BREAKTHROUGH: Consciousness Creates the Simulation | Dr. Donald Hoffman

Do you believe fairies exist? Each day more people are coming forward with stories of encountering otherworldly beings. Join me, Joe Hickey Hall on the Modern Fairy. Gates. Had to take a double take because in front of me were two elf-like goblin things. So the red light was gone and now the Whether you're already a believer or full of intrigue.

Mm-hmm. open hearted and make your own mind up. Yeah. I often talk about the virtual reality headset metaphor. It's a very, very good Step away from our assumption that space and time and the world of objects that we see around us every day is the true nature of reality. It's not. There was a moment in which I realized Everything that you've done, Don, all this mathematics means anything that you see in the world around you.

Is your construct that hit me in the face so hard is still of course taking me decades now to emotionally recover from that and to To come to terms with it and years of meditation, to let that go and to to just think this is just all of VR headset and I'm just rendering this stuff on the fly. Plato says um what we're seeing is at best like the shadows. Flickering shadows of objects.

And and he says that's what everyday reality is like. It's only seeing at best flickering shadows. Plato's cave at the deepest level says to me that there is ultimately no scientific theory of everything. There is no Spoken theory of everything. It goes i exceedingly deep. The best I can put it in words, because we have to use words here, whatever you are.

infinitely transcends anything that you could ever say or experience. That doesn't mean that you're divorced from reality. I'm saying you are, you are the reality. Don Hoffman, I must also publicly do this. It's always such an honor to have you in the Mind Meld. You have such a unique, brilliant mind, and you are exploring questions that I I know that I'm interested, obviously.

in. But the audience is also absolutely centrally interested in. These are questions about the nature of reality, questions about consciousness, questions about what we are, what we're doing here, but you approach them from such a deep technical, rigorous level as well, which is

Something that is an extremely, extremely short supply. So really, really excited for this as always. Thank you for having me, Michael. It's always a pleasure. It's my our third or fourth time now. It's and it's always a pleasure to talk with you and I'd love to Hard questions that you ask and it pushes me in good direction. So thank you very much.

I'll see what I can do. I'll see what I can do. Um I I'm not gonna start there exactly, but I do wanna acknowledge, yes, we've been having this conversation on and off for for years now. And and I have seen your thoughts evolve for sure. And in this new essay, you know, I was I I did want to bring this up. You only glancingly bring it up, but I was so glad that you did grant glancingly bring it up, which is essentially comparing The way that we experience to the famous Plato's cave algae.

Yeah. And my actually my most popular video that I've ever done was on Plato's Cave. And I tried to go deeper into it than this sort of, you know, surface level analyses because it's so true on so many levels and it's one of those rare allegories that it almost seems like there's there's no end.

to how accurate it is. Um, I thought maybe it would be a good way to both review your theory and your view of reality, as well as sort of like captivate the audience with with what's really at stake here and and what

are we really grappling with in terms of the limitations that we perceive reality through? Yes. So Plato's cave is extremely famous and rightfully so. Plato Suggests that our everyday experience of space and time and objects in the physical world, um, which feels to us so real, it feels Like it is the ultimate reality, emotionally. And we and we live our lives as though it's the final thing. We we get excited about ex success, we get upset about failures that

We feel the stakes are very, very high. We're really we're really in this thing with both feet and and fully immersed in it. And it feels very, very real. And our emotions uh correspond to And yet Plato says, um, what we're seeing is at best like the shadows, flickering shadows of objects. So there's a fire in a cave and um There are prisoners um looking at the the wall of the cave and they c and

they can't see the real world. They're stuck in this cave. All they can see are flickering shadows from a f a fire and and shadows cast by objects running in front of the fire, people moving in front of the fire and so forth. That's all they can see. And

Plato says someone then leaves the cave and goes outside and sees the real world and and can't believe what they're seeing, comes back and tell the people in the cave and and they don't believe th that person either. And and he says that's that's What everyday reality is like. It's only seeing at best flickering shadows on on the wall of a cave. And I think if Plato were

were around today, he would love the VR, virtual reality metaphor. But he he used one of the best metaphors he had at the time and a fairly low tech version um but that's what they had. And I think that Plato was pointing to something That even the VR headset metaphor and the cave metaphor are still not strong enough.

It's it's really a ne a deeper point of view. That many spiritual traditions have talked about. The Tao de Ching says the you basically the Tao that can be spoken of is is not the true Tao. And and what what what these traditions say is anything that you can talk about.

And and that's that when you start going there, that starts to get a little scary because you know it's one thing to say, well, it's a VR headset to take it off, now we see the real world. No, what you're seeing is still another description. It's another something that you can talk about. And so it goes very, very deep and and I'll I'll point out that this has something to do also with the nature of the limits of our scientific theory.

R right. So scientific the and uh I'm a scientist, of course I love science and I think that it's a an incredibly powerful tool and I encourage anybody with uh those proclivities and talents to go into science. It's it's we we need it. But on the other hand, every scientific theory starts with assumptions. And it doesn't explain its assumptions. It assumes that it's not a good thing.

And you can always then say, Okay, well I'll give you a deeper theory that can explain those assumptions and you can, hopefully.

But when you do that, if you succeed, you'll have new assumptions at the start of your new theory. And this goes on ad infinitum. So Plato's Cave is also telling us something about the nature of scientific theories as well. Yes. The If if we're going to talk, I think using scientific theories is one of the best ways to talk because it's rigorous, it's mathematically precise, it gives us tests.

To to show the limits of what we're saying. It gives us ex you know, points to experiments and so forth. So it allows us not to be dogmatic. um without some checks on our dogmatism. It it gives us clean checks on dogmatism. And of course scientists are people we will be dogmatic now and then, you know, d like anybody. But the science itself done properly will put a restraint on that and tell us when our dogmatism is um misguided. And and dogmatism is always misguided.

So so what it does then is it actually says Plato's Cave at the deepest level says to me that there is ultimately no scientific theory of everything. In fact, there is no sp spoken theory.

So it's it goes i exceedingly deep. Now I often talk about the virtual reality headset metaphor, because I think that's a a very, very important metaphor and it's a very, very good step. Away from our assumption that space and time and the world of objects that we see around us every day is the true nature of reality. It's not. It's not at all. And the the VR headset is the current

good metaphor for that. But it's you know, it's an update of Plato's Cave. But ultimately even that metaphor of the VR headset, um, as scary as it might be to some people, is not taking you deep enough. You've got to go deeper. It's got to but but it's a good first step. If you can get used to the VR headset, that's going to really help you think out of the box for the next level of scientific theory.

And I'm very interested, of course, as a scientist, in getting the next level of scientific theory. But I have no illusion that my next level is the final level, or even close, or or that I'm even approximating. It's at best a better description of a perspective of reality, at best. Um so there's this It goes.

very deep, I would say that what it what it tells us is that there's infinite job security in science. That there's n no scientific theory is even close to being the theory of everything. If if you think there's a theory of everything You really don't understand. What we're dealing with here in science. It's it's it's i it and we've you know, it some scientists in the past have thought oh, we're close to the theory of everything and

It it's always embarrassing because two or three generations later people look back and sort of giggle about what you thought was the final theory. And that'll be true about Yeah, we think we're close to a theory of everything. A hundred years from now they'll be talking about the comp concepts we didn't even have in mind.

that were foundational concepts that weren't even anywhere in our theories. And that's going to be going on indefinitely in in science. So it's better just to be humble at every moment and say these these are our best theories. We're trying to get the cleanest most rigorous mathematical theories with the cleanest uh experimental tests so that we can move on and go past the um inevitable limitations of our concepts and our our ideas right now.

So Plato's cave goes goes very, very deep. And I'm sure that um all this stuff um I'm sure Plato could um Tell me much more. Um he was pretty quite deep. Yeah, particularly do you remember the divided line that's that's presented along with Plato's cave by by Socrates slash Plato?

So remind me about the divided line. You're you're gonna love this, Don. So so essentially it's both a epistemological line and an ontological line. It's it's it's making statements about reality itself and it's making statements about knowledge itself and various sort of kinds and purities of knowledge. But essentially as you go up this divided line,

which maps over sort of stages of the cave itself. You know, you start all the way at the bottom, you essentially have naive realism, right? Like I'm seeing these shadows on the wall, therefore it's real. Just above that, you have uh like doxa is the Greek, I believe, and it it basically translates to like opinion, right? Well, this person said this, and uh plus my senses say that, so that must be reality.

But then you start to get into the higher kinds of knowledge. And as you get into the higher kinds of knowledge, you get actually further away from the physical and from your sense. So then you get up to to Dionia, right? Which is like our uh not rational, what's the word they use uh uh discursive kinds of reasoning, right? Where where we can create logical arguments, we can create mathematical formulas and and that's a very high kind of knowledge. You can

make things ab abstract. You can make very complex arrangements of ideas, but that's not the highest kind of knowledge. The highest kind of knowledge is this mysterious thing called noesis. And noesis I always have trouble trying to describe it, but I'm actually curious how how you might conceive of this. Sometimes they'll say it's something like direct, intuitive apprehension of a form, or it's some kind of almost like instantaneous.

knowing where once you know it you can't unknow it. And it's also sometimes presented as a state of knowing and being at the same time where where you we're we're sort of like epistemology and ontology dissolve because it's like you you are what what you know on some level. And um Yes. I I I think that that

to this day, for for me at least, wor works unbelievably well as a as a sense making mechanism. But also it it attempts to explain something that almost stretches the limits limits of the human mind to to try to explain this this weird state of You know, like once something clicks in your mind.

something. You you gain a skill or you it it becomes like a non-propositional kind of knowing that you no longer need, you know, every time you ride a bike, you don't need to be like, and then I put my foot on the thing and then I pedal. And it's it's just like, no, you just you just do it in this like

Like there's this like logos over the top of the whole process and it just unfolds instantly or something. And and try and and you can't put that in to any kind of theory, right? Like that it's something that is like over the top of a theory or something, but it's it it also transcends theories completely.

It it transcends the mind. It it has to tr th that's I I I agree. So you you come to the end of theories, even mathematical theories, even the most abstract formal mathematical theories, you have to go even beyond that. You know, Girdle's incompleteness theorem. Yes. um tells us that you know as powerful as mathematics is, and and of of course Goethel loved mathematics, that uh it's incomplete. Any formal system that we write down, um that

is at least rich enough to do arithmetic will be incomplete. And that's going to be true of any scientific theory. It Uh any any scientific theory is built on assumptions. Those assumptions will have a certain scope of explanation, which y if if they're if it's a good theory. Um of course anybody can write down a bad theory with wi with no scope, but but a a good theory will have some scope of of explanation. Uh but there will be there will be limits. And that's not because we're

in some kind of logical bind here. We're not not for example, one might say, well, you you've gotten yourself in a logical bind. You assume the truth of your assumptions and then you prove that they're not deeply true. What you know what you shot yourself in the foot. And and Goethel didn't assume the truth of the axioms. He only assumed that they were consistent. And that's what all we have to do in our scientific theories. We assume the consistency of our assumptions. We don't have to we w

I we don't have to assume that they're true. In fact, I would say the the the right scientific attitude is to assume these are probably not true. They're they're they're not the final truth, but uh I wanna make sure they're consistent and I wanna see if I use these tools. What is the explanatory scope of these tools? And the remarkable miracle is that over and over again Great scientific theories have an incredible scope of explanatory usefulness. And so we should take that gift.

at the same time uh y enjoying it and using it, but at the same time recognizing that that doesn't mean we've got the truth. We just have a consistent set of axioms that work for a certain explanatory scope. And if the if the consistent axioms are deep enough and rich enough, then they will under the work of someone as brilliant as g as Girdle show their limitations and show that the you know that there's a limit to what they can explain.

So it's it's very um common in the in the philosophy of science um for for philosophers to say that a scientific theory cannot So we're not assuming that the assumptions are true. We just want them to be consistent and find their limits, including the limits of the very assumptions.

themselves. But on the spiritual realm that you were mentioning, it's you know, it's it gets toward what spiritual traditions are saying. And I there's there's something that I just learned a few weeks ago. Um I was raised in uh uh a fundamentalist Christian spiritual tradition. So it was um There's this very famous saying from Jesus, Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, right? Mm-hmm. And so I looked at it i i i th the message I got growing

was uh that meant, you know, sort of be very afraid. God's really angry with you and He's coming back. Right. That's sort of the ang the message I got. Um and I decided a few weeks ago, you know, It's easy enough now with with AI to look at things in the original Greek and understand what the original Greek words are, right? There's no reason for you to take it secondhand anymore in anybody's translation. You can go say, okay, what was the exact Greek word?

Okay, what does it mean? You know, give me some context from the original, you know, the time of Jesus. Well w what did that word mean back then? And it turns out the word repent, which I thought means be very afraid, gosmat. It means nothing like that at all. It's the word is meta noe. You you mentioned no yeah. Noe. It it's it's like metamorphosis, but it's so metamorphosis is is in some sense a transformation of the body.

