so when Hoffman says the probability of truth-tracking evolution is zero, this does not mean it cannot happen, only that it happens with vanishing frequency.
“probability zero things can happen infinitely often when you say probability zero you mean probability close to zero to be very very precise so for example if I have a unit Square on the plane um and I use a measure in which the um on a probability measure in which the area of a region is as probability mhm then if I draw a curve in that unit Square it has me measure precisely zero precisely not approximately precisely zero and yet it has infinitely many points”
Conscious experiences (like the taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic, the feeling of pain) are fundamental and primitive in the theory of consciousness—not derived from neural activity or computational functions, but axiomatic starting points similar to how spacetime was previously assumed fundamental
“I said that there are conscious experiences feeling of headache the smell of garlic um experiencing the color red there are those are conscious so that's a primitive of theory and the reason I want few Primitives why because those are the Miracles of the theory right The Primitives the assumptions of e theal the things you're not going to explain those are the things you assume”
Networks of conscious agents form a single conscious agent through their interactions, because any two conscious agents that interact satisfy the mathematical definition of a conscious agent; therefore there is one conscious agent but it has useful analytic decompositions into sub-agents at all scales
“when we write down the mathematics um when you have two of these conscious agents interacting they the the pair satisfy a definition of a conscious agent so they are a single conscious agent so there is one conscious agent yeah but it it has a nice analytic decomposition into as many conscious agent that's a nice interface it's a very useful scientific interface”
Objects like tables, chairs, bottles, and the body don't exist independently in spacetime; instead, they are data structures that conscious observers construct on the fly when perceiving them, and garbage-collect (delete) when attention shifts away, similar to how a Necker cube illusion shows a 3D cube that exists only when perceived
“when I when I look at you all I see is skin hair and eyes right that's all I see but I know that there's a deeper reality I believe that there's a much deeper reality there's the whole world of your experiences your thoughts your hopes your dreams in some sense the face that I see is is just a symbol that I create right and as soon as I look away that I I delete that symbol but I don't delete you”
Leibniz's monadology and his identification of the hard problem of consciousness three centuries ago suggest he was intuiting structures similar to Hoffman's conscious agents, though with less mathematical precision
“there's a lot of ingenious arguments in Barkley liet liet in his monadology understood very clearly that the hard problem was not solvable he he posed the hard problem and and basically dismissed it just you can't do this and so if he came here he'd say look guys I told you this three 300 years a ago and he had his monadology he was trying to do something like it's um it's different from what I'm doing but he he had these things that were not in space and time the the these monads”
When you study and learn the current scientific textbooks, you are not wasting time on settled questions; rather, you are learning the tools you need to discover new frameworks, because the current textbooks will look as silly in 50 years as 19th-century physics looks to us now
“I had this feeling growing up going in College reading all these textbook oh man it's all been done yeah if I'd just been there you know 50 years ago I could have discovered this stuff but they know it's all in the textbooks now well believe me the textbooks are going to look silly in 50 years and it's your CH your chance to write the new textbook”
Kant was correct that spacetime is imposed by our sensory systems and not directly perceived as nature-in-itself, but Kant was wrong to claim spacetime is a priori fundamental; spacetime is structured by evolution for fitness but is not fundamental to reality beyond the interface
“K was an idealist transcendental idealist and he he basically had the idea that um we don't see nature as it is we impose a structure on nature he and and so in some sense I'm saying something similar I'm saying that by the way I don't call myself an idealist I call myself a conscious realist because idealism has a long history a lot of different ideas come under idealism and there's a lot of debates and so forth it tends to be identified with in many cases anti-science and anti-realism and I don't want either connection with my ideas”
The distinction between living and non-living is not fundamental; it is an artifact of the limits of our interface (spacetime), because just as dark matter and dark energy are hidden from our interface, the living/non-living distinction disappears when you go beyond spacetime
“the distinction between living and non-living is not a fundamental distinction it's an artifact of the limits of our interface right so this is a new wrinkle and this is an important wrinkle what it's so nice to take space and time as fundamental because if something looks like it's inanimate it's it's inanimate and we can just say it's it's not living”
Evolution by natural selection will emerge as a projection of a deeper cooperative conscious dynamics that has no limited resources; the appearance of competition, limited resources, and evolution is an artifact of projecting an unlimited conscious dynamics into the spacetime interface
“the fundamental Dynamics may have no limits limited resources whatsoever any projection will have certainly time as a limited resource and probably lots of other limited resources hence we could get competition and evolution and nature red and tooth and Claw as an artifact of a deeper system in which those aren't fundamental”
Nearly infinite fraction of possible conscious structures use spacetime data structures; almost all possible consciousnesses would use radically different interfaces than the spacetime interface humans perceive
