MIT Scientist: “Your Brain Evolved To Ignore Aliens – They’re Everywhere!”

Our American Alchemist this week is Donald Hoffman. Sign Up With Our Sponsors Below For Exclusive Alchemy Deals! Qualia: Curious about creatine? Go to https://qualialife.com/JESSE to get 50% off and save an extra 15% with the code JESSE. Factor: Head to https://Factormeals.com/alchemy50off and use code alchemy50off to get 50% off Superpower: Go to https://Superpower.com and use code ALCHEMY for $20 off your membership this year. Take the guesswork out of getting healthy in 2026. Get full body testing that goes 5x deeper than an annual physical and a personalized action plan that tells you exactly what to do next. All for just $199. Donald Hoffman spent 40 years building a mathematical framework he calls the recursive trace logic. It starts with one assumption: consciousness is fundamental, not physics. From there the math takes over. He can already derive time dilation, length contraction, and quantum wave functions from these hidden markov matrices. He has nine open conjectures that, if proven, would subsume both general relativity and quantum field theory as trivial special cases of a more general theory of observation. John Wheeler cited his 1989 book on observer mechanics in the It From Bit paper. Nima Arkani-Hamed and Nobel laureate David Gross are arriving at the same conclusion from the physics side: spacetime is doomed. -------------------------- Support Our Other Projects Below! Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early/Ad Free Episodes) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Apply For Jobs ➤ [email protected] Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 2:04 - Sponsor (Factor) 3:30 - Fitness Beats Perception 7:00 - The Desktop Interface 13:26 - Near-Death & Remote Viewing 20:42 - Disembodied Consciousness 30:13 - Sponsors (Superpower, Qualia) 35:20 - Hacking Perception 46:15 - The Hard Problem 58:13 - Wheeler, Leibniz & Observers 1:01:13 - Recursive Trace Logic 1:15:12 - UAP & The Trace Logic 1:28:23 - Consciousness As Primitive 1:33:25 - Space-Time Is Doomed 1:39:12 - AI, Minsky & Mike Levin 1:47:02 - UFOs At Exit Points 1:53:46 - The Amplituhedron 2:06:41 - Quantum Interpretations 2:21:37 - Higher Intelligences 2:28:06 - Unity of Consciousness 2:34:05 - Do You Believe In God? 2:44:13 - The Table Doesn't Exist 2:52:13 - Infinite Alien Intelligences 3:01:07 - Trace Logic As AI 3:18:38 - Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  What we discovered is the probability that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any true feature of objective reality. When you do the math, the answer is zero. Exactly zero.

• 0:43Jesse Michels?

  Well, you realize you're making a very bold claim. Embodied consciousness, consciousness existing inside bodies is the exception to the rule. Detachment from the five senses actually allows you greater knowledge. A good example being near-death experiences. The amount of things that we don't see in reality. We don't see electric fields. The 8 million species are just the 8 million species that it's adaptive for our survival to see. How do we then try to triangulate and figure out what true reality actually is?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  To date, science cannot answer that question.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  There are an infinite number of alien intelligences. Our headset gives us a very, very, very tiny peek at this. And the recursive trace logic gives us a mathematical framework to begin to understand exactly how our spacetime headset is built, how it can be hacked.

• 1:38Jesse Michels?

  Whoa. So it's an infinite scale of consciousness.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  That's right, not in just one direction. In an infinite number of different directions. So this is when we get to the UAP kind of stuff. The craft seems to be here, and then it goes Mach 40. To me, it's like...

• 1:53Jesse Michels?

  When you're poking at the boundaries with your consciousness or with high-energy physics, you see these entities and you see these UFOs.

• 2:02Jesse Michels?

  Do you think we're on the verge of a scientific revolution?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  If we prove those conjectures are true, then I think it's the game changer.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Ignition frequency five.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  How is this possible? Nothing too unusual about that.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Death, existence cannot longer be denied.

• 2:34Jesse Michels?

  We've talked a bit about longevity and life extension on this show, extending your telomeres, metabolic optimization, and the through line is always the same. Most of what determines how long you live comes down to really basic stuff, not these more exotic treatments. I think about that sometimes when I realize it's 10:00 PM and I haven't eaten all day because I was deep in prep for the next episode, which is kind of the story of my life since I moved to Austin. Occasionally, I'll be so deep in work that I'll forget to eat, and then I end up demolishing whatever's closest at midnight. Guys, the solution is amazing. It's a game changer for anyone who's busy. Meals show up ready to go. You heat them up in two minutes, and they're actually made with real food.

• 3:18Jesse Michels?

  Lean proteins, whole ingredients, no seed oils, no refined sugar, over 100 options that rotate weekly. I've been doing it for a bit now, and it is embarrassingly simple. I'm not a great chef. I don't like overspending every day on delivery. I really don't know why I waited so long for this. Head to factormeals.com/ alchemy50off and use code ALKAMY50OFF. That's alchemy, five, zero, O F F, to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. The offer is only valid for new Factor customers doing an auto-renewing subscription purchase. Do yourself a favor now. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. All right, Don Hoffman, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Jess. It's great.

• 4:05Jesse Michels?

  I've seen a lot of your podcasts, and I've now read your book. And you have this incredible theory where it's not adaptive for us to see reality. And it's this idea of fitness beating perception. For the people who are unfamiliar, can you give a little bit of a summary of what you mean by that? What that is? And then I want to delve off into way crazier territory than any other podcast has taken you.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Okay. The standard idea that we have about evolution and our perceptions of the world is that evolution has shaped us to be fit. And to be fit, we should probably see the truth, right? If I see a train, I should really know that there really is a train and I won't step in front of it. If I see a cliff, I shouldn't jump off. So it would be fit, we think, to have evolution shape our sensory systems to see reality as it is. Maybe not all of reality, but but most of reality that we need. That would be a standard intuition. And there are mathematical tools now. So when Darwin wrote his theory,

• 5:16Speaker 01

  he did it based on his fieldwork and his own brilliance and came up with this evolution by natural selection idea, which is brilliant. But it took another century before we turned it into mathematics. John Maynard Smith turned it into mathematics, evolutionary game theory. So we could actually now ask technical questions. We don't have to sort of speculate. We can actually run games or prove theorems. And so I and my graduate students and collaborators have done both, testing this question. On Darwin's theory, what is the probability that evolution would shape any sensory system of any organism to see truths about the world?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  And I went into it expecting that we would maybe not see all the truth, but we would see some of it and so forth. But what we discovered was that evolution does shape us to see whatever will make us fit. And that does not mean at all that we're going to see the truth. In fact, what we discovered is the probability is zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any true feature of objective reality. Precisely zero.

• 6:30Jesse Michels?

  Can you give us a super concrete example of an organism actually not seeing reality? And that somehow being adaptive for its survival?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's plenty. Almost all of our sensory experiences are of this type, as it turns out. So when you see colors, for example, you're not seeing the electromagnetic spectrum, the actual wavelengths of photons and so forth. You're just

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Collapsing that into something that we call colors, red, green, blue, yellow, and so forth. When you taste various kinds of foods, you're not getting a chemical, you know, this is C2, H3, whatever, you are getting what we would call an experience of taste. And so the way I think about it is that it's, what you've got is not a window on reality. It's more like a, like a desktop on your computer, for example. So in a desktop, you'll see that there are icons on your screen. There might be a blue folder in the middle of your screen for some file that you're

• 7:42Speaker 01

  working on, some paper. But that doesn't mean that inside your computer, there's something that's really blue and rectangular in the middle of the computer, right? Just because it looks like that on your screen doesn't mean that that's reality. Inside the computer, there's nothing blue. There's no folder. There are just bits. There are, you know, voltages that are being toggled millions of times a second in a particular pattern. And that is hidden from you. That is way too complicated for you to deal with. If you had to toggle bits, you could never write your, your paper, for example, or edit your photo. So you don't want to toggle bits. You need to have eye candy that dumbs things down. And so that's what evolution has done for us. It's given us, you could think of it as like a desktop interface.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  So there's, whatever reality is, is quite complicated. You just need to know how to interact with reality in a useful way, to do what you need to do. Like in the case of the desktop analogy, to edit a photo, to write a paper, whatever is that you're doing. And so it would actually not be fit, in the computer analogy, to have to toggle the voltages to write a paper. If you had to toggle voltages to write a paper, someone who didn't have to do that will beat you to the, to the deadline, for example, in getting a paper done. So, so that's what evolution has done for us. It is basically hidden.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  All of reality that we don't need to know about.

• 9:08Jesse Michels?

  Well, the implications of what you're saying go even deeper because a desktop interface is built for us.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:15Jesse Michels?

  And so we, as the agents, sort of using the desktop interface, you know, the person who built it, you know, maybe Steve Dwasniak originally or something would say it's not adaptive for a person to know how, you know, logic gates and bits work and semiconductors work. So we're going to iconize all of this. We're going to compress these things and abstract all of this into symbolic logic that a person can understand. And in reality, it would work the exact same way. We wouldn't be able to manipulate reality in many cases. For example, like you said, you know, seeing the electromagnetic, you know, wave spectrum of, you know, photons, that's not super helpful.

• 9:56Jesse Michels?

  You'd want to iconize the thing, say, oh, that's red, I'm bleeding, you know, and then you can instantly react.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the same thing with like your temperature, you don't need to know the absolute temperature. You just need to know if it's too hot for me, too cold for me, or just right for me. That's all you really need to know. So you, it's, so it's really, evolution shaped us to have just the parameters we need, the sensory inputs we need to make the actions that will keep us alive long enough to reproduce. So that's the key thing is just reproductive fitness.

• 10:28Jesse Michels?

  And then there's one key difference in this analogy. In the case of, you know, desktop computers, you have supply chains where you have to scale like a repeatable process and sort of, you know, sell the same thing to everybody, maybe with a few variations. In our case, there are infinite numbers of variations when it comes to our genetics and our phenotypes. And so we're all sort of seeing a very different local reality based on our own kind of idiosyncratic perceptive apparatus.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There are remarkable cases of that. So, so for example, there are some men who are dichromats. So they only have two color photoreceptors instead of the normal three. But even more interesting are women who are tetrachromats. So they have four color receptors, not just the three that would norm. So these women actually see colors that no man could even imagine. No man has ever seen them. No man can even imagine what these women are experiencing. And, and so, yeah, there are, there's lots of variations in the headset or in the, you know, in the interface. That evolution and, and from an evolutionary point of view, you want to sort of tinker with the interface. You, you do try things. Um, there are, you know, people who are synesthetes, um, who actually

• 11:37Speaker 01

  blend colors and shapes in ways that we don't normally do that. And, and so there, so this one guy, everything that he tasted, Watson, a guy named Watson, I think, everything he tasted with his mouth, he also, uh, saw things. And, and he could feel things. So he could, he would have a sensory thing with his hands. And so he actually was a great cook because he had this extra way of, you know, relating to the cooking and the tasting. He didn't just taste it. He could say, you know, although this thing has too many dents and bumps in it or something like that. And, and, and, you know, maybe that one will, that adaptation will, will carry on or maybe, maybe not.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  But you, you, it tries a lot of different things. But, but the big idea is that evolution shapes you to be successful at reproducing, period. And seeing the truth gets in the way. Having an interface that guides adaptive behavior is exactly what you need. Now, I, I should say, I'm by no means the first to say this kind of thing. I would tip my hat to a good friend of mine, Steven Pinker, who wrote a paper, um, so how does the mind work? In which he makes this very same kind of point.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I think the place where, where Steven and I may differ is I, I'm taking and saying even what we call physical objects in space and time, everyday physical objects. There, I think he would have disagreed with me. So that would be a fun conversation. But I'm saying even this cup. Is just an icon. It's not, there's nothing about objective reality that corresponds directly to a cup. This is, this is, the cup to reality is just like the blue folder on my desktop to the bits in the computer that, that I'm dealing with. So it's that abstract a relationship.

• 13:28Jesse Michels?

  Don't a lot of babies have synesthesia up until six months as well? The sort of association of colors and sounds.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  There, there may be some evidence for that. That's not my areas, but, but yeah, I think there, there is some evidence. Synesthesia does of course carry on later on for a lot of people. So, but it's, yeah, it's, um, I actually don't know the case for the, for, for babies.

• 13:49Jesse Michels?

  I don't know if you know about this phenomena, but, um, the CIA also studied psychic spies for 30 years.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  A little bit, yes.

• 13:56Jesse Michels?

  Officially for 23 years. They probably are still studying this stuff, but there was a program called Stargate. It went under a couple of different names. Apparently a lot of the remote viewers are synesthetes as well.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 14:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. So I don't know what that means, but.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  That is, the mixing of the senses. Yeah. You have to ask what, what is the evolutionary, for example, adaptation good for if you're having synesthesia and so forth? Also, there are autistic kids who seem to have all sorts of unusual abilities as, as well, which is, again, you could ask about an evolutionary account of that, but I haven't actually looked at that. But they do seem to have sensory systems that are very different than, than normal people.

• 14:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. It seems like, yeah, there are these non-verbal autistic children. It seems like they have different epistemic circuitry or something, or in certain cases, maybe where one sense goes, another gets heightened or something.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 14:51Jesse Michels?

  Because they're non-verbal, maybe, you know, what we call intuition and the rest of us is heightened. But in fact, it doesn't even, it seems like more than intuition. It seems like a way to gather knowledge that works around the five senses.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:08Jesse Michels?

  You'll put a mother in, you know, another room of one of these children. They'll be blindfolded and, and, you know, totally separate room. You'll have random images generate on an iPad for the mother. And, you know, 19 out of 20 times, they're like describing what the mother is seeing. And from my understanding, I think some of this stuff has to be done a little more rigorously if you want to apply the real, you know, true scientific method to it. But I also think there's like an overwhelming amount of anecdotal data and and there probably is something there and it's fascinating.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  It is. I've seen those studies in which the autistic child who can hardly even control their body is able to read what's in their mother's mind. And I've looked at the design of the experiments and they seemed in certain cases to be pretty rigorous. And these kids were not just sort of guessing the numbers, they were pounding them out as fast as they could and getting it exactly right in dozens and dozens of trials. And so that's the kind of thing that you that's the kind of data you have to take quite seriously. And you're going to need a pretty serious theory outside of the normal spacetime physics kinds of theories, I think, to try to explain that kind of of non-physical connection.

• 16:23Jesse Michels?

  Well, it seems like a pattern, being disembodied and actually gaining greater knowledge because of your disembodiment. So your detachment from the five senses actually allows you greater knowledge. A good example being near death experiences where people say that they floated around the room or like learned certain things that they couldn't know if they were housed in their bodies. So it's almost like the body is a collapsing function on a greater state of default, higher knowledge.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I'm working on a mathematical model that predicts precisely that. So I've got a model we can talk about that I call the recursive trace logic.

• 17:01Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And I just discovered in the last two or three weeks that it does, this model does predict that embodiment is a special case, that the normal case for consciousness in this framework is not to be embodied. So we're, we're sort of stuck in one of the more rickety kinds of interfaces, the more, more limiting kind of interface. And but the mathematics makes it very, very clear that embodiment is not at all required for this. In fact, it's in this mathematics is measure zero, probability zero. So there, the idea would be that of all the kinds of consciousnesses that are out there, the ones that have to be embodied are probability zero, which is, which blew me away. And that's

• 17:45Speaker 01

  just been two or three weeks ago that I found it in the mathematics.

• 17:48Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. And it dovetails with a lot of religious stories around the quote unquote, fall of man.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, it's, it's, it's blown me away. So I've only had this, this mathematics.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  For about three weeks and it made me rethink this, this whole, the whole thing because

• 18:10Speaker 01

  why it's very, very, if you think about it, when you're embodied, you can't just, I mean, if I want this cup to be over there, I can't just sort of sit here and go

• 18:21Speaker 01

  and make it do that. I just can't do that. I have to, what do I have to do? There are certain things that I can control. Fingers, toes, there's very, very little, if you think about it, there's very little that I control. My mouth, my head, my, all the things we call our body, that's it. If I want that cup to go somewhere, I have to do things with my hands intelligently to make that other thing happen.

• 18:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  And then,

• 18:49Speaker 01

  so, but that's one of the restrictions of embodiment is that to get things, we, we can go to the moon. We can send probes to Mars, but to do that, we have to be exceedingly clever because all, to get to the moon, all I can do is move my fingers, my toes, my arms, that's all I can do. I have to play with the rest of reality in such a way that eventually I go to the moon. I can't just sort of, so that's-

• 19:17Jesse Michels?

  It's low bandwidth and high latency.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 19:20Jesse Michels?

  Takes a long time to, there's sort of like an intention and, you know, action, translation delay and function.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 19:29Jesse Michels?

  And then it's sort of low bandwidth too, because you just have a certain amount of neurons and, you know, even the ability to develop a sophisticated intention, you know, we're seeing L L Ms beat us all the time.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 19:39Jesse Michels?

  With things like this.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's, it's very much like giving an athlete a real handicap. So,

• 19:49Speaker 01

  so, you know, maybe everybody's running a marathon, but you, you, you make them run it with terrible shoes and, and, you know, back, you know, pack on their back and so forth and- That's sort of what embodiment is. It's sort of like you can play the game of consciousness and move things around, but you're so restricted, you have to do it in these specific ways. So you have to be very creative. You have to be very, very clever. So it may be, and this is one of the more restrictive kinds of interfaces, but on the other hand, it may be that it's a bigger challenge for consciousness. In some sense, if I just want this thing to move and it moves, not much of a challenge. If I have to actually, I mean, as a baby, you have to actually go through the whole process of learning that, you know, I don't have to slap my hand

• 20:33Speaker 01

  in my face with this thing. I could, I actually can control this thing and I can actually move things. You have to learn all this stuff and then learn that's all you can do. If I want that carrot, I actually, the carrot just won't come to me. I have to get the carrot and have to figure that all out. So it's, in some sense, even though our kind of interface that requires embodiment is probability zero in the set of all possible interfaces, it's one that really forces a certain kind of intelligence and a certain kind of problem solving. So that's an interesting look on things that you wouldn't get for a purely physicalist framework.

• 21:10Jesse Michels?

  Well, you realize you're making a very bold claim, which is you're saying that embodied consciousness, consciousness existing inside bodies is the exception to the rule.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  That's what the mathematics that I'm working on, and I should mention my colleagues, Chaitan Prakash and Robert Prentner and Manish Singh and Manifah Hermanson and others that I'm working with, is that's the work that we're doing. So it's not just me. It's a whole group of us that, and this new trace logic that we're working on, really, it just, when you look at it and ask, okay, what are bodies? How do they appear in this logic of experiences? Embodiment is very, very small. But of course, there's a lot to explain about this whole trace logic because it's, it's a mathematical foundation that's entirely non-physical. It's all about consciousness. So we'll probably need to go into the notion

• 22:04Speaker 01

  of consciousness and of observation and why we need to start science there and so forth.

• 22:08Jesse Michels?

  I want to get into the trace logic and sort of flesh that out, but...

• 22:14Jesse Michels?