Metanoi is about transforming your mind. Jesus is basic he was saying, um Transcends. Your thought process. Transcend your mind. In other words, let go of your mind. The kingdom of heaven is already within you. See, he was pointing to something very, very different. Not not a mad god who's coming down because he's m angry. He was saying, let go of the restriction of your thoughts, step out of Plato's cage. Let go of your thoughts altogether.

And then you will find inside yourself the kingdom of heaven, which is entirely outside any thought. So that that rings with what the Eastern traditions have been saying. It's just been Because of our English translations, we we didn't understand what Jesus was saying in the original Koine Greek. Um version. Of course he didn't speak in Koine Greek. He spoke, I guess, in Aramaic or something like that. But the the earliest

written versions are in Koine Greek. So that's where the closest we can get to what he originally said. And he's basically saying not to be afraid, but to um essentially let go of any thought. at all. And then you will find the deeper reality that he calls the kingdom of heaven. Remarkable. So yeah, so well said. And I couldn't agree more I I I so deeply regret that I didn't go into classics sometimes because I am so into Plato and I'm so into Hellenic.

philosophy and the Neoplatonic tradition. And even just, you know, the small smattering of Greek words that I've learned over the course of of reading some of the dialogues and looking up words exact same way as you trying to clarify things. You you just realize the richness and and the depth. Yeah. of these ideas that they were talking about and and how

much of a shortfall there is in English a lot of the time. And and you see like, I see why they chose that word, but really you need like four or five different words and to tie them into all these different concepts to to really get it.

And and absolutely speaking speaking of transcending your assumptions. Your theory in general is is all about transcending your assumptions about reality, particularly in a naive realist kind of way. Particularly in the kind of way that there's a light there, there's a camera there, there's a Don right there, and all those things. are either exactly as they appear to be, or they're at least some serviceable representation of the reality that is there, right?

But your theory says no. Your your theory says not not only is it not one percent of the reality, it is zero percent of the reality. And and that's something that even my myself, as someone like I I am I've drunk the Don Hoffman Kool-Aid. I I think I I've immersed myself in the Don Hoffman core to to various degrees. But even still, you know, I I I listen to you

And I agree and I think, yeah, I think Don is on the right track. I think he's And then a little time goes by and I and I I go back to, you know, may but maybe it is kind of like Plato's Cave, where even though the shadow on the wall is not clearly that's not reality, right? It's derivative of something real. It's derivative of the light that's that's shining down. So there's still something real there. But you stick very closely to this point that not only do we not perceive reality.

We don't see it, it's not reality at all. There is zero percent of reality within the human experience. Um and and I wanna zoom I wanna zoom in on that. Why why isn't it like a little tiny, infinitesimal, uh really low resolution? part of reality rather than absolute uh but it's absolute zero.

That that's right. Uh by the way, I would love to be able to say what you're saying that there is some small connection that we've got to something that we can hang on to that's real in our in our perceptions. And as as far as I can see, there's Anything that can be talked about, anything that can be described by a concrete experience is A a flicker of a shadow on a cape and not I mean I so I understand where you want to go and I would love to go there too.

And I can't. I mean it's just logic precludes me from going there. What I can say though, I mean there is something that we would like to hold on to and uh what I can s the best I think I can hold on to is is this. When I said in utter silence and let go of every thought And I just am. It was just I am with no commentary about what that I is and what am is, anything at all. Just just pure existence. That's the closest.

But but there's no description. As soon as you put any word, any experience kind of thing on it at at all. Then than you've stepped away from. So so th the best I can put it in words, because we have to use words here, is to say that whatever you are Um infinitely transcend. Anything that you could ever say or experience. And that but that's but i that doesn't mean that you're divorced from reality. I'm saying you are you are the reality.

And to really know yourself. So the the traditions that say meditate and let go of thoughts, that's really the only way to be in touch with who you are in in some sense directly. But my guess we're here for, you know, it's not an accident that we're here in a three dimensional space, one dimensional time world, experiencing the richness of what that seems to be part of what we need to do.

And we seem to need to be lost in it. We all uh uh almost everybody I know gets lost in us. We believe that we are the little, you know, hundred and two hundred pound body that we are and and you know, we we take ourselves very seriously and our careers very seriously, or whatever, you know, our art or whatever we're doing very, very seriously. Um, even though we know by the time, you know, a hundred years from now We're gone. Probably no one's even citing your work anymore.

And y if I asked you who was the richest person on the planet you'll y in in eighteen fifty two. I have no idea. Who cares? I right? And that's so yeah. So so we have to do it's important for us to do this, and yet we deep down know that ultimately we walk away from this and no one Else is going to care what we did. But yes, it's not useless. It's not pointless. And my guess is that there's an infinite number of these headsets that we go.

but very, very limited perspective on who you are. Enjoy it. You're gonna take this headset off, and there's an infinite number of others. And somehow to know who you are um involves looking at yourself from an infinity of different rich perspectives. and getting lost in each perspective and waking up and then realizing I transcend that. And that

The best I can say right now about how to understand y who you are. It's gonna take an infinite number of s headsets. And this one, as rich as it is, is probably completely unlike other headsets. I mean, you can't even think out of the box. Big enough to think about what the next headset would be like. Yeah.

I was gonna say I completely agree in my case, Don, but I think in in your case, i in a hundred years, your ideas might just be starting to make sense. Like your your ideas might actually just st be be starting to put into actually Some applied permutations in terms of where I think your science, your theory could go. And For me, obviously I'm tracking for a lot of the people who are um familiar with your work, I think they're all tracking. But

Before we move on from the sort of core claims that you make about reality, um I'm not sure if we hit all the regular bullet points. I you know, clearly we've we've communicated the idea that Not only is this reality an air quote that we exist in limited, it really actually represents zero percent of the greater reality. Um but I don't think we've covered how you've come to that conclusion and why that must be the case.

and why it is that materialism just utterly fails to explain any of it. So maybe we could we could take a sidestep there to just review those points and then and then move.

Well yeah, I came to it through a a long process of um re research and and self examination. So as I mentioned, I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian uh framework. My dad was for a while a m a minister and so I I

got that point of view quite deeply. Uh but, you know, in college, high school, I was getting something different. I was getting Darwin's theories of evolution. I was getting a very physicalist point of view. And so is you know, I I decided by the time I was seventeen or eighteen that I needed to figure this all thing out for myself because I was getting two authorities

Very very different authorities saying very, very different contradictory things. And I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. And I decided the question I wanted to answer was, are we just machines? That was how I put it to myself. Are we just machines? I figured that the physicalist point of view said we were just machines and the spiritual said we we're not and I would go after that. And I figured the best way to do that was to actually

see how far a machine could go. So I ended up at MIT in in the artificial intelligence lab. There we're building machines as you know as deep deeply as we could at the time. Oh so I was there from seventy nine to eighty three. So I I was lucky enough to to know Marvin Minsky and take a class from him at his house, the the founder of artificial intelligence and to be

They're um, you know, debating with him and others at the foun you know, near the foundations that had been going on for uh f you know, the seventies. So by seventy nine it had been going on for for a few years. But What did I can I ask you? Sorry to interrupt, what what did artificial intelligence look like in those days? Was it like largely theoretical? Um'cause clearly, you know, com computing power was

infinitesimal compared to what it is today. So what when you say uh you know early days of artificial intelligence, what are we what are we talking about? Right. So in the early days, it a lot of it But Minsky had a theorem about perceptrons that showed fundamental limitations in the computational power of perceptrons. And so f for a while there, neural networks um weren't.

being explored because we thought that they had certain fundamental limitations. And it turned out it was a limitation not of neural networks in general, but just of the perceptron model. And and and so work out of UC San Diego um um then showed y you know, Minsky's theorem of course is true, but but but it doesn't

put anything uh uh limitation on on neural networks more generally. And then the explosion in neural networks i came. But at the time then at MIT we were trying to build I was working on um computational vision. So I was working on how how could we build Here we are now in in in twenty twenties, um, and that's that technology is be is still not quite there, right? We our cars still can't be driven safely by themselves.

It's pretty good now. It's pretty good now. It's pretty good. I was working on how do we see in three D. How can I take two dimensional camera images and compute a three D world? So that w that was the the stuff I was work and and that kind of thing was was going on there where there's a big um computational vision group there. David Marr was the the leader of it. He was my advisor and he he died when he was eighty five uh w in in

He was thirty-five years old when he died uh from leukemia. So it was a a great tragedy. But I I I was his last student. Um and I got to to to work with David and and uh Whitman Richards, who is a a brilliant um psychophysicist. So w looking at the um experimental aspects of human vision. And so we're trying to combine computational models that would how in principle could a computer system see in three D from moving images

And then how in fact does the biological vision system work? So it was it was a a very, very rich time, but the whole field was still doing the kind of AI where you're trying to build it all yourself.

You're not you're not trying to build a neural network which will become intelligence. You're trying to solve the problem yourself. And and and now we found that uh well, of course, we still need to do that as scientists to try to understand these things ourselves conceptually, but ultimately to get these fast were uh useful machines, neural networks have proven to be um um very effective once we got past the perceptron uh limitations, right?

Very interesting. Yeah, and and I I just wanna take a sidestep to acknowledge that it's it's really interesting how similar of a path. you've taken to Federico in some ways, Federico Fijin, because this is another person who came deep out of computer science, uh, investigating AI. Um was under the assumption that, you know, yeah, humans are probably very complex machines. They're probably a lot like computers.

But then something funny happens seemingly when you become an expert in the nuts and bolts of how AI and computers actually work. You see the limitations of those systems and why they're very not human like and very seemingly not conscious. Um He um he s supported my research for several years, my my team very generously. He's shared his thoughts. Uh so I I have only good things to say about Federico. He's he's a a brilliant um scientist and of course engineer inventing the the

Microprocessor. I mean what how many people can say I invented the microprocessor? He he did it. So he's brilliant and and uh I've benefited a lot listening to his ideas about um consciousness and and spirituality. Yeah, I'm a big fan as well. I've I've talked to him a couple of times on the show. Probably At least at least one of the conversations was

since you and I have spoken last may maybe both of them though. I can't remember ti time dilates, all all of that all of that kind of stuff. Um but anyway, so so yeah, you're You're kind of explaining this trajectory of how you got to where you are, where you've come to this conclusion that

not only do our our you know our senses mislead us, but really we see zero percent of reality. So so that that was a little bit of a sidebar there, but let's let's continue down down that path. Right. So As I began to do the the more rigorous research at MIT

looking at what machines could do, what what are their strengths, what are their limitations, what is it about humans that might or might not transcend what we could do with AI? So that kind that kind of question was the way I was trying to frame it. And And then I, you know, also started um In two thousand a little after two thousand

to incl include uh you know meditation into my daily life. So I started just exploring meditation, which was different. I mean I that was not something I got from a fundamentalist Christian point of view. We didn't do meditation. In fact, on occasion some

pastor or something would say that don't do that. They would explicitly tell us that you shouldn't do that. So so so I explored anyway, using meditation as as well. And began to look at the structure of the scientific theories that I was looking at and slow and then started looking at evolution by natural selection. you know, and the evolutionary theory. So you know, in in two thousand and six I started to look at evolutionary game theory and to really ask, okay, how

if if we evolved by natural selection, um what's the chance that we're gonna see reality as it is? So I was putting all these, you know, AI my own meditation practice, evolution by natural selection, uh understanding of human vision, trying to put it all together and and I I finally came to the conclusion, aha. First, scientific theories have assumptions, and those assumptions are limited and no s there's not so there's no scientific theory of everything. That's that's that's a

you know, a mic drop point for a scientist. That's a real big Hurdle to get over. There is no theory of everything. When you really grasp what that means, it's it's you have to stop and really take it in. Um and and y it requires a balance. On the one hand, I think science is one of the the best tools that humankind has. And it's a fantastic counterpoint to dogmatism. And dogmatism is is horrific. It it's it just holds us back. On the other hand,

science is so rigorous that it tells us that it can't be the final word. And that's that's that's i incredible. And so I I've slowly came to the the point of view and and I I should say slowly because, you know, what you're trained on as a child is something that's deeply ingrained in you and at least in my case, it it took years, decades for me to

be able to step back and get an objective view of what I've been taught, what I had been what I believed before I was old enough to even be rational. So you these things are already pre-programmed in you, right? So it's really a matter of looking at your programming and and realizing it is just programming. It's not the truth. Stepping it's a it's a big

It's a big emotional as well as intellectual process. And I where I am in the process right now is to to say, um I cannot let go enough of my preconception. The what I've learned is anything that I think is true, back away from it. It's it's it really have t you have to step back. Um but what I and and Be prepared to be wrong.

Try to be precise so that you can find out as quickly as possible what the limits of your ideas are. That's the key, one of the key things. Be as precise as you can be so that others and yourself can figure out what are the limits of your ideas. Every idea has limits. No And you might say, well, aha. There there you've got an absolute. What what what's what's interesting is I'm saying that even my my it's it's like girdle's incompleteness there. Yeah, right. Yeah. I was thinking that.

