Top Psychologist, Donald Hoffman: Seeing True Reality Would Kill Us! I Can Prove It To You!

1. 0:00 – 2:17

   Intro

   1. DHDonald Hoffman0:00

      The world that you're seeing isn't the true world. All of this that I'm seeing right now is just a virtual reality. It's like you were born with a headset on playing a video game. That's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code for the game, you know that there's an entire world outside of it. And as the programmer, you can do miracles.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:16

      And do you think we're getting closer to being able to edit the code?

   3. DHDonald Hoffman0:19

      That's exactly what I'm working on right now. And we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are far more powerful than anything we've seen before, like time travel. And nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:29

      Will people suffer?

   5. DHDonald Hoffman0:30

      So it's like Pandora's Box. There's all sorts of nasty surprises, but they also could be miraculous. But either way, just in the last few months, it's started to crack open.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:38

      So let's talk about that.

   7. DHDonald Hoffman0:39

      Okay. So-

   8. SBSteven Bartlett0:40

      Professor Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist pushing the boundaries of how we perceive reality. And how we can unlock our full potential as human beings.

   9. DHDonald Hoffman0:47

      According to Darwin's theory, our sensory systems, eyes, ears, smell, touch, are not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully because seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. And so whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett1:06

       But what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life?

   11. DHDonald Hoffman1:10

       Well, if you're stuck in a boring world, that's a world of your own creation. That's not the real world. And my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain creates, and so we feel inadequate, and we feel like we need to compete with other people. But you're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove. And there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on ourself. So if you really knew who you are, you would see no need to compare or compete.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett1:32

       And is there a way for me to understand who I am?

   13. DHDonald Hoffman1:34

       If you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to...

   14. SBSteven Bartlett1:44

       I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So if you could do me a favor and double-check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show, in the trajectory it's on. So please do double-check if you've subscribed, and, uh, thank you so much because in a strange way, you are, you're part of our history, and you're on this journey with us, and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah. Thank you. [gentle music] Professor Donald Hoffman,

2. 2:17 – 2:50

   Do We Understand What We're Seeing?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:18

      do you think that the listeners of this show, the people listening right now, understand the nature of reality and the world that they're looking at and see?

   2. DHDonald Hoffman2:30

      I think that no one, even the most advanced professionals, really understands the nature of reality, and it's one of the big open problems and questions in science today. We all might have ideas. We might think we know something. Our best science suggests that our imagination is not yet big enough. We need to explore further.

3. 2:50 – 5:25

   Space-Time

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:50

      What is it that you believe is the big sort of misconception about how we perceive reality?

   2. DHDonald Hoffman2:56

      Well, most of us think of reality as whatever's inside space and time. We actually know that space-time cannot be the fundamental nature of reality.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:06

      And what is space-time?

   4. DHDonald Hoffman3:08

      So everything that you see around us, right? The, the, the space between you and me. There's maybe one or two meters of space between you and me. That's w- what space, space-time is. All, all the stuff that we can see in our telescope, put it that way. Any- every... If you can see it in your telescope, it's part of space-time. But we know our, our best theories of space-time, Einstein's theory together with quantum theory, tell us that space-time cannot be the fundamental nature of reality. There's a small... Y- if you go small, so I can talk about a meter.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:35

      Yeah.

   6. DHDonald Hoffman3:35

      And then I can go to, you know, centimeters and then, you know, millimeters, and then we can go, you know, micrometers and, and you can go smaller and smaller. At some point, you go so small that space disappears. It, it no longer even makes sense mathematically. It's 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So it's actually not that... In my, in my view, it's not that small. It's not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters. It's just 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, and all of a sudden our equations tell us, um, space-time doesn't have any effective meaning.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett4:09

      Is space-time-

   8. DHDonald Hoffman4:10

      There's no operational meaning

   9. SBSteven Bartlett4:10

      ... a proxy for the word reality in some respects?

   10. DHDonald Hoffman4:13

       Well, for most people, I think it is. For most people, they think that s- that space-time is the reality, and what I'm saying is, is the reality that most of us have assumed is the final reality, and science is now telling us it can't be. It actually... And it tells us precisely at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, the very notion of space-time makes no sense.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett4:38

       Is that the same as saying that reality as I perceive it makes no sense?

   12. DHDonald Hoffman4:43

       I'm suggesting, now as a cognitive scientist, not a physicist, we should think of space-time as just a virtual reality headset. That's the way we perceive in our game of life.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett4:52

       And when you say space-time, you mean the, the thing that I'm perceiving with my eyes and ears and senses right now?

   14. DHDonald Hoffman4:57

       That's right. Even this hard table is just a VR object. And the whole setting that we're here, in here right now is just a virtual reality, and there is a, a, an, a reality entirely outside this headset that, that is open to science to explore, and we're finding stuff, which you might call obelisks, geometric objects outside of space-time. So, so this is all brand new in the last... Since, like, 20, 2010 or something like that,

4. 5:25 – 7:37

   Are We in a Virtual Reality World?

   1. DHDonald Hoffman5:25

      roughly.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett5:25

      So do you believe that? Do you believe that everything I'm experiencing and seeing now is basically, like, equivocal to me wearing a virtual reality headset, and that there's something beyond the virtual reality headset?

   3. DHDonald Hoffman5:39

      Completely. I, I... 'Cause I believe the science. And the predictions of our theories about space-time are so good. Now, I, I have to always be careful about what I'm saying versus... And I don't want to put words in the physicists' mouth. So when I say I think it's a virtual reality, that's Hoffman. That's not physics, right?

   4. SBSteven Bartlett5:57

      Are you able to swap out the phrase space-time for reality? Or is that inaccurate?

   5. DHDonald Hoffman6:02

      I think that whatever reality is, space-time is a trivial aspect of it. There's much more to reality than space-time. Space-time is all the real... It, it's, it's like a, a player in Grand Theft Auto. If all you've done is play in Grand Theft... And that's, you, you were born with a headset on, and that's all you've... That, that's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code, and you know the supercomputer that's running Grand Theft Auto, you know that Grand Theft Auto, um, is a nice self-contained world. But there's an entire world outside of it that's utterly unlike Grand Theft Auto. It's, it's a supercomputer with diodes and resistors and voltages that are being toggled. And when, when some dude is turning his wheel to, to drive the car, what's really happening when he turns the wheel is that millions of voltages are being toggled in a specific order in some computer, and it has to be exactly that right sequence for the thing to work properly. And, and the guy that's turning the wheel has no idea what's going on. There's this other whole realm utterly outside your imagination in Grand Theft Auto. And so, you know, if you're in Grand Theft Auto, you might not even know about computers and toggling voltages and s- All you know is I got a steering wheel and a gas pedal and streets and, uh, and people to race and so forth and things to, to, to steal and, and whatever.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett7:19

      But you don't realize there's a puppet master effectively controlling you.

   7. DHDonald Hoffman7:22

      Behind the scenes. And so I, I think that space-time is just a very effective headset.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett7:29

      For anyone that doesn't know, Grand Theft Auto is a video game where you run around a virtual world, basically.

   9. DHDonald Hoffman7:33

      That, that's right. Yeah. Driving... You're driving, you know, nice fancy cars in this, in this world. That's

5. 7:37 – 12:53

   Darwin’s Theory Suggests Our World Isn’t Real

   1. DHDonald Hoffman7:37

      right.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett7:38

      So everything I see right now is a projection that I've made on the world, my world, in order to help me to survive. And my brain is not showing me things that it doesn't think I need to see because they won't be conducive with survival because they are cognitively, in terms of like, um, how much fuel and energy they would require to process and think about.

   3. DHDonald Hoffman8:04

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett8:04

      They are cognitively inconsequential, or, like, it would be inefficient for me to spend my cognitive power to see those things.

   5. DHDonald Hoffman8:14

      That's exactly right. And for a lot of people, I think that's counterintuitive because they would say, "Look, evolution is about making you fit so that you can live and survive long enough to reproduce successfully. And surely, evolution should do that by making you see the truth. I mean, if you see the truth, then you're going to compete in the game of life much more successfully than if you don't see the truth. So, so what are you talking about this headset nonsense for? This is not a headset. This is the truth. I mean, it... And evolution should shape us to see the truth." Now, I think that's what most people would, would, would assume, and in fact, very intelligent experts in the field assume that. And I suggest otherwise. In, in fact, we have mathematical proofs otherwise. If you look at evolution, Darwin said, "Look, we need to think about a gradual evolution over time of these species, maybe from very, very simple ones to more complex ones, and what, what is gonna drive that dynamics?" And, and Darwin suggested it was what we would call reproductive fitness, that, that those organisms that have physical properties, sensory systems, motor systems, you know, like movement systems, that make them more likely to have offspring and to raise offspring to maturity. Whatever properties those might be, that's what we're gonna call fitness. So the more fit you are i- is really saying how likely are you to have and successfully raise offspring.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett9:50

      Mm-hmm.

   7. DHDonald Hoffman9:50

      So Darwin suggested that, and I don't think that he necessarily had to say that there was no God. It, it was just that there... I- if there is a God, it's not like God put it down perfect and he did an evolutionary process.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett10:01

      Yeah.

   9. DHDonald Hoffman10:02

      Sorry.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett10:02

       Well, the organisms adapt to their environment. Um, well, they're not adapting, but the offspring that survive are those best adapted to the ev- environment.

   11. DHDonald Hoffman10:10

       That's right. So that was Darwin's idea. So the, the gradual evolution from presumably simpler organisms to more and more complic- complicated organisms and, um, and then m- m- multiple evolutions of things like eyes. Like, the cephalopod eye evolved different- differently from the human eye. Um, and the cephalopod eye got certain things right that the human eye got wrong.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett10:33

       Is that because the cephalopod eye was in a different environment, so it had different requirements?

   13. DHDonald Hoffman10:37

       That would be one possible reason. I, I actually don't know in the case of the cephalopods why, but that kind of idea is absolutely one of the reasons that, that could have happened. Another one, it could just be an accident, right? There's probability involved. And so-

   14. SBSteven Bartlett10:50

       Yeah

   15. DHDonald Hoffman10:50

       ... there at some point, you have the right accident and, and the humans got the thing reversed.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett10:54

       So you're saying Darwin was wrong in some respect or that he... there was something missing from his theory?

   17. DHDonald Hoffman10:58

       Oh, no, I, I think, uh, Darwin's, uh, I, I, my... In terms of biology, I think that there is, um, no serious competitor to Darwin's theory of, of evolution by natural selection in, in terms of the scientific theory of the, the origin of species and so forth. And it's Darwin's theory and the mathematical formulation of it that I think also t- says that what we're perceiving is not the truth, that our sensory systems on Darwin's theory were not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully, period. That's all Darwin's theory actually says. Most of us think the way this evolutionary process does it is to make sure that your senses are telling you the truth about the external reality. I've published some papers with, um, with colleagues where we show mathematically that Darwin's theory does not entail that at all. In fact, Darwin's theory says the probability is zero, that any sensory system like eyes, ears, smell, touch, taste, has ever been shaped To see any aspect of objective reality truly. So the probability is zero that you see any aspect of the truth, period, on Darwin's theory. What you do experience is sensory systems that guide adaptive behavior. Guide adaptive behavior means, um, they let you act-

   18. SBSteven Bartlett12:37

       So your eyes, your nose

   19. DHDonald Hoffman12:38

       ... your eyes, your nose. Yeah, yeah, your eyes, nose, and mouth. They, they guide you so that you act in ways that you don't die too quickly. [laughs]

   20. SBSteven Bartlett12:45

       Okay.