“my my guess is that if Consciousness is fundamental Consciousness is all there is then the only thing that mathematical structure can be about is possibilities of Consciousness and that suggest to me that there could be an infinite variety of consciousnesses and ADV vanishingly small fraction of them use SpaceTime data structures”
The distinction between abstractions/layers of representation (like the hierarchy from voltages to transistors to assembly language to Python to graphical interfaces) and completely detached perception is important; abstractions are still connected to underlying reality, but Hoffman's claim is that perceptions are not abstractions but adaptive fictions completely detached from truth
“what's the difference between hiding the truth and forming abstractions uh layers upon layers of abstractions over these over lowlevel voltages transistors and uh chips and uh programming languages from assembly to python that then leads you to be able to have an interface like Chrome where you open up another set of JavaScript and HTML uh programming languages that lead you to have a graphical user interface on which you can then send your friends an email is that completely detached from the zeros and ones that are firing away inside the computer it's not of course”
Spiritual traditions have correctly identified for thousands of years that spacetime and material objects are illusory (maya) and that deeper introspection reveals a ground of being beyond conceptual thought, which now aligns with modern physics and mathematics
“there is one answer that um is interesting to explore is something that spiritual Traditions have said for thousands of years but haven't said precisely so we can't take it seriously in science Until It's Made precise but we might be able to make it precise and that is that um they've they've also said something like um space and time aren't fundamental their Maya they their illusion”
Being a conscious entity means you are not trapped inside spacetime as a little object; rather, you are the author of spacetime itself—you create it on the fly as you perceive, and in that sense, you are far greater and more fundamental than you intuitively feel as a localized person in a body
“You are in some sense the being that's creating that space all the time every time you look so waking up to who you really are outside of space and time as the author of space and time that's you're the author of space and time right and I'm the author of of space and time and space and time is just one little data structure many other consciousnesses are creating other other data structure”
Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis is similar in spirit to conscious realism (infinite variety of mathematical structures), but differs crucially: mathematics is not fundamental for conscious realism, consciousness is fundamental, and mathematics is to consciousness as bones are to an organism—necessary structure but not the whole
“I'm saying something similar in spirit but importantly different there's an infinite variety of mathematical structures absolutely but mathematics isn't the fundamental reality in this in this framework Consciousness is and Mathematics is to Consciousness like bones are to an organism you need the bones so mathematics is is not divorced from Consciousness but it's not the entirety of Consciousness by any means”
If you have a Markov chain (probabilistic dynamical system) where entropy is constant (stationary distribution), any projection of that chain via conditional probability will induce increasing entropy; therefore, a timeless dynamics can give rise to the appearance of time (entropic time) simply through projection into spacetime
“it's a trivial theorem three line proof that if you have a stationary Marian Dynamics any projection that you make of that Dynamics by conditional probability and if if you want I can State a little bit more even more mathematically precisely for for some readers or listeners but if any projection You Take by conditional probability the induced image of that Markov chain will have increasing entropy you will have entropic time”
The deepest mystery is why consciousness without form (formless being) gives rise to form and experience; this is analogous to why something exists rather than nothing, and it may be ultimately inexplicable—not solvable within any finite theory
“the question of that you asked what is it all about somehow it's it's related to that why does being why doesn't it just stay without any forms why does it why why do we have experiences what why should why why not just have when you close your eyes and you pay attention to what's behind you there's nothing but there's being why is why don't we just stop there why didn't we just stop there why did we create all tables and chairs and the Sun and Moon and and people all this really complicated stuff why”
Standard approaches to consciousness (integrated information theory, orchestrated collapse of quantum microtubules, global workspace theory) all assume spacetime is fundamental and all attempt to explain how conscious experiences emerge from physical dynamics; they have made no progress in explaining any specific conscious experience in decades despite talented researchers
“there's not one Theory so integrated information Theory orchestrated collapse of microt tual um Global workspace Theory these are all theories of Consciousness there's not a single theory that can give you a specific conscious experience that they say here is the physical Dynamics or the physical structure that must be the taste of chocolate or whatever one they want”
Attachment to spacetime objects and the ego-self is suffering; all the things we fight over, kill for, and build reputations around—cars, houses, money, status—are ephemeral data structures that don't persist when unobserved, yet we live in constant illusion about their permanence and importance
“so all of a sudden when you take this point of view it it has all sorts of implications for how we interact with each other how how we treat each other um and again a lot of things that spiritual Traditions have said it's a mixed bag spiritual Traditions are a mixed bag so let me just be right up front about that”
