Is Reality Really Real? With Donald Hoffman

20:20Donald Hoffman:Right, so I myself have not taken any psychedelics, but I'm collaborating with people who have and who are doing search into this. And most of the time, I would say the best hypothesis is they're just screwing things up, right? The psychedelics are just sort of addling your brain. But there are cases where I think it's worth scientific research to try to figure out if something deeper is going on, perhaps in the case of DMT, for example. But I should say that what I just said about evolution gives me a different view on neuroscience than you would normally hear from a neuroscientist. So I'm a neuroscientist.

21:01Donald Hoffman:I love to study the brain. And I think that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. Oh, that's more quantum, isn't it? Oh, look at that. Yeah, you went total string theory on us. No, he went total quantum. Neuro quantum string theory. He went off the quantum ledge on that. He did. That's right. So the idea is that if it's a VR headset kind of thing, what you see is what you render on the fly. So if you're in like a game like Grand Theft Auto and you see a red Corvette off to your right, well, there is no red Corvette in reality because the supercomputer has no red Corvette in it. So the red Corvette that I'm seeing is there when I look and render it.

21:38Donald Hoffman:And when I look the other direction, it's gone. So the Corvette only exists as I perceive it. Now, if I'm multiplayer game and someone else is looking at a red Corvette, when I'm not, they're seeing their red Corvette. They're not seeing the one that I saw. They're not seeing yours. You just described the game of adult peekaboo. That's funny.

22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:Explain to me, because I've never played Grand Theft Auto. Right. Does it render only the direction you're looking in to save CPU? That's right. That's the typical games. So it knows which way you're looking. Right. Okay. Because it doesn't make sense if you're not looking at it for it to be rendering, because you can't see it anyway. This has been the major argument in simulation theory where why would the programmer waste computer power simulating things that no one is conscious of? That makes sense. Just make it exist when you get there. So, for example, if you dig into the earth, it only has to make the layers of the earth when you get there.

22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:That you're digging right, too. It's way cheaper, way more accessible to the programmer than creating everything there all at once. That's my theory on the speed of light, if there's a simulation. The reason why you can't go faster than the speed of light is because that is the speed at which they need to create the simulation so that it can be there when you see it. Okay, so I had a theory. That's your hypothesis. Oh, sorry. You're absolutely right. Yeah. That's my idea. All right. That's a thought. That's my thought. All right. So you've both tapped into simulation theory. Don, is that what's in practice here?

23:21I mean, are the realities layered and one within another?

23:27Donald Hoffman:Simulation theory, as is typically put out, like Nick Bostrom and others who are, Elon Musk who are interested in it. So I'll say at top level, yes, it's very, very similar. But I'll make two important distinctions between Bostrom's point of view and what I'm saying. One point is that Bostrom says, you know, we're probably a simulation and there's some geek with a computer at a different level that's programming us and making us up. But that geek is actually simulated by someone at an even lower level. And you can go down many, many levels until you get to the bottom level. And the bottom level, he assumes, is a physical space-time level.

24:02Donald Hoffman:A real thing. And that's where I get off the train because I say there's no reason on evolutionary grounds to believe that space-time is fundamental. In fact, we have good reason to believe on high-energy theoretical physics grounds that space-time is doomed. As many high-energy theoretical physicists say, space-time is doomed, and they're looking for new structures beyond space-time. So I don't want to buy that the bottom level is a space-time level. And the second part of the standard stimulation theory that I don't buy is that the idea is that you can simulate consciousness, conscious experiences through algorithms on computers.

24:42Donald Hoffman:And I'm good friends and colleagues with most of the players who are trying to do this. And it's a remarkable thing. I mean, these are brilliant, brilliant scientists. and but the hard fact is that to date there's not a single specific conscious experience that any scientific theory has ever been able to show we could program up for example there's no theory about how we get the taste of chocolate the smell of garlic nothing so we are batting exactly zero right now in terms of any theory that won't explain a specific conscious experience So I think it's principled, a principled failure. These people are brilliant.

25:22Donald Hoffman:Many of them are geniuses. They're good friends of mine. If we could do it, I think we would have done it. And we haven't been able to do it. Well, I mean, it's very possible that we don't have the computing power to do it.

25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, wait, wait. Wait, okay, so all you just said, if I may summarize, is that we don't understand consciousness yet as we think it exists. So I don't believe you're saying anything deeper than that. It's just a frontier, a neuroscience physics frontier. So what point are you making other than saying we don't understand it yet? I can say we don't know happened before the Big Bang. That's a frontier. I'm not trying to say anything deeper than that. If we don't understand it, we don't understand it. We have top people working on it. So where are you trying to take us there?

26:09Donald Hoffman:So where I'm taking us is that for the last 30 or 40 years, there's been concerted effort by many brilliant neuroscientists and computer scientists and a number of theories proposed for for example integrated information theory penrose and hammer offs quantum collapse of microtubules theories various there's lots of specific mathematically precise theories and when you ask them okay you have a theory of of observation conscious experiences what specific conscious experience can you explain and the answer is zero. And this has been after -

26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's still a frontier. And what I tell people is, you know, by the way, of course, there's a book published on consciousness three times a year, okay? Like a number, it'll be pretty close. And that is evidence we don't yet understand consciousness. Because if we did, all the publications would stop and we'd be onto some other subject. So the more that's published on something, it's evidence of how little we understand. That's the point I'm trying to make. Makes sense. So, Don, as you know, in biological circles, there's a lot of talk lately about emergence, like the flocking of birds. You know, if you can analyze every cell of a bird and every molecule within it, it doesn't say I flock here.

