MIT Scientist: “Your Brain Evolved To Ignore Aliens – They’re Everywhere!”

23:29The universe would be teeming with life that is more advanced than humans and also doesn't have traditional bodies. Is that correct?

23:37Donald Hoffman:Yeah, the mathematics seems to indicate that, again, embodiment is the exception, not the rule, and that our particular kind of view of the world, the kind of, I'll call it a headset, the virtual reality headset that we're using for our embodiment is one of the more trivial kinds of headsets. So we have often the opinion of ourselves that we're pretty much near the top of the food chain here on Earth, anyway. It certainly looks like it for most of us, and that we're the most intelligent things around and so forth. But when I look at the mathematics of this trace logic, it indicates that our headset is one of the cheapest, most restrictive possible, and that there are all sorts of variations that are far more interesting and complicated than what we've got.

24:28Well, it's interesting. There are 8 million species on Earth, and a wild thought experiment would be how many of those species think that they're at the top of the food chain. Some subset must not think that they are. They have, I'm sure, predators that seem far more sophisticated that they see at certain points in their life and freak out and try to avoid all the time. And others must live in this kind of solipsistic thing, and they think they're the most sophisticated. And so who are we to say that we're not just an example of that and that there are things, you know, going on above our head in this sort of the dark forest teeming with life?

25:06Donald Hoffman:I completely agree. If you think about what I see of an ant, the ant has its life, but it seems fairly simple to me. And if I think about what do I think an ant knows about me, almost nothing, Nothing about my intellectual life, my friends, politics, religion. I mean, does it know what? No. And in fact, if I were cruel, I could come over, go like that, and kill it. And it wouldn't even know that I was about to do it. So how much does the aunt know about me? Almost nothing. But then I have to ask myself, what would I look like to an aunt? Maybe I'd look like something insignificant if I looked at something insignificant.

25:53Or something cosmological or weather phenomena or something. Or just nothing at all, right? Or nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

25:59Donald Hoffman:But now, turnabout is fair play. All I see in my perception is something that seems fairly trivial to me. It's just an ant. But that is not necessarily an insight into reality. That's just a limitation of my headset. From my headset point of view, I see something that seems trivial. It's just an ant. What I could be interacting with, if I could actually take the headset off, I might fall down in amazement before it. right? So it goes both ways. The idea that we're the biggest thing in town is out the window, at least in the mathematics that I'm doing, not at all. At least our headset is nowhere near the top.

26:45Donald Hoffman:It's in fact almost as trivial as you can be and still have a headset. So we have one of the more trivial headsets. So I think all around us, the things that look trivial to us, even inanimate, that's just because the headset is dumbing things down. On the other side of the headset, it's mind-blowing what's out there. It's compressing the thing in a way that's adaptive for your own survival, and that's sort of all you can say about it. That's right. That's right. And by the way, that aspect, the evolutionary argument, I should say, that's not just a hand wave, it's a theorem. In evolutionary game theory, there are things called fitness payoff functions.

27:23Donald Hoffman:And you can think of them simply as maybe I'm an organism, in a particular state, maybe I'm hungry, and I'm thinking about different actions like eating, feeding, flying, whatever. So a fitness payoff function says for a given organism, a state, and an action, I'll give you a number, which is your payoff for taking that action. So maybe it goes from zero to 100. Zero, you lose. 100 is the most points. And effectively, these points are saying how likely it is that you're going to survive long enough to reproduce, okay? So for you to be shaped by evolution, by natural selection, to see true structures in the world, the payoff functions that are guiding your evolution have to contain information about the structure of the world.

28:14Donald Hoffman:For example, if there's some kind of metric structure that you want to know about the world, if that metric structure is completely unknown to your payoff function, there is no way for the payoff function to tune you to that metric structure in the world. Or if there's a topology or if there's any kind of structure that you want to think about, a partial order, if the payoff function does not know about that structure, then it can't tune you to the structure. So there's a nice, clean question that we can ask here. For any particular structures in the world that you might want to know truthfully, evolution shape you to have true perceptions of those, what is the probability that you'll have a payoff function available to you that would actually be able to do that, right?

29:01Donald Hoffman:So this is a clean mathematical question. The payoff function has to be, when I say has to know the structure, technically it means it has to be a homomorphism of the structure. There's a technical way for it, but informally it just has to know about that structure. And so you can ask, what fraction of the possible payoff functions know what you need to know to tune you to the world? Are homomorphisms of the structures of the world? And evolutionary theory, evolutionary game theory, does not a priori restrict the class of payoff functions. It doesn't say this is the only class of acceptable payoff function.

29:40Donald Hoffman:It just says pick a payoff function. So we have to say, okay, we need to put all payoff functions on the table. If some genius comes along and says, for principled reasons, no, we need to restrict. Only these payoff functions are the legitimate ones for evolution. will deal with that. But right now, the current state of the scientific theory is any payoff function is fair game. So you have to, when you're asking the question in current evolutionary theory with mathematical precision, what is the probability that natural selection will shape any sensory system of any organism to see some true structure of the world?

30:20Donald Hoffman:When you do the math, the answer is zero, precisely zero, exactly zero. By the way, when we say something is probability zero, it can happen infinitely often. So this is a little technical, but it's important. Something that is probability zero can happen infinitely often, but it's still probability zero. And one way to think about that very simply is if you think about just a unit square and think about the probability of a region of the square as the area, right? So if it's a unit square, the whole area is just one. So the probability of being in the square is just one. If I cut it in half and say left half or right half, well, now it's half, right?

31:04Donald Hoffman:Because it's only half the area. But if I draw a little curve inside the square, well, that curve has zero area, right? So it has zero probability, but it has an infinite number of points. So here's a case of something that could happen infinitely often, but it has probability zero. And so it's in that sense that I'm saying the probability that evolution has shaped sensory systems to see any aspect of the true structure of reality is precisely zero. No hand wave. It's a theorem. So do we see reality as it is? According to current evolutionary theory, absolutely not. As you know, a lot of the guests I sit down with, whether they're physicists, intelligence officers, people who've worked inside black programs are operating at a really impressive level mentally.

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36:29Donald Hoffman:Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability. Varies by state. According to current evolutionary theory, absolutely not. Probability zero. It's a wild assertion, but it's also an intuitive one that kind of makes sense. I think a lot of people listening might have the question, okay, so I'm not seeing reality. I'll take that at face value. That kind of makes sense. How do we then try to triangulate and figure out what true reality actually is? And what do we do with this theory that doesn't just instill this radical Cartesian doubt? Obviously, Descartes saying that, you know, there might be this sort of demon who's able to control our perception in this totally 360 way and create the theater that we see every day.

37:16it's a thought experiment that kind of seems like it lines up with what you're saying where in your case the demon is just you know evolutionary game theory and and darwin in his case it was like something with intent but it's still it's a it's a scary thought kind of an you know one is this dog eat dog world thing and then the other is like this maybe scarier demon thing but they're both kind of scary and so how do we how do we triangulate what truth is and what that what, you know, the actual, so this chair I'm seeing isn't a chair that you're sitting on. What is it? How do I figure out what it actually is?

37:50Donald Hoffman:Well, I think we can do it. We have to be very, very careful. This is now where tools of mathematics are going to be very important and very powerful, but it's really important, I think, first to really understand the limitations of our own headset and to understand how we don't see reality as it is. And I'll give you a fun example. It's the jewel beetle. It's a beetle out in the outback of Australia. It's dimpled, glossy, and brown. The males fly, the females are flightless. The males fly around looking for females. So this is now evolution and reproduction and the whole thing. So when a male finds an eligible female, he alights and mates, and that's worked for who knows tens of thousands, who knows hundreds of thousands of years.

38:47Donald Hoffman:So evolution, you might think, has shaped the male beetles to know what a true female is. They know what a female beetle is. Well, the funny thing is that are these beer bottles called stubbies that are dimpled, glossy, and brown, and apparently just the right color. So some guys in Australia are drinking them, throw them out back and drive off. And the male jewel beetles flock to these bottles. They're dimpled, glossy, and just the right color of brown to grab their fancy. And they crawl all over these bottles. So they have full body contact. And they have no idea that this is not a female. And a lot of women might have something to say about this.

39:32Donald Hoffman:But yeah, it's just like, so here, and the real females are of no interest. The bottle, they're just so it's the male attached to the bottle and forsaking the female for the bottle. And so you might think, well, what's going on here? They've successfully made it for thousands of years. What's going on? Well, what happened was evolution gave them a little hack. Not the truth, a little hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy, and brown. Apparently, the bigger the better. And that's it. So all you have is a simple little hack, not the truth. And that's the kind of thing that we see over and over again.

40:07Donald Hoffman:I've consulted for a lot of clothing companies and advertising companies because once you know the hacks, you can use them in advertising, how to grab attention. So I know a lot of the tricks that the visual system uses, the shortcuts. What's an example? So one example is work that I've done with clothing companies for jeans. Now, it turns out the visual system looks at shading gradients from light to dark to create a three-dimensional shape. And certain body shapes are obviously going to be more attractive than others. You know, pancake butt, probably not as good as certain other kinds of shapes.

40:55Donald Hoffman:And so when a gene manufacturer is putting stitching and distress shading on their genes, they are telling a three-dimensional story. The only question is, do you know what story you're telling, and is it the story you want to tell? Because the visual system just is programmed, the headset is programmed to interpret these cues as a 3D shape. So once you know how the headset program works, you can play with it. And so what happened, I talked with these jeans companies. Actually, they came to me. I didn't come to them because they wanted help. And so I told them, you are creating a body shape. When a person puts on those jeans and you've put distress on them, you've put stitching on them and so forth, you are telling a story.

41:46Donald Hoffman:The question is, do you know the story you're telling and is it the story you want to tell? And so I remember when I showed them their jeans, I took a picture of their jeans, and then just changed the shading gradient and changed the stitching a little bit to give a little bit more attractive rear end for the same person wearing it, right? I remember the CEO, I won't mention the company, but the CEO of the company, jumping out of his chair, going up to the screen and going, our jeans, my butt looked bad, basically. Exactly. And he realized we don't have to do that. We can actually, so we have a little patent about how to do the distressing the right way and to get the stitching because the stitching, the curves in the stitching, just slight variations in it, tell a big, big story to the visual system about the construction of your body.

42:40Donald Hoffman:And that's a huge cue that males and females use in measuring attractiveness, right? A man that looks a little bit more buff, a man with pancake butt, not so good. And similarly for women. And if you're bigger than you want to be, you can make yourself smaller. If you're smaller than you want to be, in other words, you can make any story you want, given whatever your body is, you can make any story you want. Doesn't this freak you out for the future? I mean, this is going to end up in total dystopia because you have like AI's ability to synthetically spin up whatever image you want, like a deep fake image that looks like a person.

43:21And then you have the, you know, hips to waist ratio is exactly this to make, you know, the male demographic you're going after more attracted to the thing or the, you know, the butt flattening thing that you're talking about. You feed all that into AI and whatever, you know, dystopian thoughts we had about Edward Bernays, you know, Freud's nephew who, you know, helped create Madison Avenue in modern advertising. I mean, this is that on steroids. That's right.

43:48Donald Hoffman:We have the power to do that. And the nice thing is that, of course, you can go past the normal to the supernormal to the clown. So you have to be at some point, then it gets too much. And then all of a sudden you go, no, no, no. It's no longer attractive. It's too super normal. But you could get the AI to take you right up to the max and put it right there. So, yes. That's scary because, again, in a world where, you know, corporations are trying to already hack your, you know, your perceptions, your biases that are, you know, evolutionarily baked in over thousands of years and you can't really control.

44:29You know, if we're like the beetle that sees a shiny object or like we need it or whatever. How many times do you think? I mean, that's got to be coming, right? Like as soon as we. I'm already doing it with companies. Well, I think you should spend more time on your kind of nature of reality stuff. Right.

44:48Donald Hoffman:No, it turns out that when you study human visual attention as well. So we've talked about human shape and attractiveness. So there are rules for attractiveness. Once you understand the rules, then you can play with them. But there's also rules for grabbing visual attention. and once you know those rules i help companies to have their product on shelves with all the other products and you can put certain patterns on your product such that um there are what's an example i'll give you an example yeah some unconscious unconscious mechanisms attention mechanisms that you can grab people's attention and they don't even know what's going on so it turns out that But for natural reasons, evolutionarily, we have special circuitry to try to detect animate objects.

45:47Donald Hoffman:And for good reason, right? Animate objects are the things that could hurt you. They could kill us. Yeah, they could kill us, right? Or there are also things you may want to eat, for example. Maybe it's a rabbit or something like that. Not today, but in our past. Some people today. Some people today, that's right. So it turns out that we have circuitry that directs attention to animate objects over other things. If you have a big field, the animate objects will pop out. And eyes, in particular, grab attention. They're a particular feature. And so what you can do, and what I have done with companies, is you can make something that's eye-like, but not obviously eye-like, so the competition doesn't know that you're doing it.

46:38Donald Hoffman:You put it on your packaging, and your eye just goes to that package. You don't know why. The reason why is because we've tapped into subcortical hardware that's looking for animal objects like eyes. We grabbed that, grabbed your attention, and there's not a literal I there, but we know how to grab your attention anyway with that I program. And so you see that kind of—so that's the kind of level that you can take the understanding of evolution. Once you understand the evolutionary mechanisms, how they're wired into your brain, your attention system, your attractiveness system, then you can play the system.

47:13Have you ever seen CBS's logo? Not recently. It's a big I. Yeah, yeah, big I. Well, yeah, right, right, right. It's adaptive for you to know that you're being watched. There's even a term called scopesthesia, where statistically it feels like people do know that they're being watched. We were talking about Rupert Sheldrake before we started rolling.

47:30Donald Hoffman:Yes, right. And so that's fascinating. Yeah, Rupert's stuff about being seen from behind. Yeah, that's a very different thing than what I'm talking about, right? This is literally an abstract image of an eye, whereas Rupert's talking about having the sense of being stared at. Yeah, and in his case, it could be through a video camera or it doesn't necessarily need to be an eye. But it would make conventional prosaic sense in evolutionary biology that if you see an eye, you're going to take notice. Because if you're being watched, obviously, that has all sorts of implications if you're predator or prey.

48:05Donald Hoffman:That's right. And it extends to bodies. So fingers and bodily shapes. So all of these things can be used cleverly and subtly to move attention around. It's quite remarkable. Fascinating. So like you're inserting animate objects basically in the advertising. And then if you're a person walking around, you're like, oh my God. But if you do it subtly, then you'll still grab their attention and they won't know why they look there. And it probably won't even, if you're really good at it, it won't even grab, make them think twice. Oh, I'm just looking at that because I chose to. No, you didn't choose to.

48:43Donald Hoffman:We chose to make you look there. That's wild. Yeah. Let's move into more aspirational territory. All right. So you're saying that you have mathematically proven that we are actually like a low-grade interface when it comes to consciousness. And it would probably be adaptive to be disembodied. And that most of the universe is probably teeming with disembodied, disincarnate life. Is that roughly right? Yes, but there's a long way to go to explain that. Because the claim is true, but there's a lot to go to explain. please. What's going on there? So, first, we have to think about the current state of science.

