I want to pitch you this theory of consciousness and reality, and I want you to tell me, as a smart person, what you think. All right, Dr. Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science and computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He

was on our show. He has posited this theory, and it starts with this basic idea, which is: do we see the world as it is, or are we seeing some fabrication that isn't even close to reality? And he actually was able to look at this

evolutionarily. He studies visual perception and how people actually perceive stuff, and what he determined through lots of different studies and also different approaches and different fields was that organisms that see reality as it actually is go extinct. So, if you see the Matrix as zeros and ones, you go

extinct. And the reason is it takes a lot of energy to actually see reality in all its complexity. And so, the second proposition is, well, then maybe we just see part of reality, but it's still real; it's just not all of reality. And that's what most visual

scientists propose. What he proposes is based on his cognitive models and his computer models and his simulations is that organisms that see any aspect of reality as it is go extinct in just a few generations, whereas organisms that see reality as a fitness icon

designed to help them reproduce, thrive. So, in other words, there is no bottle of water here as such. There's no water, there's no atoms, there's no paper, there's none of that. This is a graphical user interface that I, as a human, have evolved

to see to help me survive I see something wet that I know that if I drink it I will not die and so we have this shorthand hack in how we see the world and over and over and over he gives examples of insects who will go extinct

having sex with a beer bottle because it's perfectly hacked their interface to look like a female insect and these male insects in Australia these beetles will have sex with this bottle to the exclusion of beautiful females nearby because it is so perfect

this has been hacked in advertising with humans to make things look hyper appealing any McDonald's ad where they're opening the burger and you see the juicy cheese and all that by the way the vegans hate us don't they and all that

that's designed to hack our interface and his theory is the interface theory of perception that every species sees reality through a series of evolved hacks that allow us to reproduce and so here's the punchline of that what is reality is there a reality and what he argues is

yes there is there is an objective reality it's not we're all not just making this up our visual cortex isn't just constructing it it's not something where and he's looked at you know the number of neurons in the visual cortex is way

more than it takes to reconstruct an image but just enough to construct an image so we are constructing the world second to second in our minds every day but the question is based on what and if you look he then digs into quantum mechanics and I read his

manuscript, the book that he hasn't released yet, in quantum mechanics, they've pretty clearly established that there is no such thing as local realism. In other words, something doesn't exist until it's interacting with a conscious observer. It's a probability wave.

So, the moon maybe doesn't exist until conscious entities interface with it. But what is it that we're interfacing with? And this is what, when he, when he described this in a TED Talk and then I read his stuff and I had him on the show,

I was convinced it felt intuitively correct to me. I want to see how you feel. You may say it's [ __ ] the world is actually nothing but consciousness subdivided into things he calls conscious agents, which are little subdivisions of consciousness that sum up and break down

kind of the way you can have a one-bit conscious agent. And all a conscious agent is, is it's able to, it's a simple mathematical function, and he has the formulas to kind of show this, how they interact with each other and how they sum the smallest one bit

conscious agent is a Planck length thing, the smallest thing you can imagine that can have three things: it can perceive, it can decide, and it can act. And the currency of reality is experience, it's conscious experience from the tiniest levels all the way down,

all the way to the largest structures that we have. And so when we try to explain consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, how does the brain, how does this three pounds of wet goo create the experience of me seeing Peter in his cool racing hat with his kind of sexy stubble, which I

wish I had yeah it's an icon but I like it I'm going to call it my con because I want it um how does it create that experience the smell of baking you know bread and the answer is we've been going about it wrong we have

to invoke a miracle in our current understanding how do we go from atoms neurons to experience well at some point there's a jump that no one has been able to explain you can wave hands what he's saying is how about you start with the miracle which is

everything is awareness and consciousness and matter and neurons are icons that we use in a species-specific way to understand this vast network of social the social network of consciousness interacting with itself and so what I'm seeing what's that Tom were you saying that

sexy dude but what is really there on your inside is this vast realm of experience and perception and awareness and thought and emotion that I don't see what I see is my species specific hack that allows me to get through the world allows me to reproduce allows me to stay

alive and allows me to survive in a way because we don't have enough processing power to see what I really think is there which is this incredibly complex series of nested consciousnesses all interacting and when you talk about books like this where they talk about

sub minds and meditation what you're doing is you're taking your highest instantiation which is the kind of aggregate of all these sub minds and you're looking and listening at those inner nested consciousnesses interacting with each other and you're also connecting to maybe the deeper

connection between all of us as a higher consciousness sounds like woo, but in his formulas, he actually shows how these things work mathematically. And actually, the formula reduces to the Heisenberg sort of formula for electron probability cloud, so it's really quite fascinating.

