- The conversation with Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine, challenges the idea that what we see is the true reality
- He argues that evolution has shaped our sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior, not to perceive objective reality
- Hoffman's research shows that the probability of natural selection shaping sensory systems to see true properties of objective reality is precisely 0
- He suggests that our perceptions are there to hide the truth and provide us with "eye candy" to guide adaptive behavior
- He compares our perceptions to a user interface on a computer, hiding the complex truth behind layers of abstractions and eye candy

- The theory of evolution and modern physics are both pointing towards the limitations of space-time as a fundamental concept in understanding reality
- Physicists are finding new mathematical structures beyond space-time, leading to new insights and simplifications in computation
- The discovery of the amplituhedron and cosmological polytope are examples of these new mathematical structures
- Both evolution and physics are indicating that space-time and reductionism have been useful but are now limited in their ability to explain the nature of reality
- Physicists are making informed guesses about deeper structures beyond space-time, leading to breakthroughs in understanding reality

- Modern science is moving beyond the ontology of space-time and reductionism 
- New theories must project into space-time and align with evolution by natural selection
- The relationship between evolution and physics is based on perceptual space and time
- Science may never achieve a final theory of everything due to Godel's incompleteness theorem
- The idea of decentralized financial systems aligns with evolutionary psychology
- The evolutionary interface does not unhinge science from important testing of theories

- The idea that objects exist independently of observation is being challenged by new theories
- Gödel's work suggests that as new axiom systems are developed, we will understand what is possible within those systems
- Space-time is a construct of our sensory systems and may not map accurately to objective reality
- Physicists are exploring theories beyond space-time, but there is still a search for a dynamical theory of consciousness
- Reductionism, the idea that fundamental laws can be found by going to smaller scales in space-time, is being questioned
- The concept of reductionism has been useful in scientific explanation, but has limitations at very small scales

- The speaker discusses the concept of scale and data structures outside of space-time
- They mention the limitations of neuroscience in understanding complex systems like the human mind and computer processors
- The importance of understanding at multiple levels, from computational theory to hardware, is emphasized
- The idea of space and time being an illusion and the concept of a deeper reality beyond conceptual understanding is explored

- The speaker discusses the potential limitations of scientific understanding and the role of consciousness in it
- They suggest that the pursuit of scientific knowledge may be endless and that scientists may need to balance exploration with simply "being"
- They also discuss the potential for new insights and technological innovations through theoretical exploration
- The speaker also explores the idea that our perception of reality may have deviated from the truth throughout evolution, but that higher cognitive abilities may allow for a more accurate understanding of reality

- The speaker's graduate student used genetic algorithms to simulate evolutionary game theory
- The simulations showed that organisms with senses tracking fitness payoffs were more fit than truth seekers
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of not believing scientific theories as gospel, but using the best tools available with humility
- The limits of game theory are discussed, including the possibility of truth-seeking organisms evolving in certain conditions
- The debate between intuitionist and algorithmic approaches in mathematics is mentioned
- The speaker acknowledges the challenge of understanding the nature of reality and the limitations of game theory as a tool

- Donald Hoffman challenges the idea that what we see is true reality, arguing that our perceptions are shaped by evolution to guide adaptive behavior
- Evolution and modern physics point towards limitations of space-time as a fundamental concept in understanding reality
- Physicists are exploring new mathematical structures beyond space-time, leading to breakthroughs in understanding reality
- The concept of reductionism is being questioned, and the limitations of neuroscience in understanding complex systems are emphasized
- The pursuit of scientific knowledge may be endless, and scientists may need to balance exploration with simply "being"
- The speaker's graduate student used genetic algorithms to simulate evolutionary game theory, showing that organisms tracking fitness payoffs were more fit than truth seekers
- The importance of humility in using scientific theories and the limitations of game theory as a tool are discussed

- The piece discusses the idea of organisms adapting to fitness functions and the concept of objects in evolutionary theory
- It challenges the assumption that objects exist independently of perception and suggests that they are data structures encoding different fitness paths
- The distinction between living and non-living is questioned as an artifact of our interface
- The origin of fitness functions and the concept of life and death are explored in relation to natural selection and evolution
- The piece also touches on the idea of consciousness and the role of perception in shaping our reality.

