The Basement: Donald Hoffman | Consciousness, Math, and the Case for Letting Go

-One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code BASEMENT at https://www. Ridge.com/BASEMENT #Ridgepod -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. -For a limited time, get 50% off for life, free shipping, and 3 free gifts at https://mengotomars.com. #ad Donald Hoffman has spent forty years asking one question: are we just machines? He walked away from a defense-industry career to answer it, and the math he found says space and time aren't real — and that what you're looking at right now is one of the cheapest headsets available. We get into the beetles, the beer bottles, the nine proofs he's chasing, and the one story he's never told publicly. Buckle up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/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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• 0:53AJ Gentile?

  Today I'm talking with Donald Hoffman. Don is a cognitive scientist who spent decades at the heart of mainstream science. He wrote fighter jet software for Hughes Aircraft in pure machine code. He trained at MIT. He sat for years in a private consciousness club that Francis Crick co-founded.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Francis Crick, the guy who discovered the building blocks of life. I discovered you can't return underwear to Target. Both took real courage.

• 1:19AJ Gentile?

  Then his own math convinced him that we've never once seen reality as it is. He seems very calm about it. Today, we're covering the beetle that fell in love with a beer bottle and why that matters for evolution.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  A beetle dated a beer bottle, eh? I've had worse.

• 1:37AJ Gentile?

  Why Don says space and time are a headset we're wearing and what that means for UAPs and the entities people meet on DMT. Near the end, Don tells a story that he's never told before. It's about the night he texted his wife goodbye from a hospital bed. You might know that part, but you don't know the rest.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Okay, no notes in that one. That one's real.

• 1:58AJ Gentile?

  Once we wrap up, I'll come back and break down the conversation, which is not going to be easy, but I'll be here. Let's go down to the basement. Professor, thanks for doing this. I appreciate you.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Thanks a lot, AJ.

• 2:19AJ Gentile?

  First thing that kind of was I found interesting about your background is you grew up in San Antonio, spent most of your life in Southern California. Where did you start ice skating? How did that even, how does that part of your resume?

• 2:33Speaker 04

  I think that that started when I was about 12 or 13 and we saw maybe an Ice Capades chalet, Ice Capades show or something like that. And my parents liked it, we liked it, and they decided to try ice skating. I was 12 or 13, my brother was a year younger, my sister was four years younger. So we went out there. I didn't like it at first because you just fall down. You get out there, you try stuff. Everything that you try to do is just wrong. All your normal reactions are wrong. So I fell, fell, fell, and I basically didn't want to do it. And they sort of forced us to do it for several weeks. And then all of a sudden, one day, it clicks.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  You realize you don't walk like you normally walk, heel toe, heel toe. You push with the side and you glide. And when you really discover that for yourself, it opens up a whole new world. And once you then enter that world, then it's fun to glide. And eventually I got to the point where I could do a double toe loop and an axle jump and so forth.

• 3:38AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  So I actually did a double jump and a one and a half turn jump and so forth. So it was, it was a blast and it's very, very good exercise. And even now, I'll go, you know, go back and ice skate.

• 3:48AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  I'm not doing double jumps, but you know, I'm 70, so it's not, not smart. But if I'm careful and just, you know, just stroke and glide on the ice, it's good exercise.

• 3:58AJ Gentile?

  I thought it was great. Okay, so Ice Capades, not hockey. That's fine.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't hockey. It was, and we, and so I did figure skating and all of us did figure skating. I've never actually been on hockey skates.

• 4:11AJ Gentile?

  Wow. I'm picturing you in the whole Lycra outfit. You look great, by the way. So Dad was a fundamentalist preacher.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:22AJ Gentile?

  What do you think he would make of you starting an institute that nothing is real? How would that conversation go?

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Well, in his later years, he did hear about the work I was doing.

• 4:35AJ Gentile?

  He did?

• 4:36Speaker 04

  We did have conversations about consciousness being fundamental. He liked that, actually, because that aspect of it is, you know, on board with his views. I mean, he thinks he knows what that consciousness is and it's his God and not other people's gods and so forth. But, but so he sort of liked the non-physicalist stuff. So, so he was all on board with that. But when, when it wasn't just directly into fundamentalist Christianity, then he wasn't so excited about it. So I would say that he was glad and would be happy about the idea that consciousness is fundamental and he would like it to show that his denomination of Christianity was the truth. And it doesn't show something like that. It just shows that there's a much deeper level of consciousness that I think the different

• 5:18Speaker 04

  religions, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and so forth, are all perspectives on a deeper consciousness. And they all get a piece of the puzzle and then they miss them, as, as any perspective would.

• 5:32AJ Gentile?

  Is this, is that what planted the seed for you to go into this research was you were getting one story on Sunday and a different one on Monday? Does this kind of reconcile it?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  That's, that's exactly right. I got once, the story I got is a pretty severe story from the Christian view. It was, the Earth is only 4,000 years old and...

• 5:52AJ Gentile?

  Oh, he was that?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Oh, no, he was that. That's right. And he had a master's degree in chemistry. So it was really, he had decided to choose that, the religious view over what chemistry had shown. And so that was quite, quite stunning. So he was, he was quite into it. So he took that point of view. Yeah. So he wouldn't have liked me going beyond the 4,000 years, which, which, which I have. I think, you know, the Earth is well over 4,000 years old. And he wouldn't have liked, I think he likes that there was a mathematical model, so he would have liked that. But he also wanted it to come out that his particular brand of Christianity was the truth

• 6:39Speaker 04

  and, and all the others weren't the truth and so forth. So, so, so, yeah, it was, I got one version on Sunday, but then I also had, you know, the Monday version, which was there was all this science and I would like to, that says that we're billions of years old and we evolved. And he didn't believe in evolution at all. That was an aff慕 to him. The notion of evolution was just off the table.

• 7:03AJ Gentile?

  I can't square the masters with chemistry with that. What drew him to faith instead of the science?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  You know, I think that it's hard to explain. It was, it seems irrational to me. The, the science is very, very clear. The experiments are quite clear. If you're going to use the language of space and time and chemistry, in that framework, the Earth is 4 billion years old and, and not 4,000 years old. So I think he just chose to reject his master's degree, not just a bachelor's, a master's degree in chemistry and, and working at various companies in high levels for using chemistry.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  So he, so, so I had to on my own then decide between the spiritual view that I was getting, I'll say the Christian view, a particular kind of spiritual view, a Christian view, and in fact, a fundamentalist Christian view on Sunday.