49:26Donald Hoffman:Right now, our best scientific theories are physicalist theories. We assume that space and time are fundamental. You know, Einstein's general theory of relativity, and that objects inside space and time are fundamental, particles, quantum fields. And In that framework, what you said wouldn't hold, right? But what we have to do then is look at the current scientific framework and there's a problem with it. The problem is the nature of observation. So one of the biggest problems in quantum theory is the so-called measurement problem. And the problem there is evolution of states of systems seems to follow one rule, the Schrodinger evolution, when you're not looking, and a different rule when you look, the so-called collapse.

50:25Donald Hoffman:The act of observing a system somehow seems to be important in the evolution that you see. So Schrodinger evolution, when you're not looking, collapse when you look. there's no that that idea has been around for literally a century a century yeah literally i think it was literally it was 1927 or something yeah 1926 was schrodinger schrodinger so 1926 schrodinger revolution i think 25 for heisenberg's but but right so it's been about a century and there is no satisfactory solution to this so-called measurement problem and quantum there are proposals, but none universally accepted. And all of them have serious problems.

51:12Donald Hoffman:And I'm happy to talk about them and their problems. Well, even the Copenhagen interpretation is so, it's just saying that the measurement collapses the wave function into an eigenstate or whatever. What does that mean? And I always find it so interesting that you have these pop quantum physics people now, like Sean Carroll, who, by the way, I'm a big fan of his books. I think he's amazing. But these, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, some of these people will like definitively say things like, oh, when particles collide, they collapse into an eigenstate or the, you know, the quantum detector is what's collapsing the wave function into an eigenstate.

51:53And I think it's totally unfalsifiable. What if the superposition of the observation exists in the quantum detector and then your interface, your conscious interface is collapsing that. Like we can't say that definitively. There's no way to know exactly what's collapsing the wave function. So it's all faith-based assertions.

52:15Donald Hoffman:Well, and the key problem at the core of this whole issue is that we don't have a notion of an observer and the process of observation. That's what's missing. And if you think about it, that's not a minor point. What is science? Science is the systematic gathering of data through observations. We call them experiments. We systematically observe the world. And then based on our observations, we write down mathematical theories about what we think are the structures of the world. And we hope that somehow it's legitimate to think that our observations give us the kind of information that we would need to write down useful, perhaps accurate theories about the structure of the world.

53:08Donald Hoffman:But for this whole thing to work, observation has to somehow genuinely inform our theories of the world. So the question is, what is observation? Why should we believe that human observations will genuinely give us the kind of data we need to come up with legitimate theories about the world? That's a non-trivial question. And to date, science cannot answer that question. So what we have is this really interesting situation where we know that observers are not unimportant. They're central and we don't have a theory. They're unremovable. They're unremovable. Without observers, there is no science and there's no reason to believe our theories.

53:52But that's not the current. The current paradigm is that we live in this materialist reductionist world where our consciousness and we are happy accidents of atoms that happenstance bounced off of one another and coalesced into like these conscious agents or whatever. This emergence is this popular term today.

54:12Donald Hoffman:Right. And so what we'd have to do then in that story, what you have to do is to show how that account could still lead to some notion of an observer that could give you data that would legitimately constrain theories about the nature of reality. And no one has done that yet. There's no accepted theory. So there's the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, and then there's also the problem in studying just human observations, right? Where we're trying to say, okay, human observations, like I'm observing that I'm tasting water or something like that. So that's an observation. I'm tasting water.

54:50Donald Hoffman:and we're trying to come up with, okay, a physiological description of the brain and brain activity that would give me the necessary and sufficient conditions to say that was an observation of Hoffman drinking water. It was Hoffman observing drinking water. That we've been at this for decades, actually for longer than that, but seriously for several decades, trying to understand how we could explain human observations like colors, tastes, smells, human observations in terms of either functional properties of some kind of network, you know, computer network or whatever, or neural network properties of the human brain or something like that, or microtubules, collapsing of microtubules.

55:36Donald Hoffman:or, you know, integrated information patterns and so forth. We've been trying to give a theory about observation. And I know that the people who are doing that, they're brilliant. They're my friends. We're buddies. And there's not a single specific observation that they can account for, like the taste of mint or the smell of, you know, chocolate or something like that. So you're trying to apply math to literal human experience. That's right, because that's the foundation of science. If we do not have a human observation, we have no data. I agree. Not only that, but you have collapse of the quantum wave function.

56:16There's no way to even know which eigenstate, which particular state gets picked. That's all based on probabilities. And so there's no way to predict, you know, let alone like some subjective experience of water or like, you know, seeing a color or an animal or whatever. Like that feels like way above our pay grade. We don't even know about the position and momentum of an atom or a subatomic particle, an electron or something.

56:41Donald Hoffman:I completely agree. And I should point out that what I'm saying here is prior to the issue of consciousness. So there are colleagues of mine who say that conscious experiences are an illusion. They're a construct of the brain.

57:03Donald Hoffman:and that's perfectly fine if you want to say that that's perfectly fine with me there's the attention schema theory for example that says this but then the question is okay we're interested in science not just hand waves so I want a specific mathematically precise attention schema for the illusion of the taste of chocolate or the illusion of the smell of chocolate or whatever it might be. So I'm a hard-nosed scientist. I want to understand the foundations of observation because it's the foundation of science. And forget consciousness, just call consciousness as an illusion. Fine. I still need to understand how observations work.

57:49Donald Hoffman:So how exactly does the illusion get done? And the answer is, there is zero on the table. There is not a single scientific theory about the illusion of mint or the taste of chocolate. So we're nowhere on. This is really, it's stunning. Here it is, 2026. And we have no theory of observation. And observation is the foundation of everything that we can do in science. And what we need is a theory of observation that's not only precise, but that gives us, that will lead to theories that say that our understanding of observation does the right thing because we need coherence, right? Whatever our story about observation is, it has to be coherence and say that, oh yeah, this theory does allow that that observation gave you legitimate data to build the theory.

58:40So how do you think observation works?

58:42Donald Hoffman:So I think that if we start inside a physicalist framework, we're not going to close that loop. I think for a couple of reasons, but I think there's logical problems. But also I know the players in the field, they're brilliant. I mean, they're really brilliant. These are smart, smart people. They're coming up empty. When I try to do it, I come up completely empty. I just think it's not going to work. Someone can easily prove me wrong by giving one. But right now, there's nothing on the table. I think we're in the stone age on it. I don't see how with math, which is so primitive, how you could ever come to encapsulate something so kind of visceral and I'm not using multidimensional in a scientific way, but multidimensional as like just experience, everyday experience seems to, you know, it's even like think about neuroscience, you know, which obviously you're well-versed in.

59:39You have these disparate pathways of, you know, speech and reading comprehension and, you know, auditory listening. And then you have this binding problem. And so that's even like, that's even, you can barely explain the pathways with math. You can't. So then we have the binding problem where we can't explain the seamless perception of experience. So, you know, at an even lower level, like, you know, how can we explain everyday experience with math? I just think we're, you know, going to be in the dark for a long time there.

1:00:13Donald Hoffman:Right. And so there are two problems I think you're pointing to here. One is that the math could be very, very complicated. The neuroscience is very, very complicated. So maybe that complexity itself is just standing in the way. And I agree. But I think in addition, there is a principled problem. I think that if you don't start with observation, you're not going to get it out of your theory. Now, this is something that Leibniz suggested back in 1700. He had this monodology, and Leibniz proposed that the fundamental furniture of the universe are these monads, which were observing entities. And so there were a bunch of these different kinds of observers, and they were all linked together with what he called a pre-established harmony.

1:01:02Donald Hoffman:So there was observation and then there was some structure binding all these observers together. but we didn't really have the math. I mean, we had Newton's math. We could do, you know, time evolution theories and differential equations and so forth. So we did what we could. Leibniz had this idea, but he didn't have, he had the math that could do the Einstein, I'm sorry, the Newton kind of thing, but he couldn't, you know, they didn't have the math, the probabilistic math that we really needed to do his thing. And more recently, you know, John Wheeler, a very, very famous physicist, worked on gravity.

1:01:39Donald Hoffman:He invented the term black hole. He was Richard Feynman's advisor. He was in the who's who of physics. He came to the realization And later in his career that somehow we had to start with what he called observer participants. That somehow the observer was really a critical notion that we were missing. And he felt that once we got that notion down, got it really rigorous, that we could then build up our physics from that. And I agree with Wheeler. So he had this very famous paper in 1989, it was called the It From Bit paper, informally the It From Bit, that somehow it's information of some kind that you get from observation that's going to be used to construct what we call the physical world.

1:02:27Donald Hoffman:and I think that he's onto something. And I've been pursuing the very, very same thing. So I've been looking for 40 years for a mathematical model of the observer as foundational. Actually, Wheeler cited my work in his It From Bit Paper. Really? So I've got a book called... So I've been after this. So this is not a new gig for me. I published a book in 1989 called Observer Mechanics with Bruce Bennett and Shaitan Prakash to mathematicians. And so, I've been after this observer thing, not just this last week or two, it's been 45 years I've been after. And so, Wheeler cited that book as an example of the kind of thing to start to pursue.

1:03:11Donald Hoffman:And then I've continued to pursue it because it's a deep problem. And now, just in the last two years, so it's not like we just started, but in the last two years, we've really had a breakthrough that I can tell you about where we start with the notion of observer, we can make it rigorous, and then we can start to ask, how do we build space-time as a headset? And then start to explain all these other weird phenomena that we were talking about earlier. Well, I want to get into that, to tell me about it. Right. So the basic idea is very, very simple. What's the simplest idea that you could possibly have about an observer?

1:03:54Donald Hoffman:Well, an observer has certain outcomes, experiences that he could have, like maybe red, green, and blue, just to be very, very simple. I'm at a traffic light. So red, green, and yellow. See, red, green, yellow. Those are my experiences. And then, so there's a list of the experiences. For humans, it's in the trillions. We have trillions of experiences that we could have, but we can think about simple observers that have three. And then the other thing is to say change. I'm seeing red now. I'm at the traffic light. I might see green a second from now. And then after that, I might see yellow in a minute or something.

1:04:32Donald Hoffman:So there are experiences, and then they change. That's it. That's all I want to assume. And the question is, what is the most sort of simple, general mathematical thing that you could write down to just say there are experiences that change? It's something called a Markov matrix. and it's just literally you write down a matrix of numbers if I see red now what's the probability that I'll see red at the next instant or green or yellow so three numbers and you have to add up to one because it's a probability then the next row is if I'm seeing yellow now what's the probability of seeing red, green and yellow and so forth three by three matrix of numbers that's it and that's going to be our theory of observation that there are millions of different matrices, countless matrices.

1:05:26Donald Hoffman:Each one, I'm thinking about the states of the matrix as observer outcomes or experiences. You can think about as conscious experiences if you wish, or if you don't believe in consciousness, you can just say observer outcomes, whichever. Mathematics doesn't care what you're going to say on that. I personally think about them as conscious experiences, and we can talk about why. But if someone doesn't want to do that, the math is just the math. And then the idea is that you can just do one little addition to the matrix that's standard in mathematics has been done for many, many decades, which is to just add and counter.

1:06:00Donald Hoffman:So every time my experience updates, my counter increments. One experience, two experiences, three, just that drop dead simple. Just I'm counting the number of experiences that I half, one after the other. We'll call those enhanced Markov chains. So now suppose I have a big, well, I'll keep it simple. My little three by three Markov chain, red, green, and yellow. I'm at the traffic light. But suppose that for some reason I put on glasses that don't let me see yellow. I can only see red and green. That's all I can see. Well, so I'm still sitting at the same traffic light, but I can only see red and green.

1:06:42Donald Hoffman:I can't see the yellow anymore. I'm going to get a certain pattern of red and green transitions that is induced by the red, green, and yellow transition, right? So it won't be, the probability of going from red to green now with just, you know, with these glasses on is going to be slightly different than red to green when I had, because yellow could have happened in there between as well, right? So now the probabilities are going to be a little bit different, but they're going to be determined by the bigger matrix, right? So the 3x3 matrix has the numbers that tell you what's happening. If I can only see the red and green subset, I will get a new matrix, and it'll be slightly different because I can't see the element, but it will be a unique matrix.

1:07:24Donald Hoffman:That's called the trace. So this is just a standard idea in Markov chain theory that goes back many, many decades. It's not me. It's a beautiful formula that's been known. And if we want to get into the weeds, we can actually do the formula. It's a really interesting formula, but there's a mathematical formula called the trace. That's been known, so that's not news. It's the zero surprise description of what you will see. So if this big matrix is what's governing the reality, so to speak, and I can only see this sub-window, then the trace is the zero surprise correct answer of what you're going to see.

1:08:08Donald Hoffman:You will not be surprised. That is the frequency. Those are the frequencies that you will see. What I discovered two years ago was that the relationship of being a trace gives a logic on the set of all Markov chains. That was the mind-blowing discovery. What was stunning to me was it was so simple and no one had ever done it before. And so I took it, I'm not a mathematician. I know enough math to get into trouble and not enough to get out, but I'm working with mathematicians like Chaitan Prakash and others that can get me out of trouble. So I took it to Chaitan and I said, look, Chaitan, I think this thing is a logic, technically a partial order.

1:08:48Donald Hoffman:And he said, Don, it's too pretty to be true. And he had to fly somewhere. So he got to Heathrow and decided to check in and he proved it. It's a partial order. So what we have is this operation of minimal surprise windows. So I have a big, I have all these Markov windows, and I can ask, what are the no surprise sub windows? That turns into a logic. You can talk about the and, the or, the negation, the meet and the join and so forth. It turns out the logic is not Boolean. It's a very non-trivial, non-Boolean logic, but it's locally Boolean. If I pick any matrix and look at all of its sub-matrices in the trace, they form a Boolean logic.

1:09:41So it's nice to the non-computer scientists, Boolean.

1:09:44Donald Hoffman:Right, right. So for computer scientists, Boolean is very, very obvious. But a Boolean logic is in some sense the simplest logic. You can take two elements and take, if I have two elements, I can take their union. So I can take an element which is their union. And I can also take their intersection. I can find an element which is, you know, in both of them. And I can take the negation. I can say what's not, you know, what's the outside of this element. So Boolean logic is at the foundation of a lot of classical computing stuff. So the thing, this logic is locally Boolean, is globally non-Boolean.

1:10:27Donald Hoffman:And so the idea then, I'll connect it with Leibniz first a little bit. The idea here is that each matrix is an observer window. It's a way of seeing. Dave Portnoy here. The wait is over. Football is here and so is DraftKings. DraftKings is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport, nationwide. New DraftKings customers. Sign up with code SPOTIFY. Spend$5 to get$200 in rewards within 21 days. Includes all markets. That's code SPOTIFY in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER, 1-800-MY-RESET. Connecticut, call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. On behalf of Boothill Casino in Kansas, Bet tax pass-through may apply in Illinois.

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1:11:46Donald Hoffman:and so it's a monad in liveness's terminology and the trace logic is the pre-established harmony that's that ties them all together that showed a logic of the whole set of observer windows now these matrices can get as big as you want they can go to a trillion off to infinity in any direction and so there's there's no top to this there's so it's it's an incredibly complicated logic. So just allow the matrix get as big as you want. The entries can change anyway. Every possible arrangement of entries, as long as each row sums to one, it counts. So this is a huge, huge space of observers. And the single logic that ties them all together that says, this is the no surprise logic of all observation.