It's just it's just that. It's saying uh the mathematics is telling us I'm a beautiful tool. In fact I'm so beautiful I can tell you my limits. So use use this tool but know that um There are an infinite number of quote unquote theorems. That I can't prove. Yeah. So use me to prove all yeah. There is a big set of theorems I can prove and there's an infinity that that I can't. And that's sort of the perspective I I have now. And and that's where I then look at, you know.

The various spiritual traditions, Eastern mess mystical traditions very, very clearly, the Tao says the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. But when when I looked at Jesus and and he uses the Meta Noe Th no no word, that's also saying the same thing. transcend the mind is what he's basically saying. Meta mind. M you know, like metamorphosis is transformation of the body or transcending your previous going from a caterpillar to a butterfly. You let go of the whole caterpillar thing

climbing on a little thing. You can only get a few feet off the ground if you climb up. Now you go to a butterfly that's in a coup a coup no none of those limits. And that's what Jesus is really pointing. Meta Noah is basically whatever your mind can do, you gotta meta that. You gotta go beyond. So it's it's not th the the word repent is a is a very, very poor English word.

Because to us it means be very upset, be, you know, m self flagellating, you know, and there's an angry God. It has nothing to do with that at all. It has entirely to do with let go of your preconceptions, your thoughts. your judgments of other people, let go of all of it, transcend your mind, and then you then you'll find that uh

the kingdom of heaven and b by the way, that's not you know the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus said, is already inside you. It's not some place you go to. It's that that space beyond all Be all the caves, all of Plato's caves, anything that you can imagine, beyond that is the kingdom of heaven which is already within you. So it's not about So so the Eastern mystical mystical traditions say this, Jesus says it, but we lose it in the translation into English.

But Jesus was basically saying the same thing. Ultimately, let go of your Plato's cave of thoughts completely and all of a sudden you will find that you're in the kingdom of heaven. There's It's not a place that you go to. It's a it's something that's already in you, is just hidden. Shrouded by all your beliefs and thoughts. Let them all go, and there you will find the kingdom of heaven in you and in your neighbor. In every one of your neighbors.

Yeah. A another one you might like, Don, to to add to to your your repertoire, which you you may be familiar with this already, but have you ever come across um the the singular fragmentary work of Parmenides before? Uh uh a little bit, but I would I'm no expert in permanent. So it it's so interesting because he's often considered to be like the father of logic, right? Like his his philosophical school w was was very well known to be this like logically rigorous um form of philosophy.

But his singular extant work, which is fragmentary, that we have from a whole bunch of different later writers mostly, is um it's usually translated as something like on nature. But what it is, is essentially him doing some kind of soul flight thing where his con his consciousness goes through some kind of um journey to encounter this goddess. And they I don't think they ever name the goddess, but you sort of um get the impression that she is this consciousness presiding over

night or primordial some kind of like primordial, you know, um very root level of existence. And she gives him this speech about There being two packs. One path is the path of of nature and the way things seem, and the other path is the path of truth. And the path of truth, she says, is one There is no separation, there's no beginning, there's no end, don't ask questions about where it came from. That's a that's a ludicrous, illogical question.

But then the other path is the way things seem: the path of separateness, the path of degrees, the path of hot and cold, life and death, all these other things. So th that that's just like yet yet another great example. Yes, there there's the way there's there's the way that everything you ever experience is gonna tell you reality is. But then underneath that, there's a truer level of reality that we seem to only have access to through

I I don't know. Some like I don't know, boot boot level or or some some very, very low level I I don't even want to use a computer metaphor, but I don't know whatever what better metaphor there is to use. Is it's almost like It's before binary in computer code even exists, and it's like the signal that you split to create binary or turn on and turn off to create binary.

It it's something like that. Like that that is the true reality underneath all of this multi multiplicity uh fractal ever swirling uh forms that it takes. There's some deeper truth underneath all of it. And it's it's just remarkable how In in some ways we've known it for so long.

But in other ways we're still grappling to really put it into practical use. And that's where you seem to be going is, you know, no, like w what what if we take this beyond the realm of ideas? What if we take this beyond the realm of philosophy? And we actually ask questions about how do we formalize that? And then how and then once we formalize it, how might we actually be able to shift reality?

in in ways we can't even imagine. And maybe that's for later in the conversation because we're we're still sort of like laying the foundation here. But that that's where I see you being such an incredible innovator. It is is taking these deep philosophical truths that I think we all in in intuitively feel, but we're not sure how to make them

operational. We're not sure how to turn them into applied engineering or science. And of course, before we get there, we have to have, as you're pointing to, these precise formal models so that we actually can try to apply them to reality and make sure they work. And I I think we've sorta I think I think we sort of have laid the foundation, but if I interrupted you on on that track, please, please continue. Um

And yeah, I I think before we get to the practical part, I do I do want to ask you a couple more questions about your personal trajectory, actually. Sure. So you have this fundamentalist upbringing. You go into hard science, you go to MIT, you get a PhD, you go into cognitive science. But one of the things I'm not sure if I've ever asked you is is was there a moment

that you that you kind of realize like, I think I'm an idealist. I think consciousness is a fundamental thing. Was was that a slow progression or was there actually a catalytic moment that that happened? Well there there actually was a an aha moment. It came in round nineteen eighty. Seven. I was working in nineteen eighty seven, nineteen eighty eight. I was working with uh Bruce Bennett, who is uh a genius mathematician in algebraic geometry.

J just to know algebraic geometry you have to be a genius. But but he was a genius among geniuses. He was truly stunning. And and Chaiton Prakash. We were working on a book that w uh called Observer Mechanics. So we published a book called Observer Mechanics in nineteen eighty nine. And And it was we were building on the research that I'd done with

computer vision. So we had all these math I've been doing this mathematics of how do we see in three D and so Bruce and Chaiton took it to with me to a new level, right? They're they're real mathematicians. So we were getting these very

specific, rigorous theorems about how you know take three or four frames and four or five uh feature points to an object, and how to compute mathematically a three-dimensional object explicitly. And A as we we did that at at one point in the conversation with with Bruce Bennett about this, we we were talking about the mathematics and something that he said all of a sudden I I realized everything that we were doing, all the math that we were doing meant that we are Creating everything that

It was it was uh there was a moment in which I realized This means everything that you've done, Don, all this mathematics means anything that you see in the world around you is your construct. And that would that hit me in the face so hard because we we tend to think that vision is uh it's just a camera, I'm taking the picture in, I'm just seeing what's there.

And even though I'd done I mean that that that feeling that we're just getting an objective picture of the world is so ingrained into us that even though I've worked on computer vision myself for years. I hadn't let go of it. And I when but now we had all these theorems, it was like it was in my face and something Bruce said just sorta make me realize, no, the math is telling me

Don, you create everything that you see. All the structure you see, it's not there until you put it there, Don. And that was so stunning. I literally had to sit down because I I went from a I'm making all this up. There's there are constraints on how I make it up, but nevertheless, I'm making it up. So there was sort of a realist to idealist, a physicalist to uh idealist flip that for me happened immediately.

It sounds like a noesis moment. It it sounds like a noesis moment where you just s like some kind of holistic Clicking occurs.

Yeah, because it was almost like that idea had never occurred to me before. It was so i it was so inconceivable. And so all of a sudden uh not not only did become it became conceivable and and you know like probably true but it took me it is still of course taken me decades now to emotionally recover from that and to to come to terms with it and and and and years of meditation. Because the assumption that I am just

immediately experiencing the truth. When I see, you know, a tree and uh My chair and so forth and uh that that's so deep conviction to let that go and to to just think this is just all a VR headset and I'm just rendering this stuff on the fly. So so h here's how crit how crazy this is. What I'm saying Einstein Said, do you really believe the moon isn't there when it's not not perceived? And that's what I'm saying. You're right, Einstein, the moon is not there when it's not perceived.

The moon that I see and the moon that you see are not the same. thing, you render your moon. We are interacting with something But it's not the moon. It doesn't look like the moon. And and So that's that's crazy, but the VR metaphor makes it more easy to understand. If I'm playing Grand Theft Auto and you see uh Red Ferrari and I see a red Ferrari, well, the Red Ferrari that I see only exists when I see it. There's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer that's running the game.

And when I look away, my red Ferrari is gone. It literally only exists when I perceive it. It doesn't exist otherwise. My friend can see a red Ferrari that I'm playing with um when I'm not seeing one, but they're seeing their red Ferrari. It's not a And it with the VR metaphor, I think it's not a good thing. Hard for the current generation to sort of get it that my moon is not the same as your moon. But for for my generation, this was like a slap.

Yeah. So so to to stretch the the VR video game metaphor as far as we can. It's not rendered until you're interacting with it, or or until your character is getting into the field of experience that necessitates. that thing rendering, yet there is some deeper logic in the code representative of the moon, of the car, of whatever object. And maybe we can get into

the nature of that deeper reality as we as we go in. But I I'm intuiting that if I were a member of the audience, I'd be like, well holy shit, if that's not real, well what is what what is this thing underneath the perception that is that is uniting it? Um and

If if you think it's appropriate to go there now, we can go there now. But I I want I I don't want to derail you from because I know you're on sort of a logical walkthrough of this. Oh no, that's that's a perfectly next uh good step to go. Absolutely.

So I'll so I'll just say that um what you're pointing to is yeah, if I'm saying this is a VR um interface, then there must be some layer of software outside there that we can start to look at and and look at the code. And Absolutely. And in fact, I think there's an infinite number of layers. So what we can only what we can do say this again gets to the idea that there is no scientific theory of everything, but it's going to be layer after layer after layer that we have to unpeel.

So we can start. We can say, okay, we thought this space time world is the final reality. Okay, it's not. It's just a VR headset. Can we begin to take our first step? As scientists, as people Outside of space time. And now now when I've said this at conferences, the scientific conferences, I I I won't mention anybody up anybody's name in I don't want to embarrass anybody. A very bright scientist at one point I could even be talking about.

Space and time is the final reality. I mean everything is inside space and time. What could you possibly be meaning, Don, about talking about getting a theory of science outside of space time? I've had that from brilliant, brilliant. And so I and I c I completely understand this is like space-time is everything. So what are you even talking about? We need to go outside of space-time. That is everything. Everything's in space-time. And what I'm saying is no, no.

This is the hard shift. Yeah. Space-time is a trivial, trivial little data structure inside. trivial compared to what you can do. This is nothing. It's it's a trivial headset inside of you. And we can begin to reverse engineer. We can get the first layers of software outside of space-time. Now uh a a very natural reaction at this point is to say, look, Hoffman's a cognitive scientist. He's not a

He's no expert in space time. Why should we listen to this guy? I mean it's the it's the high energy theoretical physicists who are the the you know the experts in space-time and and so forth. And and I I completely agree. They are the experts and Hoffman is not. So what what do the high-energy theoretical physicists say about space? And what's remarkable is This three-word phrase. Space-time is doomed. That's a quote. Nimar Khani Hamed says this.

David Gross has said this. Effectively, John Wheeler said this that space time is doomed. And the reason so so the those scientists are the same thing. Whose territory is space time. They are the experts on space time, are the ones that are saying space time has had a good run. And it's over. We need to find new a a new layer of science.

outside of space-time. What what is the and by the way, the European Research Council, um the ERC, it's a big European funding agency, I guess like sort of the NSF. has a I think it's a ten million euro initiative um for funding research on what are called positive geometry. Um that these physicists are finding outside of space-time. So so the the good news well the bad news is space-time is doomed. The good news is these physicists have something to say about what's outside.

Literally out literally outside. They are finding these positive geometries outside of space-time and by the way, um also beyond quantum theory. So so the idea is that space-time is doomed and so is quantum theory. Quantum theory is doomed. It cannot be fundamental. So the structures that they're finding, these positive geometries like look the amplitude, associon, cosmological polytopes and so forth.

These are structures that don't care about locality, that that's the key fun uh key property of of space-time, and they don't care at all about unitarity, which is a key property of quantum mechanics. They don't care about any of those. So we're when these physicists so this is not a cognitive scientist step stepping outside of space-time. These are high energy theoretical physicists. They know what they're talking about.

And I'll I'll tell you why space time is done in just a minute. But what they're saying is we're going to go someplace where we don't have not only space time, we don't have quantum. We have to show that quantum mechanics and space-time arise together from a deeper layer of something. Right now they're seeing positive geometries. I'll just call it a new layer of software outside of of the headset. But their their language is positive.

Geometries. And and here's the the the drop dead simple reason for why space-time is doomed. When you use Einstein's theory of gravity, his his curved space-time theory, together with quantum mechanics, uh um and you ask, you know, I would like to look at something really, really small.

How do you do that? Well, you have to use you know, to see something really small you need a a more powerful microscope. Right. With with wavelengths of light that are smaller and smaller wavelengths, because if the wavelengths are too big you can't see the thing. So you have to have small wavelengths to resolve finer features. That's fine. As but it requires more energy. So as you you know

Quantum theory tells us that uh you know uh in fact Einstein told us uh E equals H nu. So as you as the frequency gets higher and higher, the the wavelength gets smaller and smaller, the energy is going up. Yeah. And then Einstein told us, uh, with general relativity that you're then curving space-time more and more and more.