• 8:05AJ Gentile?

  So Catholics don't go to heaven, then?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Well, a lot of other people, even in other Christian denominations, might not be going to heaven.

• 8:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  So this, this was, it was, it was pretty austere, right? My way or the highway. And, and, and it was, bad thing about it was that God was not a really, they would talk about God being love, but, but in fact, you were trained to be afraid. You had to be really, really afraid and cry every Sunday and repent and, and, you know, it was, it was, it was quite a scene. So it was real psychological control. And it took, when you're raised in it, that's all you know, right? And so it took me, it's taken me decades to recover from that.

• 8:47AJ Gentile?

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• 10:02Speaker 04

  So I decided as a teenager, on age 17, that I had a specific question that I would try to answer. Are we just machines? That's my question. Are we just machines? And to do that, I would have to understand what machines can do and is there anything that humans can do that machines can't? That would, that was sort of the idea. So I ended up ultimately trying to answer the question. I went to MIT and I was in the artificial intelligence lab, so that's going after what machines can do. So I started in 1979 and had the good fortune of actually interacting with Marva Minsky. Took a class with Marva Minsky, the guy that, one of the guys that founded the field, the gentleman McCarthy, the two of them founded the field. So I got to argue with him at his home.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  We had his, that class for a semester in Minsky's home and we could just argue about the foundations of, the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence. And so from 79 to 83, I was there in the AI lab trying to build, you can't just talk in general about AI, you need to pick a problem and try to solve it, as a scientist. So I picked the problem of how do we see in 3D? It was machine vision I went after. How do we build visual systems that can see in 3D? The kind of stuff that we now have in self-driving cars. We were, we were pioneering it back then. So I did that as my concrete mathematical, how do we see in 3D? And... Then I was also in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. And there I was studying human neuroscience.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  So that was, you can see I was studying what machines can do in the AI lab and what human neuroscience, I was studying what humans can do and trying to piece the two together. And it wasn't until, so that was seventy-nine to eighty-three, and I kept working on the mathematical models of vision. And it was around, in nineteen eighty-six or nineteen eighty-seven, working now at University of California at Irvine with Bruce Bennett and Chaitan Prakash, two extremely talented mathematicians. I was very, very fortunate to have them working with me. They're geniuses. And I'm still working with Chaitan. He's brilliant.

• 12:03AJ Gentile?

  Well, let me stop you for a second.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:07AJ Gentile?

  While you're getting your PhD, you're working at Hughes Aircraft on

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:14AJ Gentile?

  vision systems for missiles and stuff, right?

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Yes, I did that. Well, when I was an undergraduate at UCLA, from nineteen seventy-six through nineteen seventy-eight, and then a whole year in seventy-eight to seventy-nine, I was at Hughes Aircraft full-time.

• 12:29AJ Gentile?

  What did the Hughes guys think of your work with computational vision?

• 12:32Speaker 04

  They liked it so much that they paid me the whole way to go through MIT. So I got a free ride through MIT.

• 12:38AJ Gentile?

  From Hughes?

• 12:39Speaker 04

  From Hughes.

• 12:40AJ Gentile?

  Wow. Okay, I didn't know that.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and at the time, there were no strings attached. They assumed that I would come back and I would be the director of the Hughes Aircraft Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Malibu. And I was thinking about the same thing. I was about to be a very rich guy, living in a very nice place in Malibu and directing the AI lab there. And, but my last year there, I realized, I mean, I knew what it was like to work at Hughes. And by the way, Hughes is a great place.

• 13:10AJ Gentile?

  Did you work out of El Segundo?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  El Segundo, that's right. Yeah, I worked out of El Segundo. I worked on fighter jet cockpit software, so for displays. So this was a new thing. There were all these, you know, old displays, mechanical displays on the fighter jet cockpits. And it was a time to go digital, but the microprocessors weren't that fast. And so we had to program them in machine code. So I and two or three other guys were the coders, and we wrote-

• 13:40AJ Gentile?

  Wow, you didn't even have FORTRAN yet? Or nothing like that?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Well, I had studied FORTRAN, of course. I mean, I knew FORTRAN from, actually, I did that when I was a sophomore, I think.

• 13:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  So I knew how to program in FORTRAN. But, and, but when I got to Hughes, they said, you know, we can't do FORTRAN on these, it's not that, I mean, these are special purpose processors that are interrupt-driven and they have very, very special things. All what they had was the machine code that were brand-new. So this is nineteen seventy-six, these were brand-new. It was, they called the AN-YUK-30, A-N- dash U-Y-K-30, AN-YUK-30. So you can look that up. That's what I programmed. And it, so I knew all the ones and zeros. If I wanted to multiply by two, I didn't multiply by two, I shifted.

• 14:25AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Things like that. If you wanted to divide by four, you shift to the right.

• 14:28AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  And stuff like that. So you found all the tricks. We did an entire, complete flight simulator in that AN-YUK-30 in machine code. And because we programmed the entire machine code by hand, we got it all in sixty-four K.

• 14:45AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  You can't type one word in an email for sixty-four K. We did an entire flight simulator, bit by bit. We knew all the bits. And, and it, we, it was delivered to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in nineteen seventy-

• 14:59AJ Gentile?

  To Wright-Patt, wow.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  So to Wright-Patt. So I was, and I actually, as an undergraduate, UCLA was being flown around to various military places and corporation places to help, you know, because I was one of the few, like, three or four people in the world that knew how to-

• 15:16AJ Gentile?

  This is cutting-edge stuff.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  This kind, yeah, that's right. It was cutting-edge for these new electronic displays for Frederick. So I was, I was a Cold Warrior as an undergraduate. And then in nineteen seventy-nine as well, for a full year. And then, so I took a year off from college and then went to MIT in seventy-nine. And Hughes paid the whole way, expecting me to come back and direct the AI lab. But at the end of, toward the end, I realized that I really, I had a choice between money or doing the research I wanted to do. Because I knew, even though I was going to be director, there would be directives from above. And I wouldn't be free to really explore what I wanted to do.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  And so I decided I wanted complete autonomy to explore whatever I wanted to do, not just something that's going to lead to a product. And, you know, it's not right or wrong, I mean, some people are more inclined to do one thing or the other. I was more inclined to want to be independent and follow my own. So I decided I was just, so I took a pay cut. I made less money going to the University of California at Irvine-

• 16:20AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  -than I was making as an undergraduate.