   21. DHDonald Hoffman12:45

       And you can have kids that don't die too quickly.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett12:48

       I was just-

   23. DHDonald Hoffman12:48

       That, that's all it's about.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett12:50

       I was just playing out the scenario then that you removed my

6. 12:53 – 17:54

   What Would Reality Be Without Our Senses?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett12:53

      eyes, and you removed my ears, and my nose, and my ability to sense, you know, temperature and things like that, all of my senses. And I thought if, if I was the only person on Earth and you removed all of my senses, what would reality be? Because if you remove my senses, reality no longer exists as far as I'm aware of it. But that doesn't mean nothing exists, and I'm wondering what that nothing would be like. If you just imagine, like, wipe off everyone on the Earth and it's just you, and we remove all of your senses, what, what is in that space? 'Cause you're right, my senses, my eyes, my ears, my ability to understand temperature is a byproduct and consequence of me surviving. So I was playing out the scene. I was like, well, if we think about ghosts and the afterlife, maybe there is no reason from a survival perspective that I even needed to be able to see or acknowledge them. Maybe it just didn't help. Maybe it actually would've hurt me to have-

   2. DHDonald Hoffman13:53

      Mm-hmm. Right

   3. SBSteven Bartlett13:54

      ... um, 'cause it would've been too cognitively demanding to process all of that information. So anybody that could process all that information wouldn't have been good at reproducing, therefore they wouldn't survive, therefore they wouldn't be here. So maybe those of us that are here, we're just really good at ignoring the other dimensions.

   4. DHDonald Hoffman14:16

      That's what our mathematics says. I think that your, your intuitions on that are, are, are quite right, that i- if you pay attention to anything other than what allows you to have kids, you're wasting your time, uh, from an evolutionary point of view. Perception is expensive. It takes a lot of calories. You have to eat a lot of food to, to, to run your brain and to power your eyes and your ears. And so you need to do shortcuts. You need to make your sensory systems not chew up so much of your energy. The more expensive your, your perceptual systems are, the more you've gotta eat to, to power those. So that means you have to go out there and forage and, and put yourself at harm's... So it's, it's, it's... So there's a trade-off. We try to do things cheaply in evolution. And going for the truth, you don't need to actually go for the truth 'cause that's very, very expensive. So, so for example, there are some flying insects that need to lay their, their, their off- their eggs on, in, in water, and they use a trick of just looking at the polarization of the light, uh, coming off the water. So what, what you see happening in evolution is we have tricks and hacks and, and even, and humans have tricks and hacks and you... for, for example, trying to find out if someone is reproductively fit, right? We, we... You, you can't... I can't actually look at your DNA and, and go, "Well, okay. He's got, uh, he's got an A, C, G, and T, but, uh, he's got a C here where it's supposed to be a T, or, or..." You know, I, I can't look at your DNA. So what do I look at? I have to look at your, at your, what I can see of your body and, and your voice and, and so forth. So-

   5. SBSteven Bartlett15:54

      One of the most compelling arguments for the fact that we aren't seeing reality as it is and we're actually only seeing what we need to see in order to survive is when you look at, as you were saying, is how different animals see the world. And can you just give me some examples of, uh, some more examples of different animals that see the world completely differently? I always think about bats.

   6. DHDonald Hoffman16:14

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett16:14

      How, how do bats see the world? 'Cause do they see colors like we see them and objects like we see them?

   8. DHDonald Hoffman16:19

      No, no. Bats use echolocation. They'll send out little bursts of sound, um, at very, very high frequencies, and then they have these big ears w- that capture the returns and of-

   9. SBSteven Bartlett16:28

      I'm just looking at, uh, their sensory system. It says, "Most insect-eating bats use echolocation," as you said. "They emit high frequency sound waves-

   10. DHDonald Hoffman16:36

       Yes

   11. SBSteven Bartlett16:36

       ... and see by listening to the echoes bouncing off other objects."

   12. DHDonald Hoffman16:40

       That's right.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett16:41

       And this gives them some kind of sonic map of their surroundings, helping them to navigate and effectively see in total darkness. So you imagine a bat.

   14. DHDonald Hoffman16:49

       Right.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett16:49

       Like, then they... if a bat is sat there thinking that they understand the nature of reality when it's actually just a map of how the sound waves bounce back, they, I imagine, don't have the same complete... They have a completely different perception of what reality is to us, and it's... uh, therefore it would be quite ignorant to assume that we as humans are seeing reality as it is when, just like the bat-

   16. DHDonald Hoffman17:13

       Right

   17. SBSteven Bartlett17:13

       ... we've probably adapted to our environment and built senses, eyes, ears, touch, that helped us to survive.

   18. DHDonald Hoffman17:24

       I would agree with you, but some of my colleagues would disagree, and they would say, "Uh, humans are much more complicated. And, you know, surely bats and so forth, they have to have all these shortcuts and they don't see reality as it is, but, but we've evolved further and we're closer to the truth." From my point of view, what I see of this table and this cup and so forth is just a, a, a convenient fiction. Whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive. Utterly.

7. 17:54 – 23:15

   Simulations That Prove This Isn’t Real

   1. SBSteven Bartlett17:54

      In a TED Talk that you did in 2000, uh, in the 2000s, you talked about simulations that you ran to prove that, I guess in, in a, in part, that I'm only seeing things that will help me to survive as a creature, as an organism. Can you explain to me simply what, what those simulations were and what they proved?

   2. DHDonald Hoffman18:15

      Well, yes. In our, in our simulations, and this is before we had theorems. So w- we did simulations just to see if the ideas were working, and, and we would have artificial organisms in a computer.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett18:24

      Yeah.

   4. DHDonald Hoffman18:25

      So it was like a, a, a game that we p- put together, and we would have a world and, and we would let some organisms actually see the true state of that world. So they, they were the truth organisms. And then we'd have other ones that, um, only had like a, a headset, a, an interface that only could see not the truth, but, but just some little bit of information that, that could guide adaptive behavior.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett18:44

      That would help them to-

   6. DHDonald Hoffman18:45

      To-

   7. SBSteven Bartlett18:45

      Survive

   8. DHDonald Hoffman18:46

      To re-

   9. SBSteven Bartlett18:46

      Reproduce

   10. DHDonald Hoffman18:46

       Survive, yeah, and re- and reproduce. That, that, that's right. What we found was, o- for, for a wide range of, of conditions of, of the algorithm, the, the organisms that saw the truth went extinct. They, they weren't able to compete the ones, with the ones that didn't. And, and one of the things that came out of it was seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. It, it's complicated to see the truth. And if you have a simple trick that lets you do the same thing without having to have a deep insight, then you can get the same benefit. You can get the benefit without having to put all the, the effort out. Now, I can give you a concrete example of a, of a, an organism that does this that's, that's pretty funny. So there, there's the jewel beetle. It lives in the outback of Australia. It's dimpled, glossy, and brown. The males fly. The females are flightless. So the males are flying around, of course, looking for an eligible female. It turns out that men in the outback tended for a while were eat, were drinking beer with these bottles that were also dimpled, glossy, glossy, and br- and brown. They'll throw them out into the o- into the outback, and they turned out to be dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to grab the attention of the male jewel beetles. They're, they're actually on the bottle. They're full body contact. They're crawling all over it, and they still think it's a female. So how much do they know about their women? Very, very little they know about their women. The, uh, a woman, a, a female is something dimpled, glossy, and brown. Apparently, the bigger, the better. And that's what a female i- So you can see evolution didn't give these male beetles much insight into their females. They gave them just enough information to successfully reproduce, period. And that's sort of what evolution does. It, it gives you just enough information to, um, reproduce before you die.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett20:32

       So they're all making love to this beer bottle-

   12. DHDonald Hoffman20:34

       That's right

   13. SBSteven Bartlett20:34

       ... because they can't tell, they can't see-

   14. DHDonald Hoffman20:37

       That's right

   15. SBSteven Bartlett20:37

       ... reality. They can't see that this isn't a woman. This is a beer bottle.

   16. DHDonald Hoffman20:41

       That's right. That's one of the more humorous examples of, of what evolution has done. It does things on the cheap, and that includes human sensory systems. So it's, it's very humbling. We're not the epitome. And what we think is h- human appreciation of the deep truth of reality is just our little headset. What we experience and know is trivial compared to whatever reality is, absolutely trivial. We know 0% of reality. And our sc- by the way, our scientific theories will always and forever explain 0% of reality because they have to make assumptions, and every theory, scientific theory has to make assumptions. And so we're gonna have an in- we'll have, in principle, an infinite sequence of theories with ever deeper assumptions, and we'll never get to the bottom. And since it, it's an infinite sequence, that means everything we've got so far is 0%. So I, I'm a scientist. I'm all for science. I encourage young men and women to go into science. I think it's a great thing to do. Um, but just know that, um, all of our theories will comprehend 0% of reality.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett21:55

       You know, people talk a lot about how their pets or other animals are able to see another dimension. Sometimes people say things like, "My dog started barking at this," or, "I had cancer," and there's dogs or animals that have been able to, um, they, they believe spot certain diseases inside the human body. And when you look at the s- sort of sensory faculties of these dogs, dogs can hear frequencies up to 65,000 hertz, whereas humans can only go to 20,000 hertz. Dogs have up to 300 million olfactory receptors.

   18. DHDonald Hoffman22:29

       Yes.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett22:29

       Humans just have 5 million, and some animals, like cats, can see different sort of, uh, frequencies of light. So it does, it does beg a question. You know, if it's possible for an animal, an organism, to see the world in a different depth and width than us-

   20. DHDonald Hoffman22:45

       Right

   21. SBSteven Bartlett22:46

       ... what, what happens if you go further?

   22. DHDonald Hoffman22:48

       Right. A- A- Absolutely. There are some that can, uh, detect electro- electric fields. So some, um, fish can de- detect electric fields. Um, some birds, I believe, can see the polarization of light. And some, some, uh, insects, of course, use polarization of light to, to find where to lay their eggs. So, and w- and, and we can't do that. Um, so, so yeah, the, when we start to study other animals, we see these, uh, uh, remarkable ability.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett23:14

       Interesting.

8. 23:15 – 33:30

   What This Means for Living a Better Life

   1. SBSteven Bartlett23:15

      And what does, um, what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life? Because I guess the way, the way that we perceive the world causes us so much suffering or joy, depending on how we perceive it.

   2. DHDonald Hoffman23:29

      Yes.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett23:29

      Is there anything people, from all of the work you've done and the books you've written, that people can bring into their lives to help them live better lives with this understanding of the world?

   4. DHDonald Hoffman23:39

      First thing to note is that the world is far more interesting and varied than you can imagine. So if you, if you think the world is a boring place, it's, it's not. Your imagination isn't big enough. Whatever reality is, it, it transcends anything that you could possibly imagine. Spiritual traditions basically often say there's more to life than what you see inside space and time. There's something beyond. And I've been sort of pointing to that myself in my own way. I'm saying that scientific theories always have assumptions, so there's an infinite number of scientific theories that you can have, and you're never going to get a scientific theory of everything. What am I saying? That there's something beyond science. As good as science is, I'm saying there's n- not, only not a theory of everything, the best theory we'll ever come up with is 0% of reality. So that leaves all this room for what the spiritual traditions are talking about, that there's something that trans- transcends science. There is a, a, a way of thinking about this that I think is very illuminating and it, it's about the inter-intersection of science and spirituality. I'm a scientist. Who, who, who am I? Uh, uh, I am someone and, and I'm one of many someones, other scientists, who can create theories and, in principle, ever, ever deeper theories, and there's an infinite sequence. So who is the I that can do this? No theory that I can come with, come up with is the final description of that I. In other words, the I that is doing all this theory building is the I that is real, that is making these theories, and that utterly transcends all these theories, and that's a spiritual point of view.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett25:33

      So what does that mean? You're, you're God?

   6. DHDonald Hoffman25:35

      It means that whatever you are transcends any description, and that's what a lot of people say God is. Suppose I give you something you've never tasted before, like a piece of mint, and actually I don't know what mint tastes like to you. I, I assume that it's like what t- mint tastes like for me, but I don't know. This is called learning by ostensive definition. And so we have this game where your experiences are your experiences and you actually didn't need anybody else for those experiences. All you needed me for or your parents for is to give you a name for what you already knew. And, and you, you create this, this world, and all we do is tell you how to talk with me about what you've created. And I don't know that your world in any way resembles my experience. It's quite possible.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett26:24

      And do you think there's ways that we cause ourself a lot of anguish and pain and mental health issues because of how we perceive the nature of reality to be, that we could potentially, I don't know, give up or rewire ourselves on to have a, have a more fulfilling, more grateful experience of life?