Panpsychism (the view that consciousness is a fundamental property added to physical particles) is a form of dualism that takes spacetime as fundamental and adds consciousness as an additional property; this is less parsimonious than conscious realism, which starts with consciousness as the only fundamental thing
“the psychist perspective well it's actually what I call the conscious realist perspective panus are are effectively dualists right they're saying there's physical stuff that really is fundamental and then Consciousness stuff so I would go with Pinker and say look let's just stipulate the Consciousness stuff but I'm not going to stipulate the physical stuff I'm going to actually now show how to boot up the physical stuff from just the Consciousness stuff so I'll stipulate less”
The mathematical formalism of conscious agents uses probability spaces and Markov kernels to describe how conscious experiences trigger other conscious experiences; this allows for non-computable interactions (events need not be computable), which goes beyond what neural networks and standard computational systems can do
“the events in the probability space need not be computable so the marvian Dynamics is not restricted to computable functions because the very events themselves need not be computable so so this can capture any computable Theory anything we can do with neural networks we can do with conscious agent networks but but it leaves open the door for the possibility of of non-computable um interactions between conscious agents”
God, properly understood, is not a being (a person-like deity), but being itself—the ground of all existence; conflicts arise from treating God as a specific being that one tradition owns, when actually being itself (the ground) is shared and undivided
“in in many Traditions not all the one I was raised in so my dad was a Protestant Minister we tend to think of God as a being but I think that that's not right I think the closest way to think about God is being period not a being but being the the very ground of being itself is God”
Meditation is necessary practice (3-4 hours a day for 20 years in Hoffman's case) to integrate intellectual understanding of conscious realism with emotional/behavioral acceptance; without this integration, one remains trapped in default physicalism despite intellectual agreement
“I've meditated for 20 years now then I would say averaging 3 or 4 hours a day um but it's put a new urgency but urgency is not the right word because that that it's it it's riveted my attention I'll put it that way it's really riveted my attention and um I've really paid I spent a lot more time looking up what spiritual Traditions say”
Most of my colleagues assume spacetime is fundamental; they are brilliant but stuck with an old framework, like researchers who assumed the four elements were fundamental and could never make progress in chemistry without the periodic table
“for me these are my friends and colleagues that are doing this they're brilliant they're ABS they're they're they're brilliant I my feeling is I'm so sad that they're stuck with this old framework because if they they weren't stuck like with earth air Fire and Water you could actually make progress”
By default, humans operate in physicalist mode, attached to bodies, possessions, and reputation; most people, except during meditation or explicit introspection, believe the interface is reality; this default attachment is what prevents seeing through the illusion
“I think my default mode is physicalist right I think that that's just the default I I when I'm not being conscious yeah consciously attentive intellectually consciously attentive cuz if you're just you're still if you're tasting coffee and not thinking or drinking or just taking in the sunset you're not being intellectual you're but you're still exper in it so it's when you turn on the the like the introspective machine that's when you can start and turn off the Thinker”
When you close your eyes and focus attention behind you (where you cannot see), there is no visual quality (not even darkness), yet there is still a sense of being; this empirically demonstrates that consciousness without spatial or visual content is possible and suggests consciousness is more fundamental than spacetime perception
“so I close my eyes I put my attention forward I just I have the quality of a gray model thing but when I put my attention backward there's no quality at all but there is a sense of being and that's the interesting there's a sense of being back so I close my eyes I put my attention backward there's no quality at all but there is a sense of being yeah”
Nearly dying from a heart condition (atrial fibrillation at 190 bpm for 36 hours in an emergency room where Hoffman sent a goodbye text to his wife) changed his relationship to his theory by making the abstract question of death and impermanence concretely urgent
“I almost died last year I co almost killed me um I sent a goodbye text to my wife so I was I I thought I was you really did I sent her a goodbye I I was in the emergency room and uh it had attacked my heart and it been at 190 beats per minute for 36 hours I I couldn't last much longer I knew I like they couldn't stop it so so that was that was it so that was it”
Young physicists working on amplitude hedrons and beyond-spacetime structures are having intellectual fun and success while the old guard approaches are exhausted; this generational shift mirrors how Einstein surpassed Newton—we should look to the young researchers pushing beyond current frameworks for the next revolutionary breakthroughs
“my attitude about it is if you look at the Young physicists who are searching for the inst structors Beyond SpaceTime like appen and so forth they're having a ball SpaceTime that's what the old folks did that's what that's what our the older generation did we're we're doing something that really is fun and new and and they're having a blast”
Hoffman's undergraduate reading of David Marr's paper on vision convinced him to pursue cognitive science rather than continue pure neuroscience, because Marr showed that understanding function (computation and purpose) was necessary before anatomy could make sense.