W and what happens is when you get to ten to the minus thirty three centimeters, when you try to get that small Then all of a sudden you've got so much energy, which is equal to mass, according to Einstein, equals m c squared, so much mass into such a small region of space that you create a black. And the very things you're trying to observe disappears into a black.

So the very concept of space-time has no operational meaning. At 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, it ceases to have any operational meaning. So it's over for space time. It space time falls apart e exactly at the at and if you t if you get frustrated and say, well let me um Try harder, let me try to eat a smaller wavelength of like and put more energy. All you do is you get a bigger and bigger blah. Right. So what this is telling us is that space time

is a a very f shallow structure. It it it doesn't go very deep. It goes to ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters and then it just falls apart. It's not like ten to the minus thirty three trillion centimeters, but it's just ten to the minus thirty three.

So we thought it was the final reality. Uh no, it's a it's a a thin, thin data structure that we're that we're using. And as and so is time. And that's a hard one to wrap your head around. What what in the world does it mean that time is just So so that's why space time is doomed. Because our the our best theories of s of our best scientific theories of space time tell us

It's a very shallow data structure. And it it cannot be the final. And so the physicists are now by the way, the ERC, uh there have been conferences that they've uh funded where I I think there are like a hundred participants. These are like PhDs in mathematics and high energy theoretical physics that are now exploring what's beyond space time. So this is not some crazy cognitive scientist who's talking out of his

out of his field. These are the real experts in the field saying, um, let's put ten million euros in this and let's really get the best and brightest high energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Looking for this, what's out outside. So we're taking the headset off. We're taking space-time headset off. And what do we find? We're finding These monolithic structures out there. So it's much like um 2001 a Space Odyssey, right?

We're the apes. And there's this monolith sitting there and we're we're we look at it and go It's very significant. We're we're hooting and hollering and pounding on it. What does it mean? But you know, uh by the way, um I'm not calling these physicists and mathematicians apes. They're brilliant. But w as as a species compared to what we need to understand, it it feels like we're, you know, in the same position as the apes were with the with the monolith. I mean, it's just like okay.

We found this stuff. What what does it mean? So that's where we are. We're trying we're we got these geometry sitting Outside of space-time, like the amplitude and sosahedron and so forth. So these genius, I'm gonna be very, very close. These genius mathematicians and high-energy theoretical physicists, they're geniuses, they're finding But we don't we don't have any dynamical theories yet. What what dynamical theories outside of space?

could generate these positive geometries. What what what do they mean? What is it what are they telling us about a deeper understanding of the nature of reality? So I think those questions are are are are wide open. And it's even an an interesting question to ask, what do we mean by dynamical theories outside of space-time? What is a dynamical theory when you don't have the notion of

So that's Yeah. So that's sort of well we're taking the first steps outside and I I'm also working in that same direction. I'm trying to get a theory of consciousness. that starts outside of space time. And I'm also working with with um some brilliant colleagues, Chaitan Prakash, uh Robert Prentner and and and and and others um that can you Manish Singh and others to try to understand how we could get a theory of consciousness.

prior to space-time and then to show how space-time could emerge as simply a headset that's constructed by by consciousness. But once again we have to have a mathematical model of what we mean by conscious agent. Um consciousness is outside of space time. Yeah. Beautiful. We're we we've we've now assembled a fantastic launch pad, I think, for for where this conversation can go. Uh and and just to sort of summarize for the audience.

Don is saying, not only do our perceptions deceive us in terms of what the true state of reality is. Our best models fail. Space time fails. Space time does not tell us what reality is. Even quantum theory and nothing within quantum theory, particles, whatever, none of these things are fundamentally real. So with that being the case, the question is, okay, what is the next

Deeper layer of reality after these things. And as you're pointing to, it seems to be these geometric structures outside of space and time. And the reason it seems to be these geometric structures is because these mathematicians and physicists, some of whom work at places like CERN, who are like, as you're pointing to, these Uber geniuses who are trying to penetrate into the deepest.

layers of reality or uh or air quotes reality that that we can are finding whoa, there are these weird geometric laws that even these super complex Scattering events seem to obey. And you can actually make fairly simple pictures of these. Geometries that all of these interactions obey. So there seems to be these deeper geometric structures.

it's even saying somewhere is is is deceiving because it's not like a place you can go. It's like a layer of several layers of software down or hardware down or something. Um But they seem to be there. Like like these almost these Pythagorean or Platonic you know, sources that are kind of controlling the very ground level of our reality, of our simulation, our headset, whatever whatever word you want to use.

And then, you know, you have to kind of assume that even over the top of that, or even deeper than that, there's something even more fundamental. And I think unless you go the direction Don is going, where you assume You're gonna keep running into this question unless you settle into the idea that it's gotta be content. It's got to be consciousness that's deeper than any of these structures, any of these realities, any of these models. Because if it's not consciousness,

What I mean, what else could it be? Right? Th there's there's really no other answer in my opinion, other than consciousness. And that seems to be where where you're headed. Yes. So I I agree. The the high-energy theoretical physicists are finding these these Geometries are like diamonds, high dimensional diamonds outside of space time. And

The reason they're studying these is because they're interested in trying to find a way of describing how particles interact inside space-time. So at the large hadron collider and other colliders, you take you know, protons or some kind of high you know, particles and smash'em together at high velocities and see what what happens, all the particles that come out of it. And that seems to be a really good way of understanding nature at at at at

Small scales and the particle nature, uh particle nature of of reality inside space-time. And when you try to compute mathematically the probabilities of these kinds of particle interactions and what's going to happen.

Uh you can do it with Feynman diagrams. uh ways of using space time and quantum theory, so c locality and unitarity to compute these and and you can do it. And and he gets the right answer uh inside space time. And but it turns out that um When you do it that way to just

compute the amplitude, which is a fancy word for probability. It's a it's a complex valued function that when you take its amplitude squared you you get the probabilities of these scattering events. To get these amplitudes For a very simple p scattering process it takes hundreds of pages of algebra.

uh v using Feynman diagrams. And and the problem in in the eighties w nineteen eighties was they you know, they were trying to build these colliders and the the experimentalists said to the theorists, Look, you know We can't we have to look at millions and millions of interactions and compute things quickly. You know, several hundred pages of algebra for each interaction just isn't gonna do it. And no supercomputer can keep up with that. So can y can you um please, please

Simplify things. And so a couple of mathematicians, Park and Taylor, in the mid to late 80s, um came up with A a a new formula for one class of particle interactions that took several hundred pages and cut it down to something around you know, on the order of thirty pages. And that was like a miracle. People were going, you know, these guys are complete geniuses. They it's and and then a little bit later, Park and Taylor, they'd spent so much time on this, they guessed.

A formula. It was just one or two terms. And it turned for this class of interactions it turned out to be right. And this is like holy smoke. I mean you can do it with Feynman diagrams inside space and time. Locality and unitarity, ex you know, explicit, and it takes hundreds of pages of algebra, but you get the right answer. Or you can there's something going on here, you can get it with just one or two terms. And people are well okay, but it's just you know, we we just got lucky.

But then there began to be a series of e you know, discoveries. Uh, including something called the BCFW recursion relations uh w with Witten and and his graduate students in the early two thousands or mid-2000s. began to realize that this was not just a one off. There was something going on here that you Feynman gives you the right answers using space time computation. But there was something going on where if you let go of the Unitarian locality, so you let go of space time and quantum theory.

you get the right answer and it's much simpler. So that suggested that we should explore this. And so then Nimar Kani Hamed and and other many other physicists began to go, okay, w we y maybe this isn't just a one off or a two off. maybe this is really something that we should explore. And of course they were brave because, you know,

They're starting to take a a r a step out of space-time. So they were very, very brave to do that, but they've been rewarded. They found, you know, Nima and his colleagues. Um found the Ampetohedron published in 2014. So this is not that old. This is twelve years ago that the first like clean positive geometry came out. And then in the last twelve years, they found the associra uh are are useful in this

cosmological polytopes and and and other structures, so much so that a couple years ago the ERC then said, okay, this this looks real. We need to put money into it. So so so yeah, it it's looking like The physicists are finding The high energy theoretical physicists are finding these

geometries outside of space-time, but I would say the current state of the art is we you know they're useful because their their sh their structure, their volumes, their surface structure, their edge structure is com is coding for the scattering probability. Inside space time. And the kinds of events. So it's really struct amazing. Why is a structure outside of space? that doesn't care about space and time or unitarity. It doesn't care about quantum theory. Why does that structure

code for um these scattering events. And by the way, I should say that um there this is still a work in progress. There are scattering events that they haven't yet got the positive geometries for. So it's not that they we can say we've got positive geometries for every scattering event. Th but they keep finding that they can do more and more and more. So that's why it's very, very promising. There's also something called

There are also combinatorial objects called decorated permutations. So like normal no shuffling cars or permutations. And these also in some cases are enough to classify and describe um almost completely certain kinds of scattering um processes. So we have positive geometries and these decorated permutations.

um that are structures that seem to transcend space time and yet so this is a hint about some kind of l layer of software or something outside of space time. And so the geniuses are on it and and they're but what what I'm What I'm looking at then is to say We should go back to something that Wheeler pointed out in his Yes his nineteen eighty nine paper, the It from Bit Paper. Very, very famous It from Bit Paper. Wheeler was saying We have to there he says fundamental There is no space for the

No time and no space-time. At this at the microscopic level, he he's very, very clear right at the start of his paper. We're gonna as physicists, we're gonna have to set uh understand that fundamentally there is no space, there is no time, and there is no space. And somehow he said, We're gonna have to understand Somehow, the act of observation, asking questions of nature, specific questions of nature, and getting specific answers back, that observer participancy process.

He is at the core of all science and is gonna have to be at the core of our next generation of of physical theory. And he has this loop that y we have observer participants. generate information, information generates space time, and space time loops back to the observer participants. So he's saying there's this loop between observation, information, space time, observers, in a in an infinite loop. And he says we need

We have to crack that loop. We've got to we have to start there. And that's and and that's the Interesting thing about quantum theory. And and also all the previous theories and the what is the role of the observer? Okay, we I should say in science the observer is is important. R right. We can't ignore the observer in science because scientific theories are created based on our observations. We have to have careful experiments.

with with well designed you know equipment like the large hadron collider or or you know the the James Webb telescope and so forth. We have to have really precise equipment. But ultimately, that equipment In the minds of the scientists. Without those conscious experiences in the minds of the scientists, There is no scientific theory, because the scientists are the ones who create the scientific theory. And so we need to have an understanding of how our experiences.

justify the kinds of theories that we're going to have. And how our theories then close the loop that show that our experiences and our theories all form one coherent system.

Now, the observer has been in in New Newtonian physics, the observer was assumed to be irrelevant in the sense that it it affected nothing. And so you didn't need to have a theory of the observer. So it wasn't really even mentioned. In Einstein's Theories of um space. The ob observers are mentioned. Einstein talks about observers, but they're basically clocks and coordinate systems. There's there's not the notion of an observer interfering or of affecting the object.

Only the motion of the observer changing the time and you know, m time dilations and s and length contractions and so forth. But in quantum theory, uh the formalism doesn't let you ignore the observer anymore because You have a linear differential equation, the Schrdinger evolution, when you're not observing a system. Unitary evolution. So it's linear, but it's it's unitary, but and then when you um observe

You get the wave function collapsing to a single outcome. Right. The most famous version of this is the double slit experiment. So, yeah. The the problem is this, and this is um this is an open problem in in quantum theory. You have a superposition of possibilities for what you might see, what you might measure, according to the Schrdinger Revolution. And it evolves unitarily. When you actually observe, you get one outcome. One.

Now there have been attempts to say well, do something called decoherence. There's a process of decoherence where you can try try to explain it, but it turns out de the decoherence process will give you a um it gets rid of the complex superposition and it leads to a um But it doesn't give you a unique outcome. So so there are attempts to try to make decoherence, solve the measurement problem, and it and and they fail.

They they they get half of the way, but w we we can't get half of the way. We need to get to one answer and decoherence does not get to one. And here's the problem. Any physical system in quantum mechanics must be described by the Schrodinger evolution, by unitary evolution. That means that no physical system described by the Schrdinger Revolution can collapse the wave function. Can't do it. Just can't do it. So we have

this r strange thing that we're starting we're assuming a physical world. The physical world is described by unitary evolution. Unitary evolution cannot give you a unique outcome. So that description of the physical world cannot give you a theory of measurement, period. Unable to do it. And decoherence doesn't get you anywhere near the solution of that problem.