1:12:36Donald Hoffman:So this gives you all possible observations and the no surprise logic. And we still don't understand all the details of this logic. We don't have a general formula for the union, the join. Chaitan has a formula in special cases where he can compute the join. We don't have a general formula for the join. We don't actually have a theorem yet that you can actually write down a general formula for the join. So there's some interesting open mathematical problems here. But now we can take it one more step. Those are just observer windows. There's no notion of agency yet. For agency, we can step back and say, what would it mean?

1:13:16Donald Hoffman:What would an agent want to do? Well, one thing an agent would want to do is if I'm looking through this observer window, maybe I want to look through a bigger one or a smaller one or just a different one. I want to change my observer windows. So how would I do that? Well, I would want to write down another matrix where it says, if I'm looking at this observer window, what's the probability that I'll go to that one or that one or that one? Or if I'm looking at this observer window, so what am I going to do? I'm going to write down another Markov matrix. So I've got this trace logic of observer windows.

1:13:51Donald Hoffman:It's infinite. It's huge. Now I'm stepping outside of it, and I'm putting a new kind of Markov chain on top of the whole trace logic. I'm now walking around on the trace logic of observer windows. So there's a trace logic of observer windows. I'm going to go meta now. I'm stepping outside of that. I'm walking around on those windows. How do I do it? I use Markov chains to walk around on those windows. Each way that I could walk around is what I'll call a policy. It's an agent policy. A very simple one, but a policy. I can look now at the collection of all policies. And they have a logic that ties them all together.

1:14:38Donald Hoffman:What is that logic? It's the trace logic again. Recursion. So now I have the trace logic of policies. And now I can say, I want to go meta again. I can now crawl around. I had this policy. Now I want to change this policy. I'm going to crawl around the windows this way. So I can have meta policies. So what I can do, and the meta-policies will then have their own trace logic. And this goes off so the notion of agency can be built out recursively as complicated as you want. So the whole thing comes down to there are observers with things that they can see. They change. That means there's a logic.

1:15:22Donald Hoffman:If you write down Markov chain, it means there is a logic. We just discovered there is a logic. You can then crawl around on the logic. That means you now have agency. It has its own trace logic. So the whole thing comes down to Markov chains and the trace logic recursion. That's it. It couldn't be simpler. It's unbelievably simple. And you recursively build out this notion of agency. see. And now the magic starts happening because when you take a trace, if I have a big window and you're looking at a sub-window, in terms of the little window, there's stuff going on outside that the little window doesn't see.

1:16:03Donald Hoffman:But it's all coordinated because of this trace logic. And so magic can happen outside there. So notice what happens with the time counters. If I've got a bigger window, say, let's go back to our red, green, and yellow. Every time red, green, or yellow changes, my counter goes. If I only see red and green, my counter isn't going to change as fast because I'm not seeing the yellow. So all the yellow counts that the bigger guy has, I'm not getting with my red, green guy. He only sees red and green. So his counter is going slower. That will lead to time dilation and special relativity. Really? And general relativity.

1:16:41Donald Hoffman:Exactly. It leads right to that. It predicts. So the idea, and we're working on this, so this is where my team is working on. Which is observer dependent, time dilation. Completely. So that's where it comes from. That's the claim. Whoa. And when you look at how do you get distance, the distance comes from how roughly, if I start at red, how quickly do I get to green? How quickly do I get to yellow? It's sort of a diffusion. If I'm at red, do I get to green really quickly? Do I get to yellow very quickly? Especially if you have a bigger matrix, when you have thousands and thousands of states, maybe there's lots of places to go.

1:17:20Donald Hoffman:How quickly do I get to diffuse? There's something called Dirichlet forms that come out of this. But the basic idea is the speed at which you get from one state to another, or the way you diffuse, gives you a distance. And when you have a bigger matrix, and then you take a smaller trace, the distances get smaller. So you get not only time dilation, you get length contraction from this. So the idea is, and we're working on proving that we can actually get special and general relativity exactly as headset representations of this trace logic. So that's going to be... But then we have this whole notion of that there's going to be hidden stuff, right?

1:18:12Donald Hoffman:I'm not the top observer, right? None of us are, you know, my headset is just a headset. There are bigger matrices out there. That means that if someone is working with a bigger matrix and I'm just a sub-matrix of what they're doing, they can do magic. They can do things that look like magic to me. It's completely legitimate in their framework. But in my framework, for example, something that in my framework looks instantaneous could be a million years in their framework. So this is when we get to the UAP kind of stuff where the craft seems to be here and then it goes Mach 40 instantly and gets over there.

1:18:53Donald Hoffman:And to me, it's like, it happened like, who knows? In their headset, it may have been a very leisurely movement because I'm only seeing a trace, my counter is only going very, very slow compared to their counters. So, I mean, I'm a plaything perhaps to them because it's sort of like me and the ant. I can take my time. If I want to smash the ant, no rush. I got plenty of time. The ant doesn't know I'm coming. I can do it. So as soon as you have a bigger matrix and someone's just a trace, you can play with them. That's the interesting thing here. So all of a sudden this opens up all sorts of windows for exploration.

1:19:32Well, it makes me think that maybe, you know, on some local level, it might be adaptive not to see the truth because, you know, fitness beats perception and all these sort of local evolutionary game theory kind of, you know, dynamics. But if you're talking about observer windows as basically your ability to see reality, if the larger your matrix, the bigger reality you're seeing, on some meta level, it is adaptive to see as much truth as possible, especially if you're the aliens and you can just play with us little humans. That's right.

1:20:09Donald Hoffman:So, yeah, you might want to have a policy in which you are going to bigger and bigger windows. The problem is there's never a top here. There is no top to this trace logic. There is no such thing as the biggest window. So it's an infinitely kind of scale of consciousness. That's right. Wow. This is saying consciousness goes off to infinity, not in just one direction, in an infinite number of different directions. So you can't even think big enough about this. Consciousness is far more, the trace logic is saying, consciousness is incredibly complicated. And no matter how big you think you are, there's no way that you're the top.

1:20:48Donald Hoffman:Yeah. Any headsets that you're wearing is trivial compared to, literally trivial. Any headsets that you're wearing is trivial compared to what's available. Yeah, it's interesting. Sam Altman of OpenAI, I think he had a tweet and it was like, physics is a product, or he said it was something like, intelligence is a product of physics. And I wanted to flip it and say, physics is a product of intelligence. I think you would agree with me. Absolutely. So physics, our current space-time physics, is one of the more trivial headsets that you can build out of the trace logic. And a lot in physics points to this idea that we are computationally sort of processing it.

1:21:37And Wheeler would talk about this. So he was big on the anthropic principle, not only it from bit, which is basically, if you take that one logical step further, it's sort of like we're computing reality. I mean, if you're using computer science as an analogy, you don't have to go all the way to Wolfram physics to say that he might have some information theory adjacent ideas about physics itself. But he would also talk about the anthropic principle of which there are variations, the weak and the strong. But why is the Planck length and Planck scale the way it is? why um you know uh uh does hydrogen and oxygen bond in this perfect way where normally you know solids are more dense than the liquid form of you know any sort of substance and in our case and you know and the earth would flood a million times over if if that were the case with us but in ice with water with h2o you know it forms these perfect crystal lattice structures so the ice floats above the water.

1:22:39You know, if gravity were slightly different, you know, we wouldn't have our, you know, our earth the way it is. So it feels like you could you could have two different, you know, sort of conclusions based on that. One is we like rolled the dice a million different times and we got this really lucky with earth. Like it's this Goldilocks principle. Or you could say that physics itself is just our interface. And, you know, the reason these constants, these physics constants are so perfect is because they're actually derivative of our own consciousness. That's right. Which that makes way more sense to me.

1:23:15And it's the Occam's razor explanation. There are other things in physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which point to this as well, where, you know, if you can't measure position and momentum at the same time simultaneously, that almost looks like a computational caching function. Like you can only store so much information in local memory. You also have the Sheldrake observations, which we both agreed before we were rolling. We might have problems with the Sheldrake theory. But as an empirical, you know, experimentalist, I think he's very strong. And all of his stuff points, you know, you'll grow a crystal lattice structure in a Petri dish, and it takes a long time to grow the first time.

1:23:54and then it grows much, much faster after you've grown it that first time, which to me points to sort of, in computer science, again, you have a central monad. In this case, it would be the server and then you'd have different observational nodes. And so it would take a long time to upload information, longer than it would to download it thereafter. Upload times are always longer than download times. So you can go on and on. You talk about golden ratios and Fibonacci sequences. What if those are sort of the code chunks of, you know, our reality, so to speak? And the simulation theory thing just gets more and more charismatic.

1:24:34And it's impossible to argue with. And, you know, I'm not a huge fan of Nick Bostrom, to be honest, but his arguments around the simulation theory are impossible to argue. You can't really say for certain that this is base reality. So this is really interesting because it's an update that actually discusses heuristic that will allow you to predict human observation, observations. I think a lot of people, you know, listening to what you just said about the red, green, blue, you know, example with the traffic lights might be thinking, OK, Don, that's a very narrow rule set. How do we get to, you know, like I'm tasting a hamburger.

1:25:13It's like this 360 sensory experience. How do you build a Markov matrix that really encapsulates that?

1:25:21Donald Hoffman:Right. So, yeah, you've raised a lot of interesting points there. One of them about the computational aspect of this. Markov chains are computationally universal. Anything that you can do with a universal Turing machine, you can do with Markov chains. So there's no restriction with Markov chains. And in fact, I think that they're beyond just computational. One interesting thing to explore here is that the trace logic on Markov chains therefore induces a logic on algorithms. Right? And it's a new logic on algorithms. I'm starting to explore it. So this may be a new contribution to the theory of computation, that there is a logic, and it's a very interesting logic.

1:26:08Donald Hoffman:So the trace logic of Markov chains, when you think about Markov chains as algorithms, it induces a logic on algorithms that gives us a new aspect of the theory of computation. That's going to be very, very interesting. So Wolfram's computational approach is subsumed within the Markov chain approach. In fact, any computational approach is subsumed in it. Also, when you get one objection to this Markov thing, you said it's too simple and we need to go more complicated. Absolutely, a lot of people will say it's too simple. So, for example, one objection has been, look, qualia or conscious experiences are private.

1:26:49Donald Hoffman:You can't know my experience of green and I can't know your experience of green directly. I can guess, but I can't know. And so some people say, well, in quantum theory, we have the no cloning theorem. So if you have a quantum state, it can't be cloned. And a lot of people say, well, we need that, right? To get this privacy of qualia kind of thing going on here, we need to have the notion, we need to at least go to the quantum level because we have this no-cloning theorem, right, to model that. Well, it turns out if you look more closely at the no-cloning theorem and quantum theory, it doesn't determine, it does not depend on the unitarity of the Schrodinger evolution.

1:27:31Donald Hoffman:It's only linearity. That's all you need is linearity. Markov operators are linear. And it turns out the Markov, if you're interested in the no-cloning theorem and you think that has something to do with consciousness, Markov chains have the no-cloning theorem too. So that's nothing to dismiss. Now, another thing in quantum theory is people will say, well, still, Markov chains aren't unitary. I mean, some of them are, but most of them aren't. And so you have all this weird behavior in quantum theory that you don't have in Markov chains. So what are you talking about here? When you say not unitary.

1:28:08Donald Hoffman:So unitary, effectively, in quantum theory, Schrodinger's equation, it runs the same forward and backwards in time, basically. So it's time reversible, so to speak. Whereas, for example, the problem with measurement is that that's not time reversible. Once you collapse, going from the Schrodinger evolution to I got this particular experience, that's not reversible. That's an irreversible collapse. So that's been the problem that you, in quantum theory, if you say that every physical system is governed by the Schrodinger revolution, and most would say that, right? that every physical system is governed by the Schrodinger evolution.

1:29:02Donald Hoffman:Now I want a physical system that collapses the wave function, namely, a physical system that observes, that makes a measurement. Well, there's no physical system governed by the Schrodinger equation that can do that. So that's the problem. The observation problem is we have no way of saying a physical system can do this. That's the real serious problem that we've got there. And when you go then to attempts to deal with this— So when you say there is no physical system— Because every physical system is governed by the Schrodinger revolution. Therefore, it can't collapse the wave function. Now, someone will say, well, Don, you've let go of decoherence.

1:29:46Donald Hoffman:I mean, you've forgotten about decoherence, right? You can decoher things and go classical. And decoherence does not actually lead to the collapse. So decoherence will lead you, it will get rid of the interference, but it will not give you a single outcome. It will give you a panoply of outcomes, but not a single outcome. So decoherence does not actually solve the measurement problem. It does get rid of the interference, but that's but doesn't give you the outcome. So right now, that's been the big problem. So what you're saying is it's fundamentally observation. The observation cannot be captured by any system that's governed by the Schrodinger equation.

1:30:28Donald Hoffman:Sure. And it cannot be captured by decoherence. And that means... Yeah, the only person who would try to really attempt to solve this is the Penrose-Hameroff. The idea that decoherence occurs in the brain at the sort of one graviton limit and there's a space-time superposition buildup, and then you get the collapse or whatever. Like the brain is some physical quantum system or whatever. Well, yeah, I'm good friends with Hameroff. And I think it's a really interesting idea. Of course, Penrose's physics is unassailable. I mean, he's a genius. But in terms of his application here, I don't think it's going to work.

1:31:10Donald Hoffman:Because what you have is still, They're not proposing a theory of the collapse. They don't know how the collapse happens. They're just going to say that the collapse happens. That's a miracle. They say it's like the tubulin are vibrating a lot in the microtubules, and then there's some sort of collapse there. That's right. The tubulin molecule has certain properties that allow collapse to happen, but they still don't have any physical system to do the collapse. It's just a raw plant. It collapses. It's just some refractory period of space-time superposition buildup, which allows for free will and then somehow collapse.

1:31:50Donald Hoffman:Basically, from my view, is that there's two miracles here. Collapse is a miracle and consciousness is a miracle. Let's call them the same thing. Right. Right. Fair enough, yeah. And I'm good friends with Stuart, and when I ask him, Stuart, okay, you know, quantum states of microtubules and their collapse gives us conscious experiences. Okay, well, give me one. What's the orchestrated collapse of quantum states that must be the taste of chocolate? Or the illusion of the taste of chocolate. If someone wants to say, I'm not interested in the hard problem of consciousness, fine, forget the hard problem of consciousness.

1:32:22Donald Hoffman:I want the illusion of the taste of chocolate. or the illusion, and there's nothing on the table. So again, if they put something on the table, that's a different story, but there's nothing on the table. With your Markov matrixes, you can predict subjective experience as radical as tasting chocolate. Well, so I'm changing the game. So what I'm doing is I'm saying, instead of assuming that the fundamental reality is non-conscious, non-perceptual. It's a physical world. Let's start with a different set of assumptions. Let's just take the taste of mint, the smell of garlic, the feeling of a headache as the primitives.

1:33:05Donald Hoffman:See, every scientific theory starts with assumptions. This is a really important point. This is basic, but it's really important. And a lot of scientists miss a key point here. Every scientific theory says, please grant me these assumptions, like Einstein. Grant me that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, and the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. If you grant me that, then I can give you special relativity, and with other assumptions, I can give you general relativity. So every theory starts with assumptions, and then if you grant those assumptions, it says I can explain all this other wonderful stuff.