- The speaker discusses how consciousness affects perception and creation of icons
- They question the consciousness of living beings and inanimate objects, suggesting that even a proton could have consciousness
- The portal to understanding consciousness is clearer with more complex organisms, but not with elementary particles
- The speaker discusses the role of consciousness in communication and language development
- They mention various theories on consciousness, but argue that space-time is not fundamental according to science

- The speaker argues that space-time is not fundamental and compares it to the old belief in earth, air, fire, and water as the fundamental elements
- They suggest that quarks, leptons, and gluons are more fundamental than the periodic table of elements
- The speaker believes that consciousness should be studied independently of space-time and that conscious experiences are fundamental and not derived from physics
- They also suggest that consciousness exists beyond human consciousness and permeates all matter outside of the usual definition of what matter is inside space-time

- The speaker believes that human consciousness is just one of many consciousnesses, and within human consciousness there are various types of consciousnesses.
- He discusses the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and their separate conscious experiences.
- The speaker introduces the concept of conscious agents as a mathematical structure that includes a probability measure and describes how they interact with each other.
- He suggests that networks of conscious agents are computationally universal and can capture any computable theory.
- The speaker proposes a different approach to the "hard problem" of consciousness, suggesting that consciousness is fundamental and not something that emerges from physical processes like neurons or artificial intelligence.
- He also speculates that there could be an infinite variety of consciousnesses and mathematical structures.

- The fundamental reality in this framework is consciousness, not mathematics. 
- There is an infinite variety of consciousnesses and signaling games that consciousnesses could interact via. 
- Consciousnesses could have utterly alien forms of conscious experience that may be incomprehensible to us. 
- Consciousness is proposed to be more fundamental than space-time as we perceive it. 
- The theory suggests that consciousness creates the brain, not the other way around. 
- The theory of consciousness is still in its early stages and may never have a definitive answer.

- The speaker discusses the question of how formless gives birth to form, using the example of the taste of chocolate
- They express uncertainty about whether this question can ever be fully answered
- They mention a conversation with Annika Harris about consciousness, and how their ideas are similar
- The speaker discusses the concept of a stationary dynamics of consciousness and its relation to limited resources and evolution
- The conversation ends with a question about how limited resources relate to the enjoyment of chocolate

- The text challenges the assumption of objects existing independently of perception and suggests they are data structures encoding fitness paths
- It questions the distinction between living and non-living as an artifact of our interface
- The origin of fitness functions, life, and death are explored in relation to natural selection and evolution
- The role of consciousness in shaping reality and perception is discussed
- The speaker suggests that consciousness is fundamental and not derived from physics, and that there are infinite varieties of consciousness
- The theory proposes that consciousness creates the brain, and that the concept of consciousness is still in its early stages
- The text ends with a question about how limited resources relate to the enjoyment of chocolate.

- The speaker discusses the limited resources that give rise to time and evolution by natural selection
- Evolution gives rise to the notion of self and individual selves separate from others
- The speaker speculates that consciousness is projected into individual selves and that the notion of self may be an artifact of this projection
- The speaker challenges the physicalist view of consciousness, arguing that it cannot account for specific conscious experiences
- The concept of complexity in physical systems as a determinant of consciousness is questioned

- The speaker discusses the relationship between consciousness and space-time
- Physicists claim that space-time is not fundamental, leading to a gap in understanding consciousness
- The speaker proposes the idea of conscious realism, where consciousness is fundamental and can be used to explain physical phenomena
- The speaker also discusses the possibility of visualizing and understanding reality through mathematics and intuition
- The use of psychedelic drugs and having children are suggested as ways to access new portals of consciousness