Can it be tested experimentally? Right, so this is what he's working on now. You can computer model this stuff, and the problem is it's as valid as any other model because it's hard to test. So the question is, how do you test that we're all awareness interacting with...

awareness? Yeah, there's a famous... actually, I don't remember which physicist it was. I don't think it was Fermi, but a very famous physicist once said, 'All models are wrong, some are useful.' That's right, and he himself says this is probably only partially correct.

because the idea is then, well, why would... why would evolution even happen if conscious agents just exist and they're outside of time and space? It's really just a con... Oh, that's an important piece of this, so we're wondering about time and space and how they...

you know, how are they real? Are they an actual thing? No, they are a species-specific data compression algorithm that allows us to make sense of this social network and allows us to survive. So space and time are different for you and me, for... well, we're similar.

because we have the same species, as presumably... although you're probably more evolved than me... but like a dog or a cat or a fruit fly are all awareness interacting with other awareness, but the way they see the world in space and time is totally different.

construct and so all of it is constructed, um, which transforms in my mind, let's say it's true, and we'll talk about how we can test it because I think we should brainstorm ways to test it. But I think it transforms how you think about mental

illness. So what is mental illness, but in in our reductionist materialist viewpoint, which we're very good as doctors at thinking because we've been conditioned to think that, and I think there's a lot of truth, the way we do medicine now is we are really good at

moving the icons around on the desktop. We know that a serotonin icon when put into a human icon's bloodstream does something to a subjective description of experience from that human subject in terms of depression. But what is really happening? We're like monkeys moving these icons around, but

what's the transistors and the electrons that actually make it up? If the serotonin molecule is really a conscious agent that's the sum of little conscious agents and it's interacting with our conscious agent, that re-shifts how we think about how these medicines

work, how the mind-body connection, what if that's not correct? What if the serotonin agent doesn't have the ability to perceive? So if serotonin is actually electrons, if electrons are materially real, yeah, what if serotonin is simply nothing more than atoms, electrons, you know,

atoms with all of its constituent elements, right? Electrons, protons, neutrons. So if that's true, then it it negates the entire model because it says something is materially real. This model says there is nothing real beyond awareness itself, and it creates reality on icons that allow

it to evolve and now this is difficult stuff to grasp as scientists, which both of us are, you're much more than me because it goes against everything we've been trained on, which is the big bang happened somehow, matter organized into complex structures that through which consciousness emerged. We're saying consciousness

was and subdivided into these smaller agents that combine into bigger agents and evolve over time into complex agents like ourselves that interact with other agents and social networks that probably form higher levels of consciousness. So you could actually posit what is god, but all these conscious agents at its

highest instantiation in a way that it knows more than almost anything because it's the sum of all these agents. Now, how do you test it? So if serotonin is a molecule, then yes, our reductionist approach is right and we should continue to hammer at it. If it's wrong, we should

still hammer at the reductionist approach because we're moving icons. So as Hoffman says, he says just because the desktop trash icon on my computer desktop isn't literally a trash icon and I'm not dragging real documents into it, that doesn't mean I drag my life's work

into it and hit delete. Just because I don't take it literally doesn't mean I don't take it seriously. So yeah, we take our icons seriously. We should know all about them, but we're going to hit a wall, and I think we're getting there in our

understanding because until we understand what is the fundamental nature of reality, we're not going to be able to manipulate it in a way that reduces suffering, which I think is what we're trying to do, right? When you talk about healthspan, you're talking about the longest

possible life with the most enjoyment or happiness or fulfillment or whatever their individual's goal is and to me that's like a lack of suffering. No one wants to live to suffer unless you're a BDSM, you know, bondage person, and even that's not suffering because

it's actually pleasure for them. So suffering is a mental construct. Pain is eternal, suffering is optional because it's how we frame it. What do you think? I don't know. It's hard for me to, to actually internalize that because I mean letting go of subatomic

structures as sort of not being real is um [Music] that would just require a lot more understanding on my part. Let me say this: subatomic structures are absolutely real as icons. So in other words, they mean something, they're an image. Yeah, I think trying to imagine that they

have their own state of consciousness is, you know, it's not even for me to understand. It's not even that. So okay, let me, let me dig into that a little bit because this is something that I have to think about a lot. That's a dualist belief. So in other

words, the subatomic structure, electron, is an electron with some awareness. That's a belief called dualism. It means that there is matter and there's consciousness and they're related. What, what Hoffman's saying, what I think I intuit from this is, and I'm could absolutely be

wrong, and people get violently disagreeable to this idea. There's no electron at all. Electron is a conscious agent that we see as an electron through our species-specific interface. It's how we've evolved to see the world. We see it as, and we don't ever see electrons. We use

equipment to intuit them, but then how would we explain physical experiments that have independently validated the same construct? Meaning, so for example, when Newton came along, he was the first to define a set of physical laws and they held pretty well until the early part of the 20th century.