1:33:46Donald Hoffman:what a theory never does is explain its own assumptions it assumes them so there that theory if you give me a theory i can tell you that theory isn't a theory of everything because it's not a theory of its own assumptions it's assuming its assumptions you say oh that's no problem i'll give you a deeper theory eventually that explains those assumptions absolutely that's what science is about i'm all for it and your new theory will have its own assumptions and so this goes on ad infinitum forever. There is no such thing as a theory of everything in science. And in fact, we are going to be always 0 % of the way to a theory of everything.

1:34:22Donald Hoffman:So I'm a scientist, I love science, and science by its very nature will get 0 % of reality because every scientific theory starts with assumptions. So humility is absolutely essential when we do science. Now, when we have a scientific theory, when we write down our assumptions, we do not need to assume that our assumptions are true. If we did, we'd be stuck. All we need to do is assume that our assumptions are consistent. And given that, then we can look at all the things that follow consistently from our assumptions. So that's what science assumes. It says, grant me these assumptions. I believe they're consistent.

1:35:08Donald Hoffman:You can check me, but I think these assumptions are consistent. Given that they're consistent, there's this realm of explanation. It's not universal. It's 0 % of reality, but there is a scope of explanation if it's a good theory. And so you can then say, let's explore the scope of this theory. A good theory will give you the mathematical tools you need to explore its scope. A great scientific theory will give you the tools to discover its limits, to be precise about its limits. And that's a key point that many scientists and philosophers miss. I'm making the clean point that a scientific theory starts with assumptions that are not necessarily assumed to be true.

1:35:55Donald Hoffman:They're just assumed to be consistent. They will necessarily have a limited scope, not universal scope, and they will have hard limits to explanation. It is not self-contradictory to say that that scientific theory could also tell you what its own limits are with some precision. So in the case of Einstein's theory of space-time, together with quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and Einstein's gravity? It's a great theory, great scope. All the technology around is because of it. So incredible scope. Clean limits. And the theory itself tells you the limits of its fundamental assumptions. The assumption that space-time.

1:36:42Donald Hoffman:So it takes space-time is fundamental. Einstein's theory, together with quantum field theory, tells us that that assumption that space-time is fundamental falls apart precisely at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Game over for space-time. It's at the Planck scale. It's the Planck scale. So the notion of space-time has no operational meaning at the Planck scale. Yeah. It's over. And it's a theory of gravity, and gravity breaks down at subatomic scale. That's right. And it falls apart. So it's clear that space-time isn't the story. It's a beautiful story is not the final story.

1:37:17Donald Hoffman:And science has to move beyond space-time. Now, by the way... So you're saying you have a theory that is upstream of, but encapsulates space-time and Einstein. And one example of that is the prediction of time dilation. And length contraction. And length contraction. Does anything else in general relativity get predicted by your theory? It looks like the quantum wave functions come out of this as the asymptotic behavior of the Markov chains. So I've talked about Markov chain as sort of a step-by-step thing. Now I see red, now I see green, and now I see yellow and so forth. That's just to make it clear.

1:37:54Donald Hoffman:But now suppose, think about that as frames of a movie. And I've been looking with you at one frame at a time, say, look at that frame, look at that. Now I play the movie. Now, of course, that's a different perception. Now I'm playing the movie, the frames are going by real fast. That's what I sort of mean intuitively by the asymptotic behavior. And what my collaborator, Shaitan Prakash, has shown in certain cases, and I think it's quite general, is that the quantum wave functions for free particles are precisely the same thing as the asymptotic behavior of these enhanced Markov chains. Technically, they're certain eigenfunctions, so the harmonic functions.

1:38:37Donald Hoffman:So harmonic functions of the enhanced Markov chains have exactly the same mathematical format as the wave functions in quantum mechanics for free particles. So the idea will be that quantum theory is coming out of this more general theory of trace logic and Markov chains as an asymptotic description. The trace logic is giving you, in some sense, a hidden variables theory. So it's a hidden variables theory. Like a David Bohm. Well, it's different from Bohm because Bohm has a single physical particle riding the waves of quantum theory. Like a de Broglie pilot wave. That's right. So we're completely, I mean, I have great respect for Bohm.

1:39:22Donald Hoffman:He was brilliant, drop dead brilliant. And he did some really out of the box thinking, But the pilot wave theory is still tied to space-time. Later, Bohm thought outside of space-time, deeply outside of space-time, but his pilot wave thing is really still stuck in space-time. So when you say hidden variable, what do you mean? A hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics is just any theory that says there's something that quantum mechanics is not telling you about reality. There's a deeper level of reality that we need to go to. And there are limits. I mean, there are theorems about what you can put outside of that reality, outside of quantum mechanics in your reality.

1:40:03Donald Hoffman:So there are certain things you can't do. So we have a bunch of theorems to prove based on this. So this is all new stuff. So I'll say what we have to do. We have to prove that we can get special relativity out of this. Prove that we can get curved space-time, Einstein's theory of gravity. Prove that we can get the Born rule of quantum theory out of this. prove that we can start, that we can model the Big Bang. And I can, you know, prove that we can get Heisenberg uncertainty relationship. And a number of other things. Prove that we get non-locality and so forth. So, we're assembling a team right now of mathematicians.

1:40:40Donald Hoffman:We have all these conjectures that we've put out publicly, conjectures about that. And we're getting a team to work on them one by one. So, that's where we are right now. It's quite fun. That's fascinating. Wow. Very cool. So it's not a hand wave. There are mathematicians working this put up or shut up time. So you are trying to create, establish essentially a new theory of everything while acknowledging the limits of theories of everything. Right. But that exists kind of upstream of both general relativity, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. Exactly right. And as of now, you can predict in general relativity, length contraction and time dilation.

1:41:20And then if you speed up the frames, you can predict quantum wave function, Schrodinger's, something like Schrodinger's equation. That's right.

1:41:30Donald Hoffman:That's remarkable. That's really cool. But we now need theorems and proofs on all that stuff. But it's looking quite promising to me and to a bunch of people who are willing to spend their time to work on this now. Would you be able to devise an experiment that the hidden Markov chain could predict the result for? And then you do the experiment in real life. And, you know, only this sort of theory is the proper heuristic to predict it. General relativity and quantum mechanics are too limited to predict this outcome. That would be the direction we want to go. We first want to show first that we can get exactly the predictions of.

1:42:09Predict all the current, observe things that we observe.

1:42:12Donald Hoffman:And then what's next? What goes beyond that? So we're absolutely working on doing exactly that. Fascinating. There's lots of directions to go here. The direction I'm interested in is, think of hidden Markov chains as being developed at the inception or origin, or at least playing a big part in the birth of artificial intelligence. And you were at MIT right when all of this stuff was starting. You were studying under Marvin Minsky, which is amazing, and you were having debates with him and Noam Chomsky about this stuff. So there seems like, you know, my intuition would tell me that there's something significant about the fact that your new theory dovetails with how AI started in some way.

1:43:03Like if we're trying to birth a new kind of lower level simulacra reality with AI and it started with, you know, hidden Markov models, hidden Markov chains, and then you're trying to explain physics through this, you know, that seems somehow important, especially as you talk about context windows in your hidden Markov chains. because like you could theoretically create a smaller hidden Markov chain for like a lower level species, you know, you get back into the UFO discussion where it's like, are there beings like higher on the consciousness food chain than us? You're saying that the Occam's razor explanation is there, but there's worse, you know, teaming with life in the universe, you know, that are, way, way above humanity as far as their perceptive abilities, could they then create context windows for humanity to operate in?

1:44:01That's right.

1:44:02Donald Hoffman:With the trace logic, now you get this very interesting structure on observations. If I've got this big matrix and take a trace on a small submatrix, say on the upper left-hand corner of it, right? So So that's my submatrix. The guy that can only see in the little submatrix has a certain set of states that he can move around in. But the bigger matrix will notice when the state, there are exit states. So all this guy can see is his visible states. But there are corridors out. There's a whole world outside of it. And then there are corridors back in. So there are exits, the world outside, and then there are re-entrances.

1:44:46Donald Hoffman:So the person who has the bigger matrix knows and can play with you. They have access to when the state leaves, what they're doing with it outside, and what comes back in. So you can start, what comes out of this is all sorts of games that you can play and also a notion of multi-scale collective intelligence. So I'm very interested in the work of Mike Levin. Oh, yeah, me too. Very, very. I'm a huge fan. Actually, we're just now starting up a collaboration. we're going to get a postdoc together because of the trace logic, this recursive trace logic, because it's a way of modeling the multi-scale collective intelligence.

1:45:33Donald Hoffman:At least it's promising. The idea, Mike Levin has this wonderful set of work, for example, with planaria. The planaria reproduce by cutting themselves in half, like one end grabs something and they tear themselves apart, and then they grow a new tail and a new head. It's bizarre, but they've been doing that for hundreds of millions of years. They don't die. There are cells around that have been around for who knows how many millions of years. Anytime there's a mutation, if it doesn't kill the cell, that mutation stays. So the genome is a mess. They have different numbers of chromosomes in different cells.

1:46:08Donald Hoffman:It's a complete mess genetically. And their reproduction, their physiology is rock stable. They don't get cancer. Most of the, you know, they're almost cancer free. They reproduce. Their body morphology is, is great. And they, they live forever. And the genes are, are just all over the place from cell to cell within a living organism. How do you explain that? I mean, you can see that. So it's a stunning, stunning observation. Totally stunning, especially in a world where people think genes, you know, kind of predetermine all physiological phenotypic outcomes. Absolutely. I mean, I, And I'll just mention briefly, I spent a lot of time with Francis Crick, the guy who discovered the structure of DNA.

1:46:54Donald Hoffman:He and a small group of us at UC Irvine called the Helmholtz Club met for almost 20 years secretly studying consciousness. So we were after this. Francis was trying to demystify consciousness like he demystified life with DNA. So this is a real blow to the DNA-centric point of view. It's not that DNA is irrelevant. DNA is clearly an important part of the story. But when the DNA can be different from cell to cell in a given organism, even the number of chromosomes, there's some kind of name they give for these things where you have a different number of chromosomes than cell to cell. So the question is, the one you raised, which is, so what then is responsible for guiding this morphology?

1:47:48Donald Hoffman:We thought it was the genes. The genes are all over the place. And Mike is finding experimental evidence for some kind of electric field kind of manipulations. He can cut a planarian in half and apply the right kind of potential to the halves and either grow another head, so he can have a two-headed planarian, or two tails or something like that. So all of a sudden there are these electric field connections, electrical connections between cells that seem to be having some kind of intelligence that we don't understand at all. We're just learning that they exist. So there's this level, but the way Mike talks about it is sort of like almost like a higher level programming language, right?

1:48:32Donald Hoffman:So maybe the DNA is more like just like the simpler kind of code, but there's a higher level language that can manipulate that code somehow or even just little raw statements in a language. Yeah. And I think you can take Levin's work even farther because, yeah, we know we know that voltage gated ion channels are responsible for, you know, cell communication. We know that electromagnetic fields affect and dictate body morphology, sometimes in an even more fundamental way to DNA. And so I love the analogy of like hardware, software, the software are these like, you know, electromagnetic fields. But then you get into really trippy territory because you can put a frog embryo in a Faraday cage and it won't grow properly.

1:49:18That's right. And then you could put, you know, a plant or you just use the same example. So it's a perfect experiment. You put a frog embryo next to a super powerful Wi-Fi router or, you know, maybe a better example, Chernobyl, where you have extremely, you know, excessive radiation and you end up with too many mutations. So there's this efficient frontier of mutations. and then you get into again anthropic principle stuff where you have the Schumann resonance and magnetosphere of the earth which clearly feels essential to dictating the right animal morphology because if you put a thing in a Faraday cage or even put somebody out into space they literally bring often Schumann resonance machines up with them in space because it's familiar and so the magnetosphere of the earth perfectly shields us from enough cosmic radiation where we're not going to incinerate, but then lets in enough to allow just enough UV radiation-based mutations in our genome to evolve pretty perfectly.

1:50:19And it's very strange. And then you get into the simulated reality stuff, where is Earth in a context window itself that is more compressed than one of these larger context windows? And are the UFOs that we're seeing You mentioned they would monitor the exit paths. That fascinates me because I think about when people have mystical experiences at the boundary. You know, another thing you've brought up is the holographic principle, which Hawking talks about where, you know, all 3D information can be encoded on, you know, its 2D surface. And that's really what you're seeing. and so we if we are in some sort of hologram and we're we're interacting with these things that are higher like the the novel flatland you know the 19th century you know we're we're in 3d space and we're seeing something in from higher dimensional space they'd be looking at where we're poking at the the the exits you know and then they'd be they'd understand you know bf skinner style intermittent reinforcement right and they'd understand cellular automata style stuff as far as sort of managing the petri dish.

1:51:26And then when would they show up? They'd show up around nuclear because they don't want us to destroy ourselves or maybe they're mining us for resources. I don't want to, you know, impugn any sort of, you know, benevolence or intent. But they show up around, UFOs show up around nuclear sites all over the world. So that's fascinating. And they'd probably show up at the frontier of human ingenuity because if you talk about the Archimedes lever, point of most leverage for like future timelines, you know, the quantum stuff is like a third of our economy now. It's like semiconductors, information technology.

1:51:58And so you'd show up, you know, high voltage experimentation, particle accelerators. And they seem to, again, anecdotally show up around some of these things as well. And then the final thing they show up in is weird consciousness experiences. And if you look at all mystery rituals across all these traditions, it's to liberate the soul from the body. And the soul is, you know, It sounds like this inexplicable thing that we're kind of smuggling in. It's a placeholder name, but call it some tesseract-like, higher dimensional thing that's like tethered to the body. Our body is a compressed sort of prism.

1:52:36And then that would explain near-death experiences where we're able to perceive more when you cut off that biological sort of collapsing function. Then in these mystery rituals, if you, again, all these mystery rituals, whether you're putting your hand in a glove of bullet ants or you're taking some, you know, crazy psychedelic kecky on in the Greek Eleusinian mystery rituals back in the day, it temporarily kills the physical body. And then you perceive much more. And then you see often these beings, you know, and I know you're working with Andrew Gallimore who does, you know, these DMT experiments, which again, you know, DMT comes often, you know, at the time of death or, you know, REM sleep.

1:53:16So almost when you're most disembodied. And then you see these entities that have consistent taxonomies across the people that see them. So if we're in this sort of like lower, like literal matrix, like actual matrix, you know, hidden Markov thing, then when you're poking at the boundaries with your consciousness or with high energy physics, you see these entities and you see these UFOs. So I think the UFO thing is totally consistent with your work.

1:53:47Donald Hoffman:Right, right. So the big picture that you're painting here is that there is some need to understand this multiscale collective intelligence. because there seems to be all sorts of pointers to things that cannot be explained within our current physicalist space-time framework. I completely agree. And here's at top level how the Markov trace logic, the recursive trace logic, deals with this. It turns out if you have a Markov chain, you can have a bunch of states that form what's called a community. So that once you are in these states, you tend to stay in those states. Your experiences tend to stay in that little group.

1:54:26Donald Hoffman:But then there might be another community over here, another community over there, and there's a small chance that you might move from this community to another community. Now, within each community, there's going to be a long-term behavior that you can write down the probability of being in each state. Maybe I'll be in this state one, half the time, state two, a third of the time, and so forth. So these are sort of what are called the stationary measures. There'd be approximate stationary measures. There's a stationary measure for the whole thing. So this community structure gives you different wells of intelligence.