- The speaker discusses the concept of portals within consciousness and how psychedelics may affect them
- They talk about the search for structures beyond space-time and the implications for understanding consciousness
- The speaker compares their ideas to those of philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Berkeley
- They discuss the practical implications of their theory, including the ephemeral nature of reality and the need to recreate perceptions constantly

- The speaker discusses the ephemeral nature of objects and the idea that we create our reality as we perceive it
- He explores the implications of this concept on possessions, identity, and survival after death
- The speaker connects this idea to the mathematical model of conscious agents and their relationship to space-time
- He also discusses the concept of living in a simulation and the minimal requirements for creating an immersive experience in virtual reality

- The speaker discusses the experience of looking behind with eyes closed and how it is like nothing, but there is a sense of being
- They reflect on the realization that life is like a virtual reality game, with attachments and stories being part of the interface
- The speaker meditates to detach from the interface and acknowledge the present moment as the only reality
- They express fear and attachment to the interface, and the difficulty of breaking free from it
- The discussion also touches on the impact of scientific theories and the fear of breaking the brain with these ideas.

- The speaker discusses how Einstein's theory of local realism is false according to quantum theory
- He reflects on his near-death experience and how it has changed his perspective on consciousness and attachment to the physical world
- The speaker explores the role of love in the human condition and its connection to spiritual traditions
- He contemplates the idea of a common, fundamental aspect of existence, possibly represented by various concepts of God in different traditions

- The speaker discusses the limited resources that give rise to time and evolution by natural selection
- Evolution gives rise to the notion of self and individual selves separate from others
- The speaker challenges the physicalist view of consciousness, proposing the idea of conscious realism
- They discuss the concept of portals within consciousness and the search for structures beyond space-time
- The speaker reflects on the ephemeral nature of reality and the difficulty of breaking free from attachments
- They explore the impact of scientific theories and reflect on their near-death experience
- The role of love in the human condition and its connection to spiritual traditions is also contemplated

- Donald Hoffman discusses his belief that God is not a being, but rather the very ground of being itself
- He advises young people to recognize their uniqueness and potential to contribute to the universe
- He ponders the meaning of consciousness and the purpose of experiences and forms
- Hoffman shares his personal experience of facing death and the realization that consciousness immerses itself in a particular mindset before slowly waking up
- The interviewer expresses admiration for Hoffman and his insights
- The conversation ends with a quote from Albert Einstein about time and space being modes of thought rather than conditions of existence

- Hoffman believes that God is not a being, but the very ground of being itself
- He encourages young people to recognize their uniqueness and potential contribution to the universe
- He ponders the meaning of consciousness and the purpose of experiences and forms
- Hoffman shares his personal experience of facing death and the realization of consciousness immersing itself in a particular mindset before waking up
- The interviewer admires Hoffman and his insights
- The conversation ends with a quote from Albert Einstein about time and space being modes of thought rather than conditions of existence

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine and author of The Case Against Reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Donald's Twitter: https://twitter.com/donalddhoffman
Donald's Website: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
Documents & Articles:
1. Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268
2. Conscious Agent Networks: https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/CA-circuits-CSR-rev2.pdf
3. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument in Quantum Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-epr/
Books:
1. The Case Against Reality: https://amzn.to/3MhW4Wt
2. Vision: https://amzn.to/3Q4ibTm

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Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:12 - Case against reality
12:40 - Spacetime
37:04 - Reductionism
57:30 - Evolutionary game theory
1:25:53 - Consciousness
2:21:13 - Visualizing reality
2:33:48 - Immanuel Kant
2:36:30 - Ephemerality of life
2:44:56 - Simulation theory
2:50:37 - Difficult ideas
3:05:39 - Love
3:09:14 - Advice for young people
3:11:33 - Meaning of life

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Whatever reality is, it's not what you see.

What you see is just an adaptive fiction.

The following is a conversation with Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine, focusing his research on evolutionary psychology, visual perception, and consciousness.