  You would also have to say that you'd expect predictions and observations of non-human disembodied intelligence that's disembodied in a way that's adaptive beyond humans all over the universe. The universe would be teeming with life that is more advanced than humans and also doesn't have, you know, traditional bodies. Is that correct?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the mathematics seems to indicate that, again, embodiment is the exception, not the rule.

• 22:43Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And that our particular kind of view of the world, the kind of, I'll call it a headset, the virtual reality headset that we're using for our embodiment, is one of the more trivial kinds of headsets. So we have the, often the opinion of ourselves that we're pretty much near the top of the

• 23:04Jesse Michels?

  Food chain.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Food chain here on Earth anyways. It certainly looks like it for most of us. And that we're the most intelligent things around and so forth. But when I look at the mathematics of this trace logic, it indicates that our headset is one of the cheapest

• 23:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  most restrictive possible, and that there are all sorts of variations that are far more interesting and complicated than what we've got.

• 23:28Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's interesting. There are eight million species on Earth, and a wild thought experiment would be how many of those species think that they're at the top of the food chain? Some subset must not think that they are. They have, I'm sure, predators that seem far more sophisticated that they see at certain points in their life and freak out and, you know, try to avoid all the time. And others must live in this kind of solipsistic, you know, thing, and they think they're the most sophisticated. And so who are we to say that we're not just an example of that? And that there are things, you know, going on above our head in this sort of, the dark forest teeming with life?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  I completely agree. If you think about what I see of an ant, the ant has its life but it seems fairly simple to me. And if I think about What do I think an ant knows about me? Almost nothing, nothing about my intellectual life, my, my friends, politics, religion, I mean, does it know what, no. So, and in fact, if I were cruel, I could come over, go like that, and kill it, and it wouldn't even know that I was about to do it. So how much does the ant know about me? Almost nothing. And so, but then I have to ask myself, well, what, what, what would I look like to an ant?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Maybe I'd look like something insignificant if I looked, you know, but something insignificant.

• 24:52Jesse Michels?

  Or something cosmological, or weather phenomena, or something like.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Or just nothing at all, right?

• 24:57Jesse Michels?

  Or nothing, yeah, yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  But now, turnabout is fair play. All I see, in my perception, is something that seems fairly trivial to me. It's just an ant. But that is not necessarily an insight into reality. That's just a limitation of my headset. From my headset point of view, I see something that seems trivial, it's just an ant. What I could be interacting with, if I could actually take the headset off, I might fall down in amazement before it, right? So, so it goes both ways. I, the idea that we're the biggest thing in town is I, out the window, at least in the mathematics that I'm doing, not at all, at least our headset is nowhere near the top.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's in fact, almost as trivial as you can be, and still have a headset. So we have one of the more trivial headsets. So, so I think that, I think all around us, the things that look trivial to us, even inanimate, that's just because the headset is dumbing things down. On the other side of the headset, it's, it's, it's mind blowing what's out there.

• 26:06Jesse Michels?

  It's compressing the thing in a way that's adaptive for your own survival, and that's sort of all you can say about it.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  That, that's right, that's right. And, and by the way, that, that aspect, the evolutionary argument, I should say, that's not just a hand wave, it's a theorem. In evolutionary game theory, there are things called fitness payoff functions. And you can think of them simply as, you know, maybe, there are, I'm in. I'm an organism in a particular state, maybe I'm hungry. And I'm thinking about different actions like eating, feeding, flying, whatever. So a fitness payoff function says for a given organism, a state and an action. I'll give you a number, which is your payoff for taking that action. So maybe it goes from zero to 100, zero, you didn't, you lose 100 is the most points. And effectively, these points are saying how likely it is that you're going to survive long enough to reproduce.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Okay, so for you to be shaped by evolution, by natural selection, to see true structures in the world. The payoff functions that are guiding your evolution have to contain information about the structure of the world. For example, if there's some kind of metric structure that you want to know about the world. If that metric structure is completely unknown to your payoff function. There is no way for the payoff function to tune you to that metric structure in the world. Or if there's a topology, or if there's any kind of structure that you want to think about a partial order. If the payoff function does not know about that structure, then it can't tune you to the structure.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So there's a nice, clean question that we can ask here. For any particular structures in the world that you might want to know truthfully. Might have evolution shape you to have true perceptions of those. What is the probability that your payout, that you'll have a payoff function available to you? That would actually be able to do that, right? So this is a clean mathematical question. The payoff function has to be, when I say has to know the structure. Technically means it has to be a homomorphism of the structure. So there's a technical way for it, but informally, it just has to know about that structure. And so you can ask, what, what fraction of the possible payoff functions?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Know what you need to know to tune you to the world are homomorphisms of the structures of the world. And evolutionary theory, evolutionary game theory, does not a priori restrict the class of payoff functions. It doesn't say, this is the only class of acceptable payoff function. It just says, pick a payoff function. So we have to say, okay, we need to put all payoff functions on the table. If some genius comes along and says, for principled reasons, no, we can, we need to restrict, only these payoff functions are the legitimate ones for evolution, we'll deal with that. But right now, the current state of the scientific theory is, any payoff function is fair game. So you have to, if, when you're asking the question, in current evolutionary theory,

• 29:07Speaker 01

  with mathematical precision, what is the probability that natural selection will shape any sensory system of any organism to see some true structure of the world? When you do the math, the answer is zero, precisely zero, exactly zero. By the way, when we say something is probability zero, it can happen infinitely often. So something that's, so this is, this is a little technical, but it's important. Something that is probability zero can happen infinitely often, but it's still probability zero. And one way to think about that very simply is, if you think about just a unit square,

• 29:50Speaker 01

  and think about the probability of a region of the square as the area, right? So if it's a unit square, the whole area is just one, so the probability of being in the square is just one. If I cut it in half and say, left half or right half, well, now it's half, right? Because it's only half the area. But if I draw a little curve inside the square, well, that curve has zero area, right? So it has zero probability, but it has an infinite number of points. So here's a case of something that could happen infinitely often, but it has probability zero. And so it's in that sense that I'm saying, the probability that evolution has shaped sensory systems to see any aspect of the true structure of reality is precisely zero.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  No hand wave, it's a theorem. So do we see reality as it is? According to current evolutionary theory, absolutely not.

• 30:43Jesse Michels?

  As you know, a lot of the guests I sit down with, whether they're physicists, intelligence officers, people who've worked inside black programs, are operating at a really impressive level mentally. Sometimes I feel like I'm a chimp talking to human beings. Often their work takes a toll, and a lot of them track their health obsessively. Regular lab work, obscure biomarkers, often things that most people never look at. Meanwhile, last time I went to a primary care doctor, they ran maybe like eight biomarkers, and they told me I was fine and sent me home. This massive difference between the ordinary, broken and limited healthcare system and what elite people are doing to track their health got me interested in Superpower.

• 31:28Jesse Michels?

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• 32:11Jesse Michels?

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• 32:53Jesse Michels?

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• 33:38Jesse Michels?

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• 34:23Jesse Michels?

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• 35:03Speaker 01

  According to current evolutionary theory, absolutely not. Probabilities are all.

• 35:08Jesse Michels?

  It's a wild assertion, but it's also an intuitive one that kind of makes sense. I think a lot of people listening might have the question, okay, so I'm not seeing reality. Like, I'll take that at face value. That kind of makes sense. How do we then try to triangulate and figure out what true reality actually is? And what do we do with this theory that doesn't just instill this radical Cartesian doubt? Obviously Descartes saying that, you know, there might be this sort of demon who's able to control our perception in this totally 360 way and create the theater that we see every day. It's a thought experiment that kind of seems like it lines up with what you're saying.

• 35:49Jesse Michels?

  Where in your case, the demon is just evolutionary game theory and Darwin. In his case, it was like something with intent. But it's still, it's a scary thought, kind of, you know, one is this dog eat dog world thing. And then the other is like this maybe scarier demon thing, but they're both kind of scary. And so how do we, how do we triangulate what truth is and what, you know, the actual? So this chair I'm seeing isn't a chair that you're sitting on.

• 36:17Jesse Michels?

  What is it? How do I figure out what it actually is?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think we can do it. We have to be very, very careful. This is now where tools of mathematics are going to be very important and very powerful. But it's really important, I think, first to really understand the limitations of our own headset. And to understand how we don't see reality as it is. And I'll give you a fun example. It's the jewel beetle. It's, it's a beetle out in the outback of Australia.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  It's dimpled, glossy and brown. And the males fly, the females are flightless. The males will fly around looking for females. So this is now, you know, evolution and reproduction, the whole thing. So. When a male finds an eligible female, he elites and mates and has worked for who knows, you know, tens of thousands, who knows, hundreds of thousands of years. But so, evolution, you might think, has shaped the male beetles to know what a true female is. They know what a female beetle is. Well, the funny thing is that are these beer bottles called stubbies that are dimpled, glossy and brown, and apparently just the right color.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  So they, they, some guys, you know, in Australia are drinking them, throw them out from the outback and drive off. And the male jewel beetles flock to these bottles. They're dimpled, glossy and just the right color of brown to grab their fancy. And they crawl all over these bottles. So they have full body contact.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And they have no idea that this is not a female. And a lot of women might have something to say about this. But, but yeah, this is like, so here, and the, the real females are of no interest. The bottle, they're, they're just so, it's the male attached to the bottle and forsaking the female for the bottle. And so you might think, well, what's going on here? They successfully made it for thousands of years. What, what's going on? Well, what happened was evolution gave them a little hack. Not, not the truth, a little hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown. Apparently the bigger the better. And that's it. So all you have is a simple little hack, not the truth. And that's the kind of thing that we see over and over again. I've, I've consulted for a lot of clothing companies and, and advertising companies because

• 38:42Speaker 01

  once you know the hacks,

• 38:45Speaker 01

  you can use them in advertising, how to grab attention. So I, so I know a lot of the tricks that the visual system uses, the shortcuts.

• 38:54Jesse Michels?

  What's an example?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  So, so one example is work that I've done with clothing companies for jeans. Now, it turns out the visual system looks at shade ingredients from light to dark to create a three dimensional shape. And certain body shapes are obviously going to be more attractive than others. You know, pancake butt, probably not as good as certain other kinds of shapes. And so when a jean manufacturer is putting stitching and distress shading on their jeans, they are telling a three dimensional story. The only question is, do you know what story you're telling?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  And is it the story you want to tell? Because the visual system just is programmed. The headset is programmed to interpret these cues as a 3D shape. So, once you know how the headset program works, you can play with it. And so what happened, I talked with these jeans companies. Actually, they came to me, I didn't come to them. And because they wanted help. And so I told them, you are creating a body shape. When a person puts on those jeans and you've put distress on them, you've put stitching on them and so forth. You are telling a story. The question is, do you know the story you're telling? And is it the story you want to tell? And so I remember when I showed them their jeans, I took a picture of their jeans,

• 40:25Speaker 01

  and then just changed the shading gradient and changed the stitching a little bit to give a little bit more attractive rear end for the same person wearing it, right? I remember the CEO, I won't mention the company, but the CEO of the company, jumping out of his chair, going up to the screen and going, "Our jeans make my butt look bad," basically. And he realized, we don't have to do that. We can actually, so I, we have a little patent about how to do the distressing the right way and to get the stitching, because the stitching, the curves in the stitching, just slight variations in it, tell a big, big story to the visual system about the construction of your body.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  And that's a huge cue for the males and females use in measuring attractiveness, right? A man that looks a little bit more buff. Looks good, man with pancake butt, not, not so good. And similarly for, you know, for women. So, and if you're, if you're bigger than you want to be, you can make yourself smaller. If you're smaller than you want to be, you can, in other words, you can make any story you want. Given whatever your body is, you can make any story you want.

• 41:36Jesse Michels?

  Doesn't this freak you out for the future? I mean, that's, this is gonna end up in total dystopia because you have like AI's ability to synthetically spin up whatever image you want, like a deep fake image that looks like a person. And then you have the, you know, hips to waist ratio is exactly this to make, you know, the male demographic you're going after more attracted to the thing where the, you know, the butt flattening thing that you're talking about.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:04Jesse Michels?

  You feed all that into AI and whatever, you know, dystopian thoughts we had about Edward Bernays, you know, Freud's nephew who, you know, helped create Madison Avenue and modern advertising. I mean, this is that on steroids.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  That's, that's right. We, we have the power to do that. And the nice thing is that, of course, you can go past the normal to the super normal to the clown. Right? So, so you have to be, at some point, then it gets too much. And then all of a sudden you go, no, no, no, that, no, this is, this is no longer attractive. It's, it's, it's too super, super normal. But you could get the AI to take you right up to the max and, and, and put it right there. So, so, yes.

• 42:44Jesse Michels?

  That's scary because again, in a, in a world where, you know, corporations are trying to already hack your, you know, your perceptions, your biases that are, you know, evolutionarily baked in over thousands of years and you can't really control. You know, if, if we're like the, the beetle that sees a shiny object, you're like, we need it or whatever. How many times do you think, I mean, that's gotta be coming, right? Like as soon as we, we.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I'm already doing it with, with companies.

• 43:12Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think you should spend more time on your kind of nature of reality stuff.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Right, right. No, it's, it's, it turns out that when you study human visual attention as well. So that we've talked about human shape and attractiveness. So there are rules for attractiveness. Once you understand the rules and then you can play with them. But there's also rules for grabbing visual attention. And once you know those rules, I help companies to have their product on shelves with all the other products.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  And you can put certain patterns on your product such that there are.

• 43:52Jesse Michels?

  What's an example?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example, yeah, some unconscious unconscious mechanisms, attention mechanisms that you can grab people's attention and they don't even know what's going on. So it turns out that there for for natural reasons, evolutionarily, we have special circuitry to try to detect animate objects. And for good reason, right? Those are the animate objects are the things that could hurt you.

• 44:20Jesse Michels?

  That could kill us.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they could kill us, right? Or there are also things you may want to eat, for example, maybe it's a rabbit or something like that, you know, not today, but in our past.

• 44:30Jesse Michels?

  Some people today.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Some people today, that's right. So so it turns out that we have circuitry that

• 44:40Speaker 01

  directs attention to animate objects over other things. If you have a big field, the animate objects will will pop out. And eyes in particular grab attention. There are a particular feature. And so what you can do, and what I have done with companies is you can make something that's I like, but not obviously I like, so the competition doesn't know that you're doing it. You put it on your packaging and as your eye just goes to that package, you don't know why. The reason why is because there's we've tapped into some sub cortical hardware that's looking for animate objects like eyes.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  We grabbed that grabbed your attention and there's not a literal eye there, but we know how to grab your attention anyway with that eye program. And so you see that kind. So that's that's the kind of level that you can take the understanding of evolution. Once you understand the evolutionary mechanisms, how they're wired into your brain, your attention system, your attractiveness system, then you can play the system.

• 45:42Jesse Michels?

  Have you ever seen CBS's logo?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Not recently.

• 45:46Jesse Michels?

  It's a big eye.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, big eye. Well, yeah, right, right, right.

• 45:48Jesse Michels?

  It's adaptive for you to know that you're being watched. There's even a term called scope esthia, where statistically, it feels like people do know that they're being watched. We were talking about Rupert Sheldrake before we started rolling.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 46:00Jesse Michels?

  And so that's fascinating.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 46:03Jesse Michels?

  So you can use that in advertising.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Seeing from behind. Yeah, that's a very different thing than what I'm talking about, right? This is, this is literally an image, an abstract image of an eye, whereas Rupert's talking about being, having the sense of being stared at.

• 46:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, and that, in his case, it could be through like, you know, a video camera or like, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be an eye. But it would make conventional prosaic sense in evolutionary biology that if you see an eye, you're going to take notice. Because if you're, if you're being watched, obviously, that has all sorts of implications. If you're predator or prey.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  That's right. And it extends to bodies. So fingers and bodily shapes. So all of these things can be used cleverly and subtly to move attention around. It's quite remarkable.

• 46:49Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating. So, so like, you're inserting animate objects, basically, in the advertising? And then if you're a person walking around, you're like, oh, my God.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  But if you do it subtly, then you'll, you'll still grab their attention. And they won't know why they looked there. But, and it probably won't even, if you're really good at it, it won't even grab, make them think twice. Oh, I'm just looking at that.

• 47:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Because I chose to. No, you didn't choose to. We chose to make you look there.

• 47:14Jesse Michels?

  That's wild.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:15Jesse Michels?

  Let's move into more aspirational territory. So you're saying that you have mathematically proven that we are actually like a low-grade interface when it comes to consciousness? And it would probably be adaptive to have, to be disembodied? And that most of the universe is probably teeming with disembodied, disincarnate life? Is that roughly right?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but there's a long way to go to explain that. Because that, as you, the claim is true, but there's a lot to, to go to explain.

• 47:47Jesse Michels?

  Please.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  What's, what's going on there? So. First, we have to think about the current state of science. Right now, our best scientific theories are physicalist theories. We assume that space and time are fundamental. Einstein's general theory of relativity. And that objects inside space and time are fundamental. Particles, quantum fields. And in that framework, what you said wouldn't hold, right? But what we have to do then is look at the current scientific framework. And there's a problem with it.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  The problem is the nature of observation. So one of the biggest problems in quantum theory is the so-called measurement problem. And the problem there is evolution of states of systems seems to follow one rule, the Schrödinger revolution, when you're not looking. And a different rule when you look, the so-called collapse. The act of observing a system somehow seems to be important in the evolution that you see. So Schrödinger revolution, when you're not looking, collapse when you look. There's no, that idea has been around for literally a century. A century.

• 49:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, literally, I think it was 1927 or something.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, 1926 was Schrödinger. So 1926 Schrödinger revolution. I think 25 for Heisenberg's.

• 49:24Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  So it's been about a century. And there is no satisfactory solution to this so-called measurement problem in quantum. There are proposals, but none universally accepted. And all of them have serious problems. And I'm happy to talk about them and their problems, but.

• 49:44Jesse Michels?

  Well, even the Copenhagen interpretation is so, it's just saying that the measurement collapses the wave function into an eigenstate or whatever. What does that mean? And I always find it so interesting that you have these like pop quantum physics people now, like Sean Carroll, who, by the way, I'm a big fan of his books. I think he's amazing.

• 50:08Jesse Michels?

  These, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, some of these people will like definitively say things like, oh, when particles collide, they collapse into an eigenstate, or the, you know, the quantum detector is what's collapsing the wave function into an eigenstate. And I think it's totally unfalsifiable. What if the superposition of the observation exists in the quantum detector and then your interface, your conscious interface is collapsing that? Like, we can't say that definitively. There's no way to know exactly what's collapsing the wave function. So it's all faith-based assertions.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Well, and the key problem at the core of this whole issue is that we don't have a notion of an observer and the process of observation. That's what's missing. And if you think about it, that's not a minor point. What is science? Science is the systematic gathering of data through observations. We call them experiments. We systematically observe the world, and then based on our observations, we write down mathematical theories about what we think are the structures of the world. And we hope that somehow it's

• 51:24Speaker 01

  legitimate to think that our observations give us the kind of information that we would need to write down useful, perhaps accurate, theories about the structure of the world. But for this whole thing to work, observation has to somehow genuinely inform our theories of the world. So the question is, what is observation? Why should we believe that human observations will genuinely give us the kind of data we need to come up with legitimate theories about the world? That's a non-trivial question, and to date, science cannot answer

• 52:04Speaker 01

  that question. So what we have is this really interesting situation where we know that observers are not unimportant, they're central, and we don't have a theory.