27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Nothing indicates flocking. Flocking. Yet together, they all sort of know what they're doing. So might consciousness be something emergent within our evolutionary tree? or is it, that is, you need these other base ingredients and then consciousness manifests atop them all? Or do you think it's built into our code?

27:45Donald Hoffman:So most of my colleagues who are scientists who are studying consciousness from a physiological or computational point of view would think that consciousness somehow emerges from either properties of algorithms or properties of neural activity or so forth.

28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:So are chat bots conscious? Has consciousness emerged given they have access to every word we have ever posted on the internet? That's a big slice of anyone's brain, of the summation of many brains. But will you deny them consciousness? Because I don't think Turing would.

28:22Donald Hoffman:Turing would. Most of my colleagues would say that they're conscious. And I would say that the whole question is framed the wrong way. We're starting with something inside of our headset, and we're asking if the headset can generate consciousness. And I think it's the other way around. Consciousness looks at itself through infinitely many different headsets, and space-time is just one of them. And the proof of this will be whether or not one can actually use neural activity or some kind of algorithms to actually give theories, not just claims, but a theory of specific conscious experiences. I like the taste of mint.

29:04Donald Hoffman:Give me an algorithm and a theory that says this must be the taste of mint, a scientific theory that says this must be the taste of mint, and here is why. or, for example, in the case of integrated information theory, a theory of neural activity, and more general than neural activity, a theory about how the right kind of causal structures could be conscious experiences. I would, again, ask them, give me a specific integrated information causal structure that must be the taste of mint. Right now, there is zero on the table. There are no successes.

29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, for humans as well as chatbots. So you can't blame chatbots for that.

29:46Donald Hoffman:Absolutely. So I think my view is consciousness does not emerge from algorithms. It does not emerge from neurons. It does not emerge from anything inside space and time whatsoever. In fact, it's the other way around. Space and time and everything inside them emerges as a trivial headset from consciousness. Okay, so are we looking at mathematics as the key to a solution? are we looking here at consciousness being a quantum, I want to say thing, but that sounds really clumsy and heavy. I mean, why couldn't it be a quantum manifestation? So in which case, when does space-time cease to exist? And at what scale, what level are you saying that that stops to happen?

30:30Donald Hoffman:Well, on the very last question, I can say that it's not me saying it, but actually the high-energy theoretical physicists tell us precisely where it stops. It stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Yeah, it's a Planck scale. That's a Planck scale.

30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. So just to be clear here, space-time, as we think of it as a continuum, as described by Einstein, is very successful in accounting for what we see in the universe. What we find is that on these, I can't even call it granular scale because it's way smaller than that. there's a breakdown and the general relativity does not play nice in the sandbox with the quantum right but most people are betting on the quantum because of how successful yeah they would yeah it has been if i were you i'd bet i'd bet on the stick with the quantum stick with the quantum but before you even go further on that gary don i want to just assess layers of reality not in a in a not in a programmer sense, but there's still the matter of the lion that has teeth.

31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:And I see teeth and those teeth will eat me. And so I cannot embrace your statement that that is some kind of virtual reality that does not correspond with an objective reality. Because I can, as a scientist, this is what we've been doing since Galileo, and especially since the 19th century, we can create a machine that can make a measurement that does not use your neurons. Right. And I can say, I'm looking at a furry thing with a mane and big teeth, and it weighs 800 pounds, and then it walks on a scale. The scale registers 800 pounds. A picture gets taken of it. It's got a mane. It's got big teeth.

32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:And 10 minutes later, I am mauled. So I have a hard time embracing your statement that evolution prevents me from seeing the objective reality of what just happened.

32:40Donald Hoffman:Well, so I'll just say that the evolution says the probability is zero, that any measurement gives you a true picture of reality. But the issue that you raised about observation is really a critical one. I think it's, in fact, the central issue before science today. What's remarkable is that science does not have a theory of observation. And that's one of the biggest open problems in science that's widely recognized. I mean, John Wheeler, in his famous 1989 paper from BIT, was basically saying, we have to reboot our physics with some, what he called observer participants. And Frank Wilczek has said the same thing.

33:22Donald Hoffman:We need to have a theory of the observer. and what's remarkable is now in the quantum measurement problem so where we're trying to figure out how when we make measurements in quantum theory we have the unitary one evolution that's called the unitary evolution when you're not looking and then there's this collapse when you're supposed to be observing and there is no theory yet about that collapse so where science is right now is we don't have a theory of observation and what's stunning about that is if you think about what science is, it's a bunch of people that are looking and talking to each other and saying, this is what I saw.

34:02Donald Hoffman:What did you see? Let's compare notes. Let's try to understand how to understand what our different perspectives and views and observations are. I have to correct that.

34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:They're not saying, this is what I saw. What did you see? They're saying, this is what I measured. What did you measure? And so let me add to your comment that we don't have a theory of observation. That's definitely true. But as a corollary to that, we don't have a full theory of measurement. Right. And they're related. They're related because - Because the wave function collapse is consistent through all those who measure. Correct. But it's, right, except if you're not measuring it, it's not collapsing. Right. So they're related. Yes. Right. So I don't want to, so I'm still trying to take human perception out of this equation because I can build a machine to make the measurement.

34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:Now you're a neuroscientist, so perception is everything, but coming to you as a physicist, I cannot embrace the idea that we are perceiving anything because we work really hard to get our five senses out of the experiment.

35:11Donald Hoffman:When you make a measurement with a physical device, it doesn't get into a scientific theory until some person actually perceives the measurement outcome.