He's the author of over 120 scientific papers on these topics, and his most recent book titled, "'The Case Against Reality', "'Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.

I think some of the most interesting ideas in this world, like those of Donald Hoffman's, attempt to shake the foundation of our understanding of reality, and thus, they take a long time to internalize deeply.

Questioning the fabric of reality can lead you to either madness or to truth.

And the funny thing is, you won't know which is which.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Donald Hoffman.

In your book, The Case Against Reality, Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, You make the bold claim that the world we see with our eyes is not real.

It's not even an abstraction of objective reality.

It is completely detached from objective reality.

Right, so this is a theorem from evolution of a natural selection.

So the technical question that I and my team asked was, what is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to see true properties of objective reality?

And to our surprise, we found that the answer is precisely 0, except for 1 kind of structure that we can go into if you want to.

But for any generic structure that you might think the world might have, a total order, a topology, metric, the probability is precisely 0 that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to see any aspect of objective reality.

So in that sense, what we're seeing is what we need to see to stay alive long enough to reproduce.

So in other words, we're seeing what we need to guide adaptive behavior, full stop.

So the evolutionary process, the process that took us from the origin of life on Earth to the humans that we are today, that process does not maximize for truth, it maximizes for fitness, as you say.

And fitness does not have to be connected to truth, is the claim.

And that's where you have an approach towards 0 of probability that we have evolved human cognition, human consciousness, whatever it is, the magic that makes our mind work, evolved not for its ability to see the truth of reality but its ability to survive in the environment.

So most of us intuitively think that surely the way that evolution will make our senses more fit is to make them tell us more truths, or at least the truths we need to know about objective reality, the truths we need in our niche.

That's the standard view, and it was the view I took.

I mean, that's sort of what we're taught, or just even assume, it's just sort of like the intelligent assumption that we would all make.

But we don't have to just wave our hands.

Evolution of a natural selection is a mathematically precise theory.

John Maynard Smith in the 70s created evolutionary game theory.

And we have evolutionary graph theory and even genetic algorithms that we can use to study this.

It's a matter of theorem and proof and or simulation before you get the theorems and proofs.

And a couple of graduate students of mine, Chester Mark and Brian Marion, did some wonderful simulations that tipped me off that there was something going on here.

And then I went to a mathematician, Chetan Prakash and Manish Singh and some other friends of mine, Chris Fields, but Chetan was the real mathematician behind all this and he's proved several theorems that uniformly indicate that with 1 exception, which has to do with probability measures, there's no, the probability is 0.

The reason there's an exception for probability measures, so-called sigma algebras or sigma additive classes, is that for any scientific theory, there is the assumption that needs to be made that whatever probabilistic structure the world may have is not unrelated to the probabilistic structure of our perceptions.

If they were completely unrelated, then no science would be possible.

So this is technically, the map from reality to our senses has to be a so-called measurable map, has to preserve sigma algebras.

But that means it could be infinite to 1, and it could collapse all sorts of event information.

But other than that, there's no requirement in standard evolutionary theory for fitness payoff functions, for example, to preserve any specific structures of objective reality.

If you look at all the fitness payoffs from whatever world structure you might want to imagine, so a world with say a total order on it.

So it's got end states and they're totally ordered.

And then you can have a set of maps from that world into a set of payoffs, say from 0 to a thousand or whatever you want your payoffs to be.

And you can just literally count all the payoff functions and just do the combinatorics and count them.

And then you can ask a precise question, how many of those payoff functions preserve the total order, if that's what you're looking for, or how many preserve the topology.

So the number that are homomorphisms versus the total number, and then take the limit as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff values goes very large.

And when you do that, you get 0 every time.

Okay, there's a million things to ask here, but first of all, just in case people are not familiar with your work, let's sort of linger on the big, bold statement here.

Which is, the thing we see with our eyes is not some kind of limited window into reality.

Okay, so none of this is real in the way we think is real.

In the way we have this intuition, There's like this table is some kind of abstraction, but underneath it all, there's atoms.