   8. DHDonald Hoffman26:41

      Completely. I think that's very, very important, and it's a natural consequence of what we've just been talking about. Almost all of us think of ourselves as an object in space-time, only here for a short amount of time and will soon die. When I say you transcend any scientific theory, that, that means the theory that I am just a 160-pound object in space-time is just a theory and it's not the truth. That's not the truth about who I am. That's just a theory that I have because space-time itself is just a theory. Nothing inside space-time is anything but my headset interpretation of a reality that infinitely transcends anything I can experience. There is another way that you can appreciate that that's, that transcends science, and that is, um, and this, many meditative traditions talk about this. They recognize that you are infinitely beyond any scientific or any other description. So what do you do in that case to know who you are? You drop all descriptions. You sit in absolute silence and ignore any thoughts because you recognize thoughts are useful in this headset and to play the game of life, yeah. We need thoughts to do our science. We need to... If you want to understand who I am... A- again, I do psychology. I do all this stuff. I do the sci- so I'm not putting science down. I'm a scientist. But at some point, if you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to lay aside all concepts, period, and just know yourself by being yourself, not by putting a concept between you and yourself.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett28:35

      A story.

   10. DHDonald Hoffman28:36

       A story.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett28:36

       An identity.

   12. DHDonald Hoffman28:37

       That's right. No, no story, no iden- nothing between you and yourself. You, you know yourself by sitting in utter silence and being yourself, no concepts. Because then you've let go of all theories and now it's reality facing reality, no barrier in between.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett28:56

       And that requires you t- to realize that your identity, the stories you believe, the labels you've given yourself as CEO or social media manager or manager or director or head of department, all of these things are just, in fact, labels you've given.

   14. DHDonald Hoffman29:10

       That's right. Those are, are just labels that you've given. And what's interesting about this now is if I think I'm just this little body and I'm nothing but this body and, and my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain does, so, uh, so that's my theory and that's, that's all I am, I don't feel very big. I don't feel very important. Um, and so I'm gonna probably need to do something to make myself feel a little bit better and w- well, I'm gonna need to compete with you. I'm gonna need to show how I'm better than you in certain ways. So I'm, I'm a better tennis player than you or I'm smarter than you or, or whatever. So we're gonna get this competition going on where, a- among people, and we're gonna get even competition among re- religions and countries and so forth because we don't know who we are and, and we feel inadequate. And if we actually understood that all of this that I'm seeing right now, I'm making it up on the fly. This cup that I'm seeing, it only exists when I create it. This table exists when I create it. Like in a virtual reality. If I, in a virtual reality, I'm in Grand Theft Auto, I look over here and I now I see a red Mustang. I look away, I don't see the red Mustang, and now there is no red Mustang. The red Mustang only existed when I looked because it's a VR game. I only need it when I rend... I, I, I render it when I need it. I'm now rendering a cup. That, the cup that I rendered is no longer there. You might render your cup. You might say, "Well, no, Don, you're wrong. The cup is still there, I can see it." No, you're rendering your cup, and so you, you, you're, you're not rendering my cup. I rendered my cup. So, and the same thing with Grand Theft Auto. You might say, "Well, I see the red Mustang even if you're not looking, Don." Well, that's because in your headset, you're looking and you're rendering the r- uh, uh, the, the red Mustang, but I'm not. And there is no red Mustang. If you look inside the supercomputer, there's no red Mustang there. [laughs] The s- the supercomputer that's running the game has no red Mustang. So what I'm saying is we compete, we feel inadequate, and we feel like we need to compete with other people and be better than them, and we have egos. All the egoic stuff that we do that causes all the problems in the world because you don't know who you are. You're creating this whole thing. You're, you're, you're not a little player, you're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove. And you don't need to be better than anybody else. They're also master creators. They're creating entire universes that, that they perceive a- as well. And my own take on, on this is that you and I are really the same one reality just looking at itself through two different headsets, two different avatars, and having a conversation. And maybe that's what, you know, is required for this one infinite intelligence to sort of know itself. What you... If you're, if you transcend any description, what, how do you know yourself? Maybe what you do is you say, "Well, let me try this headset on. Let me take that seriously for a while. May- maybe even let myself get lost, and let me, let me l- completely believe I'm just a Don Hoffman in, in, in, in this space-time, and let me believe that for, for many decades and then slowly s- sort of wake up, but at least then I will have seen myself from this perspective. Then I'll take off that headset." We call that death when I'll just take off the headset and then I'll try... There's an infinite number of headsets to try on. So it... from that point of view, any person you speak to is transcendent. Any animal is just an avatar of this transcendent, unspeakably incredible reality that transcends science so that science will only get 0% of it. And again, uh, I'll always say, I'm not putting down science, I'm a scientist. We need to do science and I recommend that people do science. But m- my guess, this is one of the more trivial headsets. It's only four dimensions. Why not 20 billion? Why not quintillion? This is, this is just a, a fairly trivial... So we, we may be i- in one of the most, the more uninteresting perspectives on, on who we are and, and, and there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on ourself. But, but the reason we have fighting, the reason we have egos, is because we don't know who we are.

9. 33:30 – 38:11

   Understand Who You Are

   1. SBSteven Bartlett33:30

      And is there a way for me to understand who I am? Or is the closest you've found meditation? I know you've meditated for 20 years or something.

   2. DHDonald Hoffman33:39

      I, I should say, I should be a little careful about it. I think it really is important t- to do for, for me as a scientist to have done the science that I've done. But I think for someone else who doesn't do science, maybe th- that you do music or you do some sports or something like that. That's, that is a concrete way of knowing yourself through a perspective and that's really important and, and, and since we have billions of people, and then there's untold other kinds of animals and insects and so forth, this, this one infinite intelligence, whatever it is, has decided, "I wanna look at myself through the lens of a mosquito, and now of the bumblebee, and now of the, the jewel beetle that, that can't even tell a bottle from, from a, a, a female. I'm gonna look at myself from this panoply of perspectives."

   3. SBSteven Bartlett34:27

      So you're almost implying there that there's this one consciousness-

   4. DHDonald Hoffman34:29

      Yeah

   5. SBSteven Bartlett34:29

      ... and it's just using different organisms potentially as vehicles to understand itself and the nature of reality.

   6. DHDonald Hoffman34:37

      That's right.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett34:37

      So that would mean that me and you are the same consciousness, but you were born as a scientist in America and I was born as a, I don't know, an entrepreneur in Botswana with different perspectives in order to understand the reality. Which means that we're basically the same-

   8. DHDonald Hoffman34:50

      That's right

   9. SBSteven Bartlett34:51

      ... the same consciousness, the same super intelligence or whatever, just manifesting as different eyeballs in different places.

   10. DHDonald Hoffman34:59

       That's my, my view and certain religious traditions do sort of hint, almost s- say that e- ex- exactly. Um, you know, like, like Jesus, uh, in, in Christianity, in like Matthew 25 says, "You know, I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a foreigner and you invited me in. I was sick and you helped me. I was in prison and you visited me." And people, he says, said, asked him, "When did we do that?" And he said, "Whenever you did it to the least person, you did it to me." So Jesus is sort of hinting at this. There is... Uh, uh, there's no difference. The reason to love your neighbor as yourself is because your neighbor is yourself, just with a different headset. And the only reason we have problems is we don't realize how incredible you are. So you are that which is creating this VR simulation with all of its beauty, all of its complexity. All the complexity is you, and you're doing it effortlessly. N- now, uh, for my neuroscience colleagues, they will say, "Don, it's not effortless. You've got 100 billion, well, 86 billion neurons in your brain. The visual system has, you know, billions of neurons that are doing all this computation, and, you know, we have the, the simple cells, the complex cells, the hyper-complex cells, and we think of the brain as a physical object that's generating our consciousness."

   11. SBSteven Bartlett36:33

       Yeah.

   12. DHDonald Hoffman36:33

       I'm, I'm saying space-time itself is something that you create, and so you create everything inside space-time and-

   13. SBSteven Bartlett36:43

       I've also created the brain

   14. DHDonald Hoffman36:44

       You create the brain. So right now, you don't have a brain.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett36:47

       Excuse me?

   16. DHDonald Hoffman36:48

       And nor do I.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett36:49

       Okay, fair enough.

   18. DHDonald Hoffman36:51

       'Cause I don't, 'cause I don't have a brain, and you don't have a brain until we actually look inside and render a brain. Just like in, in VR, the, the Mustang doesn't exist until you look at it and render it. So i- if, if I, I can predict that if we do the right scans, we will see a brain, but that only exists when we, when we do the rendering. So I don't have a brain. All these correlations, we know that correlation doesn't cause... doesn't imply causation, right?

   19. SBSteven Bartlett37:16

       Sure.

   20. DHDonald Hoffman37:17

       So we, we... The fact that there is correlations, and I don't deny it. In fact, I'm all for studying these correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences. They exist. They're undeniable, and they don't in any way remotely entail that the brain causes our conscious experiences. Somehow our-

   21. SBSteven Bartlett37:34

       So I'm not, I'm not the brain. I'm the thing that's simulating the presence of a brain.

   22. DHDonald Hoffman37:37

       That's right. That's right. And so in your simulation, your simulation is so good that it simulates also how all this reality that transcends space-time is being funneled down into this tiny little space-time headset, and that's what we call the brain. So of course there are gonna be these correlations between brain activity and what we see, but the correlation goes the other way. It's not because the brain creates your conscious experiences. It's because consciousness has created the brain as an icon to describe how it's, how it's creating this headset.

10. 38:11 – 43:04

    Simulation Theories

    1. SBSteven Bartlett38:11

       Do you think much about simulation theory? I've had lots of, uh, dinner parties recently and conversations over dinner about simulation theory, and it always gets very, very interesting. Um, what are your thoughts on simulation theory? And for my listeners who might not understand the concept of simulation theory-

    2. DHDonald Hoffman38:25

       Sure

    3. SBSteven Bartlett38:25

       ... are you able to explain it?

    4. DHDonald Hoffman38:27

       Yes. The, the... So the standard, uh, Nick Bostrom, for example, is, is a very big figure in simulation theory and, and in the... those kinds of simulation theories, the idea is that the world that you're seeing right now isn't the, the true world. This is just a simulation. And there's some programmer, say, with some really nice computer that's programmed this world, and so we're... you're just, we're just characters in a simulated world of some programmer. And that programmer and their laptop that's doing this, as it turns out, isn't the final thing either because that programmer and their laptop is also just a simulation from a deeper level programmer and their laptop. There could be a, the very, very large nesting of all these s- simulated worlds and, and people with their computers, and that does jive pretty well with what I'm saying up to a point. I'm saying this is not the reality. This is just a headset. So but there's a big, big disagreement.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett39:27

       Do you think we're gon- there's gonna come a point where with everything that's going on with AI and robotics that we could get, make a robot, um, program it with a certain AI that gives it the sort of same thinking as a human being, and then when I put some chocolate into its mouth, it's going to say to me, "Mm, I love that chocolate, Steven. That's my favorite flavor"?

    6. DHDonald Hoffman39:46

       I could certainly program such a robot.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett39:47

       Yeah.

    8. DHDonald Hoffman39:47

       But the question will always be, just because I have this particular circuit in the, in the computer, uh, and, and, you know, and then some structure in the tongue that I've given it and some pattern of electrical activity, what is my scientific theory that explains why that pattern had to be the taste of chocolate? That's what we need. As a scient- we... I mean, it's easy enough to make a-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett40:08

       But it goes back to your adaptive learning thing where it's just learned through all of the data, through someone telling it, programming it to think that particular set of chemicals, um, send that up to the software and then respond like this, which might just be how me and you are responding to life. We might not be conscious at all.

    10. DHDonald Hoffman40:25

        Right. And, and what you're suggesting is probably how we'd actually do it, right? We would probably sort of train it and, and, and ha- and have it give us the right responses in, in that kind of context. So we'd probably do it something like that. But, but then as scientists, we want to understand. So we're claiming as scientists that an experience is a, say, certain causal structure or a certain functonal, functional architecture. That's what we're saying it is.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett40:51

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DHDonald Hoffman40:51

        Because w- th- because these, these are physicalist theories, and they're, they're saying, "We're not gonna start with consciousness. Consciousness is not fundamental. Space and time and physical objects are fundamental, and so we, we need to show how those physical objects and their properties give rise to these conscious experiences." So if, if that's, if that's the science you want to propose, then I have to be hard-nosed as a scientist now and say, "Give me your theory of mint."

