- 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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Especially the silliness when we thought that we were so smart and we knew

So it would be interesting to explore your ideas by contrasting, you mentioned Annika, Annika Harris, you mentioned Philip Goff.

So outside of, if you're not allowed to say the fundamental disagreement is the fact that space-time is fundamental, what are interesting distinctions between ideas of consciousness, between you and Annika, for example?

You guys have, you've been on a podcast together, I'm sure in private you guys have some incredible conversations.

So where are some interesting sticking points, some interesting disagreements, let's say, with Annika first?

Well, Anika and I just had a conversation this morning where we were talking about our ideas.

And what we discovered really in our conversation was that we're pretty much on the same page.

Our ideas about consciousness are pretty much on the same page.

She rightly has cautioned me to when I talk about conscious agents to point out that the notion of agency is not fundamental in my theory.

The notion of self is not fundamental, and that's absolutely true.

I can use this network of conscious agents, and I now use as a technical term, conscious agents is a technical term for that probability space with the Markovian dynamics.

I can use that to build models of a self and to build models of agency, but they're not fundamental.

So she has really been very helpful in helping me to be a little bit clear about these ideas and not say things that are misleading.

I mean, this is the interesting thing about language actually, is that language quite obviously is an interface to truth.

It's so fascinating that individual words can have so much ambiguity and the specific choices of a word within a particular sentence, within the context of a sentence, can have such a difference in meaning.

It's quite fascinating, Especially when you're talking about topics like consciousness, because it's a very loaded term.

It means a lot of things to a lot of people.

And the entire concept of shrouded in mystery.

So combination of the fact that it's a loaded term and that there's a lot of mystery, people can just interpret it in all kinds of ways.

And so you have to be both precise and help them avoid getting stuck on some kind of side road of miscommunication, lost in translation because you used the wrong word.

I mean, because for a lot of people, consciousness is ultimately connected to a self.

I mean, our experience of consciousness is very, it's connected to this ego.

I mean, I just, I mean, what else could it possibly be?

I can't even, how do you begin to comprehend, to visualize, to conceptualize a consciousness that's not connected to this particular organism?

I'll have a way of thinking about this whole problem now that comes out of this framework that's different.

So we can imagine a dynamics of consciousness, not in space and time, just abstractly.

And you can set up a dynamics, a Markovian dynamics that is so-called stationary.

And that's a technical term, which means that the entropy effectively is not increasing.

There is some entropy, but it's constant.

And in that sense, the dynamics is timeless.

But it's a trivial theorem, 3 line proof, that if you have a stationary Markovian dynamics, any projection that you make of that dynamics by conditional probability, and if you want I can state a little bit more, even more mathematically precisely for some readers or listeners.

But if any projection you take by conditional probability, the induced image of that Markov chain will have increasing entropy.

I'll have a Markov chain X1, X2 through Xn where Xn goes to infinity, right?

The entropy H, capital H of Xn is equal to the entropy H of Xn minus 1 for all n.

But it's a theorem that H of Xn, say given X sub 1 is greater than or equal to H of Xn minus 1 given X 1.

Because with the 3 line proof, h of xn given x1 is greater than or equal to h of xn given x1 and x2, because conditioning reduces.

But then h of xn minus 1 given x1 comma x2 is equal to H of Xn given X 2, Xn minus 1 given X 2 by the Markov property.

And then because it's stationary, it's equal to h of x.

So, but the assumption of stationarity, We're using a lot of terms that people won't understand.

So there's some kind of, so Markovian dynamics is basically trying to model some kind of system with some probabilities and there's agents and they interact in some kind of way and you can say something about that system as it evolves stationarity.

So a stationary system is 1 that has certain properties in terms of entropy very well, but we don't know if it's stationary or not.

We don't know what the properties, so you have to kind of take assumptions and see, okay, well, what does the system behave like under these different properties?

The more constraints, the more assumptions you take, the more interesting, powerful things you can say, but sometimes they're limiting.