And there's an entire century of physics that describes the functioning of those atoms and the quarks that make them up.

There's many Nobel prizes about particles and fields and all that kind of stuff that slowly builds up to something that's perceivable to us, both with our eyes, with our different senses, as this table.

Then there's also ideas of chemistry that over layers of abstraction from DNA to embryos, to cells that make the human body.

It's a real experience and it's a real adaptive set of perceptions.

So it's an adaptive set of perceptions, full stop.

We want to think that the perceptions are real.

So their perceptions are real as perceptions, right?

We are having our perceptions, but we've assumed that there's a pretty tight relationship between our perceptions and reality.

If I look up and see the Moon, then there is something that exists in space and time that matches what I perceive.

And all I'm saying is that if you take evolution by natural selection seriously, then that is precluded.

Our perceptions are there, they're there to guide adaptive behavior full stop.

In fact, the way I think about it is they're there to hide the truth because the truth is too complicated.

It's just like if you're trying to, you know, use your laptop to write an email, right?

What you're doing is toggling voltages in the computer.

The reason why we have a user interface is because we don't wanna know that quote unquote truth, the diodes and resistors and all that terrible hardware.

If you had to know all that truth, your friends wouldn't hear from you.

So what evolution gave us was perceptions that guide adaptive behavior, and part of that process, it turns out, means hiding the truth and giving you eye candy.

So what's the difference between hiding the truth and forming abstractions, layers upon layers of abstractions over these, over low level voltages and transistors and chips and programming languages from assembly to Python that then leads you to be able to have an interface like Chrome where you open up another set of JavaScript and HTML programming languages that leads you to have a graphical user interface on which you can then send your friends an email.

Is that completely detached from the zeros and ones that are firing away inside the computer?

Of course, when I talk about the user interface on your desktop, there's this whole sophisticated backstory to it, right?

The hardware and the software that's allowing that to happen.

Evolution doesn't tell us the backstory, right?

So the theory of evolution is not going to be adequate to tell you what is that backstory.

It's gonna say that whatever reality is, and that's the interesting thing, it says whatever reality is, you don't see it.

You see a user interface, but it doesn't tell you what that user interface is, how it's built, right?

Now we can try to look at certain aspects of the interface, but already we're gonna look at that and go, okay, before I would look at neurons and I was assuming that I was seeing something that was at least partially true.

And now I'm realizing it could be like looking at the pixels on my desktop or icons on my desktop and good luck going from that to the data structures and then the voltages and I mean, good luck.

So what's interesting about this is that our scientific theories are precise enough and rigorous enough to tell us certain limits.

But, and even the limits of the theories themselves.

But they're not going to tell us what the next move is, and that's where scientific creativity comes in.

So the stuff that I'm saying here, for example, is not alien to physicists.

The physicists are saying precisely the same thing, that space-time is doomed.

We've assumed that space-time is fundamental.

We've assumed that for several centuries and it's been very useful.

So all the things that you were mentioning, the particles and all the work that's been done, that's all been done in space-time, but now physicists are saying space-time is doomed.

There's no such thing as space-time fundamentally in the laws of physics.

And that comes actually out of gravity together with quantum field theory.

It's a theorem of those 2 theories put together.

But it doesn't tell you what's behind it.

So the physicists know that their best theories, Einstein's gravity and quantum field theory put together, entail that space-time cannot be fundamental and therefore particles in space-time cannot be fundamental.

They're just irreducible representations of the symmetries of space-time.

So we have, so space-time, so we put the 2 together.

We put together what the physicists are discovering, and we can talk about how they do that.

And then the new discoveries from evolution of natural selection, both of these discoveries are really in the last 20 years.

And what both are saying is space-time has had a good ride.

It's been very useful, reductionism has been useful, but it's over, And it's time for us to go beyond.

When you say space-time is doomed, is it the space, is it the time, is it the very hard-coded specification of 4 dimensions?