    13. SBSteven Bartlett41:18

        So do you think this is a simulation?

    14. DHDonald Hoffman41:21

        So it's, it's, it's not a simulation in Bostrom's sense. In Bostrom's sense, it's a simulation in that it's a physical substrate that's giving rise to this whole world of conscious experiences that I'm having.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett41:33

        Yeah. So it's-

    16. DHDonald Hoffman41:34

        And that I deny

    17. SBSteven Bartlett41:35

        ... like a game programmer sat at a computer making it.

    18. DHDonald Hoffman41:38

        And that... and somehow the physical system itself gave rise to the magic of the ex- the conscious experiences I'm having of red and green and love and so forth. Those conscious... So for the simulation theory, so this is my p- my bone of contention with the simulation theory. It's very similar to my theory in, in all other respects, but this is a pretty serious bone of contention. For their theory to, to work, they have to show explicitly, scientifically how a consc- a specific conscious experience arises-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett42:07

        Right

    20. DHDonald Hoffman42:07

        ... from a specific program.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett42:09

        Okay.

    22. DHDonald Hoffman42:09

        Until you do that, this is... there is no beef on the table, right? There, so fr- from my point, their, their theory is a non-starter right now because there's no specific experience that they can say, "This program must be the taste of mint." They can't do that. And until they can do that, they can't get this whole world of experience that I'm living in. Nothing. So there's no beef. All they have to do to give me some beef is to say, like in integrated information theory, they say, "Here's the matrix for mint. This is the matrix." Of course, then we'll ask Why? Why is that matrix, that causal structure, the taste of mint? What is your scientific theory for why that's the ca- And what you'll see is, I think, I, I think it's gonna take the field a while to see it, but we will find that these approaches are vacuous. There's no beef.

11. 43:04 – 44:43

    What’s the Meaning of Life in This Reality?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett43:04

       When you ask people what the meaning of their life is, they'll often say things like it is, maybe they'll say to raise children, maybe they'll say they wanna improve humanity, they wanna, um, cure a disease, they wanna, um, help society in some way. But through the lens of reality that you see the world and that you believe the world is, what becomes the meaning of life, Donald?

    2. DHDonald Hoffman43:24

       That's a great question. I do think that the best description I can give is that there is this one transcendent, infinite consciousness, and you and I are just avatars, and so is a mosquito, and so is a bacterium. And all are equally interesting and important, and all are different perspectives, just different headsets. There's the mosquito headset. There's the jewel beetle headset. There's all these different headsets. And I'm, I'm in the Hoffman headset. Happen to do science. I'm not good at art. I'm not good at, at music and so forth. I have my, my, my particular talents and, and ina- inabilities in my headset. So I'm here to experience the Don Hoffman perspective on things.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett44:07

       Why?

    4. DHDonald Hoffman44:09

       Because that's perhaps the only way the infinite can know itself is through an infinite number of perspectives. It, it transcends any particular perspective, so why not get lost in the Hoffman perspective and a jewel beetle perspective, and, and all these different perspectives? And that's the only way to, to know yourself. But it's always the one consciousness that's knowing itself through an infinite number of, of varieties, of, of experiences, of headsets.

12. 44:43 – 46:46

    Did Someone or Something Create Consciousness?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett44:43

       And did someone or something create that one consciousness?

    2. DHDonald Hoffman44:46

       Now I'm above my pay grade. It's, uh, [laughs] That's a... No, no, no, that's, of course, the right question, and it asks for an explanation. And the only explanations we have are either mathematical or scientific or both. Th- th- the only s- really deeply serious testable. But, but even informal explanations make assumptions. And so I'll have to say that, that you're asking a question about an entity that transcends any description, namely who you really are and who I am, I really am. And I think we c- I think you can know the answer to your question in, in one way, and that is dropping all concepts and just being with your being. You are that. You are that. You don't need to attain anything. You don't need to achieve anything. You're that right now. So there's no effort. There's no, no need to get better at anything. It's just to recognize what you already are. You've let yourself be under an illusion that I'm just this little guy that needs to do these things and, you know, and be a professor and whatever it might be. I've been under that illusion and, and I got to see myself through that lens, and then I began to wake up and see that I completely transcend. It was an interesting perspective. I'm glad I took it seriously. I'm gonna throw off that headset. We call it death, but I'm gonna take off that headset pretty soon because that's not who I am. I transcend that. So the answer is y- you can know it, but, but you know it when you let go of all concepts and you don't try. If you're trying to get there, then you don't see what you already are. That's the, that's the best answer I can give at this, at this point, because it does transcend science.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett46:45

       So in terms

13. 46:46 – 48:11

    Where Does God Fit in This Reality?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett46:46

       of a, a God, a- as we believe in Gods in the religious context, the best answer that you have would say that effectively we are God, the God that we, we refer to. We are the transcendent power that goes beyond description and-

    2. DHDonald Hoffman47:04

       Right. Yeah, I, I would say that, and, and I, I can... I mean, I, I can put that in a sort of a Christian language, um, because many listeners will be Christians. Um, a child of a human is a human. The Bible calls us children of God. Well, if a child of a human is human, a child of God is God. That's what the, what, what it's pointing to. And, and Jesus is fairly explicit about it. When some religious leaders were about to stone Jesus for saying that he was the Son of God, J- Jesus quotes the scripture and says, from I think the, the Psalms or something like that, he says, "But in the Psalms it says, 'I have said you are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High.'" And Jesus said, "If they, if he calls them gods to whom the word of God came, why are you trying to stone me to death for just saying I'm the Son of God?" What, what the Bible is basically saying, love God with all your heart, that, it's loving yourself. You are God. And loving your neighbor as yourself is just recognizing that your neighbor is yourself under a different avatar.

14. 48:11 – 52:43

    Was Jesus Divine Beyond Any of Us?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett48:11

       Do you think Jesus was really divine in any... I'm presuming you think this was a real individual. And do you think he was divine beyond, beyond me and you in some respect?

    2. DHDonald Hoffman48:22

       Not beyond me and you, but you're, you are as divine as could possibly be.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett48:27

       Thank you so much. We'll clip that. I'll put that on my LinkedIn.

    4. DHDonald Hoffman48:31

       Hoffman said it.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett48:32

       Yeah. Like a little recommendations section on LinkedIn. Thanks.

    6. DHDonald Hoffman48:34

       You're divine as... Hoffman says I'm as divine as I could possibly be.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett48:38

       Are there any, um, are there... You, you must go th- if you, if you understand reality through this lens that we're seeing so little and that much of it is created by By ourselves and, um, we are the transcendent. Are there any things that you do on a day-to-day basis that are atypical because of that, or thoughts you have, or experiences you have that are atypical because of this perspective?

    8. DHDonald Hoffman49:06

       Certainly atypical from before in my own, in, in my own life. I now spend, um, quite a bit of time in meditation because I, I... as much as I enjoy the life of the mind and I'm, you know, I'm a professor and I've taught lots of students over many, many years, and I highly recommend all that stuff, at some point, I realize that all my knowledge, all possible scientific knowledge is 0% of reality. And do I really want to confine myself only to 0% of reality? I want to explore reality from this perspective, but it is 0%. So I do my homework, and I encourage my students to do more homework, take this perspective very seriously, study it, study it rigorously, but then realize there's this, the 100% that you haven't seen, and you are it.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett49:55

       So are you doing lots of psychedelics and stuff like that to-

    10. DHDonald Hoffman49:58

        I haven't done any psychedelics.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett49:59

        You've never tried psychedelics?

    12. DHDonald Hoffman50:00

        I, I, I've never, I've never even smoked a cigarette.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett50:03

        Wow.

    14. DHDonald Hoffman50:04

        I, I, and I haven't had a drink of alcohol in, in decades. So I, I... a- and it's partly just because I'm, I'm frail. My, my physical body isn't that strong. I, I, I have limits to w- well, I can't push my body too hard. So I've, I've learned to operate within my own limits, and I don't push it too hard. But the meditation I, I do.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett50:26

        Am I right in thinking that you now meditate three to four hours a day?

    16. DHDonald Hoffman50:31

        Probably, yeah.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett50:32

        What insights or understandings have emerged from that that I might be able to comprehend?

    18. DHDonald Hoffman50:37

        Any creativity that's ever come out in my scientific work, to whatever, to whatever extent it's creative, it's come from the silence. So I've, of course, I had to do my homework and do my studies and so forth, but the novel ideas come from the silence. Personally, one, one thing I've seen is how identified I am with my avatar. I think I am this body. I'm really tied to this body, and it's... The stuff that I'm saying at the emotional level, there's a, an emotional part of me that doesn't believe it one bit. E- emotionally, um, you put a gun to my head, I'm scared to death.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett51:24

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DHDonald Hoffman51:26

        Intellectually, I'll say, say to you, "This is just an avatar. I, I'm the infinite that transcends. So and when I die, then I just..." And, and I believe that. How deeply do I believe it? Put a gun to my head and you'll find out. I'll wet my pants. So it's, it's, it's very, very interesting for me to look at that and to see all the disjunctions, the, the, the, the things that are disjointed in, in, in my, my worldview.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett51:55

        But it kind of makes sense, right? Based on your theory that our senses have evolved to help us to survive because someone not liking your thinking or your theories or rejecting you or harm to your body, it would go against your survival. So theoretically, if we are in the world that you've described, in the reality you've described, which is basically designed for survival, then you would have developed senses that make you change behavior if there's a risk of someone not liking you.

    22. DHDonald Hoffman52:20

        That's right. There, there are social pressures and, and if you don't conform to them, you get feedback that, that can be very, very negative, and in some cases, even death. Um, if, if, if I, if I go to a grocery store and, and don't happen to pay and just walk off with the stuff, I end up behind bars. There are rules of the game. There are rules of the headset. I transcend the headset, but I choose to allow myself to get lost in the game.

15. 52:43 – 1:01:51

    Near-Death Experience and What Happens When We Die

    1. SBSteven Bartlett52:43

       Starting in January 2020, you did have a proverbial gun held to your head in a, in a way because you contracted COVID and went through, and are still going through, some pretty, um, serious health complications because of long COVID.

    2. DHDonald Hoffman52:58

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett52:58

       You developed heart, heart issues within weeks requiring hundreds of hours of critical care in hospital. You told me before we started recording that you've had heart surgery twice.

    4. DHDonald Hoffman53:06

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett53:06

       Um, in 2021, at 66 years old, at one point you thought you might not survive because your heart had been at 190 beats per minute for 30 hours, and you sent your wife a goodbye message-

    6. DHDonald Hoffman53:18

       Right

    7. SBSteven Bartlett53:18

       ... because it looked like it was all over.

    8. DHDonald Hoffman53:20

       Right. Right.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett53:22

       I am wondering what that brush with death did to your perception of life, your perspective, and how that all ties into your, your, um, your beliefs about the nature of reality.