So that's why this has been a problem not for, you know, a couple of months. This has been a hundred years. This has been a hundred years since we've had shorting or Hundred years. And so that's I mean, so and and these are, I mean, hundred years of geniuses working on this thing. So So we have, so, and that's what was sort of, I think, pushing on Wheeler. Wheeler was saying, okay, look, this measurement problem.

can't be pushed under the rug. We're gonna have to start with observer participancy and the information generated by observer participants somehow get space-time and then have the observers fit into that whole cycle. Yeah. So that's that's where I'm headed. That's exactly where I what I'm doing with my team. We're we're saying uh uh we agree with Wheeler, and in effect uh in his nineteen eighty nine It from Bit Paper, he cites my book.

observer mechanics with with Bruce uh Bennett and Shaitan Prakash. So he cites our book as the kind of thing that directions that we might want to go in this, where we were trying to get a mathematical model of what we called par participators, uh observers that were participating and trying to So so he he cites our book. And so that's w we can talk more about it, but w what I'm trying to do I'll just at top level now to sort of give the big picture is to say

We're proposing a dynamics of observer participators. We call them conscious agents. So wheelers, observer participators, we're calling them conscious agents. The big picture is we're saying that we think we'll be able to get the decorated permutations and the positive geometry. as representations of the asymptotic behavior, the long-term behavior of this dynamics of conscious agency. So there's a big dynamics. So the next layer of software can be outside of space.

The first layer of software outside of space time is a bunch of conscious agents. In a dynamical interaction. And when you look at their long-term behavior, you can describe it in terms of decorated permutations and positive geometries. And they're then they those project into space-time. That's the big picture. Jag är med oss Sandra, du och familjen fick punkka på bilen innan egens fram till djurparken. Ja, det blev häng på evigans rastplats istället.

Vi fick ju se några äckorrar i alla fall. Hoid dess naturliga habitat och allt. Dagens hjälper lite. Presenteras av Iff, som hjälper det mycket.

Yeah. Yeah. So so again to try to summarize for the audience and for my own sake, there's this long-standing problem within science of Understanding that the observer is relevant is always relevant. But then what is an observer? Is it, is it, you know, and

I w I was gonna go down this the whole like sidebar of there's all these different quantum interpretations, right? Like there's there's the multiverse theory, there's the Copenhagen interpretation, there's superdeterminism, uh and they're all kind of ways to try to at least in part address that and and other things. But let's not get lost in that and just say no one has really formalized this idea of what the observer is and how exactly the observer

And, you know, the the inherent agency involved in doing anything could actually be made into a formalized system. And and that's what you've done with conscious observers is you've actually made mathematically precise statements about what are these observers? What is an observer? What effect do they have on reality? What is their role? Um, in in uh making reality as we know it uh I guess appear to us as as a at least in your field as a cognitive scientist.

So you've actually done this. You've created this system. And not only have you created a system that relies on the notion that consciousness is fundamental, you've actually created a model for what these observers are and what these conscious agents are.

Um And in doing that, you've actually taken the first steps to showing how you can derive all of physics from consciousness, not not consciousness from as an epiphenomenon from physics or from uh neuroscience, but Flipping it around to the other point of view that no, all of this comes out of consciousness.

Um so yeah, I think so so now we're in this like really exciting new territory where we've got this theory of conscious observers. Um And I don't know if this is a good place to start getting into this new development or if we're not quite there yet, but Yeah, yeah, take it from take it from there. Yeah.

Yeah, I I'll I'll just mention because you did mention the um the other work that other of my colleagues are doing on consciousness from a f a physicalist framework. I'll I'll I'll just say one little thing o about that work. Fir first they're my friends and my colleagues and they're brilliant. They're the they're they're absolutely bright.

Um but they've set themselves up an impossible problem. They're trying to start with physical systems inside space and time, and they're trying to boot up consciousness. And it's not it's just not possible. And So the question I asked them, um, and the question that you can ask anybody who says they have a theory of consciousness that's a physicalist co uh theory is very, very simple. Great. You have a theory?

What specific conscious experience does your theory explain? That's the that's the only question you need to ask them. Can you explain the taste of men? What is your precise, scientifically precise mathematical description of the taste of mint? If it's integrated information theory, for example, what precise? Maximally integrated cause effect structure w which is a Markov matrix.

What precise matrix must be the taste of mint and could not be the smell of garlic? What are the you know, what how many um states does it have? If it has n states, what are the n squared elements of the matrix? Why do they have to be the those n squared values to be the taste event? That's all you have to ask, is what is your specific If I came to you and said, you know, I'm I've got a theory of particles.

Particle interactions? You go, oh oh great, okay. Um well give me one, Don. You know, what what what specific interaction do you can you explain? Like we have photon-electron interactions? And I said to you, Oh, I can't explain any specific experience. I just have a general theory of particle interactions.

Yeah. You would rightfully say, Well, you know, Don, come back to me when you have something interesting to say. That's not a theory. And that's where we are. And again, these are my friends and colleagues. They're brilliant. It's just not possible to boot up a theory of consciousness from physical you know, from neurons, from

from quantum states of microtubules, whatever you whatever it is. Uh from an AI system we can talk about AI if you want. Just not possible to start from physics Physical stuff in space time and build up. Um conscious. So if anybody says they've done it, then say, oh great, give me a specific example. Taste of mint, smell of garlic, whatever it is. What is your concrete example? If they can't give you one, then say, well, come back when you can give it.

Yeah. This is the Leibniz Mill thing basically, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like the yeah, like Leib Leibniz had this famous thought experiment where um if you Essentially the point that he's trying to get get to is you could never walk into any machinery or any construct and explain the consciousness that put it there. You can only talk about a and and this is and this holds true for the

for uh any technology. It holds true for the brain. Um and and that's it I did a terrible job of explaining that. But that's hopefully No that's that's perfectly good, Michael. It's perfectly good. And and so but a lot of my colleagues will will will say Uh well, Leibniz is wrong. Yes, we can. We're we're we're working on it. We'll we'll get uh neural networks or something like that, or or quantum states of microtubules. And and and

They should. They should try. Absolutely they should try. But if they say to you, I've got a theory of consciousness, then the right question. Now, now when as soon as they claim to have a theory of consciousness, that's a different game. When they claim to have a theory of consciousness, Then it's time to be very hard-nosed and say, give me one. Give me a specific example.

And if they can't give you a specific example, then um ask them when they will give you a specific example'cause that's when it's gonna be interesting. So so there there is literally nothing on the table so far in in in that. Um and And I think it's principal. I think the failure is principled. It's not because they're not smart. They they are very

And they're many of them are very, very good friends of mine. So so we have to step i entirely outside of space time. And that's a big leap. And but what w if we do that, then what we want to do is to have As simple a set of assumptions as possible. So if I'm going to start with consciousness outside of space-time, what's the simplest thing that I can do? I don't want to have a Rube Goldberg device.

Like Einstein with his special theory of relativity, he makes just two assumptions. The speed of light is the same in all um reference frames, um, and the laws of physics are the same in all, you know, for all observers, you know, all inertial observers. So reference frame, I mean inertial reference frame. So two two axioms and uh you're off to the races with an incredible theory. That's what you want, not some Rube Goldberg device.

So what's the minimum I mean when you talk about consciousness you can you can have lots and lots and lots of axioms, right? And you could proliferate axioms and some some of my colleagues do that. I th I think there's one axiom, there are conscious experiences. Taste of mint, smell of garlic, so forth. And they change. Yeah, I'm now I'm experiencing the smell of mint.

uh the the or the taste of mint and oh and now I'm having uh feeling a headache or oh now there's uh I I see the color red. There so I have experiences and then some changes of experiences. That's the minimum that we have. And so how do we what's the minimum, most general formalism that we could do write down

Well, I'll list my experiences. So here's my set of experiences, and here's the taste of mint. So I could have it turns out if you look at human perceptions, um our best psychophysics psychophysics is the scientific study of of of our our experience. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's a it's a beautiful field. It's it's a very rigorous field. It's been around since 1859, 1860. Um

Uh uh a well-established field. So we know we have on the order of trillions, humans have on the order of trillions of conscious experiences, distinguishable conscious experience. So it's it's a lot of it's a it's a big set for us. And bats you know have echolocation. So it's not just human experiences. We could imagine other animals with that you know electroreception. We don't you know they can see feel electromagnetic fields. Okay, well maybe they have something we can't.

See Umwelt is one of my favorite concepts. Like you really trying to wrap your mind around the idea that other organisms have a completely different view and range of experiences than what you have access to. Absolutely. And so we can't think big enough. We have to really go beyond the human limitations. But even with just humans, we have on the order of trillions. So that's that's big enough for for the mathematics that we're about to do. So we have trillions of experiences

And and then the transition. So I'm just gonna the the simplest mathematics that we can do is something called a markup. Where I just list my experiences and then I list for each experience what's the probability that if I'm experiencing red now, that maybe I'll experience green next or blue next, and just write all those numbers down. What are the probabilities of the Very, very simple. So I'm assuming that's it. Let me define an observer as a matrix where I list the experiences and I list

The transition probability. So if I have this experience, I'll go to that experience. Just the minimal thing I can do. So I'm not talking about anything more than that to begin with. So we decided to to go with that. We just have these Markov make And I'll call them conscious observers. And what we've been doing is e exploring them. We um What we've what we're what we've discovered in just in the last year and a half.

is we're starting to look at the relationships of these different conscious observers. So I can imagine A conscious observer with a trillion trillions of experiences, but maybe there's a conscious observer that only has a thousand of those, or ten of those, or fifty five five hundred million of them, but but not a trillion of them. How how are these observers related? How could they so we'd like to have some way of weaving them together?

And we discovered a logic. So this is actually a contribution to the mathematics of Markov chains. That there's a logic that that ties together every Markov. All of them together. And we call it the trace lot. And it's based on a a trace operation. And the trace operation has been known for many, many decades. So this is not new. Okay. Old books on on Markov James will talk about a trace operation. So if I have a a matrix on suppose I can

See 10 colors that are, you know, red, green, blue, yellow, and so forth, ten colors, and I have a matrix of how they might change. But then suppose that I can only see, say, red, green, and blue. Yeah. So the ten The the matrix that describes the transitions on ten, suppose that that's governing everything that's happening. Even though that's what's happening, I only see the red, green and blue. So I only see three.

So I'm gonna see some transitions between red, green, and blue. That's all I can see. So I I'm gonna want to describe my experience in terms of a three b you know three by three matrix of those transitions. But I d I want to have some canonical way of saying if th if these are the transitions on the ten by ten, then there's gotta be the the right answer for the three by three of what I

And that's called the trace. And there is a formula. I'd I can tell you the formula, but it may not be helpful. If we want, we can go into the mathematical formula and talk about it. But so there is a a precise formula that you can write down that says give me a big matrix. Give me any subset of its states, this formula, you crank the wheels, and out comes the thro little the smaller matrix, which is what you will see. And that's called.

So that's been known. Yeah, okay. What we discovered was that the relationship of being the trace of another matrix gives you a logic on the set of all markups. So it it's like Uh the the logic is non Boolean. So it's a it's a it's a complex logic. A Boolean logic, you know, is something like we're more used ands and ors and knots and so forth are are are distributive and things like that. This logic is non Boolean, but if I take any particular matrix

say a ten by ten, and I look at all the matrices that are its traces. So there'll be lots of traces of it. That if I just restrict attention to those matrices, so the top guy and all of its traces then they form a Boolean logic. So it's a Boolean sub So the way we then say this it it's a huge it's an infinitely large logic,'cause there's an infinite number of Markov chains that the the number of states can go to infinity.

You could literally, you know, in the you know get as a trillion is small. W that humans only have a trillion experiences, but we could go to quadrillion, sextillion, septillion, Google Plaque, whatever, you know, it's just it's it's it's as big as you want. Um, it's non-Bolean, but if you take any matrix, even you know, a sextillion uh state matrix, and look at all of its

Tra the things that are under it in the trace. They form a Boolean sub-logic, a big one. So it it is a logic. So that was a uh uh you know. contribution mathematically. But then we had that. So we're, you know, you you can see we're trying to understand. We have this very simple model of an observer. We're doing what Wheeler said. We're going to start with observer participancy. We're going to try to build up physics from that.

We got this logic that's tying all these observers together, but we still don't see how you can build physics from that.

But then we notice that if you um in Markov theory, it's standard, this is not us again, it's m it's standard that you can just Keep a counter. Every time you change your experience in the Markov chain. you just increment your counter, right? So I see red now. So that's one. Oh, now I see green. Oh, that's two. I went back to red. That's three. So every time the you update your experience, you update your counter. So these are called we call them enhanced markets.

So so this is again standard. So these enhanced Markov chains are just standard in the literature. You can find them. They're sometimes called space-time Markov chains, but we'll call them enhanced Markov chains. What I noticed year and a half ago, year, year and a half ago, was that if I take a Matrix, markov matrix, and it's running. So the 10 by 10 matrix for the color, 10 colors. And I only look at the 3x10. Notice that the counter on the three by three isn't going to be clicking.

as often as the counter of the ten by ten. Right. It's just yeah,'cause I my the the three by three only clicks if I see if red, green, or blue But the bigger counter is clicking red, green, blue, also yellow, purple, orange, black, seven other possibilities, seven other colors, right? Yeah. So it's clicking quite a bit more often. And

Uh I as I was looking at that, I thought, wait, that sounds a little bit like time dilation in Einstein's theory of relativity, right? Einstein has this notion that if Not just the notion, but he's got the mathematics of space-time built on this. If you're on a train and I'm sitting at the train station, you're on the train, you're going past.

pretty fast, and you got a meter stick and a clock. I'm sitting, I'm sitting at the train station, you're going past me, and I look at you, I'll notice that your clock is going too slow. And also notice that your meter stick is too short. But you on the train, you're looking at me sitting sitting on the at the train station.