• 52:14Jesse Michels?

  They're unremovable.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  They're unremovable. Without observers, they're There is no science and there's no reason to believe our theories and our theories.

• 52:22Jesse Michels?

  But that's not the current, the current paradigm is that we live in this materialist reductionist world where our consciousness and we are happy accidents of atoms that happenstance bounced off of one another and coalesced into like these conscious agents or whatever, this emergence is this popular term today.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Right. And so what we'd have to do then in that story, what you have to do is to show how that account could still lead to some notion of an observer that could give you data that would legitimately constrain theories about the nature of reality. And no one has done that yet. That's just, there's no accepted theory. So there's the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and then there's also the, the, the problem in, you know, studying just human observations, right? Where we're trying to say, okay, human observations, like I'm observing that I'm tasting water or something like that. So that, that's an observation. I'm tasting water. And we're trying to come up with, okay, a physiological description of the brain and brain activity that would be,

• 53:27Speaker 01

  that would give me the necessary and sufficient conditions to say that was an observation of Hoffman drinking water. It was Hoffman observing drinking water. We've been at this for, for decades, actually longer than that, but seriously for several decades, trying to understand how we could explain human observations like colors, tastes, smells, and so on, human observations in terms of either functional properties, like some kind of network, you know, computer network or whatever, or, or neural network properties of the human brain or something like that, or, or microtubules, you know, collapsing of microtubules or, or, you know, integrated information patterns and so forth. We've been trying to give a theory about observation and I know.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  The people who are doing that, they're brilliant. They're my friends. We're buddies. And there's not a single specific observation that they can account for, like the taste of mint or the smell of chocolate or something like that.

• 54:27Jesse Michels?

  So you're trying to apply math to literal human experience?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  That's right, because that's the foundation of science. If we do not have a human observation, we have no data.

• 54:40Jesse Michels?

  I agree. Not only that, but you have collapse of the quantum wave function. There's no way to even know which eigenstate, which particular state gets picked. That's all based on probabilities.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 54:52Jesse Michels?

  And so there's no way to predict, you know, let alone like some subjective experience of water or like, you know, seeing a color or an animal or whatever. Like, that feels like way above our pay grade. We don't even know about like the position and momentum of an atom or a subatomic particle, an electron or something.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  That I completely agree. And I should point out that what I'm saying here is prior to the issue of consciousness. So there are colleagues of mine who say that conscious experiences are an illusion. It's, you know, they're a construct of the brain.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  And that's perfectly fine. If you want to say that, that's perfectly fine with me. There's the attention schema theory, for example, that says this.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  But then the question is, okay, we're interested in science, not just hand waves. So I want a specific, mathematically precise attention schema for the illusion of the taste of chocolate or the illusion of the smell of chocolate or whatever it might be. So I'm a hard no scientist. I want to understand the foundations of observation because it's the foundation of science. And call it, call the, forget consciousness, just call them, consciousness is an illusion. Fine. I still need to understand how observations work. So how exactly does the illusion get done? And the answer is, there is zero on the table. There is not a single scientific theory

• 56:27Speaker 01

  about the illusion of mint or the taste of chocolate.

• 56:30Jesse Michels?

  So how do you?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  So we're nowhere on. This is really, it's stunning. Here it is 2026. And we have no theory. Of observation and observation is the foundation of everything that we can do in science. And what we need is a theory of observation that's not only precise, but that gives us, that will lead to theories that say that our understanding of observation does the right thing because we need coherence, right? Whatever our story about observation is, it has to be coherent and say that, oh yeah, this theory does allow that that observation gave you legitimate data to build the theory.

• 57:09Jesse Michels?

  So how do you think observation works?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  So I think that if we start inside a physicalist framework, we're not going to, we're not going to close that loop. I think for a couple of reasons, but I think there's logical problems, but, but also I know the players in the field, they're brilliant. I mean, they're, they're really brilliant. These are smart, smart people. Um, they're coming up empty. I, when I tried to do it, I come up completely empty. I just think it's not going, going to work. Someone can easily prove me wrong by giving one, but right now there's nothing on the table.

• 57:43Jesse Michels?

  I think we're in the stone age on it. I don't see how with math, which is so primitive, how you could ever come to encapsulate something so kind of visceral, and I'm not using multi-dimensional in a scientific way, but multi-dimensional as like just experience, everyday experience seems to, you know, it's even like, think about neuroscience, you know, which obviously you're well versed in. You have these disparate pathways of, you know, speech and reading comprehension and, you know, auditory listening, and then you have this binding problem. And so that, that's even like, that's even, you can barely explain the pathways with math. You can't.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 58:26Jesse Michels?

  So then, then why can't, then we can't, we have the binding problem where we can't explain the seamless perception of experience. So, you know, at an even lower level, like, you know, how can we explain everyday experience with math? I just think we're, you know, going to be in the dark for a long time there.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Right. And so there are, there are two problems I think you're pointing to here. One is that the math could be very, very complicated. The neuroscience is very, very complicated. So, so maybe, you know, that complexity itself is just standing in the way. But and I agree, but I think in addition, there is a principled problem. I think that that you, if you don't start with observation, you're not going to get it out of your theory. Now, this is something that Leibniz suggested back in 1700. He had this monology and and Leibniz proposed that the fundamental furniture of the universe are these monads, which were observing entities. And so there are a bunch of these different kinds of observers,

• 59:28Speaker 01

  and they were all linked together with what he called a pre-established harmony. So so there was observation and then there was some structure binding all these observers together. But we didn't really have the math. I mean, we had Newton's math. We could do, you know, time evolution theories and differential equations and so forth. So we did what we could. Leibniz had this idea, but he didn't have, he had the math that could do the, I'm sorry, the Newton kind of thing, but he couldn't, you know, they didn't have the math, the probabilistic math that we really needed to do his his thing. And more recently, you know, John Wheeler, a very, very famous physicist, worked on gravity, black, he invented the term black hole.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  He was, you know, Feynman's, Richard Feynman's advisor. He was in the who's who of physics. He came to the realization later in his career that somehow we had to start with what he called observer participants. That somehow the observer was really a critical notion that we were missing. And he felt that once we got that notion down, got it really rigorous, that we could then build up our physics from that. And so and I agree with Wheeler. I think that so he had this very famous paper in 1989. It's called the it from bit paper, informally the it from bit, that somehow it's information of some kind that you get from observation

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  that's going to be used to construct what we call the physical world. And I think that he's on to something and I've been pursuing the very, very same thing. So I've been looking for 40 years for a mathematical model of the observer as foundational. And actually Wheeler cited my work in his it from bit paper.

• 1:01:14Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  So I've got a book called, so I've been after this. So this is not a new gig for me. I've been, I published a book in 1989 called Observer Mechanics with Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash, two mathematicians. And so, you know, I've been after this observer thing, not just this last week or two, it's been 45 years I've been after. And so Wheeler cited that book as an example of the kind of thing to, to start to pursue. And then I've, I've continued to pursue because it's a deep problem. And now I, just in the last two years, you know, so it's not like we've just started, but in the last two years, we've really had a breakthrough that I can tell you about where we start with the notion of observer, we can make it rigorous.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  And then we can start to ask, how do we build spacetime as a headset? And then start to explain all these other weird phenomena that we were talking about earlier.

• 1:02:08Jesse Michels?

  Well, I want to get into that to tell me about it.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Right. So, so the basic idea is very, very simple. What's the, what's the simplest idea that you could possibly have about an observer? Well, an observer has certain outcomes, experiences that it could have, like maybe red, green and blue, just to be very, very simple. I'm at a traffic light. So red, green and yellow, say red, green and yellow. That's, those are my experiences. And then, so there's a list of the experiences for humans, it's in the trillions. We have trillions of experiences that we could have, but, but we don't, we can think about simple observers that have three. And then the other thing is to say they change. I'm seeing red now, I'm at the traffic light. I might see green a second from now.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  And then after that, I might see yellow in a minute or something. So there are experiences and then they change. Those are my, that's it. That's all I want to assume. And the question is, what is the most sort of simple, general mathematical thing that you could write down to just say, there are experiences that change. It's something called a Markov matrix. And it's just literally, you write down a matrix of numbers. If I see red now, what's the probability that I'll see red at the next instant? Or green or yellow? So three numbers and have to add up to one because it's a probability. Then the next row is if I'm seeing red now, sorry, yellow now,

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  what's the probability of seeing red, green and yellow and so forth? You just know three by three matrix of numbers. That's it. And that's going to be our theory of observation that there are. So there are millions of different matrices, countless matrices. Each one, I'm thinking about the states of the matrix as, as observer outcomes or experiences. You can think about as conscious experiences if you wish. Or if you don't believe in consciousness, you can just say observer outcomes. Whichever, you know, mathematics doesn't care what you're going to say on that. I personally think about them as conscious experiences and we can talk about why. But someone doesn't want to do that, the math is just the math. And then the idea is that you can just do one little addition to the matrix.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  That's standard in mathematics has been done for many, many decades, which is to just add and counter. So every time my experience updates, my counter increments. One experience, two experiences, three, just that drop dead simple. Just I'm counting the number of experiences that I have one after the other. That's called, we'll call those enhanced Markov chains. So now suppose I have a big, well, I'll keep it simple. My little three by three Markov chain, red, green and yellow. I'm at the traffic light. What is, but suppose that for some reason I put on glasses that don't let me see yellow, I can only see red and green. That's all I can see.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Well, so I'm still sitting at the same traffic light, but I can only see red and green, I can't see the yellow anymore. I'm going to get a certain pattern of red and green transitions that that is induced by the red, green and yellow transition, right? So it won't be, the probability of going from red to green now with just, you know, with these glasses on is going to be slightly different than red to green when I had, because yellow could have happened in there between as well, right? So now the probabilities are going to be a little bit different, but they're going to be determined by the bigger matrix, right? So the three by three matrix has the numbers that tell you what's happening. If I can only see the red and green subset, I will get a new matrix and it'll be slightly different because I can't see the yellow, but it will be a unique matrix.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Okay? That's called the trace. So this is just a standard idea in Markov chain theory that goes back many, many decades. It's not me. It's a beautiful formula that's been known and I can, if we want to get into the weeds, we can actually do the formula. It's a really interesting formula, but there's a mathematical formula called the trace. That's been known, so that's not news. It's the zero surprise description of what you will see. So if this big matrix is what's governing the reality, so to speak, and I can only see this sub-window, then the trace is the zero surprise correct answer of what you're going to see.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  You will not be surprised, that is the frequency, those are the frequencies that you will see. What I discovered two years ago was that the relationship of being a trace gives a logic on the set of all Markov chains. That was, that was the mind blowing discovery. And it was, what was stunning to me is it was so simple and no one had ever done it before. And I, so I took it, I'm not a mathematician, I know enough math to get into trouble and not enough to get out, but I'm working with mathematicians like Jay Tom Prakash and others that can get me out of trouble. So I took it to Chayton and said, "Look, Chayton, I think this thing is a logic, technically a partial order." And he said, "Don, it's too pretty to be true."

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  And he had to fly somewhere, so he got to Heathrow and decided to check, and he proved it. It's a partial order. So what we have is this operation of minimal surprise windows. So I have a big, I have all these Markov windows, and I can ask, "What are the no-surprise sub-windows?" That turns into a logic. You can talk about the and, the or, the negation, the meet and the join, and so forth. It turns out, the logic is not Boolean. It's a very non-trivial, non-Boolean logic, but it's locally Boolean.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  If I pick any matrix and look at all of its sub-matrices in the trace, they form a Boolean logic.

• 1:08:11Jesse Michels?

  Explain to the non-computer scientists what Boolean...

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Right, so for computer scientists, Boolean is very, very obvious. But a Boolean logic is, in some sense, the simplest logic. You can take two elements and take, if I have two elements, I can take their union, so I can take an element which is their union. And I can also take their intersection. I can find an element which is in both, in both of them. And I can take the negation. I could say, "What's not, what's the outside of this element?" So Boolean logic is at the foundation of a lot of classical computing stuff. So the thing, this logic is locally Boolean, is globally non-Boolean.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  And it, so the idea then, I'll connect it with Leibniz first a little bit. The idea here is that each matrix...

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Is an observer window. It's a way of seeing.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

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• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  And so it's a monad, in Leibniz's terminology. And the trace logic is the pre-established harmony. That ties them all together. That's a logic of the whole set of observer windows. Now, these matrices can get as big as you want. They can go to a trillion, off to infinity, in any direction. And so there's no top to this. So it's an incredibly complicated logic. So just allow the matrix to get as big as you want. The entries can change any way. Every possible arrangement of entries, as long as each row sums to 1, it counts. So this is a huge, huge space of observers.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  And the single logic that ties them all together that says this is the no-surprise logic of all observation. So this gives you all possible observations and the no-surprise logic. And we still don't understand all the details of this logic. We don't have a general formula for the union, the join. Chaitan has a formula in special cases where he can compute the join. We don't have a general formula for the join. We don't actually have a theorem yet that you can actually write down a general formula for the join. So it's going to be really... So there's some interesting, open mathematical problems here. Now, that's... But now, we can take it one more step. Those are just observer windows. There's no notion of agency yet.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  For agency, we can step back and say, what would it mean? What would an agent want to do? Well, it would, one thing an agent would want to do is if I'm looking through this observer window, maybe I want to look through a bigger one, or a smaller one, or just a different one. I want to change my observer windows. So how would I do that? Well, I would want to write down another matrix where it says, if I'm looking at this observer window, what's the probability that I'll go to that one, or that one, or that one? Or if I'm looking at this observer window, what? So what am I going to do? I'm going to write down another Markov matrix. So I'll have another, so I've got this trace logic of observer windows. It's infinite. It's huge. Now I'm stepping outside of it.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  And I'm putting a new kind of Markov chain on top of the whole trace logic. Right? I'm now walking around on the trace logic of observer windows. So there's a trace, trace logic of observer windows. I can now step, I'm going to go meta now. I'm stepping outside of that. I'm walking around on those windows. Right? And I'm, how do I do it? I use Markov chains to walk around on those windows. Each way that I could walk around is a, what I'll call a policy. It's, it's an agent policy. A very simple one, but a policy. I can look now at the collection of all policies. They're all of, and they have a logic that ties them all together. What is that logic?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  It's the trace logic again. Recursion. So now I have the trace logic of policies. And now I can say, I, I want to go meta again. I can now crawl around, I had this policy. Now I want to change this policy. I'm going to crawl around the windows this way. So I can have meta policies. So what I can do, and, and the meta policies will then have their own trace logic. And this goes off, so the notion of agency can be built out recursively as complicated as you want. So in, the whole thing comes down to, there are observer, there are observers with, with things that they can see. They change. That means there's a logic. If you write down markup chain, it means there is a logic.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  We just discovered there is a logic. You then crawl around on the logic. That means you now have agency. It has its own trace logic. So the whole thing comes down to markup chains and the trace logic recursion. That's it. It couldn't be simpler. It's unbelievably simple and you recursively build out this notion of agency. And now the magic starts happening because when you take a trace. If I have a big window and you're looking at a sub-window. There is, in terms of little window, there's stuff going on outside that the little window doesn't see. But it's all coordinated because of this trace logic.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  And so magic can happen outside there. So notice what happens with the time counters. If I've got a bigger window, say, go back to our red, green and yellow. Every time red, green or yellow changes, my counter goes. If I only see red and green, my counter isn't going to change as fast. Because I'm not seeing the yellow. So all the yellow counts that the bigger guy has, I'm not getting with my red, green guy. He only sees red and green. So his counter is going slower. That will lead to time dilation in special relativity.

• 1:14:39Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  And general relativity. Exactly. It leads right to that.

• 1:14:41Jesse Michels?

  It predicts time dilation.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  So the idea, and we're working on this, so this is where my team is working on.

• 1:14:47Jesse Michels?

  Which is observer dependent time dilation.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Completely. So that's where it comes from. It comes, that's the claim.

• 1:14:52Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  And when you, when you look at, how do you get distance? The distance comes from how roughly? If I start at red, what's, you know, how quickly do I get to green? How quickly do I get to yellow? It's sort of a diffusion. You know, if I'm at red, do I get to green really quickly? Do I get to yellow very quickly? Especially in, you have a bigger matrix when you have thousands and thousands of states. You know, maybe there's lots of places to go. How quickly do I get to, do I diffuse? There's something called Dirichlet forms that come out of this. You can, but, but the basic idea is the speed at which you get from one state to another,

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  or the way, the way you diffuse gives you a distance. And when you, when you have a bigger matrix and then you take a smaller trace, the distances get smaller. So you get, you get not only time dilation, you get length contraction from this. So you get, so the idea is, and this is, we're working on, on proving that we can actually get special and general relativity exactly as headset representations of this trace logic. So that's, that's going to be, but then you, we have this whole notion of that there's going to be hidden stuff, right? You, I'm not the top observer, right? None of us are, you know, my headset is just a headset. There are bigger matrices out there.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  That means that if someone is working with a bigger matrix and I'm just a submatrix of what they're doing, they can do magic. They can do things that look like magic to me. Yes. It's completely legitimate in, in, in their framework, but in my framework, for example, something that in my framework looks instantaneous could be a million years in their framework. So this is when we get to the UAP kind of stuff where, right, you know, the, the craft seems to be here and then it goes Mach 40 instantly and gets over there. And to me, it's like, it happened like, who knows? In their headset, it may have been a very leisurely movement because I'm only seeing a trace. My counter is only going very, very slow compared to their counters.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I'm a plaything perhaps to them because it's sort of like the, the, me and the ant. Me, the, I, I can take my time. If I, if I want to smash, you know, smash the ant. No rush. I got plenty of time. The ant doesn't know I'm coming. I can do it. So as soon as you have a bigger matrix and someone's just a trace, you can play with them. That's the interesting thing here. So all of a sudden, this opens up all sorts of windows for exploration.

• 1:17:31Jesse Michels?

  Well, it makes me think that maybe, you know, on some local level, it might be adaptive not to see the truth because, you know, fitness beats perception and all these sort of local evolutionary game theory kind of, you know, dynamics. But if you're talking about observer windows as basically your ability to see reality, if like the, you know, the larger your matrix, the larger, the bigger reality you're seeing, on some meta level, it is adaptive to see as much truth as possible, especially if, you know, you're the aliens and you can just like play with us little humans.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's right. So yeah, there is. So you could, you might want to have a policy in which you are going to bigger and bigger windows. The, the problem is there's never a top here. That's the, there is no top to this trace logic. There is no such thing as the biggest window.

• 1:18:22Jesse Michels?