• 16:23AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  At Hughes. Huge pay cut. So I made maybe a quarter or a fifth of what I would have made at Hughes, so it was-

• 16:32AJ Gentile?

  But it was a good decision, because you could have gone back to Hughes any time.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  I could, that's right. But, but once I got going on the research, then, then it really took a life of its own. I realized I really wanted to pursue this all the way.

• 16:48AJ Gentile?

  Well, let me go back to Young, Young Dom for a minute.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 16:52AJ Gentile?

  And, because maybe this is the, the seed of getting interested in vision, but the story, you're five years old and you're late to kindergarten because something grabbed your attention.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes. Yeah, that was a real wake-up call to me, so I was, yeah.

• 17:07AJ Gentile?

  Magic, right?

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:09AJ Gentile?

  This is the butterflies?

• 17:10Speaker 04

  The butterflies. So I was walking to kindergarten, and I'd learned how to walk there and, and so I was confident that I could get there. But when I was walking, I saw this beautiful bush that was in bloom. It was about my eye level, so I could really see stuff. And it was covered in butterflies. And it just was obvious to me that kindergarten was nowhere near as important as enjoying life. I mean, this is a miracle right in front of me. It's just obvious that the right thing to do is to relax and play. Relax and enjoy and explore. I mean, nature is showing you something that's amazing. You're here to enjoy it, to observe and to learn.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  And that's, I mean, I'm saying, I was intellectually saying that way, it was just my emotional, childish reaction was, this is a whole thing to explore. So it's not like I was intellectualizing, it's just obvious that you-

• 18:02AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  -had to do this.

• 18:04AJ Gentile?

  But your decision to leave Hughes is an analog of that.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was really, life is about exploring, going where your heart wants you to, and having fun. So it's really, it's really a play. It's really, and I really do think that way about reality, and that is that we're here, it's not that serious. It's, like, the Hindus have the notion of Leela, that it's a game. And I think that that's a really deep insight, that the, you know, in some sense, the greatest insights, and even technological insights, come when you, when you just play. And somehow, I think, reality rewards that.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  It's sort of like, only when you let go of your uptightness, do you start to relax into new dimensions of reality that you can explore. So it's, and, and so for me, it's been a bit of a journey, because that, that five-year-old butterfly chaser got strangled.

• 19:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  It, I got, I got in trouble. The kindergarten teacher, instead of rewarding that, let my parents know that I was late, because I was, and, and I was punished.

• 19:21AJ Gentile?

  Did you tell your teacher what, why you were late?

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I brought a butterfly in. I was trying to show, share it with everybody.

• 19:28AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  So, and I didn't really understand that that was not good for a butterfly, so-

• 19:32AJ Gentile?

  You didn't mean any harm.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  I didn't mean any harm, but then I was only five. But, but it was just obvious that this was a joyful thing, that I should just share it with all of my, my friends in kindergarten. That's just, of course. And to find out that that wasn't accepted was, and so you get slapped down. I got slapped down.

• 19:49AJ Gentile?

  That's how you create a heretic, right there, that day.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, eventually, I mean, I, I was shaped into that mold for, until I was able to leave, seventeen, eighteen years old. And then it, those are the formative years. So unforming the formative, it takes a, so I'm still in the process of decompressing from it. But in the decompression process, I really have come to the point of view that I was trained to be afraid and to just go by the rules and so forth. And now I'm realizing that true intelligence is play. True intelligence is not, it's assuming that I don't know anything.

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• 21:46Speaker 04

  That everything of interest is still ahead of me. And to just open up and say, as much as I know right now, it's trivial. Everything I've learned is zero percent.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Drop it to the moment you get something deeper. And so that's, I'm moving back to that. But the interesting thing is that the emotional programming goes very, very deep. So I see, I see, in meditation, I just see myself having to face that old programming of follow the rules, God's mad and so forth, and buckle under.

• 22:22AJ Gentile?

  And you could observe that when you're meditating?

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I see the pain of that. And I just, and all the crap. So really, it's a closing up. What that does is it closes you up to reality. You're tightened up. So what I find is that as I'm opening up to reality, all that tied up energy flows out and the old tied up person is afraid of that. So that's, that's why it's painful is that that old person is dying. It's really a death of that old.

• 22:47AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  And it is a birth of someone who's ready to play, to relax into life and to then have intelligent exploring because that's only, only then can you get outside of your box. The only way to make something new is to let go of the old. And you have to be able to let go of everything that you know, or sometimes to take what you know and leverage it, but to go into new places. You have to go into new places. So it's not like old knowledge is bad. Often, old knowledge can take you to the frontiers and then you have to, once you're at that new frontier, then you have to let go of the old knowledge. So it did its thing. It got you to a new frontier and then you have to dive in to the unknown.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  And so that's, that's fun for me.

• 23:34AJ Gentile?

  I think, I think we've all seen you live this because my audience has followed your work since the TED Talk. We've never seen you lose your temper in a debate. I mean, you've released papers that have been, that have had ten rebuttals and you've said, maybe they're right. I mean, it's just, you're just very open to criticism.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Yes, and I think that most scientists would agree that that's the way to do science. I think that's, I mean, we are humans and so some people get rattled and they get personal about it. But I would say that most scientists, when they're, you know, not emotional, they're just dispassionate and looking at science, they would say, theories are just theories. Don't be identified with them. Of course, do your best. Be as clean and as rigorous as you possibly can. Get all the evidence you can. Give as strong a presentation of your idea as possible. But then, I, I have so many good friends who disagree with me and they're brilliant and will disagree. And it does not have to be ad hominem.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  And it's never ad hominem my part because these are brilliant people. Why would I want to get upset with them? They disagree with me. Often, even if I think they're wrong, they've pushed me in a new direction that helps me think out of the box for my own stuff. And often, sometimes I'm wrong and they point out something where I'm wrong and hey, you know, good to drop it as soon as you can. So, yeah.