You're looking at me and you notice from your point of view, my clock is going too slow and my meter stick is too short. So we both think the other guy's clock is slow and their meter sticks are short. That's time dilation to space space contraction. So I've realized, okay, this sounds a lot like at least the time dilation part of Einstein's theories. Could it be?

I mean Wheeler is right that that it's just the theory of o observers, observer participancy alone that could give us the structure of space time. Could it actually be Uh but but you know, I would be a fool not to to look. So I started to look with Chaiton Prakash, uh my my collaborator. We looked at this and um Didn't seem to I couldn't find any I mean, d any reason why it it shouldn't work.

for uh s you know for a certain class of Markov chains. Not for every Markov chain. For uh now this I'll I'll be c be very careful. For Einstein's special theory of relativity to start with. So this is you're you're moving without gravity, uh So we we're not gonna talk about gravity, just a a flat space. So we just started with flat space time.

Then we say, well we have to have not just a notion of time. We're gonna take this counter, this click counter is something so how cor somehow corresponding to time and And I'm seeing that the counter dilation is going to somehow correspond to time dilation. But what about length? What about that meter stick? It has to contract. And what Einstein tells us is in flat space time, the contraction is the same.

The amount that the meter stick contracts has to be the same factor that the time can is dilated, okay? So I say, well first, what is the, you know, what is distance? And one interesting way to talk about distance, there is a couple ways to talk about distance in in Markov chains. If I have two states, like the red and the green.

colors. Yep. I can ask um How long on average, how many steps of the Markov chain will I need if I if I see green now, how long on average will it take for me before I see red? And then get back to green. That's called the commute time. The expected amount of steps from green to red and back to green again is called the commute time. And you know, sometimes it'll take ten steps, maybe some one time it'll take a hundred steps, next time it might take three steps. But on average

how long is that's called the expected commute time. And um some mathematicians named Doyle and Steiner in in twenty seventeen published a paper where they said the expected commute time um maps to the So it's it it's not the distance, it's not the distance, but the square of the distance um between the two states. So so that was an a a very, very nice result. And so we asked then, um, okay.

So are there is there a class of Markov chains for which the Euclidean distances between states, as given by Barkov theory of Steiner, uh Doyle and Steiner. And the the contractions that we get from this counter um would give us the flat space times of Minkowski. And it turns out there is. There is a class of Markov chains for which and they're called the cyclic Markov chains.

Where you literally go, um, like if if you if you can only see red, green, blue, and yellow, you go red, green, blue, yellow, red, green, blue, yellow, f forever in a cycle. That's called a cyclic m market chain. Yeah. For those mark chains, you get Minkowski space. Yeah. Well you get the contractions. When I say we get Minkowski space, of course, that's saying we have a theorem. Right. Right. So what I can say is we've written down a theorem. I would say um I think we have approved.

I'm working with two mathematicians, um, Chaitan Prakash and Nifa Hermanson. Um and and so I'm not going to announce that we have a proof until the mathematicians say. So I will just say that there's a cognitive scientist who thinks that we're doing pretty well, but he's waiting for the mathematicians to give the thumbs up to say that we have the proof.

I see no obstruction. They have t told me there there's no obstruction, but this is such a a major result that we are not going to say we've got it until we've got it. So I'll just say this, it's very promising and I can't wait uh until we Nail it down, submit it for publication. and it comes out. Then then I can say. But I will I will just say this. Uh I see no obstruction um to to this at all. It it looks to me, in fact, that it

We're being exceedingly careful, but it looks to me that it's it's almost trivial. The the it looks like it's almost trivial. But again, it's it's trivial when I have some brilliant mathematicians working with me on. And then they're then they're doing the hard work. So so so yeah, to try to bring this home for people and for myself and just summarize again.

So you were able to, from this theory of conscious observers, aka these Markov chains. So the the Markov chain equals conscious observer, conscious agent. you were able to derive space-time from that. When you say Minkowski space, you mean space-time, right? Yeah, flat space-time. Yeah, flat space-time. So so Don was able to show that you could get

space-time. So like our model of this reality from a more basic level of consciousness, not the other way around. And he was able to do this through elegant math, elegant Matt, that was so straightforward that you and your mathematician collaborator were like, nah, that this is too this is too good. This is too this is too beautiful and basic. It can't this and and it no, it seems to be correct.

So it Yeah, absolutely. It seems it it seems to work and and again I I'll defer to my mathematician colleagues collaborators to to make the final pronouncement that we that we have a clean theorem. But um I I I don't see any obstruction. But notice that there was only one class of markup chains that that would do this, right? For Flatmankowski space, it's only these cyclic. And most Markov chains are not cycles, right? They're most are going to be far more complicated.

But what's interesting about those is um they will lead to the curved space times of general relativity. Because there the length contraction and time dilations are different. So that and and and I would imagine that there are gonna be some of the many of those markov chains that won't even project into curved space time. So curved space time will only be possible for a a subset of these markov

chains and then there'll be other Markov chains that just can't be represented in space time at all. Which is perfectly fine. When I've been saying the space time's just a headset, right? It's it's just one little headset that we that we use. So so this is now the the big picture on this is that the very structure of space-time. As Wheeler proposed, the first time we're going to be able is coming from the pattern of zer of observer participant. And the relationship Among observers.

And so we had to do to understand that the tr we had to have the trace logic to understand the relationship among the observers, right? So that was what the trace logic did. It says, if you have this simple model of observers as just these Markov matrices, Then you need to have understand their relationships. Well, the trace logic shows you this be deep logical relationship.

And then with that, then you start seeing how the time dilations and length contractions that could lead to space-time arise.

Now this this is just the first step. Now there's the notion of agency. So this is like passive observation, right? That now we need a notion of of agency. That takes uh to a new level. So the way I'm thinking about it now, we we published a paper where we have um a loop where we have agents, that we have um A conscious agent having a set of experiences, a set of actions, and they're interacting with this a network of other agents. We have a have a loop.

And and that's one interesting model. But now that we have the trace logic, I'm thinking right now, and I haven't written this up yet, but I'm thinking now about a different way of talking about agents. Take the whole trace logic so that it's an infinite set of observers with the this logical relationship, and define an agent on that.

So agents crawl around on the trace logic is the idea. So at any quote unquote moment, an agent is looking at the world through a particular element of the trace logic, a particular markup. And it makes an observation, then it says, Okay The agency part is now I'm going to change which matrix I'm looking for.

Maybe I'll go to a little bit bigger matrix. I'll I'll expand my horizon of experiences. Or maybe I'll contract it. Maybe I'll maybe I'll meditate and let go of all experiences for a while. Maybe maybe so I'm gonna meditate and go to nothing. or I'm going to go to a brand new part of the world and I'm going to expand my experiences. I'm just going to be open to nature. So you can imagine going small, going big,

And and then starting to have strategies for how you're changing your observations and moving around. So all of a sudden you get the notion of agency as as Crawling around on the trace logic. And the way you'd crawl around would be again using Markov kernels. Given my current way I'm looking, which which um matrix I'm looking through.

I'll have a probability distribution on where I might go next. Which other ways of looking might I choose? So that's again a Markov matrix that does that. That says for if I'm looking from this element of the of the trace logic, which new element will I likely go to? So we can re so it's gonna be a we have the trace logic on the set of all Markov chains, and then an agent is another Markov chain crawling on the trace logic. So it's it's

It's it's pretty pretty wild. So that's gonna be the a n notion of agency that I want to explore. Um I but I should say that's an idea that I've only had in the last few weeks and we have to explore it. Yeah. But So so even within this though, so so it's very exciting from a technical point of view. But really what it is is it's putting more layers of technical understanding and

it's it's putting a lot more resolution on what we've been saying this whole time, right? Like we are in this limited scope of perception. We are essentially within this headset like the the Markov chain that is me or or the that I have access to within within this field of possibilities is still limited, right? But we can but we can crawl around within a segment.

of of the trace of this larger um overarching structure, but we're still limited. We uh just because we know this doesn't mean we now have do you know the gr the the Greek word hyperxis? So so uh when you if you look at some of these so pro Proclus was really this Neoplatonist who is very uh very logical and technical and he one of his most famous works is Elements of Theology and he lays everything out.

like Euclidean proof. Like he starts out from a very, very similar axiom to you, which is like Um there is a one everything participates in some aspect of the one but but then but and then he like lays out hundreds of other like he keeps walking through this and eventually you get you get to it to this metaphysical notion Of there being something very similar to what you're describing in a more technical way, which is that you have these like gradations of uh

age agency and ontological power. And that's like kind of what this word hypoxicis means is you Higher things on the chain have more hyparksis, and then there's other things underneath those things that have less and less as it goes down. Yes. So so it puts us in this.

constraint that you've been describing as the headset, right? Or that we again we could think about as being within a game, as within Grand Theft Auto. But then there's like limitations. There's there's still these limitations as to

what we can do. But then the interesting question is, is are these insights that you're talking about, are these potential ways to increase the scope of what the headset can do? Like are are these ways to expand what a human maybe even can do?

Or are we always gonna be limited? I mean, we're gonna be limited to some degree, of course. Like I don't think it's possible for us to dissolve back into the one as a human being and like s continue to exist. But um But do do you see that as a real possibility that we're going to unlock new faculties, new modes of perception, you know, things we can't even imagine right now? Absolutely. Uh and I I so I'll first start off with uh a a statement that's you know, to put

some modesty on the whole thing. That is this is just the first layer outside of soft uh of of software outside of space time. So it's yeah. So so I'm not claiming anywhere close to a theory of everything or anything like that, but but I think With that. Proviso, I think that there's magic in the

But you know, this i i i think about it this way. If you are a wizard inside Grand Theft Dot O, you can do all sorts of amazing things and people are impressed. But if you're the geek that wrote the software Uh you can do things that the wizard doesn't understand. You can you make their car disappear, you can take the tires off their car, th y y d you can just do magic, right? Mhm. Basically

if what we're saying is correct, um, we're going to be unlocking i incredible magic. And and so I'll I'll just give you one example of the kind of magic that goes on. This time, darling. suppose I'm...I'm... able to use this big matrix. That's that's me. I'm able to I'm I've got this big matrix. My time counter is going f for every one of those experiences. And suppose that your matrix um is only, you know, one tenth

Right. Probably is done, to be honest. Well, I should have turned it the other way. So sp I'll I'll turn it around. So you've got a big matrix and and Hoffman only sees one tenth of my But who knows what it is. But so so so h I'll I'll do it I'll do it that way. So Hoffman has only ten percent of Michael's experiences. And um w what happens then is for every click of time that I see, Michael has could do ten times

Many, many other things. He could do lots of other things where I think nothing has happened for Michael. It could be a thousand years or a million years, depending on how how much bigger. You you could you could have a thousand years to do whatever you want, and for me it's instantaneous. That that means effectively that I'm a sitting doctor.

Right. Compared to you. Yeah, I'm a sitting duck. I mean, you can do whatever you want while I'm just sitting there inert, un unable to to do anything. Well, where this gets really trippy is if you ask yourself What kind of a being would that be? Like, like, like, you know, obviously, this is a fun example, you and me. But if we really try like this, really gives you some insight as to what it might be to be a higher being.

like a an alien, an angel, a whate whatever, like whatever word you want to put on it. It might be something like this. And maybe that's why when people have, you know, altered states experiences or numinous experiences, they see these things that just completely stretch. their ability to conceive. You know, like in in in like going back to biblical examples, angels always be not afraid.

I like I know whatever I'm looking like to you, it's looking real crazy. But like d try not to freak out, you know? And and that's been my experience too with altered states is is it is absolutely That Umwelt I was talking about where I can easily make sense of reality, it is shaking, man. It is it is like you know, trying as hard as it can to maintain homeostasis and it can't happen. So maybe that's what it's like for for for us in our trace.

gaining a very low pixel resolution of like what what that adding another integer, adding another possibility to that space might be like. It might be this overwhelming, numinous, uh Mysterium tremendum kind of experience. Ab absolutely. And and I've only talked about the time. There's also the space, as you were s saying. So when you you have much more dimensions of space if you have the big if you're the bigger trace.

than mine. I I'm just a small trace than you, then my distances are different from yours. I I've I've got a limited set of time, I've got a limited set you're working in a much bigger space than me. As well as you've got more time. So you can do stuff outside where I can't see. I y you could do something inside my trace. I see this. So I see an object inside the trace. You've let me see it.