Or are you specifically referring to the kind of perceptual domain that humans operate in, which is space-time?

You think like there's a 3D, like our world is three-dimensional and time progresses forward, therefore 3 dimensions plus 1, 4D.

What do you mean by space-time is doomed?

This is from, for example, Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

So this is not just something that cognitive scientists, this is what the physicists are saying.

LRS Yeah, they're saying that, and I can say exactly why they think it's doomed, but what they're saying is that, because your question was, what aspect of space-time, what are we talking about here?

It's both space and time, their union into space-time as in Einstein's theory, that's doomed.

And they're basically saying that even quantum theory, this is with Neemar Kani Hamed especially, so Hilbert spaces will not be fundamental either.

So that the notion of Hilbert space, which is really critical to quantum field theory, quantum information theory, that's not going to figure in the fundamental new laws of physics.

So what they're looking for is some new mathematical structures beyond space-time, beyond Einstein's four-dimensional space-time or supersymmetric version, geometric algebra signature, 2 comma 4.

There are different ways that you can represent it, but they're finding new structures.

They're finding, they found something called the amplituhedron.

This is Nima and his colleagues, the cosmological polytope.

These are, so there are these like polytopes, these polyhedra in multi dimensions, generalizations of simplices that are coding for, for example, the scattering amplitudes of processes in the Large Hadron Collider and other colliders.

So they're finding that if they let go of space-time completely, They're finding new ways of computing these scattering amplitudes that turn literally billions of terms into 1 term.

When you do it in space and time, because it's the wrong framework, it's just a user interface from that's now from the evolutionary point of view, it's just user interface, it's not a deep insight into the nature of reality.

So it's missing deep symmetry, it's something called a dual conformal symmetry, which turns out to be true of the scattering data, but you can't see it in space-time, and it's making the computations way too complicated because you're trying to compute all the loops and Feynman diagrams and all the Feynman integrals.

So see the Feynman approach to the scattering amplitudes is trying to enforce 2 critical properties of space-time, locality and unitarity.

And so by, when you enforce those, you get all these loops and multiple different levels of loops.

And for each of those, you have to add new terms to your computation.

But when you do it outside of space-time, you don't have the notion of unitarity.

You have something deeper and it's capturing some symmetries that are actually true of the data.

But then when you look at the geometry of the facets of these polytopes, then certain of them will code for unitarity and locality.

So it actually comes out of the structure of these deep polytopes.

So what we're finding is there's this whole new world now beyond space-time that is making explicit symmetries that are true of the data that cannot be seen in space-time.

And that is turning the computations from billions of terms to 1 or 2 or a handful of terms.

So we're getting insights into symmetries and all of a sudden the math is becoming simple because we're not doing something silly.

We're not adding up all these loops in space time.

But they don't know what this world is about.

So they're in an interesting position where we know that space-time is doomed and I should probably tell you why it's doomed, what they're saying about why it's doomed, but they need a flashlight to look beyond space-time.

What flashlight are we going to use to look into the dark beyond space-time?

Because Einstein's theory and quantum theory can't tell us what's beyond them.

All they can do is tell us that when you put us together, space-time is doomed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds.

Beyond that, space-time doesn't even make sense.

And so they're just looking for deep structures like guessing is really fun.

So these really brilliant guys, generic, brilliant men and women who are doing this work, physicists, are making guesses about these structures, informed guesses, because they're trying to ask, well, okay, what deeper structure could give us the stuff that we're seeing in space-time, but without certain commitments that we have to make in space time, like locality.

So they make these brilliant guesses, and of course, most of the time you're gonna be wrong, but once you get 1 or 2 that start to pay off, and then you get some lucky breaks.

Couple of mathematicians named Park and Taylor took the scattering amplitude for 2 gluons coming in at high energy and 4 gluons going out at low energy.

So apparently for people who are into this, That's sort of something that happens so often, you need to be able to find it and get rid of those because you already know about that and you need to.