  So it's an infinitely kind of scale of consciousness.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  That's right. This is saying consciousness goes off to infinity, not in just one direction, in an infinite number of different directions. So you can't even think big enough about this. Consciousness is far more from the trace logic is saying,

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  consciousness is incredibly complicated and no matter how big you think you are, there's no way that you're the top.

• 1:18:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Any headsets that you're wearing is trivial compared to, literally trivial. Any headsets that you're wearing is trivial compared to what's available.

• 1:18:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Sam Altman of OpenAI, I think he had a tweet and it was like,

• 1:19:04Jesse Michels?

  physics is a product, or he said it was something like, intelligence is a product of physics. And I wanted to flip it and say physics is a product of intelligence. I think you would agree with me.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So physics, our, our current space-time physics is one of the more trivial headsets that you can build out of the trace logic.

• 1:19:26Jesse Michels?

  And a lot in physics points to this.

• 1:19:30Jesse Michels?

  Idea that we are computationally sort of processing it. And Wheeler would talk about this. So he was big on the anthropic principle, not only it from bit, which is basically, if you take that one logical step further, it's sort of like we're computing reality. I mean, that's if you're using computer science as an analogy, you don't have to go all the way to like Wolfram physics to say that like, you know, he might have some information theory adjacent ideas about physics itself. But he would also talk about the anthropic principle of which there are, you know, variations, the weak and the strong. But why is, you know, why is the plank length and plank scale the way it is?

• 1:20:12Jesse Michels?

  Why, um, you know, uh, does hydrogen and oxygen bond in this perfect way? Where normally, you know, solids are more dense than the liquid form of, you know, any sort of substance. And in our case, and you know, and the earth would flood a million times over if, if that were the case with us, but in ice with water with H2O, you know, it, it forms these perfect crystal lattice structures. So the ice floats above the water. Uh, you know, if gravity were slightly different, you know, we wouldn't have our, you know, our earth the way it is. So it feels like you could, you could have two different, you know, sort of conclusions based on that. One is we like rolled the dice a million different times and we got this really lucky with earth. Like it's this Goldilocks principle.

• 1:20:57Jesse Michels?

  Or you could say that physics itself is just our interface. And, you know, the reason these constants, these physics constants are so perfect is because they're actually derivative of our own consciousness. That's right. Which that, that makes way more sense to me. And it makes, it's the Occam's razor explanation. There are other things in physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which point to this as well, where, you know, if you can't measure position and momentum at the same time simultaneously, that almost looks like a computational caching function. Like you can only store so much. Information in local memory. You also have the Sheldrake observations, which we both agreed before we were rolling. We might have problems with the Sheldrake theory.

• 1:21:40Jesse Michels?

  But as an empirical, you know, experimentalist, I think he's very strong. And all of his stuff points, you know, you'll grow a crystal lattice structure in a Petri dish. And it takes a long time to grow the first time. And then it grows much, much faster after you've grown it that first time. Which to me points to sort of it, you know, in computer science, again, you have a central monad. In this case, it would be the server and then you'd have different observational nodes. And so it would take a lot, a long time to upload information longer than it would to download it thereafter. Upload times are always longer than download times. So you can go on and on. You talk about golden ratios and Fibonacci sequences.

• 1:22:23Jesse Michels?

  What if that, those are sort of the code chunks of, you know, our reality, so to speak. And the simulation theory thing just gets more and more charismatic. And it's impossible to argue with. And I, you know, I'm not a huge fan of Nick Bostrom, to be honest, but his arguments around the simulation theory are impossible to argue. You can't really say for certain that this is base reality. So, so this is really interesting because it's an update that actually discusses a heuristic that will allow you to predict human observation, observations. I think a lot of people, you know, listening to what you just said about the red, green, blue,

• 1:23:03Jesse Michels?

  you know, example with the traffic lights, might be thinking, okay, Don, that's a very narrow rule set. How do we get to, you know, like I'm tasting a hamburger. It's like this 360 sensory experience. How do you get, how do you build a Markov matrix that really encapsulates that?

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Right. So yeah, you've raised a lot of interesting points there. I'll, one of them about the computational aspect of this.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Markov chains are computationally universal. Anything that you can do with the universal Turing machine, you can do with Markov chains. So there's no restriction on with Markov chains. So, and in fact, I think that they're beyond just computational. One interesting thing to explore here is that the trace logic on Markov chains therefore induces a logic on algorithms.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Right? And so new logic on algorithms. I'm starting to explore it. So this may be a new contribution to the theory of computation, that there is a logic and is a very interesting logic. So the trace logic on Markov chains, when you think about Markov chains as algorithms, it induces a logic on algorithms that gives us a new aspect of the theory of computation. That's going to be very, very interesting. So, so Wolfram's computational approach is subsumed within the Markov chain approach.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  In fact, any computational approach is is subsumed in it. Also, when you get one objection to this Markov thing, you said it's too simple and we need to go more complicated. Absolutely, a lot of people will say it's too simple. So for example, one one objection has been,

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  look, qualia or conscious experiences are private. I can't, you can't know my experience of green and I can't know your experience of green directly. I can guess, but I can't know. And, and so people, some people say, well, in quantum theory, we have the no cloning theorem. So that the, if you have a quantum state, it can't be cloned. And a lot, a lot of people say, well, we need that, right? To, to, to get this privacy of qualia kind of thing going on here. We need to have the notion, we need to at least go to the quantum level because we have this no cloning theorem, right? To, to, to model that. Well, it turns out, if you look more closely at the no cloning theorem in quantum theory, it doesn't determine, it's not, it does not depend on the unitarity

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  of the Schrödinger evolution. It's only linearity. That's all you need is linearity. Markov operators are linear. And it turns out the Markov, if you're, if you're interested in the no cloning theorem and you think that has something to do with consciousness, Markov chains have the no cloning theorem too. So that's, that's not, that's not, nothing to dismiss. Now,

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Another thing in quantum theory is, people will say, well, still, Markov chains aren't unitary. I mean, some of them are, but most of them aren't. And so you have all this weird behavior in quantum theory that you don't have in Markov chains. So what are you talking about here?

• 1:26:05Jesse Michels?

  When you say not unitary?

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  So, so unitary, effectively, in quantum theory, Schrodinger's equation, it runs the same forward and backwards in time, basically. So it's, it's, it's, it's time reversible, so to speak. Whereas, for example, the problem with measurement is that that's not time reversible. Once you collapse, you know, going from the Schrodinger revolution to, I got this particular experience, that you, that's not reversible. That's, that's irreversible collapse. So that's been the problem that you, in, in, in quantum theory.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  If you say that every physical system is governed by the Schrodinger revolution. And most, um, most would say that, right? That every physical system is governed by the Schrodinger revolution. Now I want a physical system that collapses the wave function. Namely, a physical system that observes, that makes a measurement. Well, there's no physical system governed by the Schrodinger equation that can do that. So that's the problem. The, the observation problem is, we have no way of saying a physical system can do this. Right? That's the, that's the real, serious problem that we've got there.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  And when you go then to attempts to deal with this.

• 1:27:31Jesse Michels?

  So when you say there is no physical system.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Because every physical system is governed by the Schrodinger revolution. Therefore, it can't collapse the wave function. Now, someone will say, well, you know, Don, you, you've let go of decoherence. I mean, you've forgotten about decoherence, right? If you, you can decohere, decohere things and, and, and go, go classical. And decoherence does not actually lead to the collapse. So decoherence will lead you, it will get rid of the interference.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  But it will not give you a single outcome. It will give you a panoply of outcomes, but not a single outcome. So decoherence does not actually solve the measurement problem. It does get rid of the interference, but that's not, doesn't give you the outcome. So right now, that's been the big problem.

• 1:28:17Jesse Michels?

  So what you're saying is it's fundamentally observation.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, observation cannot be captured by any system that's governed by the Schrodinger equation.

• 1:28:27Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  And it cannot be captured by decoherence. And that means.

• 1:28:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, the only person who would try to really attempt to solve this is the Penrose Hammerov. The idea that decoherence occurs in the brain at the sort of one graviton limit. And there's the spacetime superposition buildup. And then you get the collapse or whatever, like the brain is some physical quantum, you know, system or whatever.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I'm good friends with Hammerov. And the, I think it's a really interesting idea. Of course, Penrose's physics is unassailable. I mean, he's, he's, he's a genius. But in terms of his application here, I don't think it's going to work. Because what you have is still, they're not proposing a theory of the collapse. They don't know how the collapse happens. They're just going to say that the collapse happens, that's a miracle. And.

• 1:29:20Jesse Michels?

  They say it's like the tubulin are vibrating.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:29:23Jesse Michels?

  You know, a lot and then in the microtubules. And then there's some sort of, you know.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  That, that's right. The tubulin molecule has certain properties that allow collapse to happen. But, but, but they still don't, you know, have any physical system to do the collapse. It's, it's just a raw plane. It collapses.

• 1:29:42Jesse Michels?

  It's just some refractory period of spacetime superposition buildup, which allows for free will. And then somehow collapse.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Basically, from my, my view is that, you know, there's two miracles here. There's, you know, the collapse is a miracle and consciousness is a miracle. Let's call them the same thing.

• 1:29:55Jesse Michels?

  All right.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  That's, that's.

• 1:29:57Jesse Michels?

  Fair enough, yeah.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  And, and, and I'm good friends with Stuart. And when I ask him, Stuart, okay, you know, quantum states of microtubules and their collapse. Gives us conscious experiences. Okay, well, give me one. What's the orchestrated collapse of quantum states that must be the taste of chocolate? Or the illusion of the taste of chocolate? If someone wants to say, I'm not interested in the hard problem of consciousness. Fine, forget the hard problem of consciousness. I want the illusion of the taste of chocolate or the illusion. And there's nothing on the table. So, so again, if they put something on the table, that's a different story.

• 1:30:32Jesse Michels?

  But you can.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  There's nothing on the table.

• 1:30:33Jesse Michels?

  You, with your Markov matrices, you can predict subjective experience as radical as tasting chocolate.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Well, so, so I'm changing the game.

• 1:30:45Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  So what I'm doing is I'm saying, instead of assuming that the fundamental reality is non-conscious, non-perceptual, it's a physical world. Let's start with a different set of assumptions. Let's just take the taste of mint, the smell of garlic, the feeling of a headache as the primitives. See, every scientific theory starts with assumptions. This is a really important point. This is basic, but it's really important. And a lot of scientists miss a key point here. Every scientific theory says, please grant me these assumptions. Like Einstein, grant me that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames. And the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  If you grant me that, then I can give you special relativity. And with other assumptions, I can give you general relativity. So every theory starts with assumptions. And then if you grant those assumptions, it says, I can explain all this other wonderful stuff. What a theory never does is explain its own assumptions. It assumes them. So there, that theory, if you give me a theory, I can tell you that theory isn't a theory of everything because it's not a theory of its own assumptions. It's assuming its assumptions. You say, oh, that's no problem. I'll give you a deeper theory eventually that explains those assumptions. Absolutely, that's what science is about. I'm all for it. And your new theory will have its own assumptions. And so this goes on ad infinitum, forever. There is no such thing

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  as a theory of everything in science. And in fact, we are going to be always 0% of the way to a theory of everything. So I'm a scientist, I love science. And science, by its very nature, will get 0% of reality because every scientific theory starts with assumptions. So humility is absolutely essential when we do science. Now, when we have a scientific theory, when we write down our assumptions.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  We do not need to assume that our assumptions are true. If we did, we'd be stuck. All we need to do is assume that our assumptions are consistent. And given that, then we can look at all the things that follow consistently from our assumptions. So that's what science assumes. Says, "Grant me these assumptions. I believe they're consistent. You can check me, but I think these assumptions are consistent." Given that they're consistent, there's this realm of explanation. It's not universal. It's 0% of reality, but there is a scope of explanation if it's a good theory. And so you can then say, "Let's explore the scope of this theory." A good theory will give you the mathematical tools you need to explore its scope.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  A great scientific theory will give you the tools to discover its limits, to be precise about its limits. And that's a key point that many scientists and philosophers miss. So I'm making the clean point that a scientific theory starts with assumptions that are not necessarily assumed to be true, they're just assumed to be consistent. They will necessarily have a limited scope, not universal scope, and they will have hard limits to explanation. It is not self-contradictory to say that that scientific theory could also tell you what its own limits are with some precision.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  So in the case of Einstein's theory of spacetime, together with quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and Einstein's gravity, it's a great theory, great scope, all the technology around is because of it. So incredible scope, clean limits, and the theory itself tells you the limits of its fundamental assumptions. You have the assumption that spacetime, so spacetime is fundamental. Einstein's theory, together with quantum field theory, tells us that that assumption that spacetime is fundamental falls apart precisely at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Game over for spacetime.

• 1:34:55Jesse Michels?

  Is that the Planck scale?

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  It's the Planck scale. So the notion of spacetime has no operational meaning at the Planck scale.

• 1:35:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  It's over.

• 1:35:04Jesse Michels?

  And it's a theory of gravity and gravity breaks down at subatomic scale.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  That's right. It falls apart. So it's clear that spacetime isn't the story. It's a beautiful story. It's not the final story and science has to move beyond spacetime. Now, by the way.

• 1:35:20Jesse Michels?

  So you're saying you have a theory that is upstream of, but encapsulates spacetime and Einstein. And one example of that is the prediction of time dilation.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  And length contraction.

• 1:35:31Jesse Michels?

  And length contraction. Does anything else in general relativity get predicted by your theory?

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  It looks like the quantum wave functions come out of this as the asymptotic behavior of the Markov chains. So with, I've talked about Markov chain as sort of a step by step thing. You know, now I see red, now I see green and now I see yellow and so forth. That's just to make it clear. But now suppose, think about that as frames of a movie. And you've been looking, I've been looking with you at one frame at a time, say, look at that frame, look at that. Now I play the movie. Now, of course, that's a different, different perception. Now I'm playing the movie, the frames are going by real fast. That's what I've sort of mean intuitively by the asymptotic behavior. And what my collaborator, Shaitan Prakash has shown, in certain cases, and we think it's, I think it's quite general,

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  is that the quantum wave functions for free particles are precisely the same thing as the asymptotic behavior of these enhanced Markov chains. Technically, they're certain eigenvectors, so the harmonic functions. So harmonic functions of the enhanced Markov chains have exactly the same mathematical format as the wave functions in quantum mechanics for free particles. So the idea will be that quantum theory is coming out of this more general theory of trace logic and Markov chains as an asymptotic description. The trace logic is giving you, in some sense, a hidden variable steering.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Okay, but it's a hidden variables theory.

• 1:37:05Jesse Michels?

  Like a, like a David Bohm.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Uh, well, it's different from Bohm because Bohm has a single physical particle riding the waves, right? That of quantum theory.

• 1:37:14Jesse Michels?

  Like a De Broglie pilot wave.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. So we're completely, I mean, I have great respect for Bohm. He was brilliant. Drop dead brilliant, but, but, and he did some really out of the box thinking, but, but the pilot wave theory is still tied to spacetime. It's later Bohm thought outside of spacetime, deeply outside of spacetime, but his, his pilot wave thing is, is really still stuck in, in, in.

• 1:37:41Jesse Michels?

  So when you say hidden variable, what do you mean?

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  A hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics is just any theory that, that says there's something that quantum mechanics is not telling you about reality. There's a deeper level of reality.

• 1:37:53Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  That, that we need to go to, to, and, and there are limits. I mean, there, there are theorems about what you can put outside of that reality, outside of quantum mechanics in, in your reality. So there are certain things you can't do. So we have to, we have a bunch of theorems to prove um, based on, on this. So this is all new stuff. So I'll, I'll, I'll say what we have to do. We have to prove that we can get special relativity out of this. Prove that we can get curved spacetime Einstein's theory of gravity. Prove that we can get the Born rule um, of, of quantum theory out of this. Prove that we can start, that we can model the big bang and I can prove that we can get Heisenberg uncertainty relationship. Uh, and, and, and a number of other things. Prove that is we get non-locality and so forth. So there are, we're assembling a team right now of, of mathematicians.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  We have all these conjectures that we've put out publicly conjectures about that. And we're, we're getting a team to work on them one by one. So that's, that's, that's where we're, we are right now. It's, it's quite fun.

• 1:38:50Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Jesse Michels?

  Wow. Very cool.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  Right. So it's not a hand wave. We, we, there are mathematicians working this put up or shut up time.

• 1:38:57Jesse Michels?

  So you are trying to create this, establish essentially a new theory of everything while acknowledging the limits of theories of everything.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:05Jesse Michels?

  But that exists kind of upstream of both general relativity, special relativity and quantum mechanics.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 1:39:11Jesse Michels?

  And. As of now, you can predict in general relativity, length contraction and time dilation. And then if you speed up the frames, you can predict.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Quantum wave function.

• 1:39:24Jesse Michels?

  Quantum wave function, Schrödinger's, Schrödinger's, something like Schrödinger's equation.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:39:28Jesse Michels?

  That's remarkable. That's really cool.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  But we now need theorems and proofs on all that stuff, but it's looking quite promising to me and to a bunch of people who are willing to spend their time to work on this now.

• 1:39:38Jesse Michels?

  Would you be able to devise an experiment that the hidden Markov chain could predict the result for? And then you do the experiment in real life and, you know, only this sort of theory is the proper heuristic to predict it. It, it, uh, general relativity in quantum mechanics are too limited to predict this outcome.

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  That would be the, um, direction we want to go. We first want to show first that we can get exactly the predictions of.

• 1:40:07Jesse Michels?

  Predict all the current.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  All the.

• 1:40:09Jesse Michels?

  Observe.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  And then say, okay.

• 1:40:11Jesse Michels?

  That we observe and then.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  What, what's next? What, what goes beyond that? So we're absolutely working on doing exactly that.

• 1:40:19Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  There's lots of directions to go here.

• 1:40:22Jesse Michels?

  The direction I'm interested in is, um, think of hidden Markov chains as, you know, being developed at the inception or origin, or being at least playing a big part in the birth of artificial intelligence. And you were at MIT, like right when, you know, all of this stuff was starting, you were studying under Marvin Minsky, which is amazing. And you were, you were, you know, having debates with him and Noam Chomsky about this stuff. So there seems like, you know, my intuition would tell me that there's something significant about the fact that your new theory dovetails with how AI started in some way.

• 1:41:02Jesse Michels?

  Like, like if we're trying to birth a new kind of lower level simulacra reality with AI, and it started with, you know, hidden Markov models, hidden Markov chains. And then you're trying to explain physics through this. You know, that that seems somehow important, especially as you talk about context windows in your hidden Markov chains. Because like you could theoretically create a smaller hidden Markov chain for like a lower level species, you know. You get back into the UFO discussion where it's like, are there beings like higher on the consciousness food chain than us? You're saying that that the Occam's razor explanation is there, but there's worse, you know,

• 1:41:47Jesse Michels?

  teeming with life in the universe, you know, that are, you know, way, way above humanity as far as their perceptive abilities. Could they then create context windows for humanity to operate in?