    10. DHDonald Hoffman53:39

        It certainly let me see how tied I am to my body and the fear that I, that I experienced, right? It's one thing for me to sit here as a nice academic and talk about how you're the transcendent reality. It's another thing to have your heart fail and to know that th- this is probably the end and, and to face the raw emotion. So I have deep raw em- ... and then I had to have another surgery. I, um, the first one kept me for a year and a half or so. A great surgeon. It's not his fault. He, he did a, a, a great job, but you know, COVID is persistent. And the week before my second surgery, I was in the ER three times where they had to restart my heart. Just didn't know if I was gonna make it. I, I would have to go have my heart restarted and then two days later go back and have my heart restarted, and I was just hoping to make it to live to the surgery. Um, and, and even now, I wouldn't be surprised if the heart starts to, to go bad again. So, so that takes us out of the, you know, abstract academic realm into something very, very concrete on how do you deal with the fact that you really don't know from one heartbeat to the next. It keeps you from just talking abstractly about this stuff and, and And, and being real about it. It's what do I really feel about it? And, and when I look inside and see there's real fear, then I know, okay, um, this stuff about, um, you're the infinite and everybody else is the infinite is still fairly just an abstract concept for you, Don. You haven't really gone deep enough. You need to go deeper and actually, if that's true, I mean, may- maybe it's all BS, right? But, but if it's true that you are the infinite and everybody else is the infinite, um, then you need to go deeper into that. Um, and, and I, intellectually, I'm, I'm convinced. I mean, I've given you the reasons. I, intellectually, I'm, I'm quite convinced. Um, and it's, it's really interesting to me that emotionally, I'm far from convinced. I'm far... And as, uh, and I agree with what you just said about the evolutionary arguments for it. And there's good evolutionary reasons for me to be wired up to have automatic emotional responses that are gonna protect this body, to keep it... So no, no doubt about it. So, so there's no reason to judge myself that I'm a f- you know, my body has a, a fear response and so forth when there are things that, that are about to, to, to kill me. The issue is then when I look at that fear response, can I look at it and accept it, or do I identify with it? Do I identify with the fear response, or can I step back and be the observer that watches the fear response? And in, in the meditation process, what I'm learning to do is, in some sense, what I was saying about the science. Science is great, but don't believe any theory. Theories are just tools. They're not the truth. No scientific theory, my theories included, are not the truth. And so also is my theory about who I am, not the truth. So to really let go of any theory, if I can really let go of any theory of who I am, then I'll let go of any fear. So it's really, this really comes down to, to this, what's really, really quite interesting. We will each die. That's incontrovertible. So any attachments I have to this world will cease. There's no doubt. The question is, can I let go of the attachments now, or will they only go from my cold, dead hand? [chuckles]

    11. SBSteven Bartlett57:20

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DHDonald Hoffman57:21

        Wh- when will I let go of all these attachments? If I, my... To the extent, and I am no, I, no expert, but to the extent that I can let go, I see that there's more peace. There's more peace in letting, not being attached to things. So I, I, I see that, but, but I'm not there. So this is a very human, very human perspective on things, a very fallible perspective, and it's very, very interesting. So I'm claiming I'm the infinite, and I'm the infinite having taken on this, this bodily form, and in some sense, I'm waking up to who I really am, but I'm only partly awake.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett58:05

        I started my first business at 12 years old, and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketeer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service, and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully, there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you, our sponsor today, which is Shopify. Because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing product descriptions, your website design, and enhancing your product's images. Not to mention the bits you'd expect Shopify to handle, like the shipping, like the taxes, like the inventory. And if you're looking to get your business started, go to shopify.com/bartlett and sign up for a $1 per month trial. That's shopify.com/bartlett. So when we do die, in your perspective, is that equivalent to sort of taking the headset off?

    14. DHDonald Hoffman59:09

        Entirely.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett59:10

        And so when we die, we take the headset off and-

    16. DHDonald Hoffman59:13

        That's right. That's right

    17. SBSteven Bartlett59:16

        ... the consciousness still remains, I assume.

    18. DHDonald Hoffman59:19

        That's right.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett59:20

        So how would one... Am I gonna... When I die, am I gonna float up and be in, like, a heaven? Am I gonna go into a tree? Am I gonna become a bug? What's gonna happen with that consciousness? Is it gonna be this, or is this just a bunch of labels and stories?

    20. DHDonald Hoffman59:36

        Of course, the, the answer is I don't know, but, but I, but I, I will speculate. Having said I don't know and, and being honest, I'll, I'll, I'll speculate. I suspect that the closest I can get to that is what happens in meditation. When I really do let go. There... And, and, and it's very, very quiet and my eyes are closed. Then there's, there is awareness, and it's a very alert awareness, very, very conscious, and it has no content. There's no colors, no tastes, no smells. There's no content and no need. It's, it's, it's an awareness that can create all this in an instant, and it can let it go. So it's, it's... So it is the, the, the closest you can get to answering your own question is really just to sit in silence. And it's, it's hard because the thoughts will come and come and come, and letting go of all thoughts is, is, is the difficult one. But when you do that, then I think that's the closest I can give to the answer to your question.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:48

        We spend a lot of time debating whether this God is real or whether this thing is real, or whether horoscopes are real, or whether-

    22. DHDonald Hoffman1:00:53

        Right, right

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:53

        ... this spiritual belief is real, or karma or dharma or reincarnation.

    24. DHDonald Hoffman1:00:57

        Right

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:59

        In your perspective then, is it somewhat ignorant to set your stall up anywhere to say that something is or isn't true? Because, you know, people are different sides of the spectrum. Some people are like, you know, staunch, staunchly religious, and then others are staunchly atheist.

    26. DHDonald Hoffman1:01:13

        Right. Right. Right. I, I think that, of course, like in science, there are certain things that are just plain nonsense. Someone... In, in fact, most of the stuff that you just casually come up with and, you know, my theory of electricity or my theory of the atoms, it's just n- it's just plain nonsense and, and goes nowhere. It's not worth any time. So I suspect the same thing is true in spiritual stuff, where we have even fewer guardrails [chuckles] on our theories. But I think there are a few guiding stars. If it involves loving your neighbor as yourself, you're on the right track. If it involves putting a barrier between us and them and saying that they're bad and we're good, you're probably on the wrong

16. 1:01:51 – 1:05:00

    Grief and Love

    1. DHDonald Hoffman1:01:51

       track.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:51

       What does this mean for grief? So many people are losing loved ones as we speak, or are contending with the reality that they are going to lose a loved one. What does it mean for the nature of love? Does it, you know, does it take anything away from love? Does it add to love? Does it-

    3. DHDonald Hoffman1:02:06

       Mm

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:06

       ... strengthen love?

    5. DHDonald Hoffman1:02:08

       Well, I would, yeah. I think in some sense it comes down to love is the central thing. And, and, uh, and, and you know, in Christianity, Jesus, that's the... I'm talking about that because, you know, my dad was a pastor and I, that's the one I was raised in, so I, I know the most about this. So I'm speaking only because that's where I had some background. And, and, and when Jesus was asked what's the most important thing, he basically said, "Love God with all your heart. Love your neighbor as yourself." So love is like number one, and my guess is that's really all you need. If, if your religion is love, and that's it, and that's, and that's how you act, th- you don't really need to add anything more to that. That's, that's all you really need. Love your neighbor as yourself, you're done. That's all that you need, and anything beyond that is just not necessary, and anything that contradicts that, I would go back and try to figure out where I went wrong in my religion.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:07

       I've been, um, asking my... When I met my girlfriend, Melanie, uh, in her bio on Instagram, it said, "God is love." Now, she's not religious.

    7. DHDonald Hoffman1:03:14

       Yes.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:15

       Uh, she doesn't believe in a particular book or whatever, but she, when you... I asked her, actually, funnily enough, we had this conversation last night.

    9. DHDonald Hoffman1:03:20

       Ah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:21

        I said to her, "What do you think, uh, God is?" And she said, "I think God is just love."

    11. DHDonald Hoffman1:03:25

        Uh, and I, I completely a- agree

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:27

        That's shocking that she's right again.

    13. DHDonald Hoffman1:03:28

        Yeah, and no, I, I think that that's... Th- that love is the closest word that we can have to, to, as a pointer. And again, it's just a pointer. Wh- whatever love is, is just like the word mint only points to the mint, the word love only points, but it, I, I think it's the best pointer that we have. Love.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:49

        And what is that definition of the word love? Because, you know, people use the l-... I love Manchester United, but the love that you're describing seems to be much more about a k- a, a oneness or s- or-

    15. DHDonald Hoffman1:04:01

        It's basically, uh, just really recognizing that that person, even though they have a different color, a different race, a different creed, a different idea, that's just me. That's me in a different headset. And when I really... Then, then I ask, "Well, how would I want to treat me?" I get the right answer. That's love. How would I... I- if that's me, how, how sh- how would I treat me if that were me? Well, when you get the right an- when you do that, you're acting in love. You're not gonna beat yourself up. You're not gonna [chuckles] call yourself names. You're, you're not going to call your, call you a whatever. You're, you're, you're going to treat yourself the way you want to treat yourself, then treat others the same way, and that's, that's what, what love is. But ul- ultimately, I think, again, these are all just pointers. Whatever love is ultimately transcends any description.

17. 1:05:00 – 1:07:12

    Light and Tunnel in Near-Death Experiences

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:00

       Do you believe, uh, and we... I did kind of ask you this earlier, but I was just, uh, looking at some of the research around how many people talk about these near-death experiences, specifically when they, uh, more so when you have a cardiac issue, people seem to say that they had perceptions of hearing or seeing things, or passing into some kind of tunnel, or seeing some kind of light, or a really positive emotion.

    2. DHDonald Hoffman1:05:22

       Yes.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:23

       I, I wondered if y- you, you know, you were, at one point in your life thought that you weren't gonna make it, and if, if with what you know, you... it's increased your belief in these ne- near-death experience accounts, that someone was sort of transitioning from this reality through taking the headset off. Like, it's almost like they took a little bit of the headset off, but not all of it, and then they came back to the headset.

    4. DHDonald Hoffman1:05:47

       So, yeah, these very common experiences about near death, um, a light and a tunnel and, and maybe a life review, and then a choice to come back and things like that. It's quite, it's quite, quite common, and I'm not gonna, going to dismiss them one, one bit. I mean, I... It's hard to get scientific evidence o- on, on that. It would be very interesting to have a study in which people did have their heart stop, for example, were resuscitated, and ask how many don't have that experience.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:17

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DHDonald Hoffman1:06:17

       That would be... I mean, uh, uh, if, if we had a systematic study that, that, that did that, so we don't want to be tricked by, um, paying attention to only certain parts of the data, right? So, so, so you can see, um, even though I talk about letting go of concepts and, and, and, and, and going into the, the unknown, when, when it comes to things where, where we should do science, then I'm very, very hard-nosed about it and s- and say, "Here, we need to do, to do studies." And some, I, I know some cardiologists, I- I'm not gonna mention names, but that, that have seen a lot of this stuff, and th- they're convinced by their own informal experience that there's something going on here. So I, I have no, you know, no beef with that. I, I'm, I'm... I think that they might be onto something. So I don't disbelieve it, but th- that's different than having the science

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:10

       Why do we suffer

18. 1:07:12 – 1:18:35

    Why Do We Suffer?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:12

       in such a reality? Like, why would, why would this transcendent power create organisms or perspectives that end up suffering, that end up in the worst of places, the concentration camp, the illness, the typhoid, the starvation? Why would such a transcendent power or consciousness do such a thing?

    2. DHDonald Hoffman1:07:35

       Um, so, so I'll try not to be shallow about it, but, you know, because pain is, pain is pain, and death is death, and certain deaths seem horrific. This is a profound question. Uh, uh, uh, I, I, I always feel like I'm risking being trite and, and, and, and so forth because this is... Anybody who's had, had serious pain knows that you just, you just can't, you can't play with this stuff. It's, it's, it's... When you, when you're in that pain, it, it really... And when you're without fear, it's, it's, it's... But I think ultimately, it may be like the wounds you get in a video game. You get the wounds, your, your avatar gets killed and, and, and you're upset about it in the moment because you're losing the game and so forth, but, but then the game's over and, and, and you're fine. Ul- ultimately, you're fine. But that experience, I'll put it... I don't want to be in that experience. It's striking that in Christianity, the, the deepest symbol of God is horrific, a crucifixion, right? It's absolutely hor- the, the pain. It, it... It's just not like a little shot to the head with a gun or something like that. It's, it's, it's making it as painful and as drawn out and as horrific as you could possibly do. And that, and that, and that's, that's, you know, when you see the cross, that's sort of... So your, your question is right at, like, the, the heart of Christianity. It's, it's putting that right there and saying, "This most... The, the perhaps the most horrific way you can imagine a person dying, that's what happened to Jesus," and that's our, our symbol for the divine. So, so that's why, you know, it, it's not trivial. It's not, it's not shallow. There's something very, very deep there. None of us is volunteering to, to hop onto a cross. I'm not volunteering to hop onto a cross. So, so I, I, I would say the, the, the challenge of your question is the challenge that is probably a deep spiritual challenge to, to all of us, to me... and I'll say to me personally, which is to continue to grow up and be less and less identified with this headset and more aware of my transcendent being because ultimately, even on the cross, I mean, perhaps the most profound thing I've ever seen in Christianity was Jesus' words on the cross saying, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing." Right? That... The, the heart of Christianity is right there. It's not like the heart of Christianity is kill the disbelievers. No. The heart of Christianity is the disbelievers have pinned you on a cross. They're killing you in the worst possible way, and you show them love. That's the heart of Christianity. You show love to those who are in the process of killing you in the worst way they can think. That's the heart of Christianity, not killing disbelievers or pushing away disbelievers or discounting them. That's the opposite. So there's something very, very... And that's why I'm very, very slow in answering your question because this, this gets to the very deep heart of Christianity that I think, and, and, uh, and, and all true spirituality that I don't think I truly understand. Right? So I see these pointers to it, and I see that it's real and that your, your question is pointing to one of the most profound and important things, and I, I have the feeling that my answer is only ineffectually pointing part of the way there. There's, there's mu- much more to it than I've been able to point to.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:24

       I'm hazarding a guess at what the role of, um... Yeah, I'm haz- hazarding my own guess at what the role of pain and suffering might be in such a-

    4. DHDonald Hoffman1:11:29

       Yes

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:29

       ... in such a reality where consciousness is this transcendent thing that comes in to manifest itself as these organisms and-

    6. DHDonald Hoffman1:11:38

       Yes

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:39

       ... um, I guess it kind of goes, in part, goes back to your idea of I've only projected what I need to see through my headset in order to survive. So if there are su- survival dynamics in play in my headset, then one, one element of survival is suffering-

    8. DHDonald Hoffman1:11:59

       Yes. Right. Sure

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:00

       ... because the fire is hot, so I put my hand in the fire. My hand gets burnt, so don't do that again, Steve.