It was billions of terms and they couldn't do it, even for the supercomputers couldn't do that for the many billions or millions of times per second they needed to do it.

So they begged, the experimentalists begged the theorists, please, you got to...

So Park and Taylor took the billions of terms, hundreds of pages, and miraculously turned it into 9.

And then a little bit later, they guessed 1 term expression that turned out to be equivalent.

So billions of terms reduced to 1 term, that so-called famous Park-Taylor formula, 1986.

And that was like, okay, where did that come from?

This is a pointer into a deep realm beyond space and time, but no 1, I mean, what can you do with it?

And they thought maybe it was a one-off, but then other formulas started coming up.

And then eventually, Neemar Kani Hamad and his team found this thing called the Amplituhedron, which really sort of captures a big part of the whole ball of wax.

I'm sure they would say, no, there's plenty more to do.

So I won't say they did it all by any means.

They're looking at the cosmological polytope as well.

So what's remarkable to me is that 2 pillars of modern science, quantum field theory with gravity on the 1 hand and evolution by natural selection on the other, just in the last 20 years have very clearly said, space-time has had a good run, reductionism has been a fantastic methodology.

So we had a great ontology of space-time, a great methodology of reductionism.

Now you need to go deeper and show, but by the way, this doesn't mean we throw away everything we've done, not by a long shot.

Every new idea that we come up with beyond space-time must project precisely into space-time and it better give us back everything that we know and love in space-time or generalizations, or it's not gonna be taken seriously and it shouldn't be.

So we have a strong constraint on whatever we're going to do beyond space-time.

And whatever this deeper theory is, it may not itself have evolution by natural selection.

This may not be part of this deeper realm.

But when we take whatever that thing is beyond space-time and project it into space-time, it has to look like evolution by natural selection, or it's wrong.

So that's a strong constraint on this work.

So even the evolution by natural selection and quantum field theory could be interfaces into something that doesn't look anything like, like you mentioned, I mean it's interesting to think that evolution might be a very crappy interface into something much deeper.

They're both telling us that the framework that you've had can only go so far and it has to stop and there's something beyond.

And that framework, the very framework that is space and time itself.

Now of course, evolution by natural selection is not telling us about like Einstein's relativistic space-time.

So that was another question you asked a little bit earlier.

It's telling us more about our perceptual space and time, which we have used as the basis for creating first a Newtonian space versus time as a mathematical extension of our perceptions.

And then Einstein then took that and extended it even further.

So the relationship between what evolution is telling us and what the physicists are telling us is that in some sense, the Newton and Einstein space time are formulated as rigorous extensions of our perceptual space, making it mathematically rigorous and laying out the symmetries that they find there.

So that's sort of the relationship between them.

So it's the perceptual space time that evolution is telling us is just a user interface effectively.

And then the physicists are finding that even the mathematical extension of that into the Einsteinian formulation has to be as well, not the final story, there's something deeper.

So let me ask you about reductionism and interfaces.

As we march forward from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics, These are all, in your view, interfaces.

Are we getting closer to objective reality?

How do we know, if these interfaces in the process of science, the reason we like those interfaces is because they're predictive of some aspects, strongly predictive about some aspects of our reality.

Is that completely deviating from our understanding of that reality or is it helping us get closer and closer and closer?

Well, of course, 1 critical constraint on all of our theories is that they are empirically tested and pass the experiments that we have for them.

So no one's arguing against experiments being important and wanting to test all of our current theories and any new theories on that.

But we have good reason to believe that science will never get a theory of everything.

I think that my own take is, for what it's worth, is that Gerdl's incompleteness theorem sort of points us in that direction.

That even with mathematics, any finite axiomatization that's sophisticated enough to be able to do arithmetic, it's easy to show that there'll be statements that are true, that can't be proven, can't be deduced from within that framework.

And if you add the new statements to your axioms, then there'll be always new statements that are true but can't be proven with a new axiom system.

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Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion - How Evolution Hid the Truth | Lex Fridman Podcast #293