• 24:57AJ Gentile?

  It's funny you mention theories are just theories. Something I wanted to talk to you about is David Marr.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 25:05AJ Gentile?

  I guess he basically launched computational neuroscience, died very young. You got to study under him at MIT.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:14AJ Gentile?

  He said, unless there's math behind it, a theory is just a theory.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:21AJ Gentile?

  But he also said that vision is designed to bring you the truth.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Yes, he did.

• 25:27AJ Gentile?

  So you've taken that premise and then used your theory to kind of, to knock that down. So just from a relationship perspective, how do you think that argument would go between you and David?

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Well, so David changed my life. I was a senior at UCLA, taking a class on artificial intelligence. And one of the papers we read was his paper, a paper with him and I think Tommy Pojo on vision. And as soon as I saw that paper, I was electrified. I realized, that's it. This is really rigorous. They're doing neuroscience, they're doing mathematical models, and they're not waving their hands. They're saying, we need to build a working system and if it doesn't work, then we're wrong. And it's sort of like, there is no nonsense here. This is all serious stuff. This is how you make progress. I said, where is this guy?

• 26:19Speaker 04

  And so I looked at and found out he was in what was then called the psychology department at MIT.

• 26:26AJ Gentile?

  Right, they didn't have anything else.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  I didn't even think of psychology in MIT. I'm thinking engineering and math and so forth. So, but there, it's now called the brain and cognitive science department. And then he was also in the artificial intelligence lab. And I thought, well, wow, this guy's got it. It's a long shot, but I need to see if I can get in there. So I applied and went out there. I'd never been to the East Coast before and I had no idea how cold it was. It was like February. And I brought just a light jacket.

• 27:01AJ Gentile?

  A light jacket.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  I learned one trial learning. But David, so they accepted me. So David Marr.

• 27:11AJ Gentile?

  Take me to that day because I've been to MIT. Were you just blown away when you got on the campus and saw these legendary buildings? These names?

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Well, it's a who's who.

• 27:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  I mean, there's no, I took a class with Noam Chomsky. Jerry Futter was there. Thomas Kuhn was in the class. I sat in in class, given by Thomas Kuhn. But there's this one class where Jerry Futter and Noam Chomsky were the instructors and Thomas Kuhn was in it. And, and the graduate students ended up being a who's who in the field. It was, there were like 50 or 60 graduate students there. It was truly a stunning situation. Wally Nada, I took a class with Wally Nada. I mean, it was.

• 27:51AJ Gentile?

  What an experience.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  I had no idea how lucky I was.

• 27:56AJ Gentile?

  You didn't know at the time?

• 27:57Speaker 04

  No, all I knew was David Marr was there.

• 27:59AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  And Whitman Richards was also my co-advisor. They knew when I came there that David was sick.

• 28:06AJ Gentile?

  You finished to under Whitman.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so I had David for, I don't know, maybe a year and a half or something like that, that I was able to work with him. He had leukemia.

• 28:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  And then Whitman Richard was an absolute gem. He encouraged me to think out of the box. He treated me as an equal and we bounced ideas back and forth. We, of course, didn't hold any punches, but it was all very, very friendly. So he really taught me how to be a gentleman and yet a researcher that doesn't pull any punches. And with David, he had assembled such an incredible group of people around him. Bertolt Horn and Eric Grimson and Ellen Hildreth and many, many more. John Hollerback. So I got to take a class with Bertolt Horn. It was, it was truly stunning.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  And it was tragic to see David die over those 18 months or so that I was there with him.

• 29:04AJ Gentile?

  He kept teaching while he was sick?

• 29:06Speaker 04

  He did. He would come to our research meetings. He would have to hold something over his mouth because he was bleeding.

• 29:12AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's heartbreaking.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  He, and you know, at one point, there was a time when one of the graduate students, I won't mention any name, but he, I knew him not well, but I certainly knew him. He defended his PhD and then committed suicide the very next day. And so that was, it was a real shock to all of us graduate students. And I was like, this guy worked so hard, why did he commit suicide the day after he got his PhD? So I was in the artificial intelligence lab, going to one of the list machines probably to do my research. And David Marr saw me, he ushered me into his office, he waved me in and said, you know, he knew about, of course, this guy that had just committed suicide the day before.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  And he said, look, if you have any feelings about doing that, life is worth living. Come talk with me first. And this was him at the, at the edge of death himself. He was facing, and he was only, he died when he was 35. It's tragic. I mean, the guy was a complete genius.

• 30:18AJ Gentile?

  He was?

• 30:19Speaker 04

  When I, when you sat in a room with him, he was the intellectual leader of the room. He was the one who knew the neuroscience. His PhD was a model of the cerebellum. But he knew the AI and he was, he commanded the room. Everybody just looked up to David. So I was very, very, I was his last student, his last cohort. So there were, I think, one or two of us in the last cohort.

• 30:45AJ Gentile?

  Imagine what he could accomplish. Which with another thirty years of work.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Oh, can you imagine? Oh, yeah, no, no, it was. So it really makes me, I feel very, very lucky to have, to have known him. He got me into the field. If it weren't for David, I would not have gone to MIT, would have gone to UCLA or something like that, which UCLA is a great school and nothing wrong with UCLA. But, but that was, MIT at that point was unique in the world. That AI really took off there, so.

• 31:14AJ Gentile?

  And so you're learning how to argue. Tell me about the, the Helmholtz Club.

• 31:23Speaker 04

  Well, so David died. And I graduated a year or two, year, year and a half later, I guess, maybe two years later. And that's when I took the job at UC Irvine instead of going to Hughes. And when David was dying, Francis Crick.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  With Watson and Crick, the guy that did the Nobel Prize work on.

• 31:48AJ Gentile?

  I've heard of him.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  DNA, everybody's heard of him. He was at UC San, well, at the Salk Institute by UC San Diego. And so he, he knew David quite well and had tried to save David's life. He was, Francis was using all of his connections, which were substantial, to try to get the latest technology, medical technology, to try to save David. So David got the best that was available at the time. Clearly the right thing to do because he was inventing modern vision science.