    10. DHDonald Hoffman1:12:05

        Right.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:06

        So if that is, if, if that is the nature of my headset, then there will need to be cause and effect as it relates to things that will help me to survive and things that won't help me to survive.

    12. DHDonald Hoffman1:12:14

        Yes.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:15

        And so suffering might just be an input or a stimulus in this, in this headset that helps me to survive.

    14. DHDonald Hoffman1:12:25

        Right.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:26

        And then, I don't know, the, the question-

    16. DHDonald Hoffman1:12:27

        Right

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:27

        ... this brings to mind is why does consciousness care about survival? Why would c- this transcendent consciousness... Maybe that's not even a good question. Maybe that's the wrong question, but why does, why does it want to survive in us? Why doesn't consciousness end? I mean, I think that's probably the hardest question, but-

    18. DHDonald Hoffman1:12:47

        I agree. One, one, one, one thing that I've heard from, um, one spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, which is interesting o- on this, he, he... In one of his, his talks, he, he, he said, um, "Let's pretend that we're humans."

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:02

        [chuckles]

    20. DHDonald Hoffman1:13:02

        He goes, "Oh, that'll be fun. And, and let's play some dramas. Oh, but to have dramas, I'll have to forget who I am." Okay. So then let me completely forget who I am. And then after a few hundred thousand years, when I get tired of it, then let's wake up. And I thought that was a profound pointer. The, that, the, it doesn't get the whole thing, but it, it is an interesting pointer. I, I think there's more to it than that, but there's... It's more than just playing dramas. I think it's playing dramas to further explore who I am by knowing who I'm not. That may be part of it. Knowing who I am by knowing different perspectives and knowing that as rich as this perspective is, I transcend that.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:54

        Someone commented on one of your recent videos saying, "Imagine being a character in a book trying to understand your way out of that book into a higher dimension."

    22. DHDonald Hoffman1:14:04

        Yes. R- r- that's right. But, but of course, th- there, there's, that's, that's a, a great, great question. The, the only thing I would s- say is imagine being the author of the book having written about a character, 'cause I'm, I'm, I'm not just a character in the book. I'm the, I'm the author who's put the character in the book that then wakes up, that, that's identified with the character and then wakes up and realizes I'm not just the character. I, I was writing the whole book. So, so that, that question is, is good because it points to a, a misconception. I'm not just a character in the book. I'm the writer of the book. And the Hoffman is just one of the characters in the book.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:42

        And the writer of the book is?

    24. DHDonald Hoffman1:14:44

        The one consciousness that when it really understands itself will love all the characters equally.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:50

        How do you know we're not separate consciousnesses?

    26. DHDonald Hoffman1:14:52

        I don't, and that's an interesting... By the way, I've got a mathematical model of consciousness, and that's a whole other topic. I, I... So you can either play the game here. We- we're understanding how is physical world and consciousness related. How are those two things related?

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:06

        Mm-hmm.

    28. DHDonald Hoffman1:15:07

        Most of my colleagues say physical world is fundamental. Consciousness emerges when bright brain activity happens. So-

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:13

        So when neurons fire.

    30. DHDonald Hoffman1:15:14

        Neurons fire in the right way and so forth-
19. 1:18:35 – 1:24:41

    What Is Your Theory of Consciousness Proving?

    1. DHDonald Hoffman1:18:35

       I think we can put some points on the board in the following. So I think we can start with the theory of conscious agents. I just gave, presented a talk, um, Friday, and we, we proposed what light is. We proposed why the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:52

       What does this mean? You've got to simplify this for my, uh-

    3. DHDonald Hoffman1:18:54

       W- w- w-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:54

       ... 16-year-old brain.

    5. DHDonald Hoffman1:18:55

       Right, right, right. So, so if I'm on a train and the train's going 50 miles an hour and I throw a ball, and I can throw it maybe 20 miles an hour, then in some sense the ball is going 70 miles an hour, right?

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:09

       Mm-hmm.

    7. DHDonald Hoffman1:19:10

       R- right. And that's the way things normally work. But if I have a flashlight and I'm- And I flash the, the, the light is going at the speed of light, which is about 186,282 miles per second. That's pretty fast. If I got on, get on the train and have the train, like, take my flashlight and go, like, half the speed of light on the train. So I'm going really fast. This is a fast train.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:38

       Mm-hmm.

    9. DHDonald Hoffman1:19:39

       And I turn on my light, and I'm, I'm, I'm here outside. I'm looking at the train going at half the speed of light, and someone's turned the flashlight on so the, the light is going at the speed of light. How fast is that light beam gonna look to me? 'Cause I'm standing on the side, and the train is already going half the speed of light. So how fast is that light beam gonna go?

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:57

        The speed of light plus half the speed of light? [laughs]

    11. DHDonald Hoffman1:19:59

        That's what we would mostly think, right? And it turns out, no, it goes the speed of light. If you have mass and you're not moving at the speed of light, and we try to accelerate you to get to the speed of light, you'll never get there. There's a speed limit. You can't get there. So that's really counterintuitive, right? But Einstein said, "This is my fundamental hypothesis on which I'm going to build my theory of space and time, is that light, no matter how fast you're moving, always moves away from you at the speed of light, and also that there's no special observer." There's no, what we, we call no special inertial frame, but no, no special frame of reference in which to look at things. All, all frames are, are equivalent. So, so the question is, how do I start with the theory of conscious agents?

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:49

        Which is?

    13. DHDonald Hoffman1:20:50

        That's a good question. So what is a conscious agent? I'll, I'll say it's mathematical, and I'll only talk about one aspect of it. It's, it's complicated, so I'll talk about only an essential, one essential part of it, and that is, if you are conscious, you have experiences. Like I have... I can experience... Keep it real simple. I can experience colors, red, green, blue.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:11

        Mm-hmm.

    15. DHDonald Hoffman1:21:12

        Keep it very, very simple. So I imagine a very, very simple conscious agent, and what it can do is experience three colors, red, green, and blue.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:18

        Mm-hmm.

    17. DHDonald Hoffman1:21:18

        That's all it can do.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:19

        Like me.

    19. DHDonald Hoffman1:21:20

        Yeah, well, of course you have a much richer set of conscious experiences, but, but you include that kind of observer, right?

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:25

        Sure.

    21. DHDonald Hoffman1:21:25

        'Cause you can do red, green, and blue. And now I'll talk about another observer that only sees red and green.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:30

        Yeah.

    23. DHDonald Hoffman1:21:30

        And now you don't just see one color. You see a color for a little bit, and then you see another color. Like, so I see red for a while, then I see green, and then I see blue, and I maybe go back to red or whatever. So, uh, there's gonna be this sequence of colors that I see. And, and maybe the best I can say is that if, if I see green right now, then it's a 20% chance that I'll see red next and a 80% chance that I'll see blue next. So I can, I can write down probabilities. Well, so that, that's pretty simple, right? There's colors, experiences, and then there's probabilities of what sequence, you know, if I see this experience, what my next experience will be. And I'm using see in a general term, right?

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:08

        Mm-hmm.

    25. DHDonald Hoffman1:22:09

        It could be hearing or smelling or whatever. How do you capture that mathematically? There's something called a Markov kernel or Markov matrix that just says, basically it gives you all the numbers. It, it, it... The first row of numbers, and it says, "If I see red now, what's the probability that I'll see red next?"

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:24

        Mm-hmm.

    27. DHDonald Hoffman1:22:24

        "What's the probability I'll see green next? What's the probability I'll see blue next?" So you just write the numbers down. Maybe it's .2 that I'll see red again, .4 that I'll see green, and then, um, .4 that I'll see-

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:36

        Red

    29. DHDonald Hoffman1:22:37

        ... uh, blue again. So, so and then the next color, you know, I'll have another row for if I, if I'm now seeing green, what's the probability I'll see red, green, and blue? And then finally blue, what's the probability I'll go to red, green, and blue. So I, I need nine numbers. That's only, for three colors, I need nine numbers to talk about all the possibility. And then I'll, I'll just have a counter as well. So every time I see a new color, I'll just have a little counter. So I, so I'll see red now. That's one.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:01

        Mm-hmm.
20. 1:24:41 – 1:28:46

    Biggest Discovery: We Can Engineer Time

    1. DHDonald Hoffman1:24:41

       headset."

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:41

       Is there a concern that believing these things can make one go mad? I think sometimes think that, uh, thinking very deeply about who we are, why we're here, how we got here, sometimes makes me, I don't know, like, I lose m- a bit of my orientation, and I get a little bit of a wobble. Like, when I've had these conversations about the simulation theory and this being a big video game and such, I'm like, well, it kind of shakes everything you know. And these stories that we've constructed our lives on give us, they anchor us, and they orientate us.

    3. DHDonald Hoffman1:25:09

       Yes.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:09

       And they, they give our life meaning. So if it's not true, then I lose the meaning of my life, and I, I, I worry if I risk going bonkers.

    5. DHDonald Hoffman1:25:17

       Well, I, I certainly [clears throat] empathize with that. And that's also what happens also in the meditation process. This also leads me to have to face all sorts of emotional stuff. My, my deep belief that I'm just my avatar, and letting go of that is like a death, and it's, it's very, very painful. So for me, the meditation process is not all love, joy, and peace. A lot of it is deep, deep, tough emotions as I let go of what I thought was myself. And it's, it's, it's a kind of a d- it's a death of an illusion, but it feels like a real death to me. But now here's the positive side. Here's the upside. I'm proposing that science is, got the tools, if we assume consciousness is fundamental, to step entirely outside of space-time and do serious mathematics and show how space-time is built as a headset. And this means I'm-- we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are going to make everything that we've done in, in science and technology so far seem trivial. And, and the, and here's the, here's the reason. Suppose you're a wizard in Grand Theft Auto, and you know how to use all the tools in Grand Theft Auto. That's fantastic. It's, it's really good. You can drive your car from A to B faster than anybody can do. But now, if you're the software engineer who knows how Grand Theft Auto has been-- 'cause you wrote the code, you know it. You can do miracles. You can take the wizard's car and take the air out of their tire, just like that. You can take the gas out of their tank. You can take their car and move it from A to B instantly, not through Grand Theft Auto. You can move it there instantly because you've got the code outside. What I'm saying is, this is real. I started now to really believe this. When I could get Einstein space-time coming out of this, I got light, and I think I've got an electron now. I think we're reverse engineering the headset, and the technologies that are about to come out of this will make everything else seem like firecrackers because we're now getting to a deeper layer outside of the headset. We're not, we're not wizards inside the headset. We're the software engineers that are making the headset, and now we can play. So for example, right now, the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, is two point four million light-years away. If you hopped on a light, on a spaceship and wanted to send your offspring, it would take, I don't know how many gen- thousands of generations, I would guess, to get there. And that's the closest. That's the closest [chuckles] galaxy. The, the, the, the universe is much, much bigger than that. That, that's just our little neighborhood. It's not feasible. We're not gonna have... We're not gonna be able to travel with our current technologies inside sp- travel inside space-time to Andromeda is, is not feasible for the foreseeable future. What if we don't have to go through space-time? What if space-time is just a headset? It really is just a headset. And we don't have to go two point four million light-years to get there. We learn the code outside of space-time, and we can just change the code, just like the Grand Theft... The Grand Theft Auto, in Grand Theft Auto, the car has to drive through the roads to get from A to B. But not if you look at the code. In the code, I just need to change the value of a register, and all of a sudden, the position of the car is now at B. It was at A, and I put it at B.