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  That's right. That with the trace logic now, you you get this very interesting structure on observations. If I've got this big matrix and take a trace on a small submatrix, say on the upper left hand corner of it, right? So that's my my submatrix.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  The guy that can only see in the little submatrix has a certain set of states that he can move around in. But the bigger matrix will notice when he, when the state, there are exit states. So there all this guy can see is his visible states, but there are corridors out. There's a whole world outside of it. And then there are, there are corridors back in. So there are exits, the world outside, and then there are re entrances. So the person who has the bigger matrix knows it and can play with you. They can, they have access to when you, when the state leaves, what they're doing with it outside and what comes back in. So you can start, what, what, what comes out of this is

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  all sorts of games that you can play and also a notion of multi scale collective intelligence. So I'm very interested in the work of Mike Levin.

• 1:43:14Jesse Michels?

  Oh yeah, me too.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Very, very, and, and.

• 1:43:17Jesse Michels?

  I'm a huge fan.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Actually, we're just now starting up a collaboration. We're going to get a postdoc together because of the trace logic. This recursive trace logic, because it's a way of modeling the multi scale collective intelligence. At least it's, it's promising. The, the idea, you know, so Mike Levin has this wonderful. Set of work, for example, with planaria. The planaria reproduce by cutting themselves in half. Like grabs one end, grabs something and they tear themselves apart. And then they grow a new tail and new head. It's bizarre, but they've been doing that for hundreds of millions of years. They don't die. There are cells around that have been around for who knows how many millions of years. Anytime there's a mutation, if it doesn't kill the cell, that mutation stays.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  So the genome is a mess. They have different numbers of chromosomes in different cells. It's a complete mess genetically. And their reproduction, their physiology is rock stable. They don't get cancer most, you know, they're almost cancer free. They reproduce, their body morphology is great and they live forever. And the genes are just all over the place, from cell to cell, within a living organism.

• 1:44:30Jesse Michels?

  How do you explain that?

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  I mean, you can see that's so, it's a stunning, stunning observation.

• 1:44:35Jesse Michels?

  Totally stunning, especially in a world where people think genes, you know, kind of predetermined all physiological, phenotypic outcomes.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I, I'll just mention briefly, I spent a lot of time with Francis Crick, the guy who discovered the structure of DNA. He and a small group of us at UC Irvine called the Helms Club met for almost 20 years secretly studying consciousness. So we were, we were after this, Francis was trying to demystify consciousness like he demystified life with, with DNA. So, so this is a real blow to the DNA centric point of view. It's not the DNA is irrelevant. DNA is clearly an important part of the story. But when the DNA can be different from cell to cell in a given organism,

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  even the number of chromosomes, they're, they're, well, they multiply, multi, some happen or not happen, there's some kind of name they give for these things where you have different number of chromosomes in cell to cells. So the question is, the one you raised, which is, so what then is responsible for?

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  Guiding this morphology, we thought it was genes, the genes are all over the place. And Mike is finding experimental evidence for some kind of, you know, electric field like kinds of manipulations. He can cut a planarian in half and apply the right kind of potential to the halves and either grow another head. So he can have a two-headed planarian or two tails or something like that. So, so there are these, all of a sudden, there are these electric field connections, electrical connections between cells that seem to be having some kind of intelligence that we don't, we don't understand at all. We're just learning that they exist. So there's this level, but, but the way Mike talks about

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  it is sort of like, almost like a higher level programming language, right? So maybe the DNA is more like just like the simpler kind of code, but there's a higher level language that can manipulate that code somehow, or even just little, you know, raw statements in a language.

• 1:46:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And I think you can take Levin's work even farther because, yeah, we know, we know that voltage gated ion channels are responsible for, you know, cell communication. We know that electromagnetic fields affect and dictate body morphology, sometimes in an even more fundamental way to DNA. And so I love the analogy of like hardware, software, the software are these like, you know, electromagnetic fields. But then you get into really trippy territory because you can put, uh, you know, frog embryo in a Faraday cage and it won't grow properly.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:47:17Jesse Michels?

  And then you could put, you know, a plant or you just use the same example. So it's a perfect experiment. You put a frog embryo next to a super powerful wifi router or, you know, maybe a better example, Chernobyl, where you have extremely, you know, excessive radiation and you end up with too many mutations. So there's this efficient frontier of mutations. And then you get into, again, anthropic principle stuff where you have the Schumann resonance and magnetosphere of the earth, which clearly feels essential to dictating the right, you know, animal morphology. Cause if you put, you know, a thing in a Faraday cage or even put somebody out in a space, they literally bring off in Schumann resonance. Machines up with them in space.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Jesse Michels?

  Because it's familiar.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Jesse Michels?

  And so the magnetosphere of the earth perfectly shields us from enough cosmic radiation where we're not going to like incinerate. But then lets in enough to allow, you know, just enough, uh, you know, UV radiation based mutations in our genome. To like evolve, you know, pretty perfectly. And it's, you get, it's very strange.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  It's, it's.

• 1:48:20Jesse Michels?

  And then you get into the simulated reality stuff where is earth in a context window itself.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:25Jesse Michels?

  That is, you know, more compressed than one of these larger context windows. And, you know, are the UFOs that we're seeing, you mentioned they would monitor the exit paths. That fascinates me because I think about when people have mystical experiences at the boundary. You know, another thing you've brought up is the holographic principle, which Hawking talks about where, you know, all 3D information can be encoded on, you know, it's 2D surface. And that's really what you're seeing. And so we, if we are in some sort of hologram and we're, we're, we're interacting with these things that are higher, like the, the novel flatland, you know, the 19th century, you know, we're, we're in 3D space and we're seeing something from higher dimensional space.

• 1:49:09Jesse Michels?

  They'd be looking at where we're poking at the, the, the exits. You know, and then they'd, they'd be, they'd understand, you know, BF Skinner style intermittent reinforcement.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:19Jesse Michels?

  And they'd understand cellular automata style stuff as far as sort of managing the Petri dish. And then when, when would they show up? They'd show up around nuclear because they don't want us to destroy ourselves. Or, or maybe they're mining us for resources. I don't want to, you know, impugn any sort of, you know, benevolence or intent. But they show up around UFOs show up around nuclear sites all over the world. So that's fascinating. And they'd probably show up at the frontier of human ingenuity because. If you talk about the Archimedes lever, point of most leverage for like future timelines, you know, the quantum stuff is like a third of our economy now. It's like semiconductors, information, technology. And so you'd show up, you know, high voltage experimentation,

• 1:50:01Jesse Michels?

  particle accelerators, and they seem to, again, anecdotally, show up around some of these things as well. And then the final thing they show up in is conscious, weird consciousness experiences. And if you look at all mystery rituals across all these traditions, it's to liberate the soul from the body. And the soul is, you know, it sounds like this inexplicable thing that we're kind of smuggling in. It's a placeholder name, you know, but call it some tesseract-like, you know, higher dimensional thing that's like tethered to the body. Our body is a compressed sort of prism, you know, and then that would explain near-death experiences where we're able to perceive more when you cut off that biological sort of collapsing

• 1:50:42Jesse Michels?

  function. Then in these mystery rituals, if you, again, all these mystery rituals, whether you're putting your hand in a glove of bullet ants, or you're taking some, you know, crazy psychedelic keke on in the Greek Eleusinian mystery rituals back in the day, it temporarily kills the physical body, and then you perceive much more. And then you see often these beings, you know, and I know you're working with Andrew Gallimore, who does, you know, these DMT experiments, which again, you know, DMT comes often, you know, at the time of death, or, you know, REM sleep. So almost when you're most disembodied, and then you see these entities that have consistent taxonomies across the people that

• 1:51:23Jesse Michels?

  see them. So if we're in this sort of like lower, like literal matrix, like actual matrix, you know, hidden Markov, you know, thing, then when you're poking at the boundaries with your consciousness, or with high-energy physics, you see these entities and you see these UFOs. So I think the UFO thing is totally consistent with your work.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Right, right. So the big picture that you're painting here is that there is some need to understand this multi-scale collective intelligence, right? Because there seems to be all sorts of pointers to things that cannot be explained within our current physicalist spacetime framework. And I completely agree. And here's the top level, how the Markov trace logic, the recursive trace logic, deals with this. It turns out if you have a Markov chain, You can have a bunch of states that form what's called a community. So that once you are in these states, you tend to stay in those states. Your experiences tend to stay in that little group. But then there might be another community over here, another community over there.

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  And there's a small chance that you might move from this community to another community. Now, within each community, there's going to be a long-term behavior. You know, that you can write down the probability of being in each state. Well, maybe I'll be in this state one half the time, and state two a third of the time, and so forth. So these are sort of what are called the stationary measures. There'd be approximate stationary measures, not... There's a stationary measure for the whole thing, but... Now, so this community structure gives you different wells of intelligence. Here's one way of living. But if I push you into the other community, this... Then all of a sudden, you... Gravity pulls you... The Markov matrix dynamics, think of it like gravity, pulls you into this other well.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  And now this is a different solution space. Then it can have another solution space over there. So all you need are little prods to go from one solution space to the other. And that could be the community structure. Now, if I look at one of these communities a little bit more closely, I might see, oh, well, within it, there are some sub-communities. Like this, there's this one community, but now there are like five sub-communities in it. So there are these five sub-wells. And then with each one of those sub-wells, I can look and, oh, well, that's got another 10 sub-wells within it. And you can begin to see that a single matrix on trillions and trillions of states could have literally multi-scale collective intelligence by all these little community structures built throughout of it. So what we could be doing with our own headset is...

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  So our spacetime headset is really only capturing a small bit of this huge multi-scale collective intelligence of the matrix that we happen to be projecting into. And so that's why, you know, we can only see certain aspects of it. And all of a sudden, they just, they transcend our spacetime description. But, but they don't, they don't transcend science. We can build with the trace logic, the recursive trace logic. We can actually build a model of these things and begin to understand things that perhaps we can't see inside of spacetime. Now, I, I should step back immediately and say, look, someone might say, look, here's a cognitive scientist

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  talking about doing science outside of spacetime. He's, he's way outside of his pay grade, right? This is, that's the realm for real physics, high-energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians to be doing that kind of stuff. So surely if it can be done, someone else is doing it. You know, cognitive scientist isn't going to be the first one to do it. And I'm not. It turns out that there are many high-energy theoretical physicists who have now firmly stepped outside of spacetime. They will say spacetime is doomed. Neymar Khani-Hamed, David Gross, and others.

• 1:55:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Neymar Khani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  At Princeton, right?

• 1:55:24Jesse Michels?

  As impressive as it gets when it comes to theoretical physicists.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  David Gross, Nobel Prize winner.

• 1:55:29Jesse Michels?

  There you go.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  So, and what they've, what they're saying is that spacetime is doomed. By that, they mean it's not fundamental. And they're saying we need to step outside of spacetime to do physics, at the next level of physics. And they're finding structures. So, so it's, but it might sound impossible. What in the world could you possibly mean to step outside of spacetime, right? For most of us, I, I talk about, to my colleagues about, we need to get outside of spacetime and.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  They just look at me like, what could you possibly be talking about? Where is outside of spacetime? Because where is any, where means inside spacetime. Where is outside of spacetime? And but the where is entirely outside the conceptual framework of spacetime. And what they're finding, so Nima Arkani-Hamed, one of the first pioneers in this era, is structures that they call positive geometries outside of spacetime. So amplitude, hedron, associate hedron, cosmological polytopes and other, other structures. These are structures that are not inside spacetime. They don't care about locality, which is a key property of spacetime.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  They couldn't care less about locality and they don't care about unitarity. So they couldn't care less about the fundamental property of quantum mechanics, unitarity. They don't care about it. They're completely outside of spacetime. They, their geometry, their volumes and edges and vertices and so forth, as it turns out, code beautifully and compactly for scattering probabilities, scattering amplitudes of particle interactions inside spacetime. That's the remarkable thing. So here's this object outside of spacetime, doesn't care about locality, doesn't care about unitarity at all, that is accurately describing gluon interactions inside spacetime.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Interactions that when you use Feynman diagrams inside spacetime to compute them, for a simple interaction, just a few particles, you could get millions of terms, millions of terms. Outside of spacetime, it boils down to a handful of terms. And you get, you get the right answer. Now, there's a lot of work to be done. I mean, they haven't got the whole panoply of what you can do with Feynman diagrams, but they're working on it. It's quite. Quite promising.

• 1:58:04Jesse Michels?

  I mean, the fact That's fascinating.

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  It's quite.

• 1:58:06Jesse Michels?

  So you have theoretical physicists at the highest level saying you have to move outside of our conventional idiom of physics, of spacetime, in order to solve problems that are prosaic and conventional in spacetime.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  And they're also moving outside of quantum mechanics. So it's not just like, oh, we're going to give a quantum foundation for spacetime. No, they're saying, we're going to go entirely outside of spacetime, entirely beyond quantum theory, and we will have spacetime and quantum theory joined at the hip, as Nemo likes to say, joined at the hip, coming out of something deeper. And this is not just a one-off. It's so big now that the European Research Council has a 10 million euro initiative. And there are many, many high-energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians now on this 10 million euro initiative, studying these positive geometries. So I'm by no means the first, by any means. There's much more brilliant people out there already looking for stuff outside of spacetime and finding it.

• 1:59:05Jesse Michels?

  Well, this is an age-old debate, actually. I mean, the modern instantiation of it goes back to the birth of quantum mechanics, where you had these debates between Niels Bohr and Einstein. Einstein saying, you know, God doesn't play dice. This can't just be probabilities. You know, we need to understand some sort of ontological truth that, you know, the quantum mechanics stuff is pointing to. Einstein himself is obviously a big contributor to quantum mechanics. And Bohr was saying, you know, no, you know, if you think you understand this stuff, you don't. That sort of turned into this Copenhagen interpretation, which mutated then into this sort of shut up and calculate. It's just, you know, this mathematical formalism. You know, don't think about it as some ontological descriptor.

• 1:59:50Jesse Michels?

  And I sort of agree with you. I don't think that, I think science is a map. It's not the territory. So I think it would take a lot of hubris to say that, you know, quantum mechanics or general relativity reflects true, you know, reality itself. But I do think it's a really interesting exercise to look at the spookiness in quantum mechanics as a pointer to a deeper truth and to a deeper ontological reality. And so when you tell me things like, oh, you can run a double slit experiment, you know, today, not observe it. And then, you know, you run it in three days with a, you know, a paired electron, and then they have inverse behaviors. If you measure it, you know, in three days and then,

• 2:00:34Jesse Michels?

  you know, you go, it's like there's a, there's temporal non-locality in, in, um, uh, quantum mechanics. And when you, when you, when you go into those sorts of, you know, uh, things, that that seems to point to like a, almost like a time agnostic reality or something. I mean, you even mentioned Schrodinger's equation going the same way forwards as it does backwards. That's same with electromagnetism and general relativity, you know, the unitarity thing. So, yeah, is there something weird about like time seems like this very weird thing that we just don't understand. Like time could, I mean, in, in maybe in your model, you know, which might be more kind of computational or something. It's like, uh, saved game states instead of time. Or I don't know. What do you think?

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  So, so a lot of interesting points. So I would say what quantum theory does do is put front and center the observer. It says, we can't ignore the observer. In ice, in Newton, the observer could be ignored. The observer didn't interfere. So you could just ignore the observer. In Einstein's gravity and it's in special relativity, you, you have an observer, but it's just clocks and, and pointers. But in quantum mechanics, all of a sudden, the observer is right there in your face. When you do an observation, the wave function is no longer the thing, you have a collapse of the wave function. There in your face is The observer is doing something.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  We have to understand, this is no longer, you know, something that we can dismiss. The very coherence of science is at stake. That's the key point. The coherence of science is at stake. If we cannot give an account of observation that makes it possible for us to have true theories that accommodate an observer. If we cannot get that whole story to work, then what are we doing? We are way off in fairy tale land until we can ground this whole thing. We have a theory of the observer that's coherent, that leads to, that explains why our scientific theories have data that's believable, right? Our observations are giving us the data.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  Our observations need to be related to the external world in some rational way so that we can actually get theories of the structure. And that structure better come back and say that our theories, that our observations are good data. And that we don't have in quantum theory. And the attempts to solve the measurement problem don't work. So the collapse of, so for example, the Everett interpretation, the many worlds. What Everett says is every time there's an observation, there is no collapse. There's, I mean, there are, if there are trillion branches to the wave function, all trillion take off. So Hoffman is making this measurement and there are now a million Hoffmans in a million

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  branches, or a trillion, or whatever it might be. Problem solved, right? There's, there is no collapse, so we don't have to worry about the role of the observer. And not quite, doesn't, doesn't quite work. So the, the problem is, why do I believe in the Schrodinger equation and quantum theory? Well, it's because the statistics in my experiments that I do in my lab, agree with the statistics I get when I look at the Schrodinger equation and take its amplitude squared.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  So it's the frequencies that I've observed in my lab matching the frequencies predicted by the amplitude squared of the Schrodinger equation, Schrodinger wave function. That convinced me of it's now, now in the Everett interpretation, I am in every branch. That means every possible sequence of outcomes that could have happened. If I'm doing, you know, I'm doing like a million measurements. Then there is a Hoffman that saw one sequence of a million. There's Hoffman that saw the different sequence, that every possible sequence is out there. So where is the connection between my Hoffman observing my, my sequences?

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  And saying, ah, this sequence confirms because it's the amplitude square. No, there's going to be a sequence where I get the exact same output every time. There is no variation. That's, that's one possibility, right? And, and so every, so, so there's, so the raises the question, if the, if the Everett interpretation, the many, many worlds interpretation is what we take. Then I have no reason to believe that the frequencies that I observe in my experiments are related to reality. Cause I could be in a branch where I get this really anomalous set of frequency, because that happens. I mean, Everett says anything that can possibly happen will happen.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  So every crazy outcome, not just the, and if you then say, oh, well, but we can fix that because I, you know, you're more likely, Don, you're more likely to be in the, the high probability, high amplitude, you know, things. And that's no longer than just quantum mechanics. Because in the Everett interpretation,

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  Dawn, there is a dawn already in all the trains of... So who is this new dawn that you're saying is going to be dropped into one of the more high probability quote unquote buckets? And what is that mechanism of dropping in? And why should I believe that? This is no longer quantum mechanics. This is a huge addition to quantum mechanics. Never been worked out. So I don't believe the multiverse right now because it leads to the conclusion that our science is incoherent. It's incoherent because our observations do not support the theory.

• 2:06:42Speaker 04

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• 2:07:12Jesse Michels?

  Isn't there some... Because I agree, I'm not a big multiverse fan and you can't infinitely split, you know, dawns into, you know, different, you know... And it's also, it's unfalsifiable, right? You end up in these sort of never-ending conversations where it's like, well, that happened even though it was low probability and it's, you know, it's somewhere else and it's continuously forking and it's like, I don't really know what you do with that. Having said that, if you take things like the delayed choice experiment, double slit experiment, some of these things at face value, even dawn's decision to measure, you know, the collapse of the wave function, you know, and look and see, and then you see this eigenstate, you see a state with the, where the, you know, photon hit the cardboard backing, you don't see this interference pattern.