35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:Correct. But we can all then look at that measurement and agree what it says without having to trust someone's testimony for what they observed. Or are you saying that the agreement itself is a shared perception?

35:36Donald Hoffman:Well, we know from Einstein that if we both are looking at, we're both measuring the velocity of an object or the speed or the shape of an object, we're going to get different answers depending on our frame of reference, right? But we actually know how to translate between Neil's frame of reference and Chuck's frame of reference to say, even though they got different answers, we can understand that they somehow agree.

35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:There is no transference into Chuck's frame of reference. Right. He has his own. Absolutely. Let me tell you something right now. It's a mess up in here. Okay, so we've talked about how we as humans can perceive and our frameworks, etc. What if we now find alien beings who have the sensorial capacity to be able to absorb way more data than we possibly could of the reality? Are we then, and I can get carried away now, looking at a fourth, fifth, sixth dimension in which these problems that we've fumbled with are solved? Before you get there, that's an important question that I address in my recently published book.

36:43Uh-oh.

36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Take me to your leader. All right. There's a whole chapter on alien powers that they could have. Okay. And there's even a story. I'm currently reading that, so I haven't got to that. You haven't gotten that to it. There's a story by Voltaire, of all people, written in the mid-18th century, where he imagines, this is one of the earliest total alien fictional stories imagined, where there's an alien 26 miles tall. And, stay with me. He's in the NBA. And I forgot. Very good. The Knicks, he's joining the Knicks next year. They're going to win another championship. I don't know where he got the numbers.

37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:He's just 26 miles away and he has 7 ,000 senses. And he comes upon other life forms and can't fathom how they can be so tiny and have so few senses and still understand or perceive the world. As we would look at a nurse worm. Exactly, exactly. So people have gone there before, but I just want to say that these machines are not only measuring things to replace our senses, they're measuring things that our senses have no access to, like the ultraviolet. Like the ultraviolet. And the infrared. Right. And gravitational perturbations and ionizing radiation. It has nothing to do with our senses, but we have machines that can measure them.

38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so I'm quite proud of the scientific community for building what are now dozens of senses of the world so that when someone comes to your dinner party and says, I have a sixth sense. You can say - Give it to them. Right. And then - What you have is a delusion. No, no. Let them have their sixth sense, but say, I have another dozen. Oh, nice. Yeah, why don't you be impressed with mine? So anyhow, I don't think of things that our senses can't detect as some magical other reality. They're just things that our machines ultimately were able to bring to our awareness. I don't want to speak for Don, but I think he's saying that somehow our perceptions and those machines are tied together.

38:49Donald Hoffman:Yes, in the following sense that we have, I'm claiming that our perceptions of the world are just a particular headset. We have a three-dimensional space, one-dimensional time headset with certain properties. I could imagine other headsets that have four dimensions, five dimensions, 20 dimensions, have senses built into them that we can't, you know, for example, you know, electric sensing in water, things like that. I think sharks can do that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:So your headset. Metaphor. Metaphor, thank you. That's the word I was looking for. He sensed that. He sensed that. So that headset metaphor is quite potent with regard to your aliens who are coming to visit.

39:30Donald Hoffman:It is. And in fact, I'm collaborating with Andrew Gallimore, who is a world expert on DMT and the studies of that. And one thing that we're, I have a mathematical model of how this headset, our headset is built and a theory of observation. And we're using that to try to begin to model how we might understand alien intelligences as having different headsets that are different from ours in ways that we can actually write down mathematics. For example, our headset may be a subset of theirs. They may have higher dimensions than we have.

40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:Love me high dimensional aliens. That'd be the funnest thing ever. Well, believe it or not, I met higher dimensional aliens while I was doing ayahuasca. I'm not even lying, man. By the way, did you know this? I only knew it researching for my book. Go ahead. There's a subset of DMT users that all agree that they're interacting with aliens. And they have formed a subgroup within DMT user, the user group. I did not know that. It's an alien subgroup. And they want to get together, see if they're actually somehow cross-dimensional communicating with aliens. and then you compare notes. I would say that makes perfect sense because in my experience, quite frankly, I had, and maybe I did, because here's the thing.

40:49I felt like the entire time, first of all, you're not high when you do ayahuasca. That's a misnomer. You are not a misconception. You're not like, you know, oh my God, I'm chipping my balls off. It's no, you're, it's like your brain has been subsectioned and you're kind of in touch with all of the different sections of your brain. But the whole time I was telling myself, this is my perception. This is all coming from my brain. And the ayahuasca was like, and what difference does that make? Because it doesn't make any of this any less real. And the more I accepted that, the more expansive the experience became.

41:32and I met beings that told me that quite frankly, the way it works is we're in a really dimension.

41:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:So Don, in your new metaphor, if you can actually mathematically model that, then it becomes more than a metaphor. It becomes a tool to calculate. What confidence do you have that Chuck actually had access beyond his current dimension?

42:00Donald Hoffman:As a scientist, I'm hard-nosed and I'm completely agnostic, but I want to do experiments. And so I'm actually designing experiments with Andrew Gallimard where we would, for example, Andrew has this technology where you can put people under DMT for extended periods of time. So for more than just three or five minutes, you can put them in there for an hour or something like that, or 20 minutes. So you can actually have extended. So what we would like to do is say, are these aliens real? in the sense that we could have one newonaut, one person who's taking DMT, go and give an alien creature in the DMT world some piece of information and then have that transmitted to somebody else, a different person.

42:43Donald Hoffman:Good way to test that. We're coming up with experiments like that. I'm completely hard-nosed. If that can be done, I don't know if I will believe it even then. I would want to do a bunch of experiments, but at least a little.