And then um you then do something so that all of a sudden it looks like the thing that I see in my trace moved at Mach 40. Right. But inside your big f matrix you're you're all within your own laws of quote unquote laws of physics and your in your But because I'm at a much smaller matrix, it looks like magic to me and it looks like it's impossible to me. So literally you could be doing all sorts of stuff and I'm a sitting duck. Um, you can so there's gonna be

Uh the the technologies that would come out of this are you you can't think big enough. Yeah. And well. Well what you just described, I don't know if you want to go here, but what you just described really sounds like most people's UFO experiences when they when they see one or they try to s sense one, is these things are doing things that from our vantage point seem like it shouldn't be possible.

It shouldn't be possible to go from sea level to forty thousand feet and then back to sea level again all within a second or two, but these are supposedly things that uh fighter pilots have captured on, you know. things that w that work well enough that we're using them to like protect our

our country and our interests and fight wars and those instruments work well for those purposes. So it seems to be telling us something about something as impossible as it sounds. So maybe that's one of the only explanations. I well, you know, I I hadn't paid much attention to the UAP thing until their There was the um congressional hearing in which people under oath said

I have been part of this. I've seen the technology. I've seen non human biological And so at that point then I gave myself permission to think about, okay, um there is now some. Credible w testimony. that these things may actually exist. And it's very, very clear from the work that I've been doing independently that this kind of technology is easily possible from from th this framework. If you're if you're if you take space time as fundamental

then it's hard to explain this technology. It's just sort of like the the laws of physics simply don't allow this stuff. And it's there's no way that we can see in a space time frame where of course we still haven't united, you know really united things that that in a deep way. We don't have a theory of everything in cer in time in inside space time. The standard model goes so so far, but

Th there are things that we might try to to do inside, but still it's hard to imagine this kind of magic happening. But if you f switch frameworks, space-time is just a VR headset. Yeah. And consciousness is The creator of this headset. So and we can start to describe a layer of software outside the headset, then it's a no-brainer that if you are the VR designer, you know how it's how it's designed. Then you can do magic inside the headset as I was describing.

So I th I I'm actually it's it's almost uh scary. the technologies that can come out of this. So the the trace logic is um also quite dangerous. So I think understanding the the trace logic and and and perhaps this notion of agency um is opening up a a Pandora's box because if you think about it, this is a way of thinking about technologies that we simply have never had before. Right. We we have all of our military systems are designed With

physics inside space time. We've only used what we know about the inside of the headset. So we our our best military equipment is because um, you know, we are like the The really the the great player of Grand Theft Auto. We know how to do stuff inside the headset. But as soon as you get outside the headset and start playing with the software itself. Uh the first you know the first country to do that is

is the winner uh in in terms of of technology. There's there's not nothing that you could do to stop it. So this is uh it's a it's actually a Pandora's box um that that's happening here. So O one can only hope that w one of the big lessons here is where did the trace logic come from? Where did this theory of consciousness come from? It comes from the idea that there is that consciousness is fundamental in each one of Yeah.

simply an avatar expression of uh of a deep unified consciousness. And and So what what comes out of the trace logic is what spiritual traditions have been saying for a long time. Well, Jesus said it very, very clearly, you know, love your neighbor as yourself. Yeah. The implication being your neighbor is yourself, basically. We're w and and and that's really the point the trace logic does say all of us are in fact the one consciousness looking at itself through different headsets.

So someone who is smart enough the trace logic outside of space-time to build technologies, hopefully also is smart enough to understand what this is saying. That is that the person that you're going to use this technology on is you. That person is you. And so Be careful how you use this technology because what you're doing it the any harm that you choose to do is harm that you're doing the same. to um an avatar of your

Ultimately you aren't your avatar. You you transcend but to the extent that you don't want something to happen to your avatar, you should not want something to happen to the avatar of of another person. So I'm hoping that the the that At the same time that we get a technological boost, then we also get in some sense a moral boost from from the same

Place. Yeah. I I suspect Don and and it seems like that this is the only way I can square the circle I'm about to describe, is within a lot of that same conversation. One of the direct things you seem to be hearing more and more is that consciousness seems to be core to whatever the UAP technology is. And of course that's very speculative and hand wavy, but maybe it's something along the lines of If we do add another possibility to our, you know, Markov matrix

Maybe it's not just gonna be some new advanced physics technology. Maybe it's gonna be something that makes that statement make sense. That there is something about consciousness and physics or about reality that's intertwined in a way that right now doesn't make sense to us. But maybe just by unlocking one more gradation of reality or one new possibility or understanding

suddenly there will be some new noesis, there will be some new understanding of, oh, this is how these pieces fit together. We we thought that applied technology like this and my qualia, my conscious experience are two completely categorically different things, but maybe this is the thing that closes the gap or closes the circle or something like that. And along with that would come all kinds of epiphanies and all kinds of new um

hugely ontologically reorienting understandings in terms of what we are. And it wouldn't just be like a a conversation. It would be an I'm I'm I'm talking about like a knowing, like a new sense or a new.

thing that um of course I can't describe because it's like it's like how do you describe what you don't know. But it but it's but it's I don't know. I that's the nebulous sense that I get right uh well first I completely agree in in the following sense that What this approach is saying is that what is beyond space time is entirely contradiction.

It is entirely in some sense psychological in the way that you were talking about. So so yeah, to the extent that the UAPs have been associated with all sorts of psychological phenomena, that that also follows immediately from this the ontology of this whole approach of the trade. It's consciousness all the way down. And so in in fact, all the technologies that look physical. Everything that looks to us physical is ultimately. from from this point of view, psychological. The the very

space time itself is entirely a psychological construct. Everything inside space time is a psychological construct. Once you understand that, then that opens up the technologies um that that would seem impossible in a a physical physicalist ontology. Um and I again I don't think that we can think big enough uh uh outs outside of the the box, but I see no reason why we will be limited to to um

pre industrial uh com compared to to to what w we're going to have. And it will be uh by the way, also, you know, other experiences like people on various drug experiences like D M T and so forth. They there are some some cases they seem to be um having experiences that are

perhaps in higher dimensional spaces, not just three dimensions, right? They they might be seeing hyper dimensional objects and and and so forth. And if Einstein's space-time, his curved space-time is the fundamental nature of reality, then clearly seeing it into a you know a 30-dimensional space. uh is is only a psychological hallucination. It's not the truth. If if our ontology is that maybe a string theory, there's eleven dimensional

like that. But but yeah. Right now string theory is not it seems to be on the ropes, um among the physicists themselves. It it doesn't seem to be working in It's giving us a lot of beautiful insights mathematically and and beautiful insights physically, but as a fundamental theory of everything I I I don't see s uh physicists rallying around it like they used to. So so So when you have experiences in really high dimensional spaces under dru now it's quite possible of course that those

any particular experience is just a hallucination. You just screwing up the brain and, you know, if you've hit me on the head, yeah, I'm gonna see all sorts of stuff. But it's also possible in in the framework I'm working on that that could be a genuine insight. That maybe if we take some drugs

Um I mean so I I'm perfectly open to saying some drugs just screw your brain up and it it's hallucination and th there's no insight into a deeper reality, period. Yeah. But uh But I think that there it's certainly possible, and I'm not gonna claim claim right now any specific drug is doing this, but I can say it is at least in principle possible in the framework I'm working on to have a drug molecule that It's already in the brain, for example, and we're tweaking it.

Right. And that then that's tweaking uh dimension parameter. Well right now the dimension parameter for space is D equals three. So D, the the parameter D has the value three in our head. And we tweak this chemical, now it goes to five or ten. And all of a sudden Um we have the same kind of architecture, but this one parameter in how we build the headset gets

gets manipulated. So it could be that some simple chemical manipulation in the brain could switch from three to ten because in when I'm actually looking at the You know, how how am I going to actually build space-time from Markov matrices? So the we're so when we do these theorems, so we're pr trying to prove this theorem, right? Of how do we get Minkowski space from the theory of conscious age? What are we doing? It's not just a theorem. This is the first step.

in building the headset. That's what we're really saying. How in principle do we build the headset? So I'm already doing this. We're we're we're saying Yeah, in principle you we could build a headset. To actually prove these theorems, we have to show how To build the head.

Yeah. And when I look at that and I see it you know, look at our theorems and it's saying, Okay, this is these are the things you have to go through to to build this headset in in the theorem, there's this little parameter that I can just switch that one little parameter I'm no longer in three dimensions, I'm in five, ten, and the pr and the theorem still goes through. That's the key thing. I see the theorem is still going to go through. Three is not special.

Right. When I go to the curved space-time of Einstein, now I'll be able to see how I can warp your space time. I I I can start to play with the curvature of the case. We have several other theorems. So I've got a a number of conjectures. We want to show exactly how quantum theory and the Born rule arises from this. What's the Born rule?

So the the quantum theory, the Born rule is um when you make a measurement, what's the probability of the outcomes that you're going to see? Okay. And the and the Born rule says if you give me the amplitude The amplitude squared is Um and uh the when I say the amplitude these are complex numbers, you have to take the number of times this complex conjugate and add them up and so forth. That the amplitude squared is gives you the probability of various alpha.

So that's that's the born rule. How do you turn a complex amplitude into a real probability for what you might see? So we so in other words, what what we have to do first and and um we've got these conjectures written down and and we're going after it now. We're gonna go after these one by one. Minkowski space, curved space time. Quantum theory and the Born rule?

The Big Bang? How did how do we get a theory of the of the Big Bang? As we go through and and prove all these theorems, what we're doing is basically setting up all the mathematics that's needed to begin to reverse engineer the headset.

And so so the so we want so here's here's this is no messing around. This is the real deal where I plan to go. Space time is just a headset. Give me the precise software.

How is the headset built? So how how are we going to do that? First, with these theorems, we um by by proving the theorems we prove that it's in principle possible and we get the outlines of the construction of the We need a little bit more information about the specifics of our I mean, because there are lots of ways to build a three D space, one D time headset to get our specific one for humans.

Um the direction I I think we want to go, and I'm I'm working with some neuroscientists um on this. I am a neuroscientist myself. We have to look at the brain. There's eighty-six billion neurons, trillions of synapses. Most of my colleagues are assuming that that somehow gives rise to consciousness. I say no, no neural activity causes conscious experience. It's just the other way around. The brain is a headset representation.

Inside space time. So I'll be very explicit. I am a cognitive neuroscientist. I'm all for neuroscience. We need more funding for neuroscience, not less. We need more rigorous research. And I also believe that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived.

And those are not contradictory. So neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. And we need an order of magnitude, more funding for for neuroscience, because it's far more difficult. The real problem of neuroscience is far more difficult than neuroscience currently understands. The brain is the headset representation of how the headset is engineered. That is the key New direction for neuroscience. The brain is the headset representation.

of how much of the headset is engineered. Not all, but the whole our whole body is gonna be have to be studied as well, but the brain is gonna be a key thing. So we have to so the problem of neuroscience is to reverse engineer the brain. Not it's not just enough to understand the wiring of the brain. Once we understand that, and that and the chemicals and so forth, that's just A headset projection. of the software outside of space time, which is far more complic

So the big problem of neuroscience hasn't even been started yet. And it's crazy because it seems like every dimension, no matter how deep we look or how wide we look, within this headset, it's like hinting at that structure over and over again. Like I'm sure you've seen these how you know, cliche images at this point of how these big Galactic superclusters look very brain like that.

And to my understanding, they've done some some deeper, even like peer reviewed analysis of the similarities in architecture between, you know, galactic filaments and um galaxies. and how similar they look to the the brain structure in in not like a hand wavy, yeah, that looks similar way but a very precise way. And and it's the same thing when you look down into the dirt, right? You the the the m the

mycelial mat at the at the very root level of the planet looks the same. So it seems like every level of intelligence at least within the the headset within space time is showing us this fractal layered intelligent structure at at every level. And the question is is what

Does that tell us about well, there's many questions, but one of the questions is what does that tell us about the level of intelligence above this one? Yeah, my um my understanding from the trace logic now is uh Our headset is one of the cheaper ones, one of the more trivial ones. We we we have the and and this is a r really important point and it's it's one that's hard to un come to grips with emotionally.

It's it's very easy for us to think that we're sort of at the top of the intelligence chain. Um I look down and I see, you know, um an ant crawling around on the ground and the ant can't see what I'm doing. It doesn't know much about me. I I live in a whole world that the ant could never conceive. And so it probably knows very, very little about my world, and my world is far, I would guess, far superior and far and far richer than that of the ant. But now it

You think about that, how much do I know about the end? I don't know too that that much about the end. Well, I can do some studies on it, but um it's quite possible that my headset very rich in my experience and my complexity. And my guess is that the ant's headset isn't telling it very much about me, right? It I'm guessing that the ant's headset just um doesn't grok Hoffman at all. But

Given that logic, there's a chance that my headset isn't grokking what I'm interacting with when I see that. All I see is an ant. Maybe all the ants of Hoffman is a few years. And it's not because Hoffman is just an ant, it's just because the ant headset can't see Hoffman very well. Well, turnabout is fair play. Maybe I all uh when I see something and I call it just an end, I think it's it's trivial, I could be interacting with an intelligence that if I actually understood it, I would fall

before it in in in terror or or amazement or whatever, because this thing completely transcends me. But all I can see is an ant. So it's just it's very easy for us to mistake the limits of our headset for an insight into reality. That's the key point. What you see inside your space-time is entirely a function of the limits of your headset. It is not an insight into the alternative.