That said, we're talking about consciousness here.

How does that, you said cooperative, okay, competitive.

I'm sitting here, I have a brain, I'm wearing a suit, it sure as hell feels like I'm a self.

Now, what, am I tuning in, am I plugging into something?

Am I a projection, a simple, trivial projection into space-time from some much larger organism that I can't possibly comprehend?

How the hell, you're saying some, you're building up mathematical intuitions, Fine, great, but I'm just, I'm having an existential crisis here and I'm gonna die soon.

We'll all die pretty quickly, so I wanna figure out why chocolate's so delicious.

Right, so the whole technical thing was to say this, even if the dynamics of consciousness is stationary, so that there is no entropic time, any projection of it, any view of it will have the artifact of entropic time.

Limited resources, so the fundamental dynamics may have no limited resources whatsoever.

Any projection will have certainly time as a limited resource and probably lots of other limited resources.

Hence, we could get competition and evolution and nature red and tooth and claw as an artifact of a deeper system in which those aren't fundamental.

And in fact, I take it as something that this theory must do at some point is to show how networks of conscious agents, even if they're not resource limited, give rise to evolution of a natural selection via a projection.

Yeah, but you're saying, I'm trying to understand how the limited resources that give rise to, so first the thing gives rise to time, that gives rise to limited resource, that gives rise to evolution by natural selection, how that has to do with the fact that chocolate is delicious.

Well, it's not gonna do that directly, it's gonna get to this notion of self.

Oh, it's gonna give you the notion of self.

And also of a self separate from other selves.

that- It's competition, it has life and death, all those kinds of things.

So it won't, I don't think, as I said, I don't think that I can tell you how the formless gives rise to the experience of chocolate.

Right now my current theory says that's 1 of the miracles I'm assuming.

And the reason my theory can't do it is because Hoffman's brain can't do it right now.

But the notion of self, yes, the notion of self can be an artifact of the projection of it.

So there's 1 conscious agent, because anytime conscious agents interact, they form a new conscious agent.

Any projection of that 1 conscious agent gives rise to time, even if there wasn't any time in that 1 conscious agent.

And it gives rise, I want to, now I haven't proven this, so this is, so now this is me guessing where the theory's gonna go.

I haven't done this, There's no paper on this yet.

My guess is I'll be able to show or my brighter colleagues working with me will be able to show that we will get evolution of a natural selection, the notion of individual selves, individual physical objects and so forth coming out as a projection of this thing.

And that the self, this then will be really interesting in terms of how it starts to interact with certain spiritual traditions, right?

Where they will say that there is a notion of self that needs to be let go, which is this finite self that's competing with other selves to get more money and prestige and so forth.

That self in some sense has to die, but there's a deeper self which is the timeless being that precedes, not precludes, but precedes any particular conscious experiences, the ground of all experience.

That there's that notion of a deep capital self, but our little capital lowercase s selves could be artifacts of projection.

And it may be that what consciousness is doing in this framework is, right, it's projected itself down into a self that calls itself Don and a self that calls itself Lex.

And through conversations like this, it's trying to find out about itself and eventually transcend the limits of the Don and Lex little icons that it's using and that little projection of itself.

Through this kind of conversation, somehow it's learning about itself.

some sense, you and I are not separate from that thing and we're not separate from each other.

Yeah, well I have to question the fashion choices on my end then.

All right, so you mentioned you agree in terms of consciousness on a lot of things with Anika.

Is there somebody, friend, or friendly foe that you disagree with in some nuanced, interesting way or some major way about consciousness, about these topics of reality that you return to often.

It's like Christopher Hitchens with Rabbi David Wolpe have had interesting conversations through years that added to the complexity and the beauty of their friendship.

Is there somebody like that, that over the years has been a source of disagreement with you, that's strengthened your ideas?

ideas have been really shaped by several things.

1 is the physicalist framework that my scientific colleagues, almost to a person, have adopted and that I adopted too.