42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:I feel the same way about out-of-body experiences, where you, if you're in the bed, get someone to write something that's facing upwards, and if you have an out-of-body experience looking down on your body, you should be able to read that statement, and then come back and say, well, what does it say? Or roses are red, or some simple phrase that would be easy to remember and to read. So, yeah, you're doing exactly the right science-minded testing.

43:23Donald Hoffman:And so I'm actually hard-nosed about it and disbelieving until I have hard evidence for it. But at least this headset theory says it's possible. So since it's possible, we should really check it out. But the higher probability is just that your brain got screwed up somehow. Your headset got screwed up. But if DMT is actually changing a parameter in the headset that says you were stuck with the three dimensions of space, but DMT is now taking you to four or five. And it's just a parameter change. And we can actually see more dimensions than we had seen before. I certainly want to know that and find that out.

44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:What in evolution would have allowed that to even be accessible to us?

44:07Donald Hoffman:Well, what's interesting is when you look at, there are high energy theoretical physicists who are studying structures outside of space time now, as you probably well know. They're called positive geometries. And the European Research Council has a 10 million euro initiative. And there are many, many high energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians finding structures outside of space time. And when you look at these structures, they have a one of some of the structures, something called the amplitude heat and has a parameter and which when it's four corresponds to our space time, one dimension of time, three dimensions of space.

44:45Donald Hoffman:But these geometries then say, but we're not stuck with four. You can have 10, a billion, a trillion. So your space time is just n equals four, but our geometries outside of space time aren't stuck at four. We can go anywhere you want. So already we're seeing in high energy theoretical physics a point or two. This may not be the only reality. N equals four. The mathematics allows us to go to N equals whatever you wish. And four, we're sort of, we got the cheap headset. We got the cheap. That's what I was told. And I'm telling you right now, what you just described is something that the tribes who actually do the rituals where I was in Costa Rica.

45:32and they're called sacred geometries. That's what they're called, sacred geometries. And in these sacred geometries, there are representations of dimensions that seemingly are infinite, but like I've described before, are like a deck of cards. They're like a deck of cards that go in all directions, but they're dimensions. Some of them larger, some of them smaller, some of them where the communication happens downward, but we're in a crappy dimension where we can't go upwards or outwards. And so we have to be communicated with from above or beside. Don, why are we in a crappy dimension? It's all your fault.

46:15And listen, I was just like this. I thought the whole time I kept saying to myself, you're high. That's all I kept saying. But the more I talk to people like you, Don, and Brian Green, and Jan Eleven, this stuff that I really didn't have any knowledge of is kind of the basis of the experience. I'm just saying. Okay, so these positive geometrics, are they going to be the solution to what David Chalmers phrased as the hard problem of consciousness?

46:48Donald Hoffman:I don't think so. Okay. And I think that the high-energy theoretical physicists aren't trying to do that. They are trying to understand observation. So that's a big, big problem, open problem in quantum gravity right now, especially the attempts to get quantum gravity that have forced mathematicians and physicists to say, you know what, we never understood the observer, and it looks like that is the obstacle. We need to go back and really understand what an observer is. And that may be the key.

47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, but if you're going to take something we don't understand in the quantum realm, and then you're going to take consciousness, which you don't really understand in the neuroscience realm, staple them together and turn that into an explanation of something that you're going to trust, feels like very unstable ground to be standing on.

47:39Donald Hoffman:Completely. I agree. So I think that we can talk about observers without worrying about consciousness first. We can just ask, can we get a mathematical model of observation? And I think we can. I've got my own model right now that I'm working on, and it's a simple model of observation that doesn't assume consciousness or non-consciousness to be fundamental. It just is a mathematical model of observation. I personally think that consciousness is important and fundamental, but this mathematical model doesn't require that. We've said so many times when we've come together, the three of us, that the problems that we're not able to solve right now, and now I'm a scientist, right?

48:19Exactly, thank you. Requires different thinking. Do you consider yourself now in that realm? And if you are, what different thinking are you looking at we now need to take, the measures that you need to bring forward that are different, that we haven't yet thought of?

48:36Donald Hoffman:Yes, so I think that we have to just think very, very clearly about what does it mean to observe? and we need to get it to its bare essence, no extra bells and whistles. What is the absolute minimum essential for observation? We need to understand that mathematically. And then we have to ask, can we start with that and that alone to build up all of modern physics? So it's a new foundation. We don't start with space-time because we now know that space-time is doomed. That cannot be fundamental. It stops at the Planck scale. So what are the new foundations going to be? I think that Leibniz was right.

49:16Donald Hoffman:Leibniz said, we need to start with observation. He called them monads. And he said there had to be these monads that were somehow interacting and had some kind of mathematical pre-established harmony.

49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:Leibniz was a mathematical philosopher, all credited with co-inventing calculus. And there was some dispute between him and, of course, my boy, Isaac Newton. but their discoveries are completely independent in the sense that they represent the calculus very differently with their symbology. In physics, we use a lot of Newtonian representation but in math, it's all Liebnin's notations. So the integral sign comes from him. You mentioned the OGs of physics there. Are we likely through your research to find that there are slightly different laws of physics in a way that we weren't aware of?

50:09Donald Hoffman:Oh, I think not just slightly. I think that we will find that our headset is one of the more trivial headsets and that other headsets have much more interesting physics.