1:55:01Donald Hoffman:Here's one way of living. But if I push you into the other community, then all of a sudden, gravity pulls you—the Markov matrix dynamics, think of it like gravity, pulls you into this other well. And now this is a different solution space. Then it can have another solution space over there. So all you need are little prods to go from one solution space to the other, and that could be the community structure. Now, if I look at one of these communities a little bit more closely, I might see, oh, well, within it, there are some sub-communities. Like this, there's this one community, but now there are like five sub-communities in it.

1:55:37Donald Hoffman:So there are these five sub-wells. And then with each one of those sub-wells, I can look at, oh, well, that's got another 10 sub-wells within it. And you can begin to see that a single matrix on trillions and trillions of states could have literally multi-scale collective intelligence by all these little community structures built throughout of it. So what we could be doing with our own headset, so our space-time headset, is really only capturing a small bit of this huge multi-scale collective intelligence of the matrix that we happen to be projected into. And so that's why we can only see certain aspects of it, and all of a sudden they just transcend our space-time description.

1:56:22Donald Hoffman:But they don't transcend science. We can build with the trace logic, the recursive trace logic, we can actually build a model of these things and begin to understand things that perhaps we can't see inside of space-time. Now, I should step back immediately and say, look, here's a cognitive scientist talking about doing science outside of space-time. He's way outside of his pay grade, right? That's the realm for real high-energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians to be doing that kind of stuff. So surely if it can be done, someone else is doing it. You know, a cognitive scientist isn't going to be the first one to do it.

1:57:06Donald Hoffman:And I'm not. It turns out that there are many high-energy theoretical physicists who have now firmly stepped outside of space-time. They will say space-time is doomed. Neema Arkhani-Hamed, David Gross, and others. Yeah. Neema Arkhani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study. At Princeton, right. As impressive as it gets when it comes to theoretical physicists. David Gross, Nobel Prize winner. There you go. And what they're saying is that space-time is doomed. By that they mean it's not fundamental. And they're saying we need to step outside of space-time to do physics, the next level of physics. And they're finding structures.

1:57:53Donald Hoffman:But it might sound impossible. What in the world could you possibly mean to step outside of space-time? For most of us, I talk to my colleagues about we need to get outside of space-time, and they just look at me like, what could you possibly be talking about? Where is outside of space-time? Where means inside space-time. Where is outside of space-time? But the where is entirely outside the conceptual framework of space-time. And what they're finding, Sunima Arkani-Hamed, one of the first pioneers in this era, is structures that they call positive geometries outside of space-time. So, amplituhedron, sociohedron, cosmological polytopes, and other structures.

1:58:43Donald Hoffman:These are structures that are not inside space-time. They don't care about locality, which is a key property of space-time. They couldn't care less about locality, and they don't care about unitarity. So they couldn't care less about the fundamental property of quantum mechanics, unitarity. They don't care about it. They're completely outside of spacetime. Their geometry, their volumes and edges and vertices and so forth, as it turns out, code beautifully and compactly for scattering probabilities, scattering amplitudes of particle interactions inside spacetime. That's the remarkable thing. So here's this object outside of space-time, doesn't care about locality, doesn't care about unitarity at all.

1:59:30Donald Hoffman:That is accurately describing gluon interactions inside space-time. Interactions that when you use Feynman diagrams inside space-time to compute them, for simple interaction with just a few particles, you could get millions of terms. Millions of terms. Outside of space-time, it boils down to a handful of terms. And you get the right answer. Now, there's a lot of work to be done. I mean, they haven't got the whole panoply of what you can do with Feynman diagrams, but they're working on it. It's quite promising. That's fascinating. So you have theoretical physicists at the highest level saying you have to move outside of our conventional idiom of physics, of space-time, in order to solve problems that are prosaic and conventional in space-time.

2:00:21Donald Hoffman:and they're also moving outside of quantum mechanics. So it's not just like, oh, we're going to give a quantum foundation for space-time. No, they're saying we're going to go entirely outside of space-time, entirely beyond quantum theory, and we will have space-time and quantum theory joined at the hip, as Nemo likes to say, joined at the hip, coming out of something deeper. And this is not just a one-off. It's so big now that the European Research Council has a 10 million euro initiative, And there are many, many high energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians now on this 10 million euro initiative studying these positive geometries.

2:00:57Donald Hoffman:So I'm by no means the first by any means. There's much more brilliant people out there already looking for stuff outside of space time and finding it. Well, this is an age-old debate, actually. I mean, the modern instantiation of it goes back to the birth of quantum mechanics, where you had these debates between Niels Bohr and Einstein. Einstein saying, you know, God doesn't play dice. This can't just be probabilities. You know, we need to understand some sort of ontological truth that, you know, the quantum mechanics stuff is pointing to. Einstein himself is obviously a big contributor to quantum mechanics.

2:01:31and Bohr was saying, you know, no, you know, if you think you understand this stuff, you don't. That sort of turned into this Copenhagen interpretation, which mutated then into this sort of shut up and calculate. It's just, you know, this mathematical formalism, you know, don't think about it as some ontological descriptor. And I sort of agree with you. I don't think that, I think science is a map. It's not the territory. So I think it would take a lot of hubris to say that quantum mechanics or general relativity reflects true reality itself. But I do think it's a really interesting exercise to look at the spookiness in quantum mechanics as a pointer to deeper truth and to a deeper ontological reality.

2:02:18And so when you tell me things like, oh, you can run a double slit experiment today, not observe it, and then you know, you run it in three days with a, you know, a paired electron, and then they have inverse behaviors. If you measure it, you know, in three days, and then, you know, you go, it's like there's a, there's temporal non-locality in, in quantum mechanics. And when you, when you, when you go into those sorts of, you know, things that, that seems to point to like a, almost like a time agnostic reality or something. I mean, you even mentioned Schrodinger's equation going the same way forwards as it does backwards that's same with electromagnetism and general relativity you know the unitarity thing right so yeah is there something weird about like time seems like this very weird thing that we just don't understand like time could i mean in maybe in your model you know which might be more kind of computational or something it's like uh saved game states

2:03:15Donald Hoffman:instead of time or i don't know what do you think so so a lot of interesting points so i would say What quantum theory does do is put front and center the observer. It says we can't ignore the observer. In Newton, the observer could be ignored. The observer didn't interfere, so you could just ignore the observer. In Einstein's gravity and its special relativity, you have an observer, but it's just clocks and pointers. But in quantum mechanics, all of a sudden, the observer is right there in your face. When you do an observation, the wave function is no longer the thing. You have a collapse of the wave function.

2:03:59There in your face is the observer is doing something.

2:04:04Donald Hoffman:We have to understand. This is no longer something that we can dismiss. The very coherence of science is at stake. That's the key point. The coherence of science is at stake. If we cannot give an account of observation that makes it possible for us to have true theories that accommodate an observer, if we cannot get that whole story to work, then what are we doing? We are way off in fairy tale land until we can ground this whole thing. We have a theory of the observer that's coherent, that explains why our scientific theories have data that's believable. Our observations are giving us the data.

2:04:49Donald Hoffman:our observations need to be related to the external world in some rational way so that we can actually get theories of the structure. And that structure better come back and say that our theories, that our observations are good data. And that we don't have in quantum theory. And the attempts to solve the measurement problem don't work. So, for example, the Everett interpretation, the many worlds. whatever it says is every time there's an observation there is no collapse there's i mean there are if there are trillion branches to the wave function all trillion take off so hoffman is making this measurement and there are now a million hoffmans in a million branches or a trillion or whatever it might be problem solved right there's um there is no collapse so we don't have to worry about the role of the observer and not quite, doesn't quite work.

2:05:44Donald Hoffman:So the problem is, why do I believe in the Schrodinger equation and quantum theory? Well, it's because the statistics in my experiments that I do in my lab agree with the statistics I get when I look at the Schrodinger equation and take its amplitude squared. So, it's the frequencies that I've observed in my lab matching the frequencies predicted by the amplitude squared of the Schrodinger equation, Schrodinger wave function, that convinced me of its... Now, in the effort interpretation, I am in every branch. That means every possible sequence of outcomes that could have happened. If I'm doing like a million measurements, then there is a Hoffman that saw one sequence of a million.

2:06:41Donald Hoffman:There's Hoffman that saw a different sequence. Every possible sequence is out there. So where is the connection between my Hoffman observing my sequences and saying, aha, this sequence confirms because it's the amplitude square. No, there's going to be a sequence when I get the exact same output every time. There is no variation. That's one possibility, right? And so, it raises the question, if the effort interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation is what we take, then I have no reason to believe that the frequencies that I observe in my experiments are related to reality. because I could be in a branch where I get this really anomalous set of frequencies because that happens.

2:07:32Donald Hoffman:I mean, ever it says, anything that can possibly happen will happen. So every crazy outcome, not just the, and if you then say, oh, well, but we can fix that because I, you know, you're more likely, Don, you're more likely to be in the high probability, high amplitude, you know, things. And that's no longer than just quantum mechanics, because in the Everett interpretation, there is a dawn already in all the trillions of... So who is this new dawn that you're saying is going to be dropped into one of the more high probability quote-unquote buckets? And what is that mechanism of dropping in? Why should I believe that?

2:08:17Donald Hoffman:This is no longer quantum mechanics. This is a huge addition to quantum mechanics. never been worked out. So I don't believe the multiverse right now because it leads to the conclusion that our science is incoherent. It's incoherent because our observations do not support the theory. Dave Portnoy here. The wait is over. Football is here and so is DraftKings. DraftKings is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport, nationwide.

2:09:20Bet with DraftKings Sportsbook to get bonus bets that expire in seven days. Or trade with DraftKings Predictions to get predictions dollars that expire in one year. Event contract trading involves risk of loss. Predictions offer void in New York. Non-withdrawable rewards issued as$50. Click to claim every seven days for 21 days. Terms at dkng.co slash offer. Limited time offer. Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability. Varies by state. Isn't there some, because I agree, I'm not a big multiverse fan and you can't infinitely split, you know, dons into, you know, different, you know, and it's also, it's unfalsifiable, right?

2:09:53You end up in these sort of never ending conversations where it's like, well, that happened even though it was low probability and it's, you know, it's somewhere else and it's continuously forking. And it's like, I don't, I don't really know what you do with that. Having said that, if you take things like the delayed choice experiment, double slit experiment, some of these things at face value, even Don's decision to measure, you know, the collapse of the wave function, you know, and look and see, and then you see this eigenstate, you see a state where the, you know, photon hit the cardboard backing.

2:10:24You don't see this interference pattern. That took place, you know, out of your free will. And so you are affecting physics on the most fundamental level. Like what we take as fundamental physics, you are affecting by even choosing to make that measurement. And I think that's kind of undeniable. And so at that point, you don't have to get into parapsychology and say that we are affecting random quantum mechanical processes, if you just take that at face value, then your physics is already different than my physics. And then don't you get into territory where, yeah, maybe space-time is this kind of consensus collapsing function construct, but you have different local collapsing functions.

2:11:06You have different local air pockets of consensus reality and consensus physics.

2:11:11Donald Hoffman:A clean notion of the observer and its relationship to our physical theories is not optional. We have to have a clean notion of the observer. And in quantum theory, there is none. Quantum theory says we absolutely have to have one. But if you look at the different kinds of theories that are out there, so for example, the multiverse one, but then there are the ones like the Bohmian thing where you stick a particle in on the wave function. It turns out when you look at those, they don't work when you go to relativity theory, so quantum field theory. They just don't work there. There's a problem of scaling, renormalization problems and so forth.

2:11:53Donald Hoffman:They don't work. And when you go to things like Chris Fuchs, a really wonderful man, we're friends, and a brilliant guy, he's got his cubist theory, which basically is a subjective Bayesian. It says the wave function and the amplitude squared is just the subjective degrees of belief. And if you keep it purely subjective, then you can solve the so-called Wigner's friend problem, right? So, you know, there's the standard problem in quantum mechanics where there's someone, you know, watching, let's say, a Schrodinger cat inside a room, a friend of yours, and they're waiting to see if the cat's going to be alive or dead.

2:12:37Donald Hoffman:But you're outside, you're in a separate room. And so you're waiting and you have a wave function yourself for your friend and the cat, whether the cat is alive and the friend says they're alive or the cat is dead and the friend says. So you have your own wave function. And it turns out that under some interpretations, the person inside could see the cat's dead and you don't know. You're still in a superposition. You don't know. So you have different statements about reality. So, someone like Chris Fuchs in the quantum Bayesian with a subjective Bayesian approach would say, no problem, because these are just degrees of belief.

2:13:15So, the experimenter outside the lab room and the experimenter inside the lab room are each allowed their own interpretation, their own probabilities.

2:13:29Donald Hoffman:Yeah. But then if you do that, there's a problem because then how do you get the connection between the wave function and the objective world? What is the data that makes you want to say that this is the right wave function to have? If your ideas are just purely subjective, then it's not tethered to the objective data that needs to tether it. And if you try to tether it, then all of a sudden you're going to get back to the Wigner's-Fenn problem. So the bottom line is I see right now what quantum mechanics has done is said what you were just talking about. We have to understand how the observer gives us the data in our scientific theories or we're incoherent.

2:14:12Donald Hoffman:And there is no theory in quantum mechanics that does that right now. So science is at this unbelievable place. It's unbelievable. We're this far advanced. We do not have a theory of the observer that will make science itself coherent. And so what I'm proposing with this recursive trace logic is what Leibniz proposed 300 years ago. We have to start, and what Wheeler proposed in 1989, it from bit, we have to go back and start where we, the thing we ignored. In Newton, we ignored the observer. In Einstein, we talked about it, but we ignored it. In quantum mechanics, we can't ignore it, and we don't know what to do with it.

2:14:56So I'm saying that's where science has to go next.

2:15:00Donald Hoffman:Science now, we have to start over, nail down exactly what we mean by an observer, get it mathematically precise, and then go back, show that once we have this, like if the recursive trace logic works, we'll see. I mean, hopefully I'll know within two or three years. If it works, the idea would be, we will then show how space-time, curved space-time and quantum field theory arise as one of the more trivial headsets that comes out of a general theory of observation. So the idea is we have this recursive trace logic, It's completely general notion of observation. And then policies and meta-policies and so forth, completely general notion of agency.

2:15:39Donald Hoffman:So the agents now can choose different experiments that they want to do. Does that give us the framework to give us all of our current scientific theories? Quantum field theory, general relativity, black holes, the whole bit. Big bang, the whole bit. Nothing left out. and then show, but this is just a trivial example of what we can do. That's your four-dimensional headset, one of time, three of space. But why not? So, for example, in the Amplituhedron with Neymar Kani-Hamed, there is a parameter in the Amplituhedron, which is the dimension of the space-time in which you're going to project this positive geometry into that.

2:16:25Donald Hoffman:And in our case, it's four, but his mathematics allows bigger numbers. Four is one of the smaller and less interesting numbers. It's perhaps the smallest non-trivial number. But as you go up, you can—so already the serious physicists working outside of space time, I should say high-energy theoretical physicists. It's not all physicists, high-energy theoretical physicists, this is their bailiwick. They're already saying we're finding these geometries that characterize scattering amplitudes in a way that the space-time that we perceive is just one of many, many possible space-times in which we could talk about this stuff.