• 32:17AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  He reinvented the whole field.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  So, so Francis knew David quite well and he knew that I was David's student. And when I came to UC Irvine, he almost immediately reached out and invited me to visit him down at the Salk Institute. So I went down and spent some time with Francis and, and we talked.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  I, I didn't know at the time that he was interested in consciousness. And at the time, it wasn't really kosher to talk about consciousness, right? So this was eighty-three, eighty-four. It wouldn't be another six or seven years before it was kosher because Francis said it was kosher. But he hadn't really come out and said it was kosher in a big, big way yet. So, but.

• 33:01AJ Gentile?

  Had Wheeler talked about consciousness at this point yet?

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Wheeler had talked about observers.

• 33:06AJ Gentile?

  But, but he didn't talk about it from bit yet, right?

• 33:08Speaker 04

  That was nineteen eighty-nine.

• 33:09AJ Gentile?

  So just after.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Then nineteen eighty-nine was his it from bit paper.

• 33:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Right. He may have talked a little bit about observers and, and the fundamental nature of observers before that paper. But that eighty-nine paper was, is the one that everybody knows about.

• 33:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  So, so Francis

• 33:26Speaker 04

  then invited me to be part of this Helmholtz Club. It was a private group that happened to, to meet at UC Irvine. And the reason it met at UC Irvine instead of where Francis was is because we, Irvine is sort of in the center of Southern California. So there are universities north of Irvine, so USC and UCLA. There are universities south of it, like UC San Diego and the Salk Institute and so forth. And Irvine is right in the middle. So I was lucky, I was right in the center. And so everybody came to me, to, to UC Irvine. And so they met actually literally a five-minute walk from my house because I lived on campus at UC Irvine.

• 34:01AJ Gentile?

  You could walk to the club?

• 34:02Speaker 04

  I could walk to the club. So everybody else had to drive. So, so it was a secret club, not for any nefarious reasons, but simply because Francis was there. And if anybody else, if anybody knew publicly that Francis was on campus, we wouldn't get any work done.

• 34:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  People would want autographs, you know, he, he was as big a scientist as they come. And so we met in private at the university club at, on Tuesdays, one Tuesday every month at one o'clock. And we would have lunch together and Francis and, and there were maybe ten or twelve of us that were the core members of, of, of the club. And we could invite one person ourselves if we wanted to. But would, as a group, would invite someone, two people from anywhere in the world, whose work was of interest to Francis and, and the group. We'd fly them in. So there'd be two different speakers each time, where they have lunch with us. We'd then grill them all afternoon. It was, it was no holds barred.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  They would present their stuff and they couldn't get through their talks. We would, Francis would, we would just go at it.

• 35:06AJ Gentile?

  What was he like when, when he disagreed?

• 35:09Speaker 04

  Well, Francis was a gentleman all the time. He was absolutely a gentleman. I never saw him impolite. But what I did see was he would never count on his fools and he would never, he, he wanted answers. Life is short. He was, he was an older man at the time.

• 35:29AJ Gentile?

  Right, I don't have much time, let's get, let's get to it.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  That's right. And, and the goal was consciousness. He had demystified life with DNA and he wanted to demystify consciousness. That was a clear goal of the Helmholtz Club. He wanted to know the latest neuroscience because he wanted to understand what neuroscience would break open the door to consciousness, just like the double helix broke open the door to understanding life. So he, he was on a mission. He was polite, he was a gentleman, but he was not going to have anybody get in his way. He, I mean, if he had a question, it was going to come out and we were going to, you know, we were going to go after it. So this is really bringing, bringing the best and brightest and, and really grill them in a, in a respectful way. But, but we're trying to understand the best they know to see if there's some clue there.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  And it was fun because there'd be, you know, maybe a dozen of us, fifteen of us in the room.

• 36:22AJ Gentile?

  All. I mean, to be flying that wall, yeah, sharp.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  It was, it was unbelievable, the, the conversations that, that went on there. And, and it was really a good thing for me to see how Francis was focused. He had a goal. He was looking for any clue anywhere and he was bringing in people from all over the place, trying to go after it. So, and I remember in nineteen ninety-two, he then, at one of the meetings, he, he told me about his book. He was writing The Astonishing Hypothesis. So I got to hear him talk about that and we talked. Talking about that book. So that's when he sort of, you know, made it really official that, you know, serious scientists can talk about consciousness. Now, it was a very physicalist approach, right?

• 37:05Speaker 04

  So he's, he was saying that somehow neural activity is going to be the cause of conscious experience. Or some aspect of neuroscience is going to be the cause of conscious experience.

• 37:16AJ Gentile?

  Kind of inverted from your hypothesis.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Completely inverted from mine, but, but I would say in line with what ninety-nine percent of my colleagues in neuroscience and, and computer science would say.

• 37:26AJ Gentile?

  Well, it's a lot easier to, as a scientist, to wrap your mind around that than, because what is consciousness creating?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  That, that's right. And, and there's good reason to go this direction because the physicalist approach, since Galileo at least, had done quite well. Over the mathematics and a physicalist, you know, ontology had worked very, very well. Spiritual ideas have been around for thousands of years. All of our technology came from physicalism with mathematically precise models. And so there's no reason, until the spiritual traditions can come up with their own mathematical model, there's, there's no beef for a scientist to go after. Unless the scientist is going to try to take the ideas of the spiritual traditions and turn them into math. But the bets were

• 38:17Speaker 04

  we got the secret to life physically, A, C, G, and T.

• 38:23AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  We got the secret to life, the, the story, I'm, I'm not saying this is right, I'm just saying this was the story. We got the secret of life, A, C, G, and T from biology and from the mathematics of that. And, and the bets were that we would get the secret of consciousness the same way. There's got probably some kind of nervous system process, a neural process at some level. We have to figure the level and how big a system is it and so forth that, that causes consciousness. So that's what we were after. And it was fun for me to see the pros go after it. And, but you know, we never got it.

• 39:01AJ Gentile?

  Never got it.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  And to this day.

• 39:04AJ Gentile?

  Still the hard problem of consciousness.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Thirty, forty years of, of now good, hard neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computer science, information theoretic attempts to start.

• 39:16AJ Gentile?