50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:But I want to set it straight here. The history of physics is not where, the history of physics since Galileo is not where, oh, we all believe this and then later on that's all wrong and we believe something else. That's not how it happens. We only believe something is true if it's been experimentally verified. Then we find out there's a deeper truth. Get right in your belly wick here. There's a deeper truth in which that's embedded, and that's just a special case. Yeah, you don't throw the baby out with the bad one. Not at all. And then there's an even deeper truth. So I don't have any hesitation thinking that my lame-ass 3D candy-ass headset is legit in its world, but it's a subset of a much larger truth.

51:01Donald Hoffman:Exactly. What you're saying is exactly where I'm headed. I want to show that I can start with a theory of observation, precise, mathematical, and get quantum gravity as a special case without hand waves. So theorem and proof, theorem and proof. So I decided to take Leibniz very, very seriously. And let's get a mathematical model of observation that's as simple as possible and see where this pre-established harmony might arise. And the simplest idea that I can think of is forget consciousness. I'm just talking observation, not consciousness, okay? So observation, you have outcomes, so you have a list of possible outcomes, and changes.

51:41Donald Hoffman:I've seen this outcome, and now I'm seeing that outcome, and that's it. I just want to say observation involves outcomes and possible changes of outcomes. And what's the minimum mathematics that we can use to represent that kind of observer? It's a matrix that says, here's a list of all your outcomes, and here's a list of probabilities. If you see outcome one, what's the probability that you'll see outcome two next, or outcome three, outcome four, and so forth? You just write down a matrix of all the outcomes and how they might change. And that's called a Markov chain, a Markov matrix. And what I've discovered is a new logic that unites all Markov chains.

52:19Donald Hoffman:So I'm saying my notion of observer is a Markov matrix, which shows the observation outcomes and how they might change. The set of all possible Markov matrices is the set of all possible observers. That's it. It's an infinite class. And I discovered a logic two years ago that has never been seen before. It's based on something that is well known, that if I have one matrix and I can only see a subset of its states. So I got a big 10 by 10 matrix, for example, but I can only see three states. The big matrix will induce an apparent matrix on the three by three. So it's called the trace. So, for example, if you're at a light and you see red, green, and yellow, and you're seeing them change, and someone else can only see red and green, well, the red and green transitions are determined by the red, green, and yellow transitions, but you can't see the yellow.

53:13Donald Hoffman:So you're going to get a different matrix for the red and green. And that's called the trace. It's a unique thing. If I give you a big matrix and say, you can only see this little window, then there's a unique matrix called the trace. And that's been known for a long time. It's a zero surprise matrix. And what I discovered is the property of being a trace gives you a logic on the set of all markout chains. It's a non-Boolean logic that gives you the pre-established harmony that Leibniz was looking for. And so what we're doing now, I've got a team that's working on the mathematics of this. We want to show that with this trace logic and it's a recursive, if this gets technical, it's recursive trace logic.

53:54Donald Hoffman:We can build agency out of it. But then we can show that the idea is we can then show how to build exactly space time to get quantum theory, space time, and so forth from this. Well, that's quite ambitious. Man, I got to tell you, first of all, I need some weed right now. No, that's number one. You took Chuck to the ledge there. Now you need some weed. Yeah, you took me to the place where I'm just like, damn. But the only thing that really, you know, I'm not going to pretend like I really followed everything you said, except that this larger representation is not necessarily made up, but is affected by the smaller representations that you're able to see.

54:42the same way when you're looking at a light change. On the one side, you see the light change from green to yellow to red, but it's the exact same transaction that's happening to somebody who only sees the light change from red to green, but they are inexorably tied together. Am I following this? They're in the same matrix. They're in the same matrix.

55:03Donald Hoffman:I got you. That's exactly right. And I'll just pick up on that because that will give you just a little clue about how this can get us towards Einstein's theory of relativity. What we do is standard in Markov chain theory to have a counter. Every time your observation changes, you increment a counter, right? So I see red. Okay, that's one. Green. Okay, two. Yellow. Oh, three. So you just keep counting like that. Now, just think about the counter for the guy that can see red, green, and yellow versus the counter of the guy that only sees red and green. The red-green guy, his counter isn't going to go as fast because it doesn't see the red.

55:38Donald Hoffman:Exactly. That, we claim, will lead directly to time dilation in Einstein's relativity. I'm going to tell you something else. You might need some weed.

55:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, Don, where else can you point this trace logic? Is it just— Wait, wait. He just spent 10 minutes talking about The Matrix. We got to go to the movie. Yeah, man, because honestly— Go ahead, go ahead. I love it. We can't just sidestep The Matrix movie. Especially since he's literally describing— Especially since it's my favorite movie. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, that's another reason. You got one of those sweaters that's full of holes. Okay. So when that movie came out in 1999, there was no, it was new to many people, but no one questioned the capability of an intelligent enough system for making you think you're experiencing anything it wants to without regard to what is happening external to your physicality.

56:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:and that's a headset of a sort. What's the metaphor again? A VR headset of a sort, except we're going directly to the neurons. We're not even using your senses. And so could you just comment on the foundational theme of humans being alive and living out their lives in their own minds and not... Wow. In their bodies. And also how dreamy Keanu Reeves is.

57:13Donald Hoffman:So, you know, The Matrix was my favorite movie at the time as well. It's still my favorite movie. It is. It probably still is, actually. I wrote a book in 1998, just the year before The Matrix came out, called Visual Intelligence, How We Create What We See. Exactly this stuff. So that's why I was so taken with The Matrix, because it was exactly what I was talking about in visual intelligence. And it gets very, very weird. Neurons, so I'm a neuroscientist, and I study neuroscience, and I'm all for neuroscience. We have 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses, and yet I say that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived.