And the reason I walked away from it was because it became clear that we couldn't start with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness.

Can you define physicalist in contrast to reductionist?

So a physicalist, I would say, is someone who takes space-time and the objects within space-time as ontologically fundamental.

is saying the smaller, the more fundamental.

That's saying within space time as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space, you get deeper and deeper laws, more and more fundamental laws.

And the reduction of temperature to particle movement was an example of that.

But I think that the reason that worked was almost an artifact of the nature of our interface.

That was for a long time, and your colleagues, including yourself, were physicalists, and now you broke away.

can't start with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness.

And- LRS So even with Roger Penrose where there's like a gray area.

And here's the challenge I would put to all of my friends and colleagues who are, give 1 specific conscious experience that you can boot up, right?

So if you think that it's integrated information, and I've asked this of Giulio Tononi a couple times, back in the 90s and then just a couple years ago.

I asked Giulio, okay, so great, integrated information.

So we're all interested in explaining some specific conscious experiences.

So what is, pick 1, the taste of chocolate.

What is the integrated information, precise structure that we need for chocolate?

And why does that structure have to be for chocolate and why is it that it could not possibly be vanilla?

Is there any, I'll ask them, is there any 1 specific conscious experience that you can account for?

Because notice, they've set themselves the task of booting up conscious experiences from physical systems.

But that doesn't mean they're, I understand your intuition, but that doesn't mean they're wrong just because they can't find a way to boot it up yet.

No, that doesn't mean that they're wrong.

The reason is principled, but I'm happy that they're exploring it.

But the fact is, the remarkable fact is there's not 1 theory.

So integrated information theory, orchestrated collapse of microtubules, global workspace theory.

There's not a single theory that can give you a specific conscious experience, that they say here is the physical dynamics or the physical structure that must be the taste of chocolate or whatever 1 they want.

So you're saying it's impossible, they're saying it's just hard.

Yeah, my attitude is, Okay, no 1 said you had to start with neurons or physical systems and boot up consciousness.

So since you chose that problem, how much progress have you made?

Well, when you've not been able to come up with a single specific conscious experience,

and you've had these brilliant people working on it for decades now, that's not really good progress.

Can you try to steel man, steel man meaning, argue the best possible case for reality, the opposite of your book title.

Can you steel man the physicalist view for a brief moment, playing devil's advocate to, or Steel Man, the person you used to be.

What's a good, like saying that you might be wrong right now what would be a convincing argument for that?

Well, I think the argument I would give that I believed was, look, when you have very simple physical systems, like a piece of dirt, there's not much evidence of life for consciousness.

It's only when you get really complicated physical systems like that have brains and really, the more complicated the brains, the more it looks like there's consciousness and the more complicated that consciousness is.

Surely that means that simple physical systems don't create much consciousness, or if maybe not any, or maybe if you're having panpsychics, they create the most elementary kinds of simple conscious experiences.

But you need more complicated physical systems to boot up, to create more complicated consciousnesses.

I think that's the intuition that drives most of my colleagues.

And you're saying that this concept of complexity is ill-defined when you ground it to space-time.

I think It's well-defined within the framework

No, it'll define relative to what you need to actually understand consciousness because you're grounding complexity in space-time.

Yeah, what I'm saying is, if it were true that space-time was fundamental, then I would have to agree that if there is such a thing as consciousness, given the data that we've got that complex brains have consciousness and dirt doesn't, that somehow it's the complexity of the dynamics or organization, the function of the physical system that somehow is creating the consciousness.

So under those assumptions, yes, but when the physicists themselves are telling us that space-time is not fundamental, Then I can understand.

See, then the whole picture starts to come into focus.

I mean, Francis Crick worked on this for the last 20 years of his life.

The fact that we've come up with not a single specific conscious experience that we can explain.

And no hope, there's no 1 that says, I'm really close, I'll have it for you in a year.

No, there's just like, there's this fundamental gap.