  Penrose and Hameroff are involved.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Penrose and Hameroff. And, and I know most of the players, they're, they're brilliant, they're my friends and colleagues and.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  The fact is, there are several theories out there. And there are trillions of conscious experiences to explain. And there is no physicalist, neuroscience, AI, computational theory, none of them, that can explain even one specific conscious experience. And that's truly stunning, like the taste of chocolate, or the smell of-

• 39:49AJ Gentile?

  The smell of mint.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Mint, or something like that. I mean, there's just, and that's pretty stunning. I mean, just to really put that in perspective, I'm a cognitive neuroscience scientist. Suppose I went to a bunch of physicists and said, "I've got a new theory of particle physics."

• 40:06AJ Gentile?

  Imagine?

• 40:07Speaker 04

  And they said, "Oh, really?"

• 40:09AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 40:10Speaker 04

  They'd smile, and so, and a natural question would be, "So, Don, you've got a theory, so, well, let's check this out. So what specific particle interaction does your theory explain? And how does it do it? Like photon-electron interactions? What is it?" And if I said to them, "Oh, no, I have a general theory of particle interactions. I can't explain any specific particle interaction." Would I be taken seriously?

• 40:34AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  I'd be kicked out of the, they'd say, "Come back." They might pat me on the back, say, "Let's have a beer," and then-

• 40:40AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  "Go your way, man." You know, they might be kind to me, but they're not going to take me seriously. And that's where we are with neuroscience and physicalist approaches to consciousness, AI and so forth. There's not a single specific conscious experience. And some people will say, "Oh, well," and I actually said this two or three weeks ago at a meeting in Venice.

• 41:01AJ Gentile?

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• 41:45AJ Gentile?

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• 42:15Speaker 04

  And one person who is a good friend of mine and who I deeply respect, so I'm not going to put up the name, said, well, we basically said, "We might have one. There is space in integrated information theory, might have a theory of space." Now, first, I felt that that made the point. There's trillions of conscious experiences, and we might have one? So that still makes the point. But that one, the theory that he was pointing to is integrated information theory, and Tsunen and co. And that theory makes very, very clear that they're saying that it's certain kinds of causal structures that give rise to specific conscious experiences.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  And the way to write down rigorously what the causal structure is, in any case, is to write down a Markov matrix. That's a matrix, you could say, a square matrix. It has n columns and n rows, and it basically has a probability measure in each row. That's a technical thing. And so that's a way to do-

• 43:19AJ Gentile?

  Later, we'll do the traffic light, if you don't mind.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah, we can do that, that's right.

• 43:22AJ Gentile?

  A lot of fun.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  So it's, so they say for every experience, every conscious experience, there is a causal structure, and you will know that you've got the causal structure when you write down a Markov matrix for it. And so, when you look at the paper that Tsunen and co. published, there is no Markov matrix. So what I would want is, okay, what is the matrix? It has how many rows? Is it like 100 rows? Okay, and it's got 100 columns?

• 43:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  That means you have 10,000 numbers. What are those numbers and why? Why is it that those numbers must be the causal structure that must give rise to the taste of mint, or whatever it might be? Or to, in this case, you know, the perception of space? So there's nothing on the table-

• 44:06AJ Gentile?

  Of course not.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  And there never will be.

• 44:08AJ Gentile?

  There never will be.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  There never will be. And it's, so, again, I know the players, they're my friends, they're brilliant.

• 44:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  They're not dumb. They're absolutely brilliant, and they're doing, by the way, they're doing good work. The work they're doing, even though they're not solving the problem of consciousness, they're getting a lot of good information about neuroscience and the structure of neuroscience and so forth. So it's not like their work is wasted. We're learning lots of stuff. We're just not learning about consciousness, except what we're learning is, it doesn't come out of neurons or physical structures. We're really learning that very, very well by geniuses trying their best to get consciousness out of physical structures or computational structures and failing.

• 44:53AJ Gentile?

  I think it's better that all these scientists disagree, because a truth is not a truth until it's known, right?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  That's really true. So this gives us a real acid test.

• 45:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  If we're going to try to show that consciousness is fundamental, it's good to show by the failure of geniuses that the physicalist approach, you just show that that won't work. But then also, they're going to be my harshest critics, which is what we need. I mean, this is not about, you know, patting people on the back and saying, "There, there, there." No, no, this is hard-nosed stuff. If you're going to come up with a new theory, you've got to take, you've got to take whatever comes your way, you've got to listen to their arguments, and you've got to respond. So if I'm going to put a theory forward in which consciousness is fundamental, of course, the physicalists are going to come after me, and that's as it should be. And then, of course, we'll go out and have a beer afterwards.

• 45:48AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  So it's all, nothing personal. But on the other hand, professionally, no holds barred. They should, and they do, do everything they can to take down. And often, I learn something from them. I'll say, "Oh, wow, didn't think about that. I need to go look at that." So it's all good. It's all good.

• 46:05AJ Gentile?

  It really is. Physicalism, a lot of, probably most of the audience knows you from the TED Talk, which was titled something like "Don Hoffman Proves There's a Simulation." But that's not exactly right, because simulation is still physicalism through the back door, isn't it?

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Right, right. So Nick Bostrom is well-known for the simulation theory.

• 46:26AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  And in Bostrom's approach, we're quite likely in a simulation. And that simulation is probably being written by some teenager-

• 46:39AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  -at a lower level, who's got their own computer and has coded us up. But that teenager and their computer is probably a simulation from an even lower level, and you keep going down until you're going to hit some bottom. So, and so there's two things that I disagree with on Bostrom. First, I like the idea of a simulation in general, right?

• 47:00AJ Gentile?

  You do.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  The aspect that we're not seeing reality as it is, that this isn't, that space and time aren't the final reality. I like that aspect of it. But there's two aspects that I disagree with. The first is, at the very, very bottom level, the assumption is, by Bostrom and most everybody, that it's, again, some kind of physicalist spacetime reality at the bottom. And I think that that's not going to work. And I think that spacetime is doomed. And we can talk about why spacetime is doomed.

• 47:29AJ Gentile?

  We will.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that's one place where I disagree. The bottom is not physical, it's not a spacetime. The second is that, to the extent that Bostrom and others think that there are conscious experiences at our level, for example, those conscious experiences must result from the programming at a lower level. Either the computational aspect of it, or a physical, or something about the physical or a comput-, but since it's a simulation, it's really only computational.

• 47:57AJ Gentile?