When I'm seeing a ladybug, that's it's that's the limit of my headset. What am I interacting with? If I actually knew what I was interacting with, I might fall down and worship. But all I can see is a ladybug. So so so so we have to be very, very careful to think of ourselves v the very fact that we think of ourselves as at the top of the food chain shows how benighted we are.

To the extent that I feel that I am really smarter than everything I see, that is the key evidence that I know next to none. So what what this mathematics is telling me is our headset is one of the cheapest headsets That I could imagine in the theory. It's only got a D parameter of three.

There's no reason why the D parameter could go couldn't go to a billion. Why shouldn't me uh one thing I th I I am frustrated, and I'm sure many mathematicians are frustrated, I can imagine the three-dimensional cube. And it's very helpful to imagine things when I'm trying to solve problems. Try to imagine a four dimensional cube, a tesseract. Mm-hmm. I can't do it. Yeah, me neither. And I I you know, and nobody can. Even a brilliant mathematician has to work around

this limitation of our imagination. They have to use mathematics and and tricks to Yeah, and proof, theorem and proof to get to the properties of these higher dimensional objects. Well and I'm not really someone probably will. Yeah, probably probably so. And uh I mean I I hope that someone can. And maybe you know, if on the right uh

psychedelic, perhaps someone can actually go to a four dimensional space and really see a test tract. I would love to get data that, you know, for some you know, like a real mathematician just saying, you know, so we get someone who's a a credible mathematician. that says, Yeah, I saw a Tesseract. Ian now we're talking about something really interesting. So if if you know Some psychedelic can do that, if you know psilocybin can do that or whatever, that would be very, very interesting.

There there was just a the uh sorry to interrupt th but I just wanted to uh share this and I'll I'll try to find the graphic for it. There is a someone made an animation Where there's hidden information that you cannot see unless you're on, I think it might be psilocybin or it's definitely some tryptamine where there's like there are basically like these tracers. moving and you can just see the color of the tracers or something. But if you but if you're on whatever particular um

you know, what whatever the alkaloid is, you can actually see that there's like hidden information that reveals itself under under that influence. So it could it I I do suspect, and to your point earlier, that that may be exactly what we're doing with with a certain class of substances that we are actually

Tweaking and expanding the headset to some degree. And I would love to say that I think it's just a pure flow of more real information, but I also think there's probably interference from your own mind and your own preconceived notions about reality and your own programming and your own fears and thoughts and blah blah blah that's getting all mixed in there.

So you are getting more, but you're also turning up the volume on your own psyche and and everything and everything all at the same time. And that that's sort of in my experience. It's just like more of everything, more of everything. Right. And and and again, I'll I'll you know, y I'm a hard news scientist, so I'll I'll say this. Of course, we have to be open

all the time to the uh possibility that the psychedelic drug is simply addling your brain and there's nothing deep to see here. On the other hand, we sh should be open with rigorous experiments, no hand waves. with with credible subjects where we try to explore is there something be beyond just addling the brain? I think

the the the mathematics I'm working on says there's a good possibility that that's in that we might be able to find that kind of thing and and if so we should we we should study it. But it's not enough to have of psychonauts. We we have to have more systematic, hard nosed, rigorous experiments If there are claims of interacting with entities beyond space time, then we need to substantiate those claims with hard nose.

the experiments where i information is exchanged from one person to the entities to some other person in a way that could not possibly have happened any other way. So so I I'm very, very hard nosed about all this stuff. Th th it's a balance. You have to be completely open to all these possibilities that might seem bizarre, and then you have to be completely hard-nosed about testing them. So so it's it's a balance.

completely open but but no BS at all in in the experiments and and and you have to be your own harshest critics. And so that's one reason why I'm I'm going after this with mathematicians and and it's a matter of theorem proof, theorem proof. Probabilities out of this, just going down systematically the positive sh showing how the positive geometries come exactly out. So this is all and if at any point we can't do it. It's game over. Right.

from the trace logic and this theory of agency that I talked about. If we if it's not possible, if if we can prove we can't do it, then um I will have to say that um Nice try. But this wasn't it. Um back back to the drawing board. So so this this is all fun. I'm excited about it. But uh you know

We've been disappointed many times before, so so we will see. It it's got to be theorem proof, theorem proof, not Yeah. But you have to you do have to be willing to think out of the think big, think out of the box. It's hard to think out of space time.

Um and to be rigorous at the same time. And so that's that's the the tight rope that you have to do. Yeah, I I love it, Don, and I I love everything you're doing and I deeply, deeply appreciate that you are rigorous when it comes to all this stuff and all the nuance that you put on all of your thoughts. Yet at the same time, you always display this epistemic humility and uh yeah I

I I I just I'm just so glad you're out there. I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing. Um it but speaking of theorem proof, theorem proof, I'd let's leave people with something that's not theorem proof, theorem proof. Sure. What what what has all of this led you to think about the teleology of what a human being is. Like I I know you you clearly believe

You know, there is this one and we are sort of permutations of this one experiencing itself. We we've talked about this before. I've heard you talk about it on on other podcasts. But Other than that, you know, why this headset? Why this experience? Is there something that's evolving that has this like teleological path? Or is it really just momentary thoughts in in the collective mind that's trying things out, or uh what do you think based on all of your experiences and all of your research?

That's a it's a great question. It's a very deep one. It's one that I I think about a lot. And The the one proviso going into it is that anything I say is just another thought. Right. And so i it will ultimately be only a limited perspective. So anything I can say Is never going to be the truth. But what seems to me is going on here is for some deep reason. This deepest reality that we are, that you are, that I am. So Michael and Don are just avatars of this deeper reality. That deeper reality

that transcends any description, period. Nevertheless chooses Clearly, to have this very, very rich description of itself, and looking at itself through Michael and Don avatars and losing itself. I mean, it's it's It was a shock when I didn't when I was let go of this is the a realist view of this and started to think this might be a headset. It was it was a total shock. So so here I am.

An avatar of a transcendent reality, and that transcendent reality has chosen to uh let itself get so completely taken up in a trivial game, a trivial perspective. that it's shocked to death when it realizes that this is just a trivial perspective. And most of us are in that so so here is this Transcendent being that's a good thing. If I could see you, Michael, as you were, I would fall down prostrate in in adoration.

Right. And and any any person, the the the the most insignificant person on the planet, if I really saw who they were. I would fall down in I think C. S. Lewis wrote something about this. I somewhere in one of it he said if you actually saw people as they really were, you would just fall down in in in admiration and and and

Humility be before them. And I think that's right. So that that is the core of, you know, love your neighbor as yourself. Your neighbor, the least what what looks to you like the least person is transcendent, absolutely the infinite. So the infinite lets itself in our experience here, be completely lost. to lose its identity. and then to slowly wake up. In a period of seventy, eighty years and then it's over. No ninety years and and and it's so it

And and and my guess is this is just one of an infinite number of headsets that it tries on. So so here's the b best picture I can say. And again, words are just words and the infinite transcends it. So that's the bottom line is to say even this description, even if it's mind bending for you, is not bind mind bending enough. I so I'm if I'm bending your minds great, but I'm telling you, I haven't bent your minds at all compared to what it needs to be bent, but but let's try this amount of bent.

There's an infinite number of perspectives and the one infinite consciousness is Choosing to look at itself through an infinite number of perspectives is a way of knowing itself, and it infinitely transcends them. So and my my Hoffman brain is just not big enough to handle that. I just just but apparently when we shed this headset, we will Be be that. And then we'll pop into another headset perhaps.

What do you what do you think about Federico's idea of like the say? You know, this idea that there's there is sort of a um yes, there is this one, but there's um something like a a non local version of you and a non local version of me that I mean it sounds much more like a soul, right? It sounds much more like something that persists. across physical lifetime.

Do you are are you open to something like that? Like that there that there is some sort of like meta conscious agent that is not bound to space-time that can that continues to exist across multiple incarnations or Yeah, I think um Federico and I have talked about his ideas for a long time. He has this notion of the one that's spinning off these subparts and part holes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think that there could be a lot of things.

In in the trace logic there is this notion that I'm part of uh I'm part of a per particular set of traces. And so the the the direct things that I'm traces of, yeah, there could be that there could be a relationship between that and his sayity I notion. Um But then the trace logic is non bullying, so there they're gonna be all an infinite number of other bullion logics. So there's an infinite number of these different

So there could be some connection between his notion of say which is informal, it's not a mathematical so that that's the the the problem. Right. H his theory there is is not mathematics, it's it's it you know it's it's it's informal. Um and But but yeah, there there i it it could work. Uh uh I would say that Federico and I and we've talked for many, many hours and we're very, very good friends. I would say that at at core we agree that there is this one fundamental consciousness that that it

spins off different perspectives on itself. You call them sayities or what I call'em headsets and so forth or or maybe um sequences of headsets that are related in in the in the trace logic somehow. Um I where I I I disagree with Federico in terminology is the notion of um field. I I I think I think it's the th to talk about fields could could be misleading in if it's if people are thinking about I'll let quantum fields these are fields defined over space time.

And and so if if um so I would just say that the notion of fields on space-time is is just the wrong metaphor completely for for consciousness. If we want to think about fields outside of space time, if we if then then then the use of of but then they're then then they're not quantum fields. Right. So quantum fields are fields defined in space time. So so

If so that's just the thing, the it's a terminological thing. Uh uh quantum fields are are is just the wrong terminology because that ties you to space-time. Quantum fields are defined over space-faceted. But the very notion of f uh I think Federico's idea about fields is is a good idea and a and a a good pointer,'cause any word is a pointer, as long as we completed completely dissociate it from quantum fields because The very notion of quantum itself disappears outside of our headset.

The positive geometries that the that these high-energy theoretical physicists are finding, um couldn't care less about quantum mechanics. Couldn't care less the unitarity is gone. Quantum fields are gone. Nothing there. You get quantum as a projection at the same time that you get space-time. So so that's why we have to be very, very, very careful. Tying quantum somehow with consciousness.

is tying it to the headset. Quantum is a function of the headset. It does n quantum does not transcend the headset. And consciousness does. And so that's the big and I think i I think Federico completely understands that. So it's merely a terminological thing that I'm uh being careful about. That's my sense too. Now that you said that, maybe it it just makes me wonder maybe there's a positive geometry outside of space and time.

that is like the true the true nature of Don or the true nature of Michael and it and it's that that is sort of the source of Of this, of uh or uh uh another Greek word. Have have we talked about Suntheima or Sunthamata? before. No. Um it it really reminded me of this when you were talking about if I could see the truth of what a ladybug is, I might fall down and and prostrate. That it's a it it it's usually translated as like signature or a symbol.

of something higher. And that was the idea is that like everything is some kind of symbol or signature emanating from some kind of higher transcendent um reality or source or or uh or consciousness. And then that includes us. Supposedly that's what that it what individuals are as well. It's just we're we're a we're a signature of something something else, something higher in the

in the Markov chain or or s just a trace of of whatever that is. And I don't know. It at the very least it resonates with me. And it seems like you actually are going toward proving these kinds of things done. So I I've taken a lot of your time That's that I do want to do that.

I I I I I like your idea of talking about them in this context outside of of space time, but but I I would make be be very clear. The positive geometries like the amplitude and so forth are modeling one small part of our space-time experience, and that is scattering amplified.

So they're so these geometries aren't really uh they're probably not up to the the task that you were pointing to. I mean we need a bigger stro the positive geometries are going outside of space time, so they're they're beautiful and they're brilliant and They're groundbreaking. But they're not big enough for understanding the headset and these this notion of uh Federico's notion of aseity. They're I don't think they're uh

to that job. We have to have much m more complex structures, which will then have to show how the positive geometries outside of space-time come from these deeper models of the sayies outside of space. So and the idea will be that the positive geometries only describe certain asymptotics of the rich dynamics. So we have this very, very rich dynamics, but when you only look at the asymptotics,

that's when you get these positive geometries. So it's a really Um dumbed down simplified asymptotic description. But everything you were saying was Right, in terms of the ideas, I just wanted to make this technical point. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. Well, all I can't even handle the dumbed down version.

Well, thank God you think that because like I said before, your epistemic humility just makes me love you that much more, Don, and love your work that much more. I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing. I I can't wait to see what comes of this latest discovery because it seems like a a pretty significant one. Um and yeah, man, I I really hope we have future conversations. Me too. Thank you very much, Michael. It's a pleasure. Great questions, as always, and a great pleasure to talk with you.

Now receiving frequency transmission. He sat by me and I realized with immense gratitude that dogs are all sentinels. We've merely fooled ourselves into thinking that we take care of it. But they are truly our guardians sent here to watch over us. They are angels, and yes, we He peed in the hole. And I wished that angels didn't pee in hallways. That's the thing about altered states. They don't show you what isn't their They show you what was always there hiding in plain sight.

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