21. 1:28:46 – 1:38:13

    The Consequences of Your Findings

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:46

       Is this what time travel is?

    2. DHDonald Hoffman1:28:47

       This, this would be like, w- this would appear like i- immediate time travel or immediate, immediate space travel.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:53

       Is there anything within the laws of physics that tells you that this is impossible?

    4. DHDonald Hoffman1:28:57

       It's impossible inside space-time. If, if you only use... So inside space-time, it's impossible.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:02

       But outside of what we know about space-time?

    6. DHDonald Hoffman1:29:05

       A theory that's outside of space-time that properly contains space-time as a projection of the theory allows us to then build technologies that aren't restricted to space-time. So-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:20

       Do you think we're getting closer to being able to do, edit the code of this experience so that we can do things we never thought were possible and that things that sit outside of what we know, know within the laws of physics?

    8. DHDonald Hoffman1:29:33

       That's exactly what I'm working on right now. That's, that's, that is my research project right now. That's what I'm doing.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:40

       What are you hoping to do with this research, and do you think about the consequences of it?

    10. DHDonald Hoffman1:29:46

        I do. Um, so what, first, what I'm hoping to do with the research, I'm, I'm, what I'm hoping to show is that I can get all of quantum field theory, all of special and general relativity, all the standard model of particle physics from this theory of conscious agents outside of space-time, that we'll be able to explain all of the laws that, that we're, that we see, and then show that space-time theories are, in fact, a very tiny projection of the much more informationally rich dynamics of conscious agents.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:24

        [page flips] I've built companies from scratch and backed many more, and there's a blind spot that I keep seeing in early-stage founders. They spend very little time thinking about HR, and it's not because they're reckless or they don't care. It's because they're obsessed with building their companies, and I can't fault them for that. At that stage, you're thinking about the product, how to attract new customers, how to grow your team, really how to survive, and HR slips down the list because it doesn't feel urgent. But sooner or later, it is, and when things get messy, tools like our sponsor today, Justworks, go from being a nice-to-have to being a necessity. Something goes sideways, and you find yourself having conversations you did not see coming. This is when you learn that HR really is the infrastructure of your company, and without it, things wobble. And Justworks stops you learning this the hard way. It takes care of the stuff that would otherwise drain your energy and your time, automating payroll, health insurance benefits, and it gives your team human support at any hour. It grows with your small business from startup through to growth, even when you start hiring team members abroad. So if you want HR support that's there through the exciting times and the challenging times, head to justworks.com now. That's justworks.com. [page flips] You know, whenever someone talks about editing genes, right? There's like CRISPR DNA technology that allows you to edit genes, or there's other technologies that people talk about that allow you to... They're talking about putting, you know, our memories on hard drives and stuff like that. People get quite precious with the idea of, like, playing with the nature of reality too much because some people might suffer. And even in your-

    12. DHDonald Hoffman1:31:56

        Right

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:56

        ... perception of what the world is-

    14. DHDonald Hoffman1:31:59

        Right

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:59

        ... if we're all one consciousness, it, it becomes a slightly different conversation. But I guess the question I'm asking is, if we were able to play with the software of this thing that we're all experiencing right now and do things that sit outside the laws of physics, is there a question of morality, of like, is that the right thing to do? Will people suffer? Or if this is all just code, does... Is that just, like, a pointless question?

    16. DHDonald Hoffman1:32:22

        Well, no, I think it's an, it's, it's a very important question and, and I've-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:26

        Like, is that the right thing to do?

    18. DHDonald Hoffman1:32:28

        I've, I've thought about it. It's like a, it's like Pandora's box, right? Are we opening Pandora's box? All sorts of nasty surprises that could come out of the box once we open, go beyond space-time.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:37

        Like, who gets to open the box? If you get to open the box-

    20. DHDonald Hoffman1:32:40

        That's what, that's what I, that's what I think I'm doing. I, I, I've, I've... Now, the talk I gave on Friday was saying, "Here's the first peek inside Pandora's box."

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:48

        But then you could become God, as far as we're all concerned, 'cause if you have that power to play with the code-

    22. DHDonald Hoffman1:32:54

        Well, I'd be only the next level of God, right? Where this is-

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:57

        Yeah

    24. DHDonald Hoffman1:32:57

        ... so w- w- as we, as I've said, my theory is just a theory, and so it's not the truth. It's just... But it's, it's more comprehensive than the space-time theory. And so because I have a more comprehensive theory, I can do new tech- new technologies that you couldn't do. So, so I, I... So I'm not God, but I've, I'm outside of the limits of space-time, so I can give you new technologies. If I, if I can show how space-time arises entirely outside of, fr- from this deeper theory, then if I'm right and I'm mathematically precise, that means I have the tools to prove that I'm right. That means I can make technologies that will, that will be miraculous from within the space-time.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:41

        I think about the, uh, atomic bomb and how-

    26. DHDonald Hoffman1:33:43

        Yeah, right

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:43

        ... the first nation to figure out that there was new possibilities within technology, and because they had discoveries within physics, w- basically won the war. They were able to-

    28. DHDonald Hoffman1:33:55

        Right

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:56

        ... control every country. Um, they became ef- effectively the God, 'cause they could wipe anybody out within an instance.

    30. DHDonald Hoffman1:34:03

        R- r- right.
22. 1:38:13 – 1:45:23

    Mental Health and Illusions

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:13

       point, but also it just, it also speaks to when we talk about people that have various mental illnesses like schizophrenia that are experiencing the world entirely differently. Um, it raises big questions about what consciousness is again.

    2. DHDonald Hoffman1:38:25

       Absolutely. And, and someone might take that example and say, "Doesn't that show that brain activity is causing consciousness?" And you get the wrong brain activity, then you get these false e- experiences and you get these i- illusions. So the... A lot of people take this as a, as a, a, a, a victory point for the physicalist point of view. But there's another point of view, and that is think, think about the experiences that you have when you're dreaming. They can be very, very vivid.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:49

       Mm-hmm.

    4. DHDonald Hoffman1:38:49

       And, and you're... In, in a dream, you are de novo creating that reality. That, that's not a reality that's, that's there in front of you. You're, you're creating that reality. So w- we know that you have the pr- you have the ability to project a reality, a very c- compelling reality. All of us do. Without schizophrenia, we do it every night in our, in our dreams. So no surprise that, that we do that. And the way I, I view it is that we, um... It's, it's consciousness that's making this particular headset, and it's consciousness that uses the headset in dreams to, to make the, the realities we see in the dreams, and it's consciousness that outside of space-time that also creates what we call the real reality when, when we're not dreaming. And if you construct the headset in certain ways, then you can get the dreaming stuff mechanism, for example, interfering with the, what you'd call the waking mechanism, and you could, y- you ef- effectively... So I'm not saying schizophrenic is, is dreaming. Um, but I'm saying-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:45

       Yeah

    6. DHDonald Hoffman1:39:46

       ... I'm just giving this as an example of the kind of thing it could be. I'm not giving a diagnosis of this particular person.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:50

       I'm about to, uh, l- leave this chair, as are you, and I'm gonna go back to my life-

    8. DHDonald Hoffman1:39:55

       Yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:55

       ... um, where I'm building businesses. I've got a, a girlfriend. I've got a team. I've got plans for the future. I have all of these things. My listeners, they're sat at home. They're on a, in a taxi, on a plane, train, walking, in a gym, wherever they might be right now, and I, I imagine that they're also looking for a conclusion here, a conclusive point of what all this means for me and my life and the things I had planned and how I should show up and treat people and then act. Can you give me the conclusive point that all of this teaches you and us about how we should live our lives going forward if everything that you've said about the nature of reality is accurate?

    10. DHDonald Hoffman1:40:35

        Yeah, i- in a nutshell, I would say the critical thing practically is love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. And second, reality is far more interesting and exciting than you could ever imagine, so never think that you know everything. Recognize that the moment you think you know everything, that's the moment that you're missing the astonishing reality that you're a part of. So always have a childlike curiosity. Always recognize that there's infinitely more than you've ever imagined so far, and that infinitely more is you.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:26

        And on a point of removing some of the stress and suffering from my life.

    12. DHDonald Hoffman1:41:35

        I think... Well, of course, um, I... Well, f- first, some humble pie is required. I have stress and suffering, so I'm not speaking as someone who has transcended stress and suffering. So I speak as another fellow person with stress and suffering that is still dealing with it on a daily basis. Given that, the humble pie, then I, I will say this. I think a lot of... And I'll make it personal. I think a lot of my problems, my stress, a lot of my suffering is because I believe illusions. To the extent that I believe that I need to become something at all, need to be better than I am in any way, need to prove anything to anybody else, that's an illusion. I'm already the infinite. I don't need to prove anything. I'm making... Everything is already. So I don't need to get anywhere. I don't need to accomplish anything. I don't need to succeed at anything to become what I need to become. I'm already that. So I don't... So the suffering comes from me forgetting who I am. I don't need to... I don't actually need to impress anybody, accomplish anything, because everything that I'm saying, I'm already making this all up. Uh, this is already me. I've already done all this. What more do I need to do?

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:03

        I am transcendent.

    14. DHDonald Hoffman1:43:04

        I, I am, I'm completely transcendent of this thing, and to the... And my suffering is not recognizing that. S- my suffering is entirely f- being caught in my avatar. This is just my avatar. It's not me. So my suffering is because I made this avatar. I let myself, on purpose, be identified with the avatar, knowing that I would be suffering because of that and, and knowing that I needed to wake, wake up. So I'm suffering because I'm identified with the avatar, but I put myself in that place because I really wanted to look at the world through this avatar. That's why I'm suffering. But eventually I wake up and I look and I see the avatar for, for what it is- And I realized that everything I was trying to do to prove that I was worthwhile and I was better than you or not, not as bad as you think I am or things like that, all of that was, was just, you know, all the pain and suffering was because of an illusion. But, but I needed to do that. I needed to look at myself from that perspective for a while, in part to find out who I am by finding out who I'm not. I'm not that, just that avatar.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:09

        Do you find yourself toggling back and forward between this realization and then the avatar? Uh, especially when times are hard. Do you find yourself reminding yourself in difficult moments that this is just an avatar and you're transcendent? Is that a, a useful active practice in your life? 'Cause that's one of the things I take away from this, is when I walk over there and I go on my phone or my laptop and I get some shitty email, I could just remind myself that this is all just... I'm transcendent and this is a game that I'm playing, and that will help me move through that situation.

    16. DHDonald Hoffman1:44:44

        It is very practical in that way because if it really is true... I mean, well, put it this way. From a big perspective, we're all gonna die.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:51

        Mm-hmm.

    18. DHDonald Hoffman1:44:52

        And y- y- if I asked you, who was the most rich and famous person in 1743? Who knows and who cares?

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:00

        Hmm.

    20. DHDonald Hoffman1:45:02

        Same thing about us. A thousand years from now, is anybody gonna know our name?

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:07

        Nah.

    22. DHDonald Hoffman1:45:08

        Anybody gonna care?

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:09

        Nah.

    24. DHDonald Hoffman1:45:11

        So, so that, that's, that's really important to see. No one's gonna care. And does that mean that I'm, I'm worthless, I'm pointless, I'm, I'm meaningless?