57:50Donald Hoffman:So what are neurons? They are a headset representation of how our headset is engineered. So neurons are a headset representation of how our headset is being created. So neuroscience is much harder than we thought. We don't just have to understand the wiring and the physiology. That's just the baby beginning. Now we have to reverse engineer it and ask, what is the software outside of space-time, which when you project it into space-time, looks like neurons and synapses and physiology? So we have a really hard task ahead of us. As long as we're thinking we're stuck inside space-time and this is the reality, we're actually missing the real science that's ahead of us.

58:33Donald Hoffman:The real science is space-time is a trivial headset. Let's get on with the job of reverse engineering it and understanding the first layer of software that's outside of it. I think the positive geometries that the high-energy theoretical physicists are finding are a first step. And I'm hoping to show that their positive geometries are actually so-called sub-geometries of the Markov polytope that I'm working with.

58:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:All I was asking was, do you think, as portrayed in The Matrix, you could meddle in someone's head and make them think they're living out of their entire lives?

59:05Donald Hoffman:Absolutely. Once you understand the software, you can play and you can do miracles. If you think about it, if you wrote, suppose you're the wizard in Grand Theft Auto, so you can drive the car as fast as anybody. You can play all the rules inside the game. But suppose you're a geek who can't really drive, but you wrote the software. You wrote the software of the game. Well, you can turn the expert, the wizard's car into a donkey. You can do whatever you want. So once you know the software, you can do magic. And my guess is, not just a guess, if this approach is correct, when we start to understand the software outside of our space-time headset, the technologies will be mind-blowing.

59:46Donald Hoffman:Everything that we have right now will be trivial compared to the technologies we've learned.

59:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:That'll be the next season of Black Mirror, where you get inside the brain. And that's a whole set of plot lines right there. And you know what, I mean, can we for a second, because there's a lot of people, we live in a very polarized, divisive time. Sure. So. Unlike the Second World War or the First World War. Or the Revolutionary War. Or the Civil War. Or the Civil War. Or the Vietnam War. Yeah, we're uniquely divisive, Chuck. However, I will say that the difference is in all those times, we didn't have this constant influence of manipulation called visuals in phones and social media and algorithms.

1:00:38And so I'm interested to hear what you think about the power that these things possess, not only individually, but societally.

1:00:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm going to re-ask that with fewer words. In what way has the algorithm hijacked our evolutionary proclivities? Ooh, damn! I gotta leave now! I'm so ashamed of my question! Did I capture what you were saying? I hope they still play the whole question I asked just so that people can see how that you captured it all in one phrase.

1:01:14Donald Hoffman:Yes. Well, great question and actually quite pertinent. In other words, are we humping the beer bottle?

1:01:26Hey, man, stop doing my job.

1:01:32Donald Hoffman:I'm allowed two jokes per episode. Okay. All right, go ahead. The background that I have in neuroscience and evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory has made me of interest to various companies because they asked me to help them with their marketing and advertising and product design because I know the rules of the game. And so I'll give you a concrete. There's lots of examples. I'll just say a top level. We know how to manipulate your attention to make you want things that you don't even know that we're doing. So the answer is yes. Once you know the rules of the game, you can play them, and companies pay me to do that.

1:02:07Donald Hoffman:It's out there. I'll just give you a fun one, though, but there are many. Jeans, denim jeans. Your visual system has rules for how you create 3D objects. How do you create 3D shapes? So this is all part of the headset software. And shading gradients and lines and so forth are used by the visual system to create 3D shapes. When you put on jeans and they have distress, they're trying to make them look distressed and so forth, and they have stitching, you are telling a 3D story about the body of the person who's wearing those jeans. The only question is, do you, as the clothing manufacturer, understand what story you're telling?

1:02:49Donald Hoffman:And is it the story that you want to tell? Are you giving the person pancake butt when you didn't want to do that? Or are you making them look good? So I went to these jeans companies. Well, they came to me, actually. And so I showed them, I look, I said, look here, you're creating pancake butt and here, but here's how you can change the distress. So that all of a sudden you can make any shape rear end that you want. And I remember the CEO of one company, when I was giving the presentation, I won't mention the company. He jumped out of his chair, ran up to the slide screen that I was showing how I did this.

1:03:20Donald Hoffman:And he said, our jeans make me look terrible. And he, so they, they bought it. and I showed them how to do it, and they then went and made the stitching on their jeans different and the distress different. And you can make any shape that you want once you know how to do it. So this stuff is being used. Once you know the rules of the headset, you can play the game and no one knows that you're doing it. It's funny because the same thing happens similarly in nature. The reason why zebras have stripes is because they herd and when they are being hunted and they run, all the stripes visually confuse the lion.

1:03:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Absolutely. Most of the time. Most of the time. I've seen a whole lot of zebra legs up. Yeah, I know. I know, it's terrible. Humans think they're quite small. I should have had more stripes. I knew I needed more stripes.

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1:08:13Humans think they're really smart. Some of them do anyway. And we can manipulate each other as we've just discussed.

1:08:20Donald Hoffman:Yes. Okay, and we can write code like in Grand Theft Auto. But ultimately, who is writing and in charge of this holistic, this consciousness, this place you're trying to get to through your trace logic? There is no top to the trace logic, which is really quite interesting. These mark-out matrices go off to infinity in any direction that you want, and there's no top to it. So there is a pre-established harmony like Leibniz envisioned. They're all tied together with this trace logic, but there is no top, which is quite stunning.

1:08:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:In what ways have theologians approached you as someone who's opening up a box where they can put their God?