When at one layer below the Newtonian understanding, there was a new layer of physical laws that had to be described. Many of these laws have been independently validated and I would think that if it was all a hack, meaning if we were all creating our own construct, our own

icons, it strikes me as improbable that we would be converging on the same descriptions, the same experimental, um, identifications. This is a great way to think about it and here's how, here's how I would think about that. We have our hack, but it's based on

reality and reality is these conscious agents exchanging experience with each other. We see it as the laws of physics. We see it as an electron binding to this and this chemical reaction happening and of course it will be validated because it's actually happening in the sense that these agents are behaving

relationally to each other in predictable, precise ways that we can measure and science can quantify. It's just a question of, are they actually... wait, but why would the electrons, the protons behave in a predictable way when you and I can't behave in a predictable

because we don't behave predictably, Peter, because we are complex instantiations of multiple conscious agents that that emerge a very high level of consciousness. So part of the reason you have these voices that are telling you you're an [ __ ] and I have them is that we have

unconscious that are unconscious to us, agents that are making decisions in the background that are feeding it up to our higher instantiation. It's very unpredictable as a complex system. The simplest systems, in other words, one-bit, two-bit, 12-bit, 100-bit conscious agents behave

predictably because they have three actions: perceive, decide, act. It might be that the one-bit conscious agent can only have two perceptions, two actions, and so it sums up scientifically and mathematically as absolute predictability. Wait a second, if you collapse that to one and one

you could have a reductionist world if you had no choice. If all of the subparticles had no choice, right? Wouldn't that, it would become a semantic game. Well, if none of the particles had a choice, meaning they were, you always knew how they were going to behave, right? Right.

Right. Well, then you have, it's the same as being materialist. It's saying they have no consciousness. So that's right. The definition of this is they have choice. And here's something that's even more interesting, which again I just can't, so probabilistically, that just

strikes me as impossible. Yeah, right, because you couldn't have the order that we have in the universe if there was any choice to be made at that level. That's just, again, I'm saying this is a guy who's bullshitting because he's

hearing about this for the first time. But that's my, that's my sort of initial reaction is I don't understand how you could preserve any order in the universe if there was any choice to be made in that regard. Yeah, so what's interesting

is when you look at actual quantum mechanics there is uncertainty at the quantum level there is uncertainty but there is a prediction yeah but exactly it's defined by a probability function right but it collapses to something that's known once it's observed correct so what is observation but two

conscious agents interacting and exchanging experience that then allows this particular conscious agent to settle into a particular choice so to me it's not exclusive of that having choice at the smallest level now again this is the simplest of choices yeah and and one thing you said was

interesting to me because I struggled with this which was how can if we all see things differently as a hack how can there be reality how can they be objective predictable scientifically valid reality well look at it this way so you have um he gives the example which I think is

very powerful of synaesthetes so people who have synesthesia which is they experience the world very differently instead they smell colors or they hear sounds oh sorry no of course you hear sounds that's normal you hear sights and you see colors when you hear

sounds and he gives examples of a guy who any time he tastes mint in his hand he feels a basket of ivy and it turns out that guy is a synesthete so his interface is a mutation something has changed in the way how do you do

how do you know that without functional MRI or is that the way that one can he's actually done some of that on these guys it's interesting and the parts of the brain that light up with touch light up when he's actually thinking about mint or something so you've

basically just you've gotta you've you've uh you've re you've uh you've disaligned it, for lack of a better word, the relationship between the external and internal sensory, you know, the cortex has basically been remapped, there's some remapping now, I would argue

that the cortex is an icon we use to actually consciousness interacting with itself, but imagine that person now is a mutation of some kind that interfaces with the world differently because he can feel mint, it turns out he's a glorious chef, so he has a career as a

professional chef because he's able to take flavors and tactilely feel them and it's and to him it's real, that's interesting, it's like a basket, he's putting his hand in a basket of IV when he tastes something else, I forgot

he would make a horrible surgeon, I mean could you imagine to taste all of those body parts to be able to because you know you rely on your feelings like uh chilled monkey brains, Dr. Jones, uh no, that it's true, so a surgeon would go

extinct having that skill, but a chef would evolve, now imagine evolution starts to put pressures on us where only the best chefs get laid and have sex and reproduce, now that's the default, that's the default, so he's saying well, but see to me that is totally explainable

through Darwinian biology, right? That is completely understandable, so Darwin is essential for this theory as well, you have to, in fact, the core universal principles of Darwinism have nothing to do with DNA and molecules, they have to do with is something heritable, is there evolutionary pressure on it and

those sort of things and that works just as well with conscious agents as it does with material stuff so material subconscious agents can evolve over time to have perceptions that actually allow them to succeed in this social network where they're competing but I mean and again forgive

me for just not having a goddamn clue what you're talking about why is it that if that bottle is an icon you can't make it lift up off the table by thinking about it because in the social network of conscious agents that happen to be this way that is not a

perceptual decision or an action that's why can't you override it because you well there are rules between how these things actually interact in other words it's not a free-for-all it's not magical thinking it's not like well just because everything's awareness I

create like Deepak Chopra he'll say something like everything is consciousness and so you can secrete which is my way of using secret as a verb you can secrete success and happiness and all that well that's not true that's magical thinking what we're saying is no

there are so have you seen The Big Lebowski dude dude the dude buys stuff there are rules dude okay this isn't [ __ ] nom right there are rules and the rules are these things behave you know one of the worst parts about

trying to be health-conscious is that you can't drink white Russians as liberally as the Big Lebowski who says so you say so

This Theory Of Reality Will Melt Your Mind

This Theory Of Reality Will Melt Your Mind

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