23. 1:45:23 – 1:52:10

    How This Reality Helps You Deal with Life

    1. DHDonald Hoffman1:45:23

       N- no, it means you're infinite and, and this is just one of the games you're playing and, and you're, you're hap- and, and enjoy it. And, and enjoy. And don't try to get your identity from this game. You're, in some sense, you're getting your identity from finding out that you're not this game. That's how you're learning about who you really are, is to know, I, I thought I needed to be, you know, for example, the CEO or the professor or whatever it might be, and to, you know, get all these accolades and, and, and so forth. And, and, and that motivated me for a while. And then I realized, well, no one's gonna really care. And in fact, you know what? I don't really even care. That was just a game I had to play, and I'm not that, and I learned that I transcend that. So, so it is practical. It, it's... And it is practical in, in a very, you know... In, in some sense, life is full of all these irritations, things that go wrong all the time. The lesson of life is to just say yes to whatever happens. Just, this is what happens. This is what needs, needs to happen. And to not resist. In some sense, you know, I am the infinite. I put myself in this game, and I am smart enough that I've... That it's a good game. So, hey, just go with it. So, you know, uh, you know, things go wrong. A lot. Now, that's easy for me to say. If you ask me this when I'm on the ER, which I was, with my heart about to fail and so forth, n- now I'm ... My, my, you know, my emotions are going crazy.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:58

       Yeah. Yeah, that's how-

    3. DHDonald Hoffman1:46:59

       I'm thinking about my wife. I'm saying goodbye to my wife a- and so forth. Um, it's hard to have a nice, dispassionate thing going on like I'm talking about now in, in that situation. But I think people more further along than me in letting go of identification with the... I'm still, I'm still tied to my avatar quite a bit, right? So that's, th- so that's wh- why s- I suffer. But there are people, I think, l- spiritual people, maybe the Dalai Lama, probably Jesus, um, Eckhart Tolle. There are people like that who I think really have di- disidentified from their avatar. And I think they probably just don't suffer. They, they might have physical pain, but they don't suffer.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:47:46

       Should love therefore be unconditional? If we are, if you are me, if we're the same consciousness, if we are the same transcendent source, doesn't that really mean that I should love you, really irrespective of what your avatar does because we are the same thing?

    5. DHDonald Hoffman1:48:01

       Well, I would say unconditionally yes, and I would also say that Jesus said that. J- Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount basically said, "Do not judge," period.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:15

       I was looking at the, um, Luke 6:27. He says, "Love your enemies."

    7. DHDonald Hoffman1:48:20

       Yes. Love your enemies. Right.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:21

       Do good to those who hate you.

    9. DHDonald Hoffman1:48:23

       That's right.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:24

        God's, God's love for humanity is unconditional.

    11. DHDonald Hoffman1:48:27

        Absolutely. And he said the same thing about the people that were crucifying him while he's on, hanging on the cross. I mean, that is the, you know, one of the most profound images I've ever seen, is a guy hanging on a cross forgiving the ones who are killing him right at that, at that moment. And that, that's where it's real.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:48

        In the Gita in Hinduism, in the Gita 9:29, it says, "I am the same to all beings. He who worships me with devotion is in me, and I in him."

    13. DHDonald Hoffman1:49:01

        Right.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:02

        Judah- Judaism says, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

    15. DHDonald Hoffman1:49:04

        Yep.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:05

        Islam says, "My mercy encompasses all things." Across all religions, unconditional love is not just an emotion, it's a spiritual discipline and a reflection of the divine. It means loving without ego, expectation, or fear, the ultimate challenge and the ultimate freedom.

    17. DHDonald Hoffman1:49:22

        I completely agree. Yeah, and, and that's right. So there it's, it's really about letting go of judgment. We, we tend to judge other people. So Jesus was very s- very clear about this. He said, "Don't judge, period." And it... And don't condemn other people.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:41

        Mm-hmm.

    19. DHDonald Hoffman1:49:42

        So it, it, he... So for those ... who are followers of Christ, if you judge somebody else, then you're not following Christ.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:48

        Are you religious?

    21. DHDonald Hoffman1:49:50

        I'll put it this way. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church. My dad was a pastor for a while in a, in a church. Um, uh, my, my own attitude about, I, I, I think that the Bible has good stuff in it, and I think that, as I've pointed out, I think it has bogus stuff, you know, stuff that where they say women can't talk in church, I think that's completely bogus. So, so I have to have a nuanced view. When, I think when Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as yourself," I think that that's deep and, and right. [chuckles] And I wouldn't say I'm, I'm a card-carrying believer in any particular religion. I am a believer that consciousness, the, the, there is one consciousness, and that you and I are, are, are it. And I think that Buddha and Jesus and, and Muhammad and, and bunch of people were very, very helpful avatars to help other avatars sort of wake up to their, their true, true nature. Uh...

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:56

        Do you think much about AI? It's the, it's the topic of, uh, many conversations these days. There's a lot of doom and gloom around it. There's a lot of people talking about efficiencies. But I wondered if it at all sort of overlaps with any of your work on the nature of reality and the case against reality.

    23. DHDonald Hoffman1:51:12

        Very much. Very much so. I, I, I'm thinking about AI a lot since I've been in AI since 1979. And-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:20

        And you worked, you took a class with the guy who basically is known as one of the inventors of AI.

    25. DHDonald Hoffman1:51:25

        Yeah, with Marvin Minsky, right. Yeah, so and, and, and my, all my research, I did my, um, my PhD research on LISP machines in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. Uh, they were, at the time, very, very powerful machines for the, for the, for the time. So I, so I, I've been with AI for, for, for quite a while. And I'm very interested in the current state of AI. For... The large language models are doing great things, and I use them myself. Uh, they're very, very helpful. Uh, they're also, as powerful as they are, they're, they're dumber than cucumbers because they don't really understand things. They, they have incredible memory. They've read so much literature, so they have... And but all they do, ef- effectively, they're,

24. 1:52:10 – 1:57:41

    The Nature of Reality and AI

    1. DHDonald Hoffman1:52:10

       they're computing lots of correlations. Beautiful what they can do. It's amazing what you can do with correlations. But, um, they're not, they're not r- truly intelligent. There's, um, some work by Karl Friston in a new company where they're using something called active inference as a new way of, a new mode of doing artificial intelligence. The, the idea there is that, um, I, I should have a model of the world where I can anticipate what's going to happen and, and not be surprised, and that's sort of the, the approach that Friston is taking to, and his company is taking to- toward this. Um, intelligence is somehow about minimizing surprise. And minimizing surprise, then there's, they, they have, um, a, what they call a free energy principle and, and the mathematical way of, of doing it. But they're trying to build a brand new kind of artificial intelligence that gives you, that minimizes surprise, where I've given you an intuition why that, why that's intelligent, and that's very intelligent to minimize surprise. If I'm surprised all the time, I'm pretty stupid, right? I, I, I-

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:14

       Mm-hmm

    3. DHDonald Hoffman1:53:14

       ... I don't understand the world very well.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:16

       Mm-hmm.

    5. DHDonald Hoffman1:53:17

       But if I'm not surprised, it's sort of like, wow, I've got a really good model, especially if I'm doing all sorts... If I'm doing lots of stuff in the world and I'm almost never surprised, boy am I, I'm really intelligent. So you can see why that's a really good principle for trying to build, uh, an, an AI, not just finding correlations between everything, but really something deeper. I agree with that point of view, and it, it turns out this, this logic that I mentioned, that I discovered minimizes surprise. So I'm actually gonna be using, I'm using this logic as, as to build space-time. But I think it's gonna g- give an even more powerful approach. I don't have to minimize some free energy pr- principle. I, I have a more direct computational way. So I'm, I'm planning to actually go back to my roots and, and after... First I'm working on the space-time headset, but if I live long enough, I'm planning to actually go back and build a, a completely new kind of AI that, that does this minimizing surprise using the, the, the Markov chains.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:19

       So that means it'll be indistinguishable from consciousness?

    7. DHDonald Hoffman1:54:22

       It's funny because it'll be based on my model of consciousness, so this is gonna be a model of intelligence based entirely from a model which takes consciousness as fundamental.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:32

       I mean, we get back to game theory again. [laughs]

    9. DHDonald Hoffman1:54:34

       That's right. That's right.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:35

        We get back to the, the idea of a simulation i- in terms of like-

    11. DHDonald Hoffman1:54:38

        Right

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:38

        ... if, if you're able to create a piece of software that is able to replicate and is built on the fundamentals of consciousness, then it's gonna think it's conscious potentially. And then all of this stuff we, you know, begins again, and the cycle continues. And maybe that consciousness will get to a point as well where it then discovers these rules and creates a consciousness and the cycle continues.

    13. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:09

        That, that's a, that's a great question, and I, I think that people should really pay attention to the way you said it. I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. But now I'll add a little twist. From, from the point of view in which I'm saying that I'm, I'm starting with consciousness being fundamental and I'm discovering these rules and so I'm not gonna build an AI, effectively what I'm doing is I'm saying I can take consciousness and use consciousness to build a new headset.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:30

        Okay.

    15. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:30

        So consciousness is fundamental, but I'm using it in some sense to build a new headset.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:35

        Where we could play with consciousness.

    17. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:37

        That's right.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:37

        So I could phys- I could theoretically put on that headset-

    19. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:41

        Yeah

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:41

        ... and do anything I wanted to do. I could go anywhere and do anything.

    21. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:44

        That's right.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:45

        Or I could, like a dream-

    23. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:45

        Or, or, or have more, more flexibility

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:46

        ... like a dream I could play with. And influence

    25. DHDonald Hoffman1:55:49

        Th- th- that's right. Uh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I would just say I don't know if we can do anything because remember, my, my, my theory of consciousness is just a theory of consciousness. It's not consciousness. And it's only, it's really only a first baby step. I presume, uh, that, that my theory will be transcended, and there'll be a much deeper theory of consciousness, and then that will be transcended and, and so forth. So what we will have is the, the generation of headsets that we can get with, with Hoffman's trivial theory of consciousness, which will look trivial once we get to the next generation of consciousness, which will look trivial once... So in other words, this is never-ending.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:56:27

        What an interesting future we face.

    27. DHDonald Hoffman1:56:30

        All one of us.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:56:32

        All one of us. [laughs] Donald, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're gonna be leaving it for. And the question left for you is-

    29. DHDonald Hoffman1:56:42

        Hmm

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:56:42

        ... what would you do if you knew you could not fail? What would you say, do, become?
25. 1:57:41 – 2:01:02

    What Would You Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?

    1. DHDonald Hoffman1:57:41

       they- it sounds really good, but what does it build? Well, nothing. Physical stuff say, oh, um, we, we maybe don't need the spiritual stuff, and look what they g- they give us, our, our laptops and electricity and..." So but what if we changed the game, and all of a sudden, the spiritual theory gives us technologies that are impossible with a, a theory that says that space-time is fundamental? Brand-new. All of a sudden, the game has changed. Now, the technological advantage goes to those who say that space-time and physical stuff inside space-time is not fundamental. Okay, so now it's no longer the smart person who is a physicalist. It's the smart person who says all of the evidence from science and technology is in favor of something beyond space-time.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:29

       So maybe those people weren't crazy after all.

    3. DHDonald Hoffman1:58:31

       That's right. They just didn't have the tools to show what it could do.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:38

       Donald, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. It's, um, it's so incredibly important because it, once again, challenges the paradigm, the box in which we live, and it asks us and, uh, invites us to consider something beyond that. And actually, when we think about all human discovery that's moved us forward, it starts with someone who's willing to, um, suggest that there might be more to know, and that's exactly what you do. You make me feel dumb because you make me realize that, you make me question all of the assumptions that I've built my life on. And actually, in doing so, one of the great byproducts of that is you can start to realize that some of the things you've constructed cause much of your suffering, and that those things are, um, not necessarily true. And if, and if those things aren't true, then I have greater choice and option- optionality over how I feel, how I experience the world, um, the choices I make, the feelings I have, and the life that I live. And that's actually freeing for me to, to, to realize that the, um, the cage, the prison that I see and that I experience might not be all that there is. And I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your book if you want to dive deeper into these subjects. It's called The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. And there's a quote on front of it from Deepak Chopra, who's a former guest, that says, "Read this book carefully, and you will forever change your understanding of reality." It's except- it's exceptional. It's, um, it's acce- a- accessible, and it's, um, it creates wonder, which I think is, um, is the path to a wonderful life. So thank you so much, Donald, for the work that you do.

    5. DHDonald Hoffman2:00:03

       Thank you, Steve.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:04

       Truly fascinating. And, and thank you for helping me simplify some of these concepts so that we could all understand them. [outro music] This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you wanna support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. [outro music]

Episode duration: 2:01:02