  Right, it's not really consciousness, is it?

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Well, and the thing is, I wouldn't want to say it's not really conscious. I would just say, "We have no theory yet that could explain how that could happen." We have, this is one of those theories, you know, computational theories for building consciousness have yet to explain a single conscious experience. And I think it's principled. The failure, again, is principled. So I think that Bostrom is wrong to say that the bottom level is a spacetime level, if he says that. If he doesn't say that, I'd be interested to see what he does say. And I think it's wrong to say that computational systems can give rise to conscious experiences. Or, I would, by the way, some people, like Michael Graziano, would say, "Oh, well, there are no conscious experiences. There's only the illusion of conscious experiences." Okay?

• 48:42AJ Gentile?

  That's unfalsifiable.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Well, it's, well, someone who says the illusion of conscious experiences, as a scientist, I would then want you to give me, and you want to say that, so computational systems can give rise to the illusion of conscious experiences, not real conscious experiences. I'm happy to go with that game.

• 49:01AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what we always do in science, we make hypotheses. But if you're going to play that game, then to do the scientific thing, you now owe me a scientific account. What specific computational system, for example, must be the illusion of the taste of chocolate and could not be the illusion of the taste of mint? Now, there are no candidates put on the table so far. So the idea of saying that it, you know, there's not consciousness, there's the illusion of consciousness, does not get you off the hook for giving me specific examples. And there are zero. So the illusion hypothesis has no empirical evidence for it whatsoever, and I think that it never will.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  So just moving from consciousness to the illusion of consciousness doesn't get you off the hook. And you have to put up the scientific experiments and the scientific theories for specific cases, and there are none. And I predict that there will never be any. So illusionism gets you nowhere on this.

• 50:02AJ Gentile?

  Very interesting.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Have to be hard now. As you can see, again, it's not ad hominem. I'm the first to say, Graziano is a brilliant guy. All these people are brilliant, but, you know, this just won't work.

• 50:17AJ Gentile?

  But I love the disagreement. That's the only way forward. You and Chetan wrote Observer Mechanics in 89.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:25AJ Gentile?

  So you, the two of you made a bet pretty early. And you were kind of out in the wilderness for 20 years?

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:32AJ Gentile?

  What was that like to just have no one really paying attention?

• 50:36Speaker 04

  That's right. So we published a book, Observer Mechanics. It was three of us, actually. Bruce Bennett, who was a math, a genius mathematician.

• 50:45AJ Gentile?

  Is he gone?

• 50:45Speaker 04

  He died in early 2000s.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  And Chetan Prakash, who is also a genius mathematician, is still alive and we still collaborate. And he's a good friend.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  We really worked hard in the 80s. It was probably four or five years of hard work to put out that book.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  And by the way, when we published it in 1989,

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Wheeler cited it in his It From Bit paper. So if you look at his paper, one of the citations is to Observer Mechanics. So he read our book when he published his paper on It From Bit.

• 51:25AJ Gentile?

  That's a fun phone call to get.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it really is. So he was aware that we had, you know, some cognitive scientists and mathematicians had really taken the idea of consciousness, conscious observers being fundamental and were trying at the time to show how we could build up spacetime from it. So Wheeler was aware of it.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  When I came from MIT to UCI, I was on the fast track. I mean, I was getting grants left and right.

• 51:55AJ Gentile?

  Sure you were.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  I was the head of AI, research at the time in vision science and so forth. But when I started moving into this, what was really interesting to me now, when I realized in 1986, 87, that we're creating everything that we see. I mean, you can't walk away from that.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  The whole physicalist, in one moment, when I realized, I don't know if I told you, but when I, when I realized that,

• 52:22Speaker 04

  it was at a certain moment, when I realized what the mathematics was saying to me, there was a one point where the mathematics all of a sudden just slapped me in the face. And I realized that we're creating all this stuff like it's a VR headset.

• 52:35AJ Gentile?

  Well, before we do that, let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll get into the math.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 52:40AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 52:41Speaker 00

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• 53:37AJ Gentile?

  Let's assume everyone's seen your TED Talk. Just give me the dinner conversation

• 53:44AJ Gentile?

  sort of summary of the theory. Give me the 62nd on the beer bottle beetle.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:50AJ Gentile?

  Tell me about denim jeans.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  Right. Right. So the TED Talk

• 53:56Speaker 04

  really took on

• 53:59Speaker 04

  a deep belief that we have, that evolution shapes us to see the truth. Right? So Darwin's theory says that evolution shapes us to be fit, shapes organisms to be fit. And it shapes their sensory systems to make them fit. And most of us, and so technically that means it shapes sensory systems to make you good at reproduction. In evolution, the payoff, the fitness payoff is how many offspring you have. The more offspring, the more fit you are in some sense.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  And most of us assume informally and even formally, I mean, experts, that sensory systems that are shaped by evolution to be more fit do that because they've been shaped by evolution to show you the truth. Clearly, it would seem sensory systems that show you the truth will keep you alive longer than sensory systems that don't show you the truth. And that's a deep, deep intuition. And it's wrong. It's, it's, so very, very brilliant people think that and it's wrong. And I can, in my TED Talk, I gave some explanations about why, and I also gave some examples.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  And maybe I should start with an example, then I'll explain the deeper principle behind it. So it's, and the examples aren't, aren't new, but they really make a point. So one example is the are beetles. So there are these beetles in the outback of Western Australia.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  The jewel beetle, it's called. And they're dimpled, glossy and brown. The males fly and the females are flightless. And the males will go flying around looking for a female. And if he finds one that's, you know, looks right, he'll alight and mate.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  And, but in the outback of Western Australia, there are some men who were drinking beer and these things they called stubbies that were also, these bottles were dimpled, glossy and brown. And apparently the right color of brown, they tossed them out into the outback and the jewel beetle males would fly down onto these, these stubbies and flock all over them trying to mate. Now, it's remarkable, it's just not like they flew down to it, realized it wasn't a female and took off. They fly down, they're crawling all over, full body contact, as much contact as they can have. And they, they persist in trying to mate.

• 56:37AJ Gentile?