2:17:03Donald Hoffman:And I'm saying, that's right. We're going to now have to just go and look at the set of all possible headsets of all kinds that observers could come up with. And it's going to be infinite numbers. So ours is one of the more trivial ones. And now with the policies, so remember a policy was a way of crawling around on the observer windows. And what would it mean to be embodied? Because we talked about embodiment and I said it was one of the smaller, you know. What does it mean to be embodied? Well, what does it mean for me to move my hand from here to grab that cup? It's going to be a policy in which I have a bunch of observer windows.

2:17:44Donald Hoffman:The observer window in which there's another observer, that's another frame, another frame, another frame, another frame, right? notice that that's a particular subset of windows in this huge trace logic. There's lots of, but that is one frame in it. And I'm being forced to use frames of this type to make the cup move from there to there. But if I think about it, there are lots of other policies in which my hand stays here and the cup just moves. There are all sorts of policies, and there are a lot more of those than there are in which my hand has to move in this particular way to do it. So that's where you see immediately that the embodiment is a measure zero set of the whole thing.

2:18:29Donald Hoffman:But we're forced right now to have these policies in which we can only directly, so to speak, change certain things, my fingers, my toes. those are the, we're stuck to those observer window that have that kind of thing in them. And we can only move them in certain sequences. So we have to be really, really clever. I want this cup to go from here to there. There's a million ways to do it, but not if I'm forced to use my hand. Now there's like one, just a smaller set of ways that I can do it to get it to move over there. So that's why I said earlier on that once you get to this recursive trace logic and have the notion of policies, that then you see embodiment is not necessary.

2:19:13Donald Hoffman:And in fact, it's probability zero. It's stunning. So if embodiment is actually maladaptive for life, are there any observable things in our current space time that you think might actually be alive? Well, it's an interesting question you raised there. Is it maladaptive for our current? So embodiment, is it maladaptive? And - Well, clearly not for us in some way, shape or form. like it's the best form for us. Well, it raises a big question, and that is, what is this whole game about? Right? There are all these windows and all these infinite number of policies. And so now I'm thinking about consciousness itself and what is consciousness up to?

2:20:00Donald Hoffman:And all I can think of is that consciousness must be in knowing itself by exploring itself from an infinite number of perspectives and from an infinite number of policies, an infinite number of meta-policies. And that's, in some sense, what an infinite unbounded consciousness does to explore and know itself. You take a perspective and maybe you lose yourself in the perspective so completely that you don't even know that you're the infinite consciousness, right? Oh, that's beautiful. Well, that comports with a bunch of religious stuff. It really does. And it really does, but now there's math behind it.

2:20:37Donald Hoffman:Yeah. And John Wheeler, you know, wrote his you on that piece of paper of the universe observing itself. You have Alan Watts and other mystics talking about, you know, we're the universe trying to observe itself or, or piece itself path back together. I think that's sort of a common thread, but I was sort of going like, you know, in a slightly different direction, which is, you know, obviously you have these sort of context windows, you have these different matrices. You know, we see a specific matrix. Maybe we're teaming with alien life and they see larger matrices and they can kind of pop into ours and mess with us.

2:21:16But are there things in our space time, things like, I don't know, plasma might be an example. There's a great book called The New Science of Heaven by a guy named Robert Temple. And he talks about plasma being the substrate of the universe and alive and atomic matter actually being the exception to the rule and charged ions, you know, stripped of most of what we think of as atoms, actually just permeating the entire universe. And there are all these strange experiments of like humans walking up to plasma and it cohering to the human's heartbeat. A lot of the UFO stuff looks like kind of plasma balls that seem to be sort of synchronized with our own intent or something.

2:22:01So in this model, are there things that we see that we attribute to kind of, you know, just like the ant would see us and they'd be like, wow, that might be like natural phenomena or like they have no idea what we are. We see these things and we put these natural placeholders on them. But now assuming that the likelihood is life is disembodied, it's not the opposite. We're the exception to the rule. Then some of these natural phenomena, things like plasma, might be alive.

2:22:32Donald Hoffman:Right. Now, the one proviso is that plasma is whatever this thing is seen through our headset. So already, whatever we see and call plasma has already been dumbed down to fit into our little headset. So the trace logic would force us to say, whatever is really causing me to see plasma could be infinitely more interesting than what I call plasma. But it still gets, I think, to the point that you want to make, which is once we have this ability to see others as sub traces of us, can we start to play games? Can we start to do stuff? Absolutely. And so that's where, for example, I think I'm no expert in the UAP kind of stuff or the DMT stuff.

2:23:15Donald Hoffman:I'm collaborating with Gallimore on DMT. But it seems to me that there are tools here to allow you to do whatever you want, basically, because you have a different time counter than the sub-trace. So you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want to compared to them. They may see it as instantaneous, what's happening, like moving from stationary to Mach 40, some craft immediately. But from the UIP point of view, it's not. It could be very, very leisurely in their headset because their clock is going at a different pace than our clock. And their space could be very, very different than our space.

2:24:00You would also end up with your model if you have these different perceptive windows and you have a higher perceptive window. If you wanted to keep a lower system organism with a smaller perceptive window out, but you also wanted to initiate the right people. Like you get back to stories of Plato where you have a cave, you have people kept in the cave by the sort of guardian class. And the weird thing about the UFO thing is like very few people can say anything sort of coherent about it. But there's an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence. around it. So it's like those two things simultaneously is the weirdest thing about it.

2:24:40And it almost implies that there's like an intent on the other end that are like dangling bizarre anomalies that like are meant to not be collapsed into any coherent theory. And it's almost like you're and this is if you get into like the deeper kind of, you know, substrates of Jacques Vallée and some of the hardcore UFO researchers, this is what they're getting at. You almost end up with this model that is similar to Plato, where like this, these guardians, which literally I'm not even talking about like elites in society, socioeconomically, I'm talking about like guardians of reality itself are dangling things in front of us and getting us to, you know, showing us the light.

2:25:21We're glimpsing the light and then we're, we're moving outwards and ascending through the cave. Uh, but it's also adaptive to kind of keep most of us in a cave or something. And, and, and if you think about technology, it is this forcing function, whether it's AI or nuclear or, you know, the ability for the human genome to be sort of messed with. It's this forcing function of like, if you had this technology, the latency and the bandwidth limitations of humans to like, do really amazing things and do really destructive things all goes out the window. And so completely. So it's almost like your stuff plus the nick bostrom simulation stuff you end up with this theory of reality where like some higher uh living organisms that are disembodied are probably managing us well yeah

2:26:16Donald Hoffman:there's a couple another way to think about it that makes your point i think and that is one way that we could think about what's what's going on with like the recursive trace logic is it's giving us a layer of software outside of our headset. So this is just a VR game. And by stepping out of space-time headset and getting a first layer of software description of how the headset is built, we get some interesting new power. If you're the Grand Theft Auto example, right? If you're a wizard at Grand Theft Auto, you can race your car faster than anybody, get from here to there, steal stuff, whatever.

2:26:54Donald Hoffman:But if I'm the geek that can't drive a car, but I wrote the software, then I can do magic. I mean, I can literally take the air out of the tires of the wizard. I can make his car disappear. I can make it turn into a turtle. I can do anything I want to because I know the software. So we have, when you look at the recursive trace logic, you realize that those with the bigger matrices have the ability, they have software. They have the software, if they're enough bigger than you, they have the software to know how your headset is working. And they can just play with you. Like someone who knows the software, they can just play and do complete math.

2:27:38Donald Hoffman:So you can't think big enough. You absolutely can't think big enough when you realize the possibilities that the recursive trace logic brings up. But I would point out, in spirit, it's very similar to Nick Bostrom, but there is a key difference between what I'm saying and what Bostrom is saying. And it's an important difference. Bostrom is saying that, yes, what we're doing here is just a simulation, and there's some geek with their little computer and writing software, and we're just characters in their software. And that person, by the way, is also just a character in some deeper level of software, and it goes all the way down.

2:28:23Donald Hoffman:But at the bottom, he puts a physical world. There's some physical place, and I'm saying there is no physical bottom to this whole thing. So that's one difference. There is no physical bottom, so that's one difference between what I'm saying and what Bostrom says. And there's another thing I'm saying that's different. Bostrom is saying that somehow you could program a computer to create the conscious experience. If you believe that there's conscious experience, then it has to be. So I won't say what Bostrom believes. I will say this. If you are doing this computer simulation thing and you believe that there's consciousness, then you're going to be forced to say that somehow a computer program done right will give you consciousness.

2:29:05Donald Hoffman:And I deny that. I think that that's in principle not possible. there is no way to start with algorithms and get consciousness integrated information theory all these other approaches have not been able to give us a single concrete example of a specific conscious experience and i predict they never will they'll never get close i would predict that too because we're not working with the tools of whatever you know elements created us and so it's it's interesting you know when when simulation theory gets talked about i feel there are two connotations there's the grand theft auto nihilistic connotation of like right you know or conclusion rather where it's like uh anything goes we're in a simulator we're in a video game uh and then the second thing is more aspirational which is like there are realities and windows above us and so another question i would ask is uh you're talking about between species you know some theoretical alien species and us, and then down the food chain to lower level animals as far as our perceptive apparatuses, you know, being going from, you know, somewhat limited to very unlimited.

2:30:18Within a single lifetime, do you think a human can widen their perceptive apparatus in a way where they see more?

2:30:28Donald Hoffman:I do. And this sort of gets spiritual now. I think that that's partly what's going on here and what it's about. So I think, I mean, I don't know what consciousness is up to, but I can guess. I mean, I'm a scientist, but I can throw out hypotheses. One thing I think is consciousness trying to understand itself by taking an infinite number of perspectives. And getting lost in the perspective, in some sense, to really take a perspective means to lose yourself in it. So to really believe that I am this body, and to really be tied to it and be afraid of its death, and so forth. And then to slowly wake up.

2:31:09Donald Hoffman:And now to the aspirational part, as I wake up and as I get to the point where I get better and better technologies. And I realized that I can use this power, but I'm also waking up to who I am. So this is the aspirational part where consciousness lost itself in the game, identified with an avatar. It's getting a better, better understanding of that part of the matrix. It's getting more power. And now it comes to the point where it's going to choose how it's going to use that power. Do I want to use it to hurt people, to dominate them? Or am I going to use it in some other way? To the extent that consciousness wakes up to, oh, wait a minute, that's just me.

2:32:03Donald Hoffman:That person there is me in a different avatar. See, it's all one consciousness through an infinite number of windows and an infinite number of policies and an infinite number of meta-policies. It gets lost, thinks it's just the avatar, but as it gets more power and it wakes up to its identity as the one consciousness that transcends this whole set of games, then you realize that now that I've got this new weapon or I've got this gun, I would be a fool to shoot that person because it's like shooting myself in the foot. Why would I take a weapon and shoot myself in the foot? Because that person is not my enemy.

2:32:42Donald Hoffman:That person is me. And so that's the aspirational part of this. And it leads to a whole interesting, you know, religious kind of thing, moral kind of thing. What are we here for? And what do we learn in the process? How do you logically conclude that other people around you are also yourself? Well, so there is a leap there. So the leap is to say that I do think that if you look at the trace logic, it's saying that as you go up and up, all these windows are connected, right? As Leibniz says, there's a pre-established harmony, and there's a unifying structure that ties the whole thing into one. and so but as i said earlier this is just a mathematical theory it's a scientific theory and no theory is ever the final theory what it points to though what this theory points to is a fundamental unity of consciousness despite all this beautiful structure it's there's a fundamental unity so i have the the feeling that there is this one deep consciousness that we all are each of us is, but just seeing through a particular avatar, through a particular window, policy, meta-policy, and so forth, and waking up to the fact that, oh, Jesse is just on.

2:34:08Donald Hoffman:And we're having this conversation, but the way I treat Jesse is exactly the way I'm treating myself. And if I don't want to shoot myself in the foot, I wouldn't want to shoot Jesse on the foot either because that's me. And so that's the aspirational part. It's interesting because evolution in physicalist framework doesn't tell me that you and I are one. It tells me that we're competitors and I need to beat you to get whatever resources I need. But this theory of the observers says a very, very different story. It says, no, that evolutionary story works inside the headset. If you stick inside the headset, it's a good theory.

2:34:48Donald Hoffman:It works. That's fascinating. And your father was a priest, is that right? No, he was a fundamentalist Christian Protestant minister, right? So this has to dawn on you. You've gone through your own arc like this, where you started religious, then you got into this sort of dog-eat-dog Darwinian model, which it's actually adaptive for us not to see reality because of evolutionary game theory. And then you figured out this sort of matrix model, which if you go all the way up the chain of consciousness, you end up with this unified field of consciousness. So you moved from God, and then you moved away from God, and then you moved back to God.

2:35:30Donald Hoffman:Right. And part of the journey for me was what I loved about science was the mathematical rigor. Precise theories with precise assumptions and mathematical precision and testing. You knew the theories were consistent. They may not be true, but they're consistent. But it was physicalist. And that didn't, I mean, ultimately it felt like there was something missing in the physical, and it turns out there is. We can't get a theory of the observer yet in a physicalist framework. We just can't. And we can't get a theory of conscious experience. And we can't get a theory of the illusion of conscious experience.

2:36:13Donald Hoffman:There's nothing that gives us any specific illusion of a conscious experience. So, the plus of science was rigor, no-nonsense, consistency. The downside was the physicalism assumption. It seemed to be too restrictive. On the religious side, the downside was complete lack of rigor and no consistency and no tests, no empirical tests. And as a result, a lot of the stuff you hear, a lot of stuff I heard, is just utter nonsense. That was the downside. The upside was the idea that consciousness is fundamental and somehow love and unity is, I mean, like with a lot of the religions, the fundamental thing is love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself.

2:37:09Donald Hoffman:If you stick to that fundamental idea in the religions and cut away everything else, I'm on board. That seems really right. Most of the other stuff is all this inconsistent nonsense and all the snake oil and so forth. So you can see the problem that you've got as a human being in this kind of situation. There's snake oil and so forth, and yet the fundamental thing is love your neighbor as yourself. Science has got the rigor, they got the mathematics, that seems really good, but there's no reason to love your neighbor as yourself in the sense that, I mean, it's dog-eat-dog, Darwinian kind of thing.

2:37:44Donald Hoffman:I love my neighbor myself as long as convenient for me and so forth, but there's no deep sense in which I'm one with my neighbor. And so, for me, the synthesis is to take the rigor of science, the mathematical precision, and the absolute insistence on data, careful observations, and to take from the the spiritual traditions, get rid of all the nonsense, get rid of all the hand wave and dogma, and keep the essence, which is there is a fundamental unity. Love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yours. Take that from the spiritual tradition. Bring those two things together. And then I think we have a new thing going forward that could really be the aspirational science meets spirituality that you were talking about.

2:38:35Donald Hoffman:Do you believe in God? I believe that I would say this, as best as words can do it, so I'll say this, I think to answer the question, I have to be very, very careful. Words are just words. As I said, science starts with assumptions, there is no scientific theory of everything. And so, whatever Whatever reality is infinitely transcends what science could do. And yet I'm a scientist. I think science is a fantastic tool. I want to use it. But reality, whatever it is, infinitely, not just a little bit, infinitely transcends anything that we could come up with in science. But to answer your question, so I'm not dodging your question.