1:09:04Donald Hoffman:Representatives from almost every kind of religion have approached me. because I'm saying that in some sense, observation is fundamental and it's very, very close in spirit to those who want to say consciousness is fundamental. I myself think consciousness is fundamental, but I don't have to say that for this mathematics. The mathematics can just be observation.

1:09:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:You've made that point. It's an important point. Otherwise, you're intertwined with something else that needs an explanation. Why complicate your account?

1:09:34Donald Hoffman:Exactly. As far as science is concerned, I'll just call it observation, period. And any scientist would say, absolutely, we need a theory of observation. Bring it on. Whereas consciousness is more controversial. My own view, though, about the spiritual aspects is it comes down to a very fundamental thing about science itself. And that is this very, very simple point. Every scientific theory starts with assumptions, period. It says, if you grant me these assumptions, then I can explain all this other wonderful stuff. But no theory explains its own assumptions. Now, you can say, well, I'll give you a deeper theory that explains the assumptions of that previous theory.

1:10:16Donald Hoffman:Yes, you can. And your deeper theory will have its own assumptions. It's turtles all the way down. Right. It's turtles all the way down. And so there will never be a theory of everything in principle because we'll never have a theory that explains its own assumptions. So there is no theory of everything.

1:10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's a Girdle's incompleteness theorem right there.

1:10:35Donald Hoffman:It really is. Yeah. It's a Girdle's incompleteness theorem. So it's a scientific incompleteness theorem as well. So when we sometimes talk about the God of the gaps, well, I'm a scientist. I love science. I love the rigor of science. We do not assume that our assumptions are true in science. We assume that our assumptions are consistent. We know that they're never the final truth. We're always going to have some deeper layer to go to. What we have to assume is not that we have the truth, but that we have a consistent set of starting assumptions. If they were not consistent, then we could prove anything.

1:11:13And that's why scientists don't murder one another for their findings. Generally, that's correct.

1:11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, there are no marauding scientists on the front line. E equals MCQ, not M squared.

1:11:27Donald Hoffman:and so we're infinitely far from the theory of everything so there's not i'm not worried about a god of the gaps that science is infinitely far from a theory of everything and so i don't have a theory of god um and i don't want i'm not a god of the gaps kind of guy well god of the gaps has

1:11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:been replaced by aliens you don't understand something it's aliens and so aliens are the gaps doesn't have the same ring to it no so so in my book i i coined the phrase aliens of our ignorance. Nice. Yeah. Don, what's the timeline on this research, which is ironic seeing as space-time is doomed. Do you have a timeline? You've got a new kind of watch. How many dimensions? So, do you have a timeline for the work that you're undertaking now?

1:12:16Donald Hoffman:I have a group. We're starting something called the Trace Research Institute and it's going to be coming out in June, actually. We're being announced in June. And I have some mathematicians and physicists working with me. We have eight specific mathematical conjectures that I'm hoping to prove in the next three years. So that's sort of the goal, to have these proven in the next three years. And the idea would be we start with this trace logic on observers and show exactly how we get first special relativity, then general relativity, quantum field theory, non-locality, and so forth. And then, so that's the idea, is to start to reverse engineer our space-time headset by starting with observers that could build a space-time headset, but they could build almost anything else.

1:13:05Donald Hoffman:And that's the key point. Observers can build any headset that they want. Space-time is one of the more trivial ones. It's only four dimensions. Wow. You just dissed humans right there. Well, you know, we are very disable. Disable. I've got to say. Have you looked around like, oh. We really are dismal. Well, actually, I'll turn that around now. I'll say something about you and me. We are not our avatars. These bodies in three-dimensional space, one dimension of time, there's a Neil avatar, there's a Chuck and then Don. All these avatars are just avatars. You're not your avatar. This is just an avatar in a headset.

1:13:48Donald Hoffman:So this is where it does sound spiritual. Now, whoever you are, whatever you are, it's not something inside space and time. Space and time is inside you. That's your creation on the fly. You're rendering your body. So my hand is something I render on the fly when I look at my hand. And with that, otherwise, there is no hand. The hand is just a headset avatar representation. Is there a way I can render a few choice bigger parts?

1:14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:DMT. So I got to land this plane here. Let me ask you the ultimate skeptical question. Sure. Let's say you come out with this account of all that your ambitions hold for you. what prediction can you make from that new formulation that will give confidence that the new formulation is real? Well, of course. Because what you described, it sounds like you're in a position, you've constructed this literal matrix to account for everything. and is that any different from the, you know, how the leopard got its spots? The rigid Kipling just so stories. I'm going to make an explanation and that's how it got its spots and here we are.

1:15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm going to make an explanation, which is why you don't see this and you'd make that and we got a space time here and it collapses there and we got relativity, boom. Give me a prediction.

1:15:25Donald Hoffman:So the first thing we'll have to do is to first show that we can get, for example, all of special and general relativity and quantum field theory. We have to do that first, right? But then we can take the next step, which is to say, you know, Einstein had to assume that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames and that nothing could go faster than the speed of light. That's an assumption. What if we can prove that? What if we can show from this deeper theory that it must be the case in your headset that the speed of light is the maximum speed? Now, all of a sudden, something that Einstein had to assume we show follows from the theory of the observers.

1:15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:That'd be a good one, by the way.

1:16:00Donald Hoffman:That would be one of my first ones that I want to go to. And I can give you a little hint as to where I think it's going to come from. It turns out in a Markov chain, there is something called a commute time, how quickly you can go from one observation to another. And there is a minimum commute time and therefore a fastest transition, and it's something called cyclic Markov chains. And so the direction I'm going to be going is that because there is a maximum speed of transition in Markov chains, that's where the speed of light maximum is going to come from. So that will be a completely new out of the construct, a new construct for it.