• 2:07:55Jesse Michels?

  That took place, you know, out of your free will. And so you are affecting physics on the most fundamental level. Like what we take as fundamental physics, you are affecting by even choosing to make that measurement. And I think that's kind of undeniable. And so... At that point, you don't have to get into parapsychology and say that we are affecting random quantum mechanical processes. If you just take that at face value, then your physics is already different than my physics. And then don't you get into territory where, yeah, maybe spacetime is this kind of consensus collapsing function construct, but you have different local collapsing functions. You have different local air pockets of consensus reality and consensus physics.

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  A clean notion of the observer and its relationship to our, our physical theories is not optional. We have to have a clean notion of the observer. And in quantum theory, there is none. Quantum theory says we have, absolutely have to have one. But if you look at the different kinds of theories that are out there, so for example, the, the multiverse one, but then there are the ones like the Bohmian thing where you stick a particle in on, on the wave function. It turns out when you look at those, they, they don't work when you go to, to, to relativity theory. So quantum field theory, they just don't, they don't work there. There's a problem of, of, you know, scaling as you, you know, renormalization problems and so forth. They, they don't work.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  And when you go to things like, Chris Fuchs, a really wonderful man, we're friends and a brilliant, brilliant guy. He's, he's got his cubist theory, which, which basically is a subjective Bayesian. It says the, the wave function and the absolute squared is just the subjective degrees of belief. And if you, if you keep it purely subjective, then you can solve the so-called vigorous friend problem, right? So, you know, there's the standard problem in quantum mechanics where there's someone, you know, watching, let's say a Schrödinger cat inside a room, a friend of yours. And, and they're waiting to see if the cat's going to be alive or dead. But you're outside and you're in a separate room.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  And so you're, you're waiting and you, you have a wave function yourself for your friend and the, and the cat, whether they're, the cat is alive and the friend says they're alive and the cat is dead and the friend says. So you have your own wave function. And, and it turns out that under some interpretations, the person inside could see the cat's dead and you don't know, you're still in a superposition. You don't know. So you have different statements about reality. So the, the, someone like

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  Chris Fuchs and the quantum Bayesian with a subjective Bayesian approach would say, no problem, because these are just degrees of belief. So the experimenter outside the lab room and the experimenter inside the lab room are each interpret, you know, are allowed their own, their own interpretation, right? Their own, their own probabilities. Yeah. But, but then if you do that, there's a problem because then how do you get the connection between the wave function and the objective world? What is the data that makes you want to say that this is the right wave function to have? Or if your ideas are just purely subjective, then it's not tethered to the objective data that needs to tether it.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  This is just your, and if you try to tether it, then all of a sudden you're going to get back to the Wigner's Fen problem. So, so the bottom line is, I see right now, what quantum mechanics has done is said what you were just talking about. We have to understand how the observer gives us the data in our scientific theories, or we're incoherent. And there is no theory in quantum mechanics that does that right now. So, science is at this unbelievable place. It's unbelievable. We're this far advanced. We do not have a theory of the observer that will be, that will make science itself coherent. And so

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  what I'm proposing with this recursive trace logic is what Leibniz proposed 300 years ago. We have to start, and what Wheeler proposed in 1989, yep, from bed. We have to go back and start where we, the thing we ignored. We, in Newton, we ignored the observer. In Einstein, we talked about it, but we ignored it. In quantum mechanics, we can't ignore it. We don't know what to do with it. So, so I'm saying, That's where science has to go next. Science now, we have to start over. Nail down exactly what we mean by an observer. Get it mathematically precise and then go back.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  Show that once we have this like, if the recursive trace logic works, we'll see. I mean, hopefully I'll know within two or three years. If it works, the idea would be we will then show how spacetime, curved spacetime and and quantum field theory arise as one of the more trivial headsets that comes out of a general theory of observation. So the idea is we have this recursive trace logic. It's completely general notion of of observation and then policies and meta policies and so forth, completely general notion of agency. So the agents now can choose different experiments that they want to do. Can, does that give us the framework to give us all of our current scientific theories? Quantum field theory, general relativity, black holes, the whole bit, Big Bang, the

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  whole bit, nothing left out. And then, then show, but this is just a trivial example of what we can do. That's, that's your four dimensional headset, one of time, three of space. But why not? So, so for example, in the amplitude heteron with, with, with Niemeyer-Kahn-Hamed, there is a parameter in the amplitude heteron, which is the, the, the dimension of the spacetime in which you're going to project this positive geometry into that. And in our case, it's four, but his mathematics allows bigger numbers. Four is, is one of the smaller and less interesting numbers. It's what the perhaps the smallest non-trivial number.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  But as you go up, that you can, so already the, the, the serious physicists working outside of spacetime, why I should say high energy theoretical physicist, it's not all physicists, high energy theoretical physicists who this is their bailiwick. They're already saying, we're finding these geometries that characterize scattering amplitudes in a way that spacetime that we perceive is just one of many, many possible spacetimes in which we could talk about this stuff. And I'm saying, that's right. We're going to now have to just go and look at the set of all possible headsets of all kinds that observers could come up with. And the, and it's going to be infinite numbers. So ours is one of the more trivial ones. And now with the policies.

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  So remember, a policy was a way of crawling around on the observer windows. And what would it mean to be embodied? Because we talked about embodiment and I said it was one of the smaller, you know. What does it mean to be embodied? Well, what does it mean for me to move my hand from here to grab that cup?

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  It's going to be a policy in which I have a bunch of observer windows. The observer window in which there's another observer, that's another frame, another frame, another frame, another frame. Right? Notice that that's a particular subset of windows in this huge trace logic. There's lots of, but that is one frame in it. And I'm being forced to use frames of this type to make the cup move from there to there. But if I think about it, there are lots of other policies in which my hand stays here and the cup just moves.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  There are all sorts of policies and there are a lot more of those than there are in which my hand has to move in this particular way to do it. So that's where you see immediately that the embodiment is a measure zero set of the whole thing. But, but we're forced right now to have these policies in which only, we can only directly, so to speak, change certain things, my fingers, my toes, my, those are the, we were stuck to those observer window that have that kind of thing in them. And we can only move them in certain sequences. So we have to be really, really clever. I want this cup to go from here to there. There's a million ways to do it, but not if I'm forced to use my hand. Now there's like one, just a smaller set of ways that I can do it to get it to move over there.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  So, so that's why I said earlier on that once you get to this recursive trace logic and have the notion of policies, that then you see embodiment is not necessary and in fact, it's probability zero. It's stunning.

• 2:16:44Jesse Michels?

  So if embodiment is actually maladaptive for life, are there any observable things in our current space time that you think might actually be alive?

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Well, it's an interesting question you raised there. Is it maladaptive for our current embodiment? Is it maladaptive?

• 2:17:04Jesse Michels?

  Well, clearly not for us in some way, shape or form, like it's the best form for us.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  But well, it's, it's, it raises a big question. And that is, what is this whole game about? Right? There are all these windows and all these infinite number of policies. And so I now I'm thinking about consciousness itself. And, and what is consciousness up to? And all I can think of is that consciousness must be in knowing itself by exploring itself from an infinite number of perspectives and from an infinite number of policies and infinite number of meta policies. And that's in some sense, what an infinite, unbounded consciousness does to

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  explore and know itself. You take, you take a perspective and maybe you lose yourself in the perspective so completely that you don't even know that you're the infinite consciousness, right?

• 2:17:58Jesse Michels?

  Oh, that's beautiful. Well, that comports with a bunch of religious.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  It really does. And it really does. But now there's math behind it.

• 2:18:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And John Wheeler, you know, wrote his U on that piece of paper of the, the universe observing itself. You have Alan Watts and other mystics talking about, you know, where the universe trying to observe itself or, or piece itself back together. I think that's sort of a common thread. But I was sort of going like, you know, in a slightly different direction, which is, you know, obviously you have these sort of context windows. You have these different matrices. You know, we see a specific matrix. Maybe we're teaming with alien life and they see larger matrices. And they can kind of pop into ours and mess with us.

• 2:18:45Jesse Michels?

  But are there things in our spacetime, things like, I don't know, plasma might be an example. There's a great book called The New Science of Heaven by a guy named Robert Temple. And he talks about plasma being. The substrate of the universe and alive and atomic matter actually being the exception to the rule and charged ions, you know, stripped of most of what we think of as atoms, actually just permeating the entire universe. And there are all these strange experiments of like humans walking up to plasma and it cohering to the human's heartbeat. A lot of the UFO stuff looks like kind of plasma balls that seem to be sort of synchronized

• 2:19:26Jesse Michels?

  with our own intent or something. So in this model, are there things that we see that we attribute to kind of, you know, just like the ant would see us and they'd be like, wow, that might be like natural phenomena or they have no idea what we are. We see these things and we put these natural placeholders on them. But now assuming that the likelihood is life is disembodied, it's not the opposite. We're the exception to the rule.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:19:54Jesse Michels?

  Then some of these natural phenomena, things like plasma, might be alive.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  Right. Now, the one proviso is that plasma is whatever this thing is seen through our headsets. So already, whatever we see and call plasma is already been dumbed down to fit into our little headsets. So the trace logic would force us to say, whatever plasma, whatever is really causing me to see plasma could be infinitely more interesting than what I call plasma. But it still gets, I think, to the point that you want to make, which is, once we have this ability to see others as sub-traces of us, can we start to play games? Can we start to do stuff? Absolutely. And so that's where, for example, I think, I'm no expert in the UAP kind of stuff or the DMT stuff. I'm collaborating

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  with Gallimore on DMT. But it seems to me that there are tools here to allow you to do whatever you want, basically, because you have a different time counter than the subtrace. So you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want to compared to them. They may see it as instantaneous, what's happening, like moving from stationary to Mach 40, you know, some craft immediately. But from the U I P point of view, it's not that it could be very, very leisurely in their headset because their clock is going at a different pace than than our clock. And their their space could be very, very different than our space.

• 2:21:29Jesse Michels?

  You you would also end up with with your model if you have these different perceptive windows and you have a higher perceptive window. If you wanted to keep a lower, you know, system organism with it with a smaller perceptive window out, but you also wanted to initiate the right people. Like you get back to stories of Plato where you have a cave. You have people kept in the cave by this sort of guardian class. And the weird thing about the UFO thing is like, very few people can say anything sort of coherent about it, but there's an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence around it. So it's like those two things simultaneously is the weirdest thing about it. And it almost implies that there's like an intent on the other end that sort of like dangling

• 2:22:14Jesse Michels?

  bizarre anomalies that like are meant to not be collapsed into any coherent theory. And it's almost like you're, and this is if you get into like the deeper kind of, you know, substrates of Jacques Vallée and some of the hardcore UFO researchers, this is what they're getting at. You almost end up with this model that is similar to Plato where like this, these guardians, which literally I'm not even talking about like elites in society socio economically. I'm talking about like guardians of reality itself are dangling things in front of us and getting us to, you know, showing us the light, we're glimpsing the light and then we're, we're moving outwards and ascending through the cave.

• 2:22:55Jesse Michels?

  But it's also adaptive to kind of keep most of us in a cave or something. And, and if you think about technology, it is this forcing function, whether it's AI or nuclear or, you know, the ability for the human genome to be sort of messed with. It's this forcing function of like, if you had this technology, the, the, the latency and the bandwidth limitations of humans to like, do really amazing things and do really destructive things all goes out the window. And so

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 2:23:28Jesse Michels?

  So it's almost like your stuff plus the Nick Bostrom simulation stuff, you end up with this theory of reality where like, Some higher living organisms that are disembodied are probably managing us.

• 2:23:44Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, there's a couple, another way to think about it that makes your point, I think. And that is, one way that we could think about what's, what's going on with like the recursive trace logic is, it's giving us a layer of software outside of our headset. So this is just a VR game. And by stepping out of spacetime headset and getting a first layer of software description of how the headset is built, we get some interesting new power. If, if, if you're the Grand Theft Auto example, right? If you're a wizard at Grand Theft Auto, you can race your car faster than anybody, get from here to there, steal stuff, whatever. But if I'm the geek that can't drive a car, but I wrote the software, then I can do magic.

• 2:24:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I can literally take the air out of the tires of the, of the, of the wizard. I can make his car disappear. I can make it turn into a turtle. I can do anything I want to because I know the software. So we have, when you, when you look at the recursive trace logic, you realize that those with the bigger trace, the bigger matrices have the ability, they have the, they have software. They, they have the software, if they have enough, if they're enough bigger than you, they have the software to know how your headset is, is working and they can just play with you, like, like someone who knows the software brand, they can just play and, and do complete math. So you can't think big enough. You absolutely, you can't think big enough when you, when you realize the possibilities that the recursive trace logic brings up.

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  But I would point out, in, in spirit, it's very similar to Nick Bostrom, but there is a key difference between what I'm saying and what Bostrom is, is saying, and it's, it's an important difference. Bostrom is saying that, yes, what we're, we're doing here is just a simulation and there's some geek with their little computer and writing software and then we're just.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  Characters in their in their software and then this world is just and that person, by the way, is also just a character in some deeper level of software and and there goes all the way down. But at the bottom, he puts a physical world. There's some physical place and there's some and I'm saying there is no physical bottom to this whole thing. So that's one difference. There is no physical bottom. So that's one difference between what I'm saying and what Bostrom says. And there's another thing I'm saying that's different. Bostrom is saying that somehow you could program a computer to create the conscious experience. If you if you if you believe that there's conscious experience, then it has to be. So I won't say what Bostrom believes. I will say this. If you are doing this computer

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  simulation thing, and you believe that there's consciousness, then you're going to be forced to say that somehow a computer program done right will give you consciousness. And I deny that. I think that that's in principle not possible. There is no way to start with algorithms and get consciousness. Integrated information theory, all these other approaches have not been able to give us a single concrete example of a specific conscious experience. And I predict they never will. They'll never get close.

• 2:26:55Jesse Michels?

  I would predict that, too, because we're not working with the tools of whatever, you know, elements created us. And so it's it's interesting, you know, when simulation theory gets talked about, I feel like there are two connotations. There's the grand theft auto nihilistic connotation of like, you know, or conclusion, rather, where it's like, anything goes. We're in a simulator, we're in a video game. And then the second thing is more aspirational, which is like, there are realities and windows above us. And so another question I would ask is, you're talking about between species, you know, some theoretical alien species and

• 2:27:35Jesse Michels?

  us, and then down the food chain to lower level animals as far as our perceptive apparatuses, you know, being going from, you know, somewhat limited to very unlimited. Within a single lifetime, do you think a human can widen their perceptive apparatus in a way where they see more?

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  I do, and this is sort of gets spiritual now. I think that that's partly what's going on here and what it's about. So I think, I mean, I don't know what consciousness is up to, but I can guess. I mean, I'm a scientist, I can throw out hypotheses. One thing I think is consciousness trying to understand itself by taking an infinite number of perspectives and getting lost in the perspective. So in some sense, to really take a perspective means to lose yourself in it. So to really believe that I am this body and to really be tied to it and be afraid of its death and so forth. So I'm really, and then to slowly wake up. And now to the aspirational part, as I wake up and as I get to the point where I get

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  better and better technologies and I realize that I can use this power, but I'm also waking up to who I am. So this is the aspirational part where consciousness lost itself in the game, identified with an avatar. It's getting a better, better understanding of that part of the matrix. It's getting more power and now it comes to the point where it's going to choose how it's going to use that power. Do I want to use it to hurt people, to dominate them? Or am I going to use it in some other way?

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  To the extent that consciousness wakes up to, oh, wait a minute, that's just me. That person there is me in a different avatar. See, it's all one consciousness through an infinite number of windows and an infinite number of policies and an infinite number of meta policies. It gets lost, thinks it's just the avatar, but as it gets more power and it wakes up to its identity as the one consciousness that transcends this whole set of games, then...

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  You realize that now that I've got this new weapon, or I've got this gun, I would be a fool to shoot that person because it's like shooting myself in the foot. Why would I take a weapon and shoot myself in the foot? Because that person is not my enemy. That person is me. And so that's the aspirational part of this. And it leads to a whole interesting religious kind of thing, moral kind of thing. What are we here for? And what do we learn in the process?

• 2:30:25Jesse Michels?

  How do you logically conclude that other people around you are also yourself?

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  Well, so there is a leap there. So the leap is to say that I do think that

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  if you look at the trace logic, it's saying that as you go up and up, all these windows are connected, right? There is a pre... Leibniz says there's a pre-established harmony. And there's a unifying structure that ties the whole thing into one. And so, but as I said earlier, this is just a mathematical theory. It's a scientific theory. And no theory is ever the final theory. What it points to, though, what this theory points to is a fundamental unity of consciousness. Despite all this beautiful structure, there's a fundamental unity. So I have the feeling that there is this one deep consciousness that we all are. Each of us is,

• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  but just seeing through a particular avatar, through a particular window, policy, meta-policy, and so forth. And waking up to the fact that, oh, Jesse is just gone. And we're having this conversation, but the way I treat Jesse is exactly the way I'm treating myself. And if I don't want to shoot myself in the foot, I wouldn't want to shoot Jesse in the foot either because that's me. And so that's the aspirational part. It's interesting because evolution in physicalist framework doesn't tell me that you and I are one. It tells me that we're competitors, and I need to beat you to get whatever resources I need.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  But this theory of the observer says a very, very different story. It says, no, that evolutionary story is, works inside the headset. It's, it's, if you, if you stick inside the headset, it's a good theory. It works.

• 2:32:17Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. And your father was a priest, is that right?

• 2:32:22Speaker 01

  No, he was a, a fundamentalist Christian Protestant minister, right?

• 2:32:28Jesse Michels?

  So this has to dawn on you. You've gone through your own arc like this, where you started religious. Then you got into this sort of dog eat dog Darwinian model, which, you know, it's actually adaptive for us not to see reality because of evolutionary game theory. And then you figured out this sort of matrix model, which if you go all the way up the chain of consciousness, you end up with this unified field of consciousness. So you moved from God, and then you moved away from God, and then you moved back to God.

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  Right. And part of the journey for me was what I loved about science was the mathematical rigor.

• 2:33:09Speaker 01

  Precise theories with precise assumptions and mathematical precision and testing. You knew the theories were consistent. They may not be true, but they're consistent. But it was physicalist. And that didn't, I mean, ultimately it felt like there was something missing in the physical. And it turns out there is, we can't get a theory of the observer yet in a, in a physicalist framework, we just can't. And we can't get a theory of conscious experience. And we can't get a theory of the illusion of conscious experience. There's nothing that gives us any specific illusion of a conscious experience. So that, that was, the plus of science was rigor, no nonsense, consistency.

• 2:33:53Speaker 01

  The downside was the physicalism assumption seemed to be too restrictive. On the religious side, the downside was complete lack of rigor. And no consistency and no tests, no empirical tests. It was, and, and as a result, a lot of the stuff you hear, a lot of stuff I heard is just utter nonsense. That, that was the downside. The, the upside was.