2:39:29Donald Hoffman:I'm going to get to your question, but it's so deep that I have to say a couple of things. there are most of the stuff that we know we don't know through science or through study the color green at some point in your life when you were two someone said Jesse that's green and you looked and you go oh okay that's green someone pointed to a rabbit and said that's a rabbit and you got it and if you think about what went on there It's a miracle, right? Your mom sitting with you and points and says, rabbit, and you look once or twice and you get it. There were a thousand, a million hypotheses that you could have, maybe it was the ear and the rug.

2:40:17Donald Hoffman:Maybe it was the color of the fur. Maybe it was the left eye. Maybe it was the left paw and the cup over there. What could you possibly mean by rabbit? And yet at the right age, someone points, says rabbit, just once or twice is all you need typically, and you get it. This is called learning by ostensive definition. And almost everything you know is not because of a scientific theory. It's because of ostensive definition. Everything of everyday life that you know, colors, shapes, someone pointed and said, and you got it. That's ostensive definition. So now, what do I mean by God? that's because God's just a word, right?

2:41:01Donald Hoffman:So I'm getting, so I wanna escape from the trap of using words and getting trapped and just, so I'm going to use a extensive definition. Here's what I think God is. I'm gonna say, what I'd like you to do is ask yourself the question, I wonder what my next thought will be, and then just wait.

2:41:30Donald Hoffman:what happened? Thought about God. But it was sort of silent for a little bit. Did you have a point there when I said, I wonder what my next thought will be, and then you just were waiting for a minute to see what your first thought will be. Was there a little gap there? There was a gap there, and I was waiting for what my next thought would be, which is I'm assuming what you generally are pointing to. That's right, I'm pointing to that. But my thinking is also very weird, and I don't think in words. So it wasn't like I wasn't saying that in my head. I was just sort of waiting. You were waiting.

2:42:04Donald Hoffman:And that's not about God. So that's the best pointer I can give for what I mean by God, is that awareness that you can have. And you can do this anytime you want to, actually, is to just say, I'll just not think for a while. And just be aware without thought. That awareness is what I think is God. and I believe in that and it cannot be described. Yeah, and you almost, you got me thinking about this when you said, you know, how did I learn about the color green and probably all sorts of concepts that I take for granted in everyday life and it's almost like we have meme libraries in our head and we attribute, like what we see is an interplay between what's adaptive for us to see, as you describe so well in your book.

2:42:57But there's also some super imposition of what we have in our heads, some like Bayesian priors of like what we think the concept is that we're like imposing on reality at all times. And so when you say God is the suspension of thought, I think it's almost impossible. like in waking life everything has that all these connotations that i've placed on all these things there's nothing like going to like an entirely new context like going on a trip and like you're in some vast new landscape and you can't attach any of that sort of baggage to like all the concepts

2:43:37Donald Hoffman:that you're like taking in right so that's a very good point and i would just say that but i'm trying to point to them with that little thing I did, you know, I wonder what my next thought will be. What I'm pointing to is just the raw awareness in which all these things arise, the colors, the sounds, the emotions, the thoughts, that raw, that raw awareness that doesn't require any of these things. That is what I'm trying to point to. But I'm still, I'm looking at your shirt and I'm looking at the chair and there are All these things that I have superimposed ideas about that might not be at the forefront of my mind in my sort of waking consciousness reality.

2:44:20But it's impossible for me to strip my preconceptions about those things while I'm processing them.

2:44:27Donald Hoffman:Whereas someone like the Dalai Lama might be able to. Someone who has been spending years in meditation would be able to say, yes, I can just be the presence, the awareness, and no content. And that's what I mean by God, is that awareness without any content. I think it's accessible to all of us, but it's something that requires practice to let go. So why do you think there's a bliss in that? Does that speak to this sort of, again, meta level, like not the Darwinian, but the meta level, if you have all these matrices, the adaptiveness of seeing more? Does the fact that meditation, you end up in these sort of city states or whatever, you know, different traditions call it different things, but you end up in these states of joy.

2:45:24Right. Just about reality itself. Is there something adaptive about that?

2:45:29Donald Hoffman:I don't know if I would put it in the evolutionary adaptive kind of context, because I think it transcends that. In some sense, evolutionarily, it's not adaptive to not be thinking about stuff and planning and watching out for things that could kill you. But it is if consciousness is best not embodied, and then if your consciousness persists past life, and if you're going to dissolve or self-nullify into this greater harmonic consciousness, which is not at all a prescription or something I would propose, but on some theoretical level. Yes, I think—and by the way, now I'm speaking beyond my spiritual attainment.

2:46:10Donald Hoffman:Me too. So just with that proviso, I'm no saint, but I would say that the point of going into silence and letting go of all thoughts, and the reason it leads to bliss, that is the fundamental nature of reality. None of this really does matter, in a sense. This is just a headset, and you put it on, you let yourself get lost in the game for a while. You let yourself get upset for a while, and then you woke up and go, oh, you take the headset off. Okay, so I learned something about myself from that perspective. Now let me try on this other headset. But you were never in any danger. You'd let yourself feel like you were in danger.

2:47:06Donald Hoffman:But the bliss is there is in some sense only you, the one, and there is no danger. There's only the love, the unity. But it's in the headset that you get all these emotions and you let yourself have them. That's part of experiencing all the possibilities. You let yourself experience that and then you transcend it. And again, I'm speaking way over my pay grade, but yeah. How do we triangulate or figure out what true reality actually is? So I'll take at face value your theory that, you know, the reason I see your face, I see your shirt and it looks a certain way to me is because of that's somehow adaptive from some evolutionary game theory perspective.

2:47:59But what about like, what do you actually look like? What is the chair you're sitting on actually look like? What is this table actually in some platonic higher sense, or in your case, this higher context window matrix? Is there some way to get at that with your theory?

2:48:16Donald Hoffman:Oh, I think that all these things that you're talking about only exist as icons in the headset. They have no deeper reality than that. But it is still some unique binary code sequence, ultimately. or maybe not a completely unique. Well, yeah, go for it. So, yeah. So I would, so I'll put it this way because it's very stark. Right now I have no neurons. I have no brain. If you looked, you would see a brain. And I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I like neuroscience. But I think that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. And this table does not exist when it's not perceived. There is nothing more to the table than the raw perceptions I'm having right now.

2:49:08Donald Hoffman:There is literally nothing more to it than that. Really? Because there are people who are sort of solipsistic, holographic universe types, and then there's the neutral monists, where there's some interplay between consciousness, and there is, but there is something objective. and then there's like the materialist reductionist you know this is all very separate mind matter are very separate and so what you're saying it sounds like you're more in the like it's all it's all like a product of your perception and exactly this isn't real well it's it's a real experience and and it's it the experience is there only for for so long as i choose to look and make that experience and as soon as i go away my table is gone jesse may still see this table but but But it's your table.

2:49:57Donald Hoffman:It's not mine because that's your experience. There's no such thing as the table. There's only your experience and my experience. We coordinate such that we think that there is the table. But what if the monad were perceiving the table? Wouldn't it see something discreet? It might be more complex than what we see because it's like way more evolved than us. but well but i would say you are the ultimate consciousness through a jesse avatar talking with the hoffman avatar and through the jesse avatar you're creating a table through the hoffman avatar the same you is creating a table my my table is now gone whereas your avatar's table is still there where do you get that the idea that we are sort of fractal almost pinched nodes of a larger reality.

2:50:43Donald Hoffman:The recursive trace logic itself. That is the mathematical. So when Leibniz was saying that he wanted a theory of observers being fundamental with a pre-established harmony, what I'm proposing is that this recursive trace logic is that pre-established harmony, and it shows how you can talk about separate monads, separate observers, and yet the pre-established harmony shows that they're all one so there is it's like um almost like a stylus on an lp player or something like we're uh the measurement instrument right right right of something that is uh fundamentally there but there's uh it's i'm seeing this unique perception based on my own measurement instruments of my body and and what's adaptive for me we're seeing that as well the monad would see something different but there's no objective it's always going to be unique the only objective thing is you you the awareness staring through a Jesse avatar and staring through that's the only thing that is the objective reality all this other stuff literally comes and goes this is very much like again a VR headset when I'm playing Grand Theft Auto I look over there and I see a red Ferrari and you also are playing with your Grand Theft Auto.

2:52:04Donald Hoffman:And I say, Jesse, look at that red Ferrari. And you say, oh yeah, I see it. And then I look away, my red Ferrari is literally gone. There's no red Ferrari anywhere for me. And you might still see it. So Jesse has his own red Ferrari and there's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer that's running this thing. There's just bits running on the computer in this example. So my red Ferrari is gone completely. And if I go back, I'll render a red Ferrari and then I've got one. So I'm really saying I render a table when I look and it doesn't exist because I'm not rendering it. So I'm rendering. And that is actually impressive to think about.

2:52:39Donald Hoffman:This is a really complicated world. And I render it effortlessly. I just look and it happens. That's how good you are. That's fascinating. So it's almost like conscious agents or perceivers are the fundamental units of the real ultimate reality. It's kind of empowering in some sense. It is. I would just make one provisional, and that is I think there is only the one awareness. Sure. But all these conscious agents that I talk about are a scientific tool to talk about it. But I would want to say the awareness transcends my theory. It transcends any theory. But given that, then I agree with you. I just want to always make sure that we're humble about our scientific theories.

2:53:24I could say we're windows and the sunlight peering through the windows is what's ultimately, you know, binding all of us or something. And so we're like pinched nodes on a circuit or something and we have unique signatures of what we see. That's all of the same thing.

2:53:41Donald Hoffman:I agree with those metaphors. It's really the one looking at itself through different pinches or different windows or it's almost like one light shining through different films. It's like a movie projector. And there's one light, but you can block the light. So, Jesse has a way of blocking that light. Hoffman's a way of blocking that light in different ways. These are all metaphors. Yeah. I mean, the analogies will always fall short. We can try. Do you believe in UFOs? Do you think they comport with your theory in any way? We're at an unprecedented time in UFO history where the president is actively contemplating releasing documents, which they clearly have on these unidentified flying objects.

2:54:30Donald Hoffman:Well, I'll say I hadn't even really given them any serious thought until there was the sworn testimony before Congress where credible, high-ranking military and other officials said, I have seen non-human biologics and non-human technology. and um at that point i said i have no reason to disbelieve these people and i have no scientific or theoretical reasons to disbelieve them and actually since that time i've then been looking at the possibilities of the trace logic to model some of this stuff and i think it's quite feasible well it sounds like again the embodiment of consciousness if that's the exception to the rule then you're probably going to end up not only with all sorts of disembodied consciousnesses but you could have also just with your theory itself uh if it's adaptive for us to not see base reality we only see between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum a dog whistle is a dog whistle because it eludes you know uh especially older people who are hard of hearing you know so it's like the amount of things that we don't see in reality we don't see electric fields.

2:55:47You ask somebody, do they believe in an electron? They say yes. You say why? Well, it's in our textbooks and they say they can detect it with electron microscopes. So these are just umbelts. These are sort of ways to perceive things. And then you could say the same with UFOs. You have all these signatures being picked up for looking infrared. You have them on radar. You have eyewitnesses. In certain cases, you have all three of those things. and there's nothing really like if you're actually an earnest scientist, you can say, oh, it's impossible or you can like take that in as data. That's very valid and interesting.

2:56:23And it's almost like with your theory, it's Occam's razor. We'd be swimming in life. The sort of dark forest analogy from this three body problem, Chinese science fiction novel would be the base case that we'd be swimming in a lot more life. The 8 million species are just the 8 million species that it's adaptive for our survival to see.

2:56:43Donald Hoffman:I completely agree. I think that there are an infinite number of alien intelligences that just follows from recursive trace logic. It's infinite. So our headset gives us a very, very, very tiny peak at this. And I mentioned earlier, I think our headset is one of the more trivial ones. So I think that we're not near the top of the food chain. We're near the bottom of the food chain, as far as I can tell in terms of the headset and its accessibility. So I think that there's the chance of alien intelligences that are greater than ours is one. And I think that there's an infinite variety of them. And I think that the recursive trace logic gives us a mathematical framework to begin to understand exactly how our space-time headset is built, how it can be hacked, a higher headset.

2:57:45Donald Hoffman:Now that we have the mathematics, even though we're stuck in a 3D headset, we're not stuck conceptually. We can, with mathematics, design. We can actually show how the recursive trace logic can build our three-space, one-time dimension headset. We can then build higher and higher dimensional ones. And we can ask how someone who had those headsets could play with our headset. We're in the position to actually understand how higher intelligences could play with us. And we could then try to, if we wanted to, to try to see if there were ways to counter it if we wanted to. But I think that we're now in a position.

2:58:21Donald Hoffman:Now, if you're a physicalist and you say space-time is fundamental and nothing can go faster than the speed of light, period. That's the game. That's the name. Then you don't have the tools, I don't think, to deal with the UAP phenomena. But I think you've mistaken some limitations of a little headset for a fundamental nature of reality problem or a limitation. So I think the limitations of our headset are just limitations of our headset. And there are other headsets that include ours as a little special case that do not have the space-time limitations that we have, that don't care about our speed of light.

2:58:59Donald Hoffman:Their clocks are going at different rates than ours could ever go, for example. And that's not even thinking big enough. There's all sorts of ways in which they could exceed our headset. So we have the mathematical tools to...

2:59:30Do you think we're on the verge of a scientific revolution?

2:59:37Donald Hoffman:I'll say this. If we can, I mentioned those, we have nine conjectures. about building special and general relativity, quantum field theory, and so forth. If we prove those conjectures are true, then I think it's the game changer. So we should know within a few years. If we prove that all those conjectures are true, then there's no reason to be stuck inside space-time anymore. Our science can go beyond it. And as soon as we do that and then start to get new technologies, it'll be over for the physicalist, the space-time. framework. Yeah, I'm very excited for that. And I think you put it well, that it feels like science is moving inwards.

3:00:22So to the observer, to the observer and Newton, the observers not taken into account with things like time dilation and different inertial reference frames, all sorts of things. General relativity does take the observer into account, but not fully. And then it's impossible to ignore, but they've attempted to ignore it in quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics, And it's interesting that there's a confluence of these sort of scientific paradigms where you can't ignore the observer. And, you know, there's an Austrian philosopher I like named Rudolf Steiner, and he's, you know, it's called anthroposophy.

3:01:00And it's the scientific study of spiritual phenomena. And so I wonder with a more observer-based science where you can't separate the observer from the observed, which classically you would in enlightenment thought, if we start to get a scientific explanation for spiritual phenomena that seem very N of one, mystical phenomena that seem like they'll always exist outside of the realm of science. And that was really Steiner's aspiration. And he was actually, you know, himself, you know, one of the fathers of like organic farming. And, you know, he made real, he wasn't like a total mushy brain thinker.

3:01:44So I wonder if your stuff does get worked out and we are able to predict more than just length contraction, time dilation, and Schrodinger's equation, which is remarkable that you can just do that. If you get all nine of these things, then I wonder if you can explain a lot of spiritual phenomena. We could re-merge the science and the spirit, which have really been bifurcated since the Enlightenment.