1:16:39Donald Hoffman:But that will just be the beginning, because then I want to actually show once we go into these higher dimensions, I can then start building technologies. Remember, my clock, if I have a bigger space time than you, my clock is ticking a lot more than you. That means I can do miracles, right? Because for two ticks of your clock, I might have a million ticks of my clock. So I can be doing all sorts of stuff. So this may be how I'll explain UAP kind of phenomena that seem to violate the laws of physics. They do violate our laws if you're stuck in our headset. But they may have a headset in which their clock is ticking a million times to one tick of ours.

1:17:19Donald Hoffman:And so what looks like instantaneous acceleration to us is, for them, a walk in the park.

1:17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Or just a fuzzy video artifact of a monochromatic data-taking device. But, okay. One or the other. So, I got you. So, it's the experience of something that would be normal in their reference frame that, to us, looks extraordinary or even miraculous. Right.

1:17:43Donald Hoffman:That's right. And there's another aspect of this that's really quite interesting. And if you think about, I look around and I see an ant and I ask myself, how much does the ant see about me? And my feeling is probably nothing, almost nothing. It doesn't know anything about me. But then, and if you ask, okay, so how would it represent me? It might not even represent me at all. But if it does represent me, it's something trivial. Well, now turn it around. I see the ant is fairly trivial. But remember, this is just a headset. The headset dumbs things down. It's quite possible that what I see is an ant.

1:18:21Donald Hoffman:I'm actually, the reality that I'm interacting with is so transcendent, so much bigger than me, that if I could actually understand it, I would fall down speechless before it. But my headset turns it down into a tiny little ant. So this gives us a sort of a different way of looking at everything around us. What I'm seeing is my headset dumbed down representation of something that's not inside the headset. So it changes the whole game of how I look at the world. I see an ant and I have no idea what I'm really dealing with. All I know is my headset is so stupid that it's just showing me an ant. That's what I know.

1:19:00So just touching on Darwin's theory, origins of species, et cetera, obviously pre-internet, pre-computers. Are you kind of telling us that it is the most amazing theory and all it needed was mathematics to show how amazing it was?

1:19:18Donald Hoffman:Well, I think that Darwin's theory is brilliant and evolutionary game theory, the mathematics really brought out all the wonderful power of Darwin's theory. But now I step back. It's a theory that's sort of tied to our headset, right? Every scientific theory has its scope and also its limits. So I think inside the headset, Darwin is the best theory that we have for understanding biology inside of our headset. Once we get outside the headset, I will want to find a deeper theory and show how Darwin's theory is a special case of something far deeper. So, But that's going to be the thing. Now you're getting greedy.

1:19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:Einstein wasn't good enough. You're going to throw Darwin into the pot.

1:20:00Donald Hoffman:Right. Science must always get to deeper theories. We always expect that our theories are just stepping stones. I love that.

1:20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, good way to put it. Well, Professor Hoffman, this has been a delightful conversation. Thanks for giving us a peek into your madness. You want to say that again? Thanks for giving us a peek into your genius. How about that? And they are the same thing. They're the same thing. Or rather, a peek into your headset.

1:20:30Donald Hoffman:That's been a great pleasure and a lot of fun. I enjoy laughing with you guys.

1:20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Excellent, excellent. So good luck with that. Do you have a good website for people to track, or is it all secret?

1:20:40Donald Hoffman:I have. For those who are scientists, if you do Google Scholar on Donald Hoffman, you'll find a hundred papers that I've got on Google Scholar.

1:20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, Google Scholar, people don't know. gains access to research journals. And provided there aren't other Donald Hoffmans out there, you'll get all of his papers. But it's pretty easy to filter. Yes.

1:20:58Donald Hoffman:So we're announcing a Trace Research Institute, which is going to be pursuing this research in the summer of 2026.

1:21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the greatest value there, which we've seen since the early 90s, when I think NASA was early out of the box to recognize the value of multidisciplinary thinking. they didn't ask how would a physicist do this they said let us take on the topic of origins well there's the origins of the planet of life of the solar system and everybody got together in the coffee room and and got to got to share notes in ways that were previously siloed so in this new institute uh you're going to have mathematicians uh presumably biologists yeah absolutely neuroscientists absolutely any room for astrophysicists yeah absolutely we want to We've got our own theory of the Big Bang.

1:21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:Do you need a job?

1:21:50Donald Hoffman:No, I'm gainfully employed here. I'm just checking. No, absolutely. Actually, one of our conjectures is a new way of modeling the Big Bang from the Markov chain. So we have to do it all. Go big or go home, basically. All right.

1:22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:There he is. Okay. I don't think we need to say anything else after that. Okay, sir. Thanks for joining us.

1:22:09Donald Hoffman:Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

1:22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:On StarTalk. All right. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. What do we call this one? The nature of reality. The nature of reality. And in the end, it's just a matrix.

1:22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Yeah, Ray. How's your name? All in. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.

1:22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Hi, besties. It's Tinks. If you need a little inspo, a little tough love, or just someone to tell you that everything is going to be okay, come hang out with me on my podcast. It's me, Tinks. We talk dating, confidence, friendships, healing, leveling up, and all the things we're working on together. I share my frameworks, your questions, and yes, plenty of chaotic stories. New episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So whether you're on your hot girl walk, commuting, or hiding from your ex on Instagram, I've got you. Listen to It's Me Tanks wherever you get your podcasts. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore.

1:23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:Stand still, not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now, we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.