• 2:34:23Speaker 01

  The idea that consciousness is fundamental and somehow love and unity is, I mean, like with a lot of the religions, the fundamental thing is love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. If you stick to that fundamental idea in the religions and cut away everything else, I'm on board. That seems really right. Mostly the other stuff is all this inconsistent nonsense and you know, all the snake oil and so forth. So you can see the problem that you've got as a human being in this kind of situation. There's snake oil and so forth, and yet the fundamental thing is love your neighbor as yourself. Science has got the rigor, they got the mathematics, that seems really good, but there's no reason to love

• 2:35:07Speaker 01

  your neighbor as yourself, I mean, in the sense that, I mean, it's dog eat dog Darwinian kind of thing. I love my neighbor myself as long as convenient for me and you know, and so forth. But there's no deep sense in which I'm one with my neighbor. And so for me, the synthesis is to pull the, to take the rigor of science, the mathematical precision and the absolute insistence on data, careful observations, and to take from the spiritual traditions, get rid of all the nonsense, get rid of all the hand wave and dogma, and keep the essence, which is there is a fundamental unity. Love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is your, take that from

• 2:35:52Speaker 01

  the spiritual tradition, bring those two things together, and then I think we have a new thing going forward that could really be the aspirational science meets spirituality that you were talking about.

• 2:36:04Jesse Michels?

  Do you believe in God?

• 2:36:07Speaker 01

  I believe that there, I would say this, as best as words can do it, right? So I'll say this, I think, to answer the question, I have to be very, very careful.

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  Words are just words. As I said, the science starts with assumptions. There is no scientific theory of everything. And so whatever reality is, infinitely transcends what science could do. And yet, I'm a scientist. I think science is a fantastic tool. I want to use it. But reality, whatever it is, infinitely, not just a little bit, infinitely transcends anything that we could come up with in science.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  But to answer your question, so I'm not dodging your question. I'm going to get to your question, but it's so deep that I have to say a couple of things. There are most of the stuff that we know,

• 2:37:07Speaker 01

  we don't know through science or through study.

• 2:37:12Speaker 01

  The color green. At some point in your life, when you were two, someone said, Jesse, that's green. And you looked and you go, oh, okay, that's green. Someone pointed to a rabbit and said, that's a rabbit. And you got it. And if you think about what went on there, it's a miracle, right? Your mom sitting with you and points and says, rabbit. And you look once or twice and you get it.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  There were a thousand, a million hypotheses that you could have. Maybe it was the ear and the rug. Maybe it was the color of the fur. Maybe it was the left eye. Maybe it was the, you know, the left paw and the cup over there. What could you possibly mean by rabbit? And yet, at the right age, someone points, says rabbit, just once or twice is all you need typically. And you get it. This is called learning by ostensive definition. And almost everything you know is not because of a scientific theory. It's because of ostensive definition. Everything of everyday life that you know, colors, shapes. Someone pointed and said, and you got it. That's ostensive definition.

• 2:38:24Speaker 01

  So now, what do I mean by God? Because God is just a word, right? So I'm getting, so I want to get, escape from the trap of using words and getting trapped and just, so I'm going to use ostensive definition. Here's what I think God is. I'm going to say, what I'd like you to do is,

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  Ask yourself the question, I wonder what my next thought will be, and then just wait.

• 2:38:59Speaker 01

  What happened?

• 2:39:00Jesse Michels?

  Thought about God, because, but it was, it was sort of silent for a little bit and then.

• 2:39:05Speaker 01

  Did you have a point there when, when I said, um, I wonder what my next thought will be? And then you just were waiting for a minute to see what your first thought will be. Was there a little gap there?

• 2:39:14Jesse Michels?

  There was a gap there and I was waiting for what my next thought would be, which is, I'm assuming what you generally are pointing to.

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:39:24Jesse Michels?

  But my thinking is also very weird and I don't think in words. So it wasn't like, I wasn't saying that in my head. I was just sort of waiting.

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  You were waiting.

• 2:39:32Jesse Michels?

  About God.

• 2:39:34Speaker 01

  So that, that, that's the best pointer I can give for what I mean by God. Is that awareness that you can have, and you can do this anytime you want to actually, is to just say, I'll just not think for a while.

• 2:39:48Speaker 01

  And just be aware without thought. That, that awareness is what I think is God. And I believe in that. And it, it cannot be described.

• 2:40:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And you almost, you got me thinking about this when you said, you know, what, how did I learn about the color green? And probably all sorts of concepts that I take for granted in everyday life. And it's almost like we have meme libraries in our head and we attribute like what we see is an interplay between what's adaptive for us to see. As you described so well in your book. But there's also some superimposition of what we have in our heads, some like Bayesian priors of like what we think the concept is. That we're like imposing on reality at all times.

• 2:40:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:40:38Jesse Michels?

  And so when you say God is the suspension of thought. I think it's almost impossible, like in waking life, everything has that, all these connotations that I've placed on all these things. There's nothing like. Going to like an entirely new context, like going on a trip and like you're in some vast new landscape and you can't detach any of that sort of baggage to like all the concepts that you're like taking in.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  Right. So that's a very good point. And I would just say that what I'm trying to point to them with that little thing I did, you know, I wonder what my next thought will be. What I'm pointing to is just the raw awareness in which all these things arise, the colors, the sounds, the emotions, the thoughts, that raw, that raw awareness that doesn't require any of these things. That is what I'm trying to point to.

• 2:41:35Jesse Michels?

  But I'm still, I'm looking at your shirt and I'm looking at the chair and there are all these things that I have superimposed ideas about that might not, you know, be at the forefront of my mind in my sort of waking consciousness, reality, but it's impossible for me to like strip my preconceptions about those things while I'm processing them.

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  Whereas someone like the Dalai Lama might be able to, right? Someone who has been spending years in meditation would be able to say, yes, I can just be the presence, the awareness and no content. And that's what I mean by God is that awareness without any content. I think it's accessible to all of us, but it's something that requires practice to let go.

• 2:42:27Jesse Michels?

  Why do you think there's a bliss in that? Does that speak to this sort of, again, meta level, like not, not the Darwinian, but the meta level, if you have all these matrices, the adaptiveness of seeing more. Does the fact that meditation, you end up in these sort of city states or whatever, you know, the different traditions call it different things, but you end up in these states of joy.

• 2:42:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:42:53Jesse Michels?

  Just about reality itself. Is there something adaptive about that?

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  I don't know if I would put it in like the evolutionary adaptive kind of context, because I think it transcends that. In some sense, evolutionarily, it's not adaptive.

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  To not be thinking about stuff and planning and, and washing out for things that could kill you and, and.

• 2:43:15Jesse Michels?

  But it is if consciousness is best not embodied. And then if your consciousness persists past life, and if you're going to dissolve and or self nullify into, into, you know, sort of this greater harmonic consciousness, which is not at all a prescription or something I would propose.

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:43:31Jesse Michels?

  But on some theoretical level.

• 2:43:33Speaker 01

  Yes, I think, and by the way, now I'm speaking beyond my spiritual attainment, but I'll.

• 2:43:38Jesse Michels?

  Me too.

• 2:43:40Speaker 01

  So just with that proviso, I'm, I'm no saint, but I would, I would say that

• 2:43:46Speaker 01

  the

• 2:43:48Speaker 01

  point of going into silence and letting go of all thoughts is, and then the reason it leads to, to bliss is, is that is the fundamental nature of reality. None of this really does matter in a sense. This is just

• 2:44:06Speaker 01

  a headset.

• 2:44:07Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  And you, you put it on, you let yourself get lost in the game for a while. You let yourself get upset for a while. And then you woke up and go, oh, you take the headset off. Okay. Well, so I learned something about myself from, from that, that, that perspective. Now let me try on this other headset. And, and, but, but

• 2:44:30Speaker 01

  you were never in any danger. You'd let yourself feel like you were in, in danger. But the bliss is there, there is in some sense, only you, the, the one.

• 2:44:43Speaker 01

  And there is no danger. There's only the love, the unity. But the, it's in the headset that you get all these emotions, but you're, and you let yourself have them. You, you, that's part of experiencing all the possibilities. You let yourself experience that and then you transcend it. That's the, and again, I'm speaking way over my pay grade, but, but yeah.

• 2:45:05Jesse Michels?

  How do we triangulate or figure out what true reality actually is? So I'll take at face value, your theory that, you know, the reason I see your face, I see your shirt, and it looks a certain way to me is because of, that's somehow adaptive from some evolutionary game theory perspective.

• 2:45:28Jesse Michels?

  But what about like, yeah, what do you, what do you actually look like? What is, what is the chair you're sitting on actually look like? What is this table actually? In some like platonic higher sense, or in your case, this higher context window matrix? Is there some way to get at that with your theory?

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I, I think that all that, all these things that you're talking about only exist as icons in the headset. They're, they have no deeper reality than that. So these, these, so I'll.

• 2:45:56Jesse Michels?

  But it is still some unique binary code sequence ultimately.

• 2:46:02Jesse Michels?

  Or maybe not a completely unique. Well, yeah, go for it.

• 2:46:06Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I would, so I'll, I'll put it this way, because it's very stark. Right now I have no neurons.

• 2:46:16Speaker 01

  I have no brain. If you looked, you would see a brain. If you, and I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, I like neuroscience. But I think that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. And this table does not exist when it's not perceived. There is, there is nothing more to the table than the raw perceptions I'm having right now. There is literally nothing more to it than that.

• 2:46:39Jesse Michels?

  Really? Because there are, you know, people who are

• 2:46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:43Jesse Michels?

  sort of solipsistic holographic universe types. And then there's like the neutral monists where, you know, there's some interplay between conscious and then consciousness and there is, but there is something objective. And then there's like the materialist reductionist. You know, this is all very separate mind, matter are very separate. And so what you're saying, it sounds like you're more in the like, it's all, it's all like a product of your perception.

• 2:47:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:47:10Jesse Michels?

  This isn't real.

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's a real experience.

• 2:47:13Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:47:14Speaker 01

  And it's, the experience is there only for, for so long as I choose to look and make that experience. And as soon as I go away, my table is gone. Jesse may still see this table, but, but it's your table is not mine because that, that's your experience. There's no such thing as the table. There's only your experience and my experience. We coordinate such that we think that there is the table.

• 2:47:34Jesse Michels?

  But what if the monad were perceiving the table? Wouldn't it see something discreet? It might be more complex than what we see because it's like way more evolved than us, but.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  Well, but I would say you are the ultimate.

• 2:47:49Speaker 01

  Consciousness through a Jesse avatar, talking with the Hoffman avatar. And through the Jesse avatar, you're creating a table. Through the Hoffman avatar, the same you is creating a table. My table is now gone, whereas your avatar's table is still there.

• 2:48:06Jesse Michels?

  Where do you get that? The idea that we are sort of fractal, almost pinched nodes of a larger.

• 2:48:12Speaker 01

  The recursive trace logic itself.

• 2:48:14Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:48:15Speaker 01

  That is the mathematical. So when Leibniz was saying that he wanted a theory of observers being fundamental with a with a pre-established harmony. What I'm proposing is that this recursive trace logic is that pre-established harmony. And it shows how you can talk about separate monads, separate observers. And yet, the pre-established harmony shows that they're all one.

• 2:48:37Jesse Michels?

  So there is, it's like, um, almost like a stylus on an LP player or something like we're the measurement instrument.

• 2:48:46Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 2:48:46Jesse Michels?

  Of something that is fundamentally there. But there's, I'm seeing this unique perception based on my own measurement instrument of my body and, and what's adaptive for me. You're seeing that as well.

• 2:49:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:49:02Jesse Michels?

  The monad would see something different, but there's no objective. It's always going to be unique.

• 2:49:07Speaker 01

  The only objective thing is you, you, the awareness staring through a Jesse avatar and staring through. That's the only thing that, that, that is the objective reality. All this other stuff literally comes and goes. It's just very much like, again, a VR headset. When I'm playing Grand Theft Auto, I look over there and I see a red Ferrari. And you, you're, you're, you also are playing with Grand Theft Auto. And I say, Jesse, look at that red Ferrari. And you say, oh yeah, I see it. And then I look away, my red Ferrari is literally gone. There's no red Ferrari anywhere for me. And you might still see it. So Jesse has his own red Ferrari. And there's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer that's running this thing. There's just bits running on the computer in this example.

• 2:49:52Speaker 01

  So my red Ferrari is gone completely. And if I go back, I'll render a red Ferrari and then I've got one. So I'm really saying, I render a table when I look and it's no, it doesn't exist because I'm not rendering it. So I'm rendering, and that is actually impressive if you think about it. This is a really complicated world. And I render it effortlessly. I just look and it happens. That's how good you are.

• 2:50:16Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. So it's almost like conscious agents or perceivers are the fundamental units of the real ultimate reality. It's kind of empowering in some sense.

• 2:50:29Speaker 01

  It is. I would just make one proviso, and that is, I think there's, there is only the one awareness.

• 2:50:36Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:50:36Speaker 01

  And but all these conscious agents that I talk about and are a scientific tool to, to talk about it. But, but I would want to say the, the awareness transcends my theory. It transcends any theory. But given that, then I agree with you. I just want to always make sure that we're humble about our scientific.

• 2:50:52Jesse Michels?

  Well, you could say we're, we're windows and the sunlight peering through the windows is what's ultimately, you know, binding all of us or something. And so

• 2:51:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:51:01Jesse Michels?

  We're, we're like pinched nodes on a circuit or something and we have unique signatures of what we see. But it's all of the same thing.

• 2:51:10Speaker 01

  I agree with those metaphors. It's, it's really the one looking at itself through different pinches or different windows, or, or it's almost like one light shining through different films. It's like a movie projector. And there's a, you know, it's one light, but you can block the light. So Jesse is a way of blocking that light. Hoffman's a way of blocking that light in different ways. That's another, these are all metaphors.

• 2:51:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. I mean, the analogies will always fall short.

• 2:51:39Speaker 01

  They'll always fall short.

• 2:51:40Jesse Michels?

  We can try. Do you believe in, in, in UFOs? Do you think they comport with your, you know, theory in any way? We're at an unprecedented time in UFO history where the president is actively contemplating releasing documents, which they clearly have on, on these unidentified flying objects.

• 2:51:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'll say, I hadn't even really given them any serious thought until there was the sworn testimony before Congress where credible, high ranking military and other officials said, I have seen non-human biologics and non-human technology. And at that point, I said, I have no reason to disbelieve these people. And I have no scientific or theoretical reasons to disbelieve them. And actually, since that time, I've then been looking at the possibilities of the trace logic to model some of this stuff. And I think.

• 2:52:39Speaker 01

  It's quite feasible.

• 2:52:40Jesse Michels?

  Well, it sounds like, again, the embodiment of consciousness, if that's the exception to the rule, then you're probably going to end up not only with all sorts of disembodied consciousnesses, but you could have also, just with your theory itself, if it's adaptive for us to not see base reality, we only see between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum. A dog whistle is a dog whistle because it eludes, you know, especially older people who are hard of hearing, you know. So it's like, the amount of things that we don't see in reality, we don't see electric fields, you know, you ask somebody, do they believe in an electron, they say yes. You say, why? Well, it's, you know, it's in our textbooks and they say they can detect it with electron microscopes. So these are just

• 2:53:25Jesse Michels?

  umvelts, these are sort of ways to like, you know, perceive things. And then you could say the same with UFOs, you have all these signatures being picked up forward looking infrared, you know, you have them on radar, you have eyewitnesses, in certain cases, you have all three of those things. And there's nothing really like, if you're actually an earnest scientist, you can say, oh, it's impossible, or you can like, take that in as data that's very, you know, valid and interesting. And it's almost like with your theory, it's Occam's razor, we'd be swimming in life. The sort of dark forest analogy from this three body problem, Chinese science fiction novel, would be the base case, that we'd be swimming in a lot more life. The eight million species are just the eight

• 2:54:08Jesse Michels?

  million species that it's adaptive for our survival to see.

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  I completely agree. I think that there are an infinite number of alien intelligences in that just follows from recursive trace logic, it's infinite. So our headset gives us a very, very, very tiny peek at this. And I mentioned earlier, I think our headset is one of the more trivial ones. So I think that we're not near the top of the food chain, we're near the bottom of the food chain, as far as I can tell, in terms of the headset and its accessibility. So I think that there's the chance of

• 2:54:46Speaker 01

  Alien intelligence, intelligences that are greater than ours is one. And I think that there's an infinite, an infinite variety of them. And I think that the recursive trace logic gives us a mathematical framework to begin to understand exactly how our spacetime headset is built, how it can be hacked, how a higher headset. Now that we have the mathematics, even though we're stuck in a headset, a 3D headset, we're not stuck conceptually. We can, with mathematics, design our, we can actually show how the recursive trace logic can build our three-space, one-time dimension headset.

• 2:55:30Speaker 01

  We can then build higher and higher dimensional ones. And we can ask how someone who had those headsets could play with our headset. We're in the position to actually understand how higher intelligences could play with us. And we could then try to, if we wanted to, to try to see if there were ways to counter it, if we wanted to. But I think that we're now in a position, now if you're a physicalist and you say spacetime is fundamental and nothing can go faster than the speed of light, period. That's the game, that's the name. Then you don't have the tools, I don't think, to, to deal with the UAP phenomena. But I think you've mistaken some limitations of a little headset for a fundamental nature of reality problem, or a limitation.

• 2:56:14Speaker 01

  So I think that limitations of our headset are just limitations of our headset. And there are other headsets that include ours as a little special case, that do not have the spacetime limitations that we have, that don't care about our speed of light. Their clocks are going at different rates than ours could ever go, for example. So, so, and, and that's, that's not even thinking big enough. There's all sorts of ways in which they could exceed our headset. So we have the mathematical tools to examine this, to understand how our headset could be engineered and reverse engineered and played with by other alien technologies that are higher, we can, we can actually understand that now. But if we, but we have to let go of the physicalist framework. We have to put the observer framework first.

• 2:56:59Jesse Michels?

  Do you think we're on the verge of a scientific revolution?

• 2:57:05Speaker 01

  I'll say this, if we can, I mentioned those, we have nine conjectures about building special and general relativity, quantum field theory and so forth. If we prove those conjectures are true, then I think it's the game changer. So we should know within a few years. I mean, if we prove that all those conjectures are true, then there's no reason to be stuck inside spacetime anymore. Our science can go beyond it. And as soon as we do that and then start to get new technologies, it'll be over for the physicalist, the spacetime framework.

• 2:57:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I'm very excited for that. And I think you put it well, that it feels like science is moving inwards.

• 2:57:50Speaker 01

  To the observer.

• 2:57:53Jesse Michels?

  To the observer. And Newton, the observer's not taken into account with things like time dilation, different inertial reference frames, all sorts of things. General relativity does take the observer into account, but not fully. And then it's impossible to ignore, but they've attempted to ignore it in quantum mechanics.