So much so that Steve Pinker in 1 of his writings says, look, he likes the global workspace theory, but he says the last dollop of the theory in which there's something it's like to, he says, we may have to just stipulate that as a brute fact.

He understands the state of play on this problem of the hard problem of consciousness, starting with physicalist assumptions and then trying to boot up consciousness.

I'm starting with physical stuff that's not conscious.

I'm trying to get the taste of chocolate out as maybe some kind of function of the dynamics of that.

And so Pinker is saying we may have to punt, we may have to just stipulate that last bit, he calls it the last dollop and just say stipulate it as a bare fact of nature that there is something is like.

Well, from my point of view as the whole point, the whole promise of the physicalist was we wouldn't have to stipulate.

I was gonna start with the physical stuff and explain where the consciousness came from.

If I'm going to stipulate consciousness, why don't I just stipulate consciousness and not stipulate all the physical stuff too?

Well, it's actually what I call the conscious realist perspective.

Panpsychists are effectively dualists, right?

They're saying there's physical stuff that really is fundamental and then consciousness stuff.

So I would go with Pinker and say, look, let's just stipulate the consciousness stuff.

But I'm not gonna stipulate the physical stuff.

I'm gonna actually now show how to boot up the physical stuff from just the consciousness stuff.

Is it possible, so if you stipulate less, Is it possible for our limited brains to visualize reality as we delve deeper and deeper and deeper?

With the tools of math, with the tools of computers, with the tools of our mind, are we hopelessly lost?

You said there's ways to intuit what's true using mathematics and probability and sort of Markovian dynamics, all that kind of stuff, but that's not visualizing, that's what's a kind of building intuition.

But is it possible to visualize in the way we visualize so nicely in space-time in 4 dimensions, in 3 dimensions, sorry.

Well, we really are looking through a two-dimensional screen onto what we intuit to be a three-dimensional world and also inferring dynamic stuff, making it 4D.

Anyway, is it possible to visualize some pretty pictures that give us a deeper sense of the truth of reality?

I think that we will incrementally be able to do that.

I think that, for example, the picture that we have of electrons and photons interacting and scattering, it may have not been possible until Faraday did all of his experiments and then Maxwell wrote down his equations.

And we were then sort of forced by his equations to think in a new way.

And then when Planck in 1900, desperate to try to solve the problem of black-body radiation, what they call the ultraviolet catastrophe where Newton was predicting infinite energies where there weren't infinite energies in black body radiation.

And he in desperation proposed packets of energy.

Then once you've done that, and then you have an Einstein come along 5 years later and show how that explains the photoelectric effect.

And then eventually in 1926, you get quantum theory.

And then you get this whole new way of thinking that was from the Newtonian point of view, completely contradictory and counterintuitive, certainly.

And maybe if Gieson is right, not contradictory.

Maybe if you use intuitionist math, they're not contradictory, but still.

And so here's a case where the experiments and then a desperate mathematical move, sort of we use those as a flashlight into the deep fog.

Right, and so that science may be the flashlight into the deep fog.

I wonder if it's still possible to visualize in the, like we talk about consciousness from a self-perspective experience it.

Hold that idea in our mind, the way you can experience things directly.

We've evolved to experience things in this 3D world.

When you're thinking mathematically, you still in the end of the day have to project it down to a low dimensional space to make conclusions.

Their conclusions will be a number, or a line, or a plot, or a visual.

So I wonder how we can really touch some deep truth in a subjective way, like experience it, really feel the beauty of it, you know, in the way that humans feel beauty.

I think that we get little hints of it from psychedelic drugs and so forth.

We get hints that there are certain interventions that we can take on our interface.

I apply this chemical, which is just some element of my interface, to this other, to a brain, I ingest it.

And all of a sudden, I seem like I've opened new portals into conscious experiences.

That's like the black body radiation doing something that we didn't expect, right?

It doesn't go to infinity when we thought it was going to go to infinity, and we're forced to propose these quanta.

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