“I when I was an undergrad at UCLA I read one of his papers in a in a class and said who is this guy because he said you have to have a computational theory what is being computed and why an algorithm how is it being computed”
Money and cryptocurrencies are relevant to consciousness theory because from an evolutionary psychology perspective, centralized monetary systems risk corruption due to power (as with central banks), while decentralized finance (DeFi) distributes power and aligns with human nature and evolutionary incentives
“the decentralized idea the de defi kind of idea in cryptocurrencies may make good sense from just an evolutionary psychology point of view having you know human nature being what it is putting a lot of faith in a few Central controllers um depends a lot on the veracity of those and trustworthiness of those few Central controllers and we have ample evidence time and again that um that's often betrayed so it makes good evolutionary sense I would say to have a decentralized”
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely because of evolution; this is a feature, not a bug—it teaches us lessons about the dangers of centralized control through negative examples
“the fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is also an Evol a consequence of evolution right that's also a feature I think right you can argue from the long span of living organisms it's nice for power to corrupt for you to it so uh mad men and women throughout history might be useful to teach us a lesson we can learn from our negative example”
Consciousness is likely involved in determining the meaning of life, and if consciousness continues to explore infinite varieties of mathematical structures and experiences, this exploration itself might be the meaning—an endless process of consciousness discovering its own possibilities
“my my guess is that if consciousness is fundamental and of girdle girdle's incompleteness theem holds here and there's infinite variety of structures for Consciousness to some sense explore um that maybe that's what it's about this is something that anuka and I talked about a little bit and she doesn't like this way of talking about it so I'm going have to talk with her more”
Having children is a way of creating new portals into consciousness; each child is a unique projection of the one consciousness with a personality and conscious perspective you've never encountered before, and this is what having children achieves (creating genuine novelty in conscious experience)
“and you had you went through this physical process they were born then you there was all the but is that portal yours so when you have kids are you creating new portals that are completely distinct from the portals that you've created with other Consciousness like can you can you elaborate on that to which degree is are the consciousness of your kids a part of you well so every person that I see that symbol that I see the body that I see is is a portal potentially for me to interact with with a Consciousness”
The distinction between intuitionist and classical mathematics matters for physics; if intuitionist mathematics is used instead of classical mathematics (which assumes the law of excluded middle and the continuum), Newtonian theory can be quantized, suggesting quantum mechanics and Newtonian mechanics are not as different as they appear
“Nicholas geson has a physicist had really interesting work recently on how if you go with intuitionist mathematics uh you could effectively quantize Newton and you find that the Newtonian Theory and and quantum theory aren't that different once you go with funny it's really quite interesting”
Steven Wolfram's exploration of cellular automata and computation as fundamental to reality is interesting and worth pursuing; discrete computational structures could generate spacetime at very small scales, which is more plausible than assuming spacetime is fundamental
“so you have somebody like uh stevenh wol Fromm who recently has been very excitedly exploring um a proposal for a data structure that could be um the numbers that would make you a little bit happier in terms of scale because they're very very very very tiny um so do you like this space of exploration”