• 2:58:11Speaker 01

  Quantum mechanics, right?

• 2:58:12Jesse Michels?

  And it's interesting that this, there's a confluence of these sort of scientific paradigms where you can't ignore the observer. And, you know, there's an Austrian philosopher I like named Rudolf Steiner, and he's, you know, it's called anthroposophy, and it's the scientific study of spiritual phenomena. And so I wonder, with a more observer-based science, where you can't separate the observer from the observed, which classically you would in enlightenment thought, if we start to get a scientific explanation for spiritual phenomena that seem very N of one, mystical

• 2:58:52Jesse Michels?

  phenomena that, you know, seem like they'll always exist outside of the realm of science. And that was really Steiner's aspiration. And he was actually, you know, himself, you know, one of the fathers of like organic farming and, you know, he made real, he wasn't like a total mushy brain thinker. So I wonder if, you know, these, your stuff does get worked out and we do, we do, we are able to predict more than just length contraction, time dilation, and Schrodinger's equation, which is remarkable that you can just do that. If you get all nine of these things, then. I wonder if you can explain a lot of, you know,

• 2:59:34Jesse Michels?

  spiritual phenomena. We could re-merge the science and the spirit, which have really been bifurcated since the Enlightenment.

• 2:59:42Speaker 01

  Well, I agree with you, and I think that what would come out of this would be the realization that what we thought was the physical world is just experiences that are spiritual. This is the table, we have thought of the table as something that exists independent of me, that would be there even after I'm dead and so forth. And the table, Hoffman's table that you're seeing right now will not be there, not only when Hoffman's dead, but when he just looks away, that table's gone. So the whole physical framework disappears. And this really, putting the observer first, is really in some sense already moving us into like a spiritual kind of framework, but one where we have all

• 3:00:21Speaker 01

  the mathematical guardrails of science and all the experimental guardrails of science. It's no longer the Wild West, anything goes, any preacher can say whatever he wants to and rip people off if he wants to and so forth. It's going to be a spirituality with really clean guardrails on it.

• 3:00:41Jesse Michels?

  That'll be fascinating. I do find it so interesting how much your work converges on and comports with ancient traditions, like Plato, where you have inemnesis, you know, in sort of Greek traditions, forgetting of your soul self. And then occasionally you'll glimpse that soul self through noesis, or in the Hindu tradition, you have Maya. You have, you know, very pervasive are these concepts of this joyous illusion where you're playing out some sort of karmic, you know, path.

• 3:01:16Jesse Michels?

  And you're slowly maybe seeing beyond the veil, but that's this kind of incremental process. But life itself is ultimately sort of illusory.

• 3:01:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this recursive trace logic sort of says that that's the essential thing, is that each window is just a window. It's a way that the one consciousness is looking through itself. And what I don't understand is why.

• 3:01:42Speaker 01

  The infinite consciousness chooses to let itself get lost. That's very interesting that it would, from this framework, it chooses to go in with both feet, completely identify with the avatar, be afraid, be afraid of death, be selfish, learn to not be selfish, learn to not be afraid. Have death be there as the beckoning, the wake up call to who you really are, to have the experience of that fear. So all the spiritual stuff, but why you, why consciousness does this? As it clearly does in my case, I can say first person, my experience has been complete

• 3:02:25Speaker 01

  identification with the avatar, fear of death, the whole nine yards, a slow waking up, disbelief, holy, could I really be that? You know, it's truly a stunning idea to me to, I still remember the first time I realized that consciousness might be fundamental, like that the science was saying consciousness could be fundamental. I had to sit down, it was so, I was so tied to the physicalist framework. And I was only maybe 29, 30 years old, when, when the math hit me in the face. I've been working on this and hit me in the face that that was what it meant. And I just had to sit down, I was so stunned.

• 3:03:06Jesse Michels?

  This also has implications for AI where we're sort of progressively outsourcing our thinking more and more to these sort of, you know, transformers and thinking machines. I think the more that we do that, the less we probably work on our own perceptive apparatus. I mean, studies show that like Gen Z will literally like their decision, their decision making will sort of atrophy and it becomes sort of vestigial because you're literally using this sort of fake pen pal, which isn't always giving you right advice.

• 3:03:39Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:03:40Jesse Michels?

  Constantly to like make life decisions, you know, it's like which person you should, you know, date and you know, it's sort of crazy, you know, uh, uh, you know, there, you know, who you should, uh, you know, or what you should write up for some paper that, you know, should be your own, should be your own thinking, you know, or, you know, you try to write a book and you do it through this, you know, there are all these things that AI is sort of, you know, we're outsourcing our agency to it and.

• 3:04:08Jesse Michels?

  That seems really bad in your theory, because in your theory, there's something extremely adaptive about going through reality to grow your own perceptive abilities.

• 3:04:18Speaker 01

  Well, you raise an interesting point, and I think I've been in AI since 79, so I've been very interested in artificial intelligence. And you're right that AI, as it's being used by many people today, gives them false stuff. It gives them some, of course, not all false. There are useful bits of information that you get and useful direction, but enough false that it can be problematic. The current large language models don't really know anything. They they compute correlations, and they're, in some sense, they're dumber than cucumbers, right? But they can read everything, and they can do correlations that we can't, because

• 3:05:02Speaker 01

  they have the computational resources. And so they take up tons of tons of energy to do them. I think that we will have completely new architectures. I actually think the recursive trace logic is an AI architecture. It's a completely different kind of than LLM. It's a completely new architecture. I'll just say one reason why I think it's that. One aspect of intelligence, we're looking at artificial intelligence, one aspect of intelligence is surprise. To the extent that I'm surprised, I'm not intelligent. If every time I try to do something, like pick up this cup, the cup breaks, or I try to button my shirt, my shirt rips, or I try to wash the dishes and, you know, like, kill myself or something

• 3:05:47Speaker 01

  like that, hurt myself. If every time I do something, I'm surprised at the outcome, well, then I'm not very smart. Minimizing surprise is not all of intelligence, but it's certainly a big part of intelligence. And the trace logic is the logic of zero surprise. So in that sense, the trace logic is the logic of intelligence. And I see going forward that it would be Very beneficial to move away from the correlation architectures of large language models to the trace logic architecture.

• 3:06:22Jesse Michels?

  Have you worked with, I don't know, Demis Hassabis or like any of these sort of like super Ilya Sutskever? I always don't know how to pronounce his last name, but some of these like really frontier AI researchers who are trying to look beyond transformer technology.

• 3:06:39Speaker 01

  I've, I won't mention the names. I've talked with some people who are, are interested in the possibility of using the trace logic for, for this kind of thing. But, but that stuff I, I shouldn't go into anybody. I can only put my name on the table and I can just say, this is what, what I see going forward. I know that there are other companies out there that are trying to use like minimize free energy as a way of approximating minimizing surprise and trying to build AIs based on minimizing free energy. But the trace logic, you don't have to minimize anything. The trace logic is logic, not only of minimum surprise, zero surprise.

• 3:07:18Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating.

• 3:07:19Speaker 01

  You can't do better.

• 3:07:20Jesse Michels?

  It's very ambitious. Yeah.

• 3:07:22Speaker 01

  So, so in that, I think AI going forward.

• 3:07:27Jesse Michels?

  I just don't know how you, cause I think of the Carl Friston free energy stuff and like if you're minimizing entropy, you know, if you get, see randomized signals, it's like this Pavlovian conditioning thing with your neurons and you like, you try to, you know, go for as low entropy as possible or whatever. But there's, the thing you're interfacing with as a conscious agent is just this like infinitely complex world. I just don't know. I feel like you'd have to model the infinitely complex world in your trace logic system. And that feels like impossible or Sisyphean to me.

• 3:08:02Speaker 01

  Well, you'd have to build, just like we have to do with large language models, you, you have to put in tons and tons of data, use tons and tons of energy and so forth. And you, you can never get to the top. So you'll always, right? The trace logic has no top. So the, all you could do is, is program up a subset of the trace logic.

• 3:08:19Jesse Michels?

  But it'd be a different data architecture.

• 3:08:21Speaker 01

  Completely different architecture and, and search process.

• 3:08:23Jesse Michels?

  It wouldn't just be like tokens in vector space connected with one another. It would be these sort of what might happen and these different little rule sets.

• 3:08:33Speaker 01

  And that's right. And, and they'll be, if you think about this as the different Markov matrices are different.

• 3:08:42Speaker 01

  Ways of looking at things. You can ask, what should I talk about in terms of the beliefs that I get? What are the, so if I'm looking, but what beliefs do I have? And the beliefs would be the stationary measures of the Markov chains, the long-term probabilities. I'm talking ergodic Markov chains, but you can generalize it to non-ergodic as well. But the, I have a bunch of states. And in some sense, for this observer window, what's the long-term probability that I'll see state 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? That's, that's a kind of a belief system. And it turns out, so probability, so they're all probability measures. These beliefs then would be probability measures, which are the stationary measures.

• 3:09:24Speaker 01

  And probabilities, of course, are beliefs, so they have a logic. So there is also a logic of probability measures. And, and I discovered it. It was in 1992. We were looking at Bayesian models of perception when I was working with a team. And they're mathematicians. I said, you know, we're talking about Bayesian belief, probability model. So there's clearly a logic here because we have to talk about propositions here. We're using probability measures as propositions. We can take their and, their or, negation, implication. What is it? So I just said, you guys are mathematicians. What is it? I'm not a mathematician. And we looked, we had a graduate student look for a few weeks.

• 3:10:09Speaker 01

  He told us what they had and it was obviously trivial. And we couldn't believe it. The professor of mathematics there, Bruce Bennett, couldn't believe it. He's a genius mathematician. So we sat down and we did it. We, we wrote a paper, it came out in 92 or 93. It's called, we called it the Lebesgue logic of probability measures. So there is a, just like there's a logic on, the trace logic on Markov chains. There is a logic on the set of all probability measures. It's called the Lebesgue logic. It's not very well-known, actually. But it gives you the notion of conjunction, disjunction, negation. It's a non-bullion logic. It has Boolean sub-logics. And we found out, just in the last couple of years,

• 3:10:54Speaker 01

  that the map that takes a Markov matrix to its stationary measure is a homomorphism from the trace logic to the Lebesgue logic. So there is a

• 3:11:10Speaker 01

  Beautiful intermeshing of observation and belief. They're homomorphic. So the trace theory, the trace logic on Markov chains and the Lebesgue logic on probability measures mesh perfectly. And they give you a theory of observation and belief that meshes perfectly.

• 3:11:29Jesse Michels?

  Wow. If you take, though, for granted, the idea that your perception of reality is changing reality itself with like, you know, delayed choice experiment and double slit experiment, things like that, then, and then we obviously don't have some understanding of what eigenstate gets picked in Schrödinger's equation. How would you, in this trace logic system, be able to know exactly what state gets picked? And then does free will, you know, exist? Because if I'm choosing to make a measurement to begin with, that's a choice I made. I don't see how you could sort of deterministically predict that, you know?

• 3:12:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny that you mention this because just yesterday I spent an hour with my collaborator, Chetan Prakash, who's a mathematician, on exactly how we're going to try to get contextuality, quantum contextuality, out of the trace logic. And we think we'll be able to do it with these policies. So we think that we'll be able to get the right kind of contextuality, the quantum contextuality, by the right choice of policies on the trace logic itself. So that's, so in other words, this is taking these things out of hand wave into, we know that there is either a theorem in our favor or a theorem against us. And it's just a matter of us writing down the theorem. The trace logic mathematics is absolutely clean. We have no wiggle room.

• 3:12:55Speaker 01

  We can either do it or we can't. It's just a matter of doing the theorem and the proof. And I think we'll get contextuality and we'll get that thing from, but that's what I love about this theory. There's literally, you can see, I have no wiggle room. There is, once I have Markov chains and I notice that there is this logic on them, I can't fool with the logic. That logic is what it is.

• 3:13:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:17Speaker 01

  I can then build a meta logic, I can do the policies on it, that's all the freedom I've got. Then it has its own, there's no, so this thing either works.

• 3:13:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:25Speaker 01

  I can build it, there's no tweaking.

• 3:13:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, go big or go home.

• 3:13:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:13:29Jesse Michels?

  You're either gonna predict general relativity and quantum field theory, or it's gonna break.

• 3:13:35Speaker 01

  And so, I, yes, it's, it's, it's, I can't play with it.

• 3:13:42Speaker 01

  And it's also in a, in a vein that I think is very interesting. There are a lot of people who are trying to think about trying to build up spacetime in, on everything, everywhere, all at once kind of framework. Right, instead of having, you know, the time at time zero, you know, the state at time zero, and then some kind of differential equation evolving. There's, there are more like Emily Adlam at Chapman University, who was a brilliant philosopher of physics, absolutely brilliant philosopher of physics. I've learned a lot from, from reading her, her work on, on quantum theory and so on. She will, she's talking about how she's also thinking about the notion of, of getting constraints that are global constraints.

• 3:14:27Speaker 01

  They're not time evolution constraints, it's more, she calls it more like Sudoku. Where it's not like you move from left to right, she would say, in, in trying to solve the puzzle, you can do any direction you want to. There's a global constraint on what is a, a correct solution. And that's the interesting thing about the trace logic, it is more the Sudoku kind of thing. Once you have a big matrix, all the traces are pre-established. They're set, it's a, it's a, and it's also, even the matrix itself is not a time evolution from here to here. It's, it's a global statement of all the probabilistic relationships among these states.

• 3:15:03Jesse Michels?

  So ultimately, this matrix that you're trying to create is literally a matrix to our reality.

• 3:15:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:15:10Jesse Michels?

  It's literally.

• 3:15:10Speaker 01

  In the metaphorical sense, too.

• 3:15:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's a compression of reality itself.

• 3:15:14Speaker 01

  That's, that's right.

• 3:15:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:15Speaker 01

  And, yeah, but, and it happens to use Markov matrices as well.

• 3:15:21Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating.

• 3:15:22Speaker 01

  It is, it's, it's really quite fun, there's a whole other level.

• 3:15:26Jesse Michels?

  Was, was Markov interested in doing, was, was this an aspiration of his at all?

• 3:15:32Speaker 01

  I think he did this in the early 1900s. And the story I've heard is that he did it because he was irritated with some other mathematician or statistician that was claiming something that he thought was wrong. And so he just wanted to get a proof that this guy was wrong. And he came up with a theory of Markov chains to prove this guy that he was wrong. But I don't know that he then pursued it.

• 3:15:52Jesse Michels?

  That's a petty motivation for what might become our new theory of everything.

• 3:15:55Speaker 01

  I wouldn't put it on him. I might put it on my lack of understanding of the full situation. Right, yeah. So I'm not going to put that on him.

• 3:16:01Jesse Michels?

  But it's also how these things would happen. You know, it's like, it's funny, kind of happenstance accidents like that is how science often progresses.

• 3:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, Markov chains were then picked up to help us understand nuclear reactions. When they realized that it really became a thing when we started to realize that it could explain how a nuclear reaction happens. There are all these conditional probabilities. Markov chains are conditioned, you know, what will happen conditioned on your current state?

• 3:16:32Jesse Michels?

  Well, that I feel like makes it bode well for predicting stuff in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. If it's, you know, useful in the context of nuclear chain reactions, it's probably.

• 3:16:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's computationally universal.

• 3:16:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:45Speaker 01

  Some, one objection that people might have against Markov chains is to say, look, they're special because you have only a finite memory. You can only have a finite memory in it. And I would say, I agree, it's a finite memory, but it's, they're computationally universal, in the same sense that a Turing machine is computationally universal. But the Turing machine has as much tape as you need, but it's always a finite amount of symbols that you're writing down. But you have as much tape as you need. And it's the same thing with Markov chains. You effectively have as much tape as you need. And so the fact that it's, you know, the, the next state depends on the current state is not a problem

• 3:17:26Speaker 01

  because I can make the current state as complex as I want. That's effectively making the tape as, has as many symbols on it as I want. So, so there's effectively no practical limitation to the Markov framework at all. So when someone says, oh, but it's only conditional on the current state. Easy to fix, easy to show that you can just make the state as big as you want. So, so it seems to be a universal

• 3:17:54Speaker 01

  and powerful framework. But again, I should then, now it's humble pie time again, to say every scientific theory starts with assumptions, including my theory. And so it's infinitely far from the truth.

• 3:18:07Jesse Michels?

  Right. Well, it's fascinating nonetheless. Are you familiar with Jonathan Gerard by any chance? And he's doing some stuff with Wolfram.

• 3:18:15Speaker 01

  Wolfram, right, right. Yeah, he's, yeah, right.

• 3:18:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, they're fascinating too. He's, I brought this up in the past and I've just found it to be very interesting at high level. I don't understand half of his stuff, but he'll say, you know, that like Leibniz and Newton, we had kind of a vector calculus, understanding of reality and, you know, with the Wolfram stuff and kind of with your stuff, it feels like this too. We'll move to a computational understanding of the, of the universe. And it does feel like if we're just these perceptive nodes, you know, and then there's maybe some, some high infinitely more complex, you know, states of perception. That feels more computational than it does like we have 3D space and then we have fourth dimensional time

• 3:19:01Jesse Michels?

  and we're just kind of inexorably moving forward. And we can observe things within that scope.

• 3:19:08Speaker 01

  Right. So I think, I mean, I have done a podcast with Wolfram. So we've talked

• 3:19:13Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 3:19:14Speaker 01

  Together with each other and, and his stuff is of course computationally universal. The Markov approach is computationally universal. So it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah, you can talk about it as, as computation.

• 3:19:28Speaker 01

  It's a matter of the way that you're, the concepts that you're, you're putting forward and the, and the structures that you're, that you're exploiting. So I'm, I'm exploiting this.

• 3:19:37Speaker 01

  Zero surprise structure of markup chains and therefore of computations. There's this zero surprise structure that no one has ever seen before. And that, I think, is going to be really critical going forward for intelligence. I think, actually, I'm working right now on understanding what it means for algorithms. So like, because I think, as I mentioned, it has something to do with computational complexity and it's going to be really interesting to see that. So there will be some kind of translation ultimately between Wolfram's language and what I'm doing, because they're all computationally universal. The question is just which language is useful for what kinds of problems that we want to solve.

• 3:20:19Speaker 01

  And I think both, I mean, I think that they're doing brilliant work and Jonathan Gerard is doing brilliant work as well.

• 3:20:25Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think I speak for everybody in saying that I am so excited to see what you find over the next few years. And you're not for lacking in ambition. I think you're really, you know, it's kind of go big or go home. You are going for it. It's super cool and it's a very kind of polymathic theory as well. It takes, you know, kind of evolutionary biology and then you're taking computational principles, you're taking physics. And, you know, I love that you're able to entertain, you know, an exploration of UFOs and alien life with me. And this has been fascinating and I hope we can do it again.

• 3:21:01Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Great pleasure, Jesse.

• 3:21:03Jesse Michels?

  Thank you, Don.

• 3:21:07Jesse Michels?

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• 3:22:13Speaker 04

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