3:02:13Donald Hoffman:Well, I agree with you, and I think that what would come out of this would be the realization that what we thought was the physical world is just experiences that are spiritual. We have thought of the table as something that exists independent of me, that would be there even after I'm dead and so forth. The Hoffman's table that he's seeing right now will not be there, not only when Hoffman's dead, but when he just looks away. That table's gone. So the whole physical framework disappears, and this really, putting the observer first, is really in some sense already moving us into a spiritual kind of framework, but one where we have all the mathematical guardrails of science and all the experimental guardrails of science.

3:03:00Donald Hoffman:It's no longer the Wild West, anything goes, any preacher can say whatever he wants to and rip people off if he wants to and so forth. It's going to be a spirituality with really clean guardrails on it. That'll be fascinating. I do find it so interesting how much your work converges on and comports with ancient traditions like Plato, where you have anamnesis, you know, in sort of Greek traditions, forgetting of your soul self. And then occasionally you'll glimpse that soul self through noesis or in the Hindu tradition, you have Maya. You have, you know, very pervasive are these concepts of this joyous illusion where you're playing out some sort of karmic, you know, path.

3:03:47And you're slowly maybe seeing beyond the veil, but that's this kind of incremental process. But life itself is ultimately sort of illusory.

3:03:56Donald Hoffman:Yeah, and this recursive trace logic sort of says that that's the essential thing, is that each window is just a window. It's a way that the one consciousness is looking through itself. And what I don't understand is why the infinite consciousness chooses to let itself get lost. That's very interesting that it would, from this framework, it chooses to go in with both feet, completely identify with the avatar, be afraid, be afraid of death, be selfish, learn to not be selfish, learn to not be afraid. have death be there as the beckoning, the wake-up call to who you really are, to have the experience of that fear.

3:04:45Donald Hoffman:So all the spiritual stuff. But why consciousness does this? As it clearly does in my case, I can say first person, my experience has been complete identification with the avatar, fear of death, the whole nine yards, a slow waking up, A disbelief? Could I really be that? It's truly a stunning idea to me. I still remember the first time I realized that consciousness might be fundamental, that the science was saying consciousness could be fundamental. I had to sit down. I was so tied to the physicalist framework. I was only maybe 29, 30 years old when the math hit me in the face. I've been working on this and it hit me in the face that that was what it meant.

3:05:36Donald Hoffman:And I just had to sit down. I was so stunned. This also has implications for AI where we're sort of progressively outsourcing our thinking more and more to these sort of, you know, transformers and thinking machines. I think the more that we do that, the less we probably work on our own perceptive apparatus. I mean, studies show that like Gen Z will literally like their decision, their decision making will sort of atrophy and it becomes sort of vestigial because you're literally using this sort of fake pen pal, which isn't always giving you right advice constantly to like make life decisions. You know, it's like which person you should, you know, date.

3:06:18And, you know, it's sort of crazy, you know, you know, there, you know, who you should, you know, what you should write for some paper that, you know, should be your own, should be your own thinking, you know, or, you know, you try to write a book and you do it through this. There are all these things that AI is sort of, you know, we're outsourcing our agency to it. And that seems really bad in your theory, because in your theory, there's something extremely adaptive about going through reality to grow your own perceptive abilities.

3:06:50Donald Hoffman:Well, you raise an interesting point, and I think I've been in AI since 79, so I've been very interested in artificial intelligence. And you're right that AI, as it's being used by many people today, gives them false stuff. It gives them some, of course, not all false. There are useful bits of information that you get and useful direction, but enough false that it can be problematic. the current large language models don't really know anything they compute correlations and in some sense they're dumber than cucumbers but they can read everything and they can do correlations that we can't because they have the computational resources and so they take up tons of energy to do them I think that we will have completely new architectures I actually think the recursive trace logic is an AI architecture.

3:07:49Donald Hoffman:It's a completely different kind than an LLM. It's a complete new architecture. I'll just say one reason why I think it's that. One aspect of intelligence, we're looking at artificial intelligence, one aspect of intelligence is surprise. To the extent that I'm surprised, I'm not intelligent. If every time I try to do something like pick up this cup, the cup breaks, or I try to button my shirt, my shirt rips, or I try to wash the dishes and kill myself or something like that, hurt myself. If every time I do something, I'm surprised at the outcome, well, then I'm not very smart. Minimizing surprise is not all of intelligence, but it's certainly a big part of intelligence.

3:08:32Donald Hoffman:And the trace logic is the logic of zero surprise. So in that sense, the trace logic is the logic of intelligence. And I see going forward that it would be very beneficial to move away from the correlation architectures of large language models to the trace logic architecture. Have you worked with, I don't know, Demis Hassabis or like any of these sort of like super Ilya Tsutsakever, I always don't know how to pronounce his last name, but some of these like really frontier AI researchers who are trying to look beyond transformer technology? I won't mention the names. I've talked with some people who are interested in the possibility of using the TraceLogic for this kind of thing.

3:09:19Donald Hoffman:But that stuff, I shouldn't go into anybody. I can only put my name on the table and I can just say, this is what I see going forward. I know that there are other companies out there that are trying to minimize free energy as a way of approximating minimizing surprise. And they're trying to build AIs based on minimizing free energy. but the trace logic you don't have to minimize anything the trace logic is logic not only of minimum surprise zero surprise that's fascinating you can't do better it's very ambitious yeah so in that i think the ai going forward i just don't know how you because i think of the carl fristen free energy stuff right and like if you're minimizing entropy you know if you get so you It's like this Pavlovian conditioning thing with your neurons and you try to go for as low entropy as possible or whatever.

3:10:15But the thing you're interfacing with as a conscious agent is just this infinitely complex world. I feel like you'd have to model the infinitely complex world in your trace logic system, and that feels impossible or Sisyphean to me.

3:10:33Donald Hoffman:Well, you'd have to build, just like we have to do with large language models, you have to put in tons and tons of data, use tons and tons of energy, and so forth. And you can never get to the top. So you'll always, right, the trace logic has no top. So all you could do is program up a subset of the trace logic. But it'd be a different data architecture. Completely different architecture and search process. It wouldn't just be like tokens and vector space connected with one another. it would be these sort of what might happen in these different little rule sets. That's right. And if you think about this as the different Markov matrices are different ways of looking at things, you can ask, what should I talk about in terms of the beliefs that I get?

3:11:21Donald Hoffman:So, if I'm looking, but what beliefs do I have? And the beliefs would be the stationary measures of the Markov chains, the long-term probabilities. I'm talking ergodic Markov chains, but you can generalize it to non-ergotic as well. But I have a bunch of states, and in some sense, for this observer window, what's the long-term probability that I'll see state one, two, three, four, five? That's a kind of belief system. And it turns out, so they're all probability measures. These beliefs then would be probability measures, which are the stationary measures. And probabilities, of course, are beliefs, so they have a logic.

3:12:02Donald Hoffman:So there is also a logic of probability measures, and I discovered it. It was in 1992. We were looking at Bayesian models of perception. I was working with a team, and they're mathematicians. I said, you know, we're talking about Bayesian belief, probability. So there's clearly a logic here because we have to talk about propositions here. We're using probability measures as propositions. We can take their and, their or, their negation, implication. What is it? So I just said, you guys are the mathematicians. What is it? I'm not a mathematician. And we looked. We had a graduate student look for a few weeks.

3:12:41Donald Hoffman:He told us what they had, and it was obviously trivial. And we couldn't believe it. The professor of mathematics there, Bruce Bennett, couldn't believe it. He's a genius mathematician. So we sat down and we did it. We wrote a paper, it came out in 92 or 93. We called it the Lebesgue logic of probability measures. So just like there's a trace logic on Markov chains, there is a logic on the set of all probability measures. It's called the Lebesgue logic. It's not very well known, actually. But it gives you the notion of conjunction, disjunction, negation. It's a non-Bullian logic. It has Boolean sublogics.

3:13:21Donald Hoffman:And we found out just in the last couple years that the map that takes a Markov matrix to its stationary measure is a homomorphism from the trace logic to the Lebeg logic. so there is a beautiful intermeshing of observation and belief they're homomorphic so the the trace theory the trace logic on markov chains and the lebeg logic on probability measures mesh perfectly and they give you a theory of observation and belief that meshes perfectly If you take, though, for granted the idea that your perception of reality is changing reality itself with like, you know, delayed choice experiment and double slit experiment, things like that.

3:14:14Then and then we obviously don't have some understanding of what eigenstate gets picked in Schrodinger's equation. How would you in this trace logic system be able to know exactly what state gets picked? And then does free will exist? Because if I'm choosing to make a measurement to begin with, that's a choice I made. I don't see how you could sort of deterministically predict that.

3:14:43Donald Hoffman:Well, it's funny that you mention this because just yesterday I spent an hour with my collaborator Chaitan Prakash, who's a mathematician, on exactly how we're going to try to get quantum contextuality out of the trace logic. And we think we'll be able to do it with these policies. So we think that we'll be able to get the right kind of contextuality, the quantum contextuality, by the right choice of policies on the trace logic itself. So, in other words, this is taking these things out of hand wave into, we know that there is either a theorem in our favor or a theorem against us. And it's just a matter of us writing down the theorem.

3:15:22Donald Hoffman:The trace logic mathematics is absolutely clean. We have no wiggle room. We can either do it or we can't. It's just a matter of doing the theorem and the proof. And I think we'll get contextuality and we'll get that thing from, but that's what I love about this theory. There's literally, you can see, I have no wiggle room. There is, once I have Markov chains and I notice that there is this logic on them, I can't fool with the logic. That logic is what it is. I can then build a metalogic. I can do the policies on it. That's all the freedom I've got. Then it has its own. There's no, so this thing either works.

3:15:56Donald Hoffman:Yeah. I can build it. There's no tweaking. Yeah, go big or go home. That's right. So that's. Predict general relativity and quantum field theory or it's going to break. And so, yes, I can't play with it. And it's also in a vein that I think is really interesting. There are a lot of people who are trying to think about trying to build up space-time in an everything, everywhere, all at once kind of framework. Instead of having the state at time zero and then some kind of differential equation evolving, there are more like Emily Adlam at Chapman University, who was a brilliant philosopher of physics, absolutely brilliant philosopher of physics.

3:16:44Donald Hoffman:I've learned a lot from reading her work on quantum theory. She's talking about how she's also thinking about the notion of getting constraints that are global constraints. They're not time evolution constraints. She calls it more like Sudoku, where it's not like you move from left to right, she would say, in trying to solve the puzzle. You can do any direction you want to. There's a global constraint on what is a correct solution. and that's the interesting thing about the trace logic it is more the sudoku kind of thing once you have a big matrix all the traces are pre-established they're set it's a it's a and it's all even the matrix itself is not a time evolution from here to here it's it's a global statement of all the probabilistic relationships among these states so ultimately this matrix that you're trying to create is literally a matrix to our reality.

3:17:41That's right. It's literally...

3:17:42Donald Hoffman:In the metaphorical sense, too. Yeah, it's a compression of reality itself. That's right. Yeah. And it happens to use Markov matrices as well. That's fascinating. It is. It's really quite fun. There's a whole other level... Was Markov interested in doing... Was this an aspiration of his at all? I think he did this in the early 1900s. And the story I've heard is that he did it because he was irritated with some other mathematician or statistician that was claiming something that he thought was wrong. And so he just wanted to get a proof that this guy was wrong. And he came up with the theory of Markov chains to prove this guy that he was wrong.

3:18:22Donald Hoffman:But I don't know that he then pursued it. That's a petty motivation for what might become our new theory of everything. I wouldn't put it on him. I might put it on my lack of understanding of the full situation. Right, right. Yeah. So I'm not going to put that on him. But it's also how these things would happen. You know, it's like, it's funny kind of happenstance accidents like that is how science often progresses. So Markov chains were then picked up to help us understand nuclear reactions when they realized that it really became a thing when we started to realize that it could explain how a nuclear reaction happens.

3:18:55Donald Hoffman:All these conditional probabilities, Markov chains are conditioned. You know, what will happen conditioned on your current state? Well, that I feel like makes it bode well for predicting stuff in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. If it's useful in the context of nuclear chain reactions, it's probably... Well, it's computationally universal. Yeah. One objection that people would have against Markov chains is to say, look, they're special because you have only a finite memory. You can only have a finite memory in it. And I would say I agree it's a finite memory. but they're computationally universal in the same sense that a Turing machine is computationally universal.

3:19:40Donald Hoffman:A Turing machine has as much tape as you need but it's always fine at the amount of symbols that you're writing down but you have as much tape as you need and it's the same thing with Markov chains. You effectively have as much tape as you need and so the fact that the next state depends on the current state is not a problem because I can make the current state as complex as I want. That's effectively making the tape has as many symbols on it as I want. So there's effectively no practical limitation to the Markov framework at all. So when someone says, oh, but it's only conditional on the current state, easy to fix.

3:20:17Donald Hoffman:Easy to show that you can just make the state as big as you want. So it seems to be a universal and powerful framework. But again, I should then, now it's humble pie time again. To say every scientific theory starts with assumptions, including my theory. And so it's infinitely far from the truth. Right. Well, it's fascinating nonetheless. Are you familiar with Jonathan Girard by any chance? And he's doing some stuff with Wolfram. Wolfram, right, right. Yeah, he's, yeah, right. Yeah, they're fascinating too. He's, I brought this up in the past and I've just found it to be very interesting at high level.

3:20:57I don't understand half of his stuff, but he'll say, you know, that like Leibniz, and Newton, we had kind of a vector calculus understanding of reality and, you know, with the Wolfram stuff and kind of with your stuff, it feels like this too, we'll move to a computational understanding of the, of the universe. And it does feel like if we're just these perceptive nodes, you know, and then there's maybe some, some high, infinitely more complex, you know, states of perception, that feels more computational than it does like we have 3D space and then we have fourth dimensional time and we're just kind of inexorably moving forward and we cannot observe things within that scope.

3:21:40Donald Hoffman:Right. So I think I have done a podcast with Wolfram. So we've talked together with each other and his stuff is, of course, computationally universal. The Markov approach is computationally universal. So it's, yeah, you can talk about it as computation. It's a matter of the way that you're, the concepts that you're putting forward and the structures that you're exploiting. So I'm exploiting this zero surprise structure of Markov chains and therefore of computations. There's this zero surprise structure that no one has ever seen before. And that, I think, is going to be really critical going forward for intelligence.

3:22:25Donald Hoffman:Actually, I'm working right now on understanding what it means for algorithms, because I think, as I mentioned, it has something to do with computational complexity, and it's going to be really interesting to see that. So there will be some kind of translation, ultimately, between Wolfram's language and what I'm doing, because they're all computational universal. The question is just which language is useful for what kinds of problems that we want to solve. And I think both, I mean, I think that they're doing brilliant work and Jonathan Gerard is doing brilliant work as well. Well, I think I speak for everybody in saying that I am so excited to see what you find over the next few years.

3:23:03And you're not for lacking in ambition. I think you're really, you know, it's kind of go big or go home. You are going for it. It's super cool. And it's a very kind of polymathic theory as well. It takes, you know, kind of evolutionary biology and then you're taking computational principles, you're taking physics. And, you know, I love that you're able to entertain, you know, an exploration of UFOs and alien life with me. And this has been fascinating and I hope we can do it again.

3:23:32Donald Hoffman:Thank you very much. Great pleasure, Jesse. Thank you, Don.

3:23:38Alchemist, did you enjoy that? Well, here's the thing. That episode was just the tip of the iceberg. If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video.

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