  Until they're, until they die.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's right. So they, they do not give up. And this could make the species go extinct. So, so what's interesting then is what this shows is that the males don't know too much about what a real female is. They don't have a real understanding of a female. A female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown. The bigger the better. And, and, and that's, that's as much insight as having to females. And some females might tend to agree that their males don't have much insight into it. And, and so that, that really shows you that when evolution is shaping sensory systems,

• 57:17Speaker 04

  what it's doing is giving you a solution that's good enough for reproduction. And in that niche, in their niche, what was good enough apparently was dimpled, glossy and brown, the bigger the better. You don't need to know anything more about a female because you weren't going to be fooled. There were no stubbies at the time. And so that was good enough. So it's what you call a satisficing solution. It's good enough. It's just not the best, you know, possible thing.

• 57:44AJ Gentile?

  This is don't worry about the man behind the curtain, right?

• 57:46Speaker 04

  That, yeah, right. So, and, but that's not just a one-off now. It's repeatedly, we see that there are all these tricks and hacks. There's, if, if someone wants to read about this, look at, look online, you know, do an AI on supernormal stimuli.

• 58:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Supernormal stimuli, and you will find all sorts of things that are fun about how organisms can be tricked by, by, and we use that all the time in designing. For example, makeup is supernormal stimuli. When you put on lipstick, the red of your lips is supernormal in, in nature. No woman would ever, almost no woman would have lips that red. So it's not natural. And yet in men, there is a program for sexual attractiveness. And

• 58:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  up to a point, redder lips

• 58:43Speaker 04

  tickle that, that algorithm and make you more, of course, at some point, then, then you go into, you know, clown material, right?

• 58:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  So you can go to, so you can push supernormal to a point and then you go clown and then all of a sudden you fall off. So, so what, what you see in evolution is that our sensory systems

• 59:05Speaker 04

  In these particular cases have not been evolved to show the truth, they're tricks and hacks. Now David Marr was quite well aware of this when I was a graduate student here, and he knew, for example, that flies had tricks and hacks for their sensory systems. Marr and Poggio looked at the fly visual system, and so Marr and Poggio would say that the fly, yeah, had tricks and hacks, but David said, "The human visual system, though, is estimating the true shapes of surfaces." So we, with our more sophisticated visual systems and all the billions of neurons that we have, can do something that the fly can't. So we have been shaped by evolution to see the true shapes of real objects in space and time. So he was very much a physicalist.

• 59:48AJ Gentile?

  But he was wrong about that?

• 59:50Speaker 04

  I think that he was wrong, and the argument now, I'll give the technical argument, I'll try to make it as accessible as possible, but there is a nice clean technical argument that I think takes us apart very, very quickly. In evolution, there are, there was a mathematical model of evolution made by John Maynard Smith. So Darwin was not a mathematician, his theory was deep and brilliant, but it wasn't mathematical. John Maynard Smith and others made it mathematical with evolutionary game theory. So we can now actually take Darwin's ideas and state them with mathematical precision and start to prove theorems and look at the details of his theory. That was in the 70s that evolutionary game theory came out.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  And in game theory, there are things called payoffs, right? If you're playing a game, if you take certain actions, you can get certain rewards, right? There's payoffs for, you know, who your opponent is, what the situation of the world is, and what action you take, you'll get different payoffs. This is just, you know, standard Dini game, you think about it. You know, there are payoffs for being in a certain state and taking certain actions. So these things are called payoff functions. And so the idea that we're shaped by evolution to see true structures in the world can now be stated very, very clearly.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  There must be payoff functions that actually know about the structure of the world, because they don't know anything about the structure of the world. If the payoff function does not depend on the structure of the world, and it doesn't communicate the structure of the world somehow, then it can't possibly shape you to know the structure of the world. So it's all about these payoff functions. So the nice clean, so they might show you things about the world, like the metric structure of the world, or orders. So there are different kinds of mathematical properties of the world that you can have. So topologies, metrics, partial orders, all sorts of technical things that you could ask about the true structure of the world. And so there's a nice clean technical question.

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  What's the probability that a randomly chosen payoff function knows about the structure of the world? And whatever structure you want, you know, again, topology, metrics, partial orders, whatever it might be. Now, we can actually answer that question. It's not just a hand wave question. We can answer the question, what is the probability that a randomly chosen payoff function actually could possibly shape you to know the truth of the world? And the answer to the probability is zero. 0% of the payoff functions hold information about the structure of the world.

• 1:02:29AJ Gentile?

  Fit wins.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  So fitness loses.

• 1:02:33AJ Gentile?

  Fitness loses.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  Well, if you're going for, if you're going for truth to give you fitness, that version of fitness loses, right? You're saying, "To see the truth is to make you fit." That version of fitness loses big time.

• 1:02:48AJ Gentile?

  Now Yale ran this with different payoff functions, and fitness won. What did they get wrong or right?

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Right, so in the Yale study, there are now, when you go into, so they didn't actually address this question that I'm raising, right?

• 1:03:05AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  So, and the reason I'm going up at this deeper, when you try to go into the weeds, you can find little cases where you can, in this particular situation, get something to happen nice.

• 1:03:18AJ Gentile?

  Sure, you can.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  So you can always find a case where, so that's why I wanted to go to the big picture here, because I've gotten a lot of little papers out there where people say, "Well, in this particular case," oh, yeah, sure, you can, you can make a case like that. But the big picture is this. Evolutionary theory does not, in its current form, restrict the class of payoff function that says any possible function right now is a legitimate function. Now, it's perfectly fine if someone wants to come up with a new version of Darwin's theory, evolutionary game theory, that says only these classes of payoff functions are permissible, and these are the principled reasons why. But we do not have such a theory right now.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  So the current theory, as it stands, does not restrict any payoff functions. It doesn't eliminate any payoff functions. So then, the argument is very, very simple. When you look at the set of all possible payoff functions, and you ask, "How many of these," the technical term is homomorphism, "how many, what fraction of them are homomorphisms of total orders, partial orders, metrics, topologies, whatever it is, whatever structure you want?" And the answer is-

• 1:04:28AJ Gentile?

  Hang on, let me catch them up. Homomorphism is a subway map against a subway.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:04:33AJ Gentile?

  The stations on the map correlate to the real world. That's what a homomorphism is.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:04:38AJ Gentile?

  Just a projection, okay.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, the map is a faithful representation of the structure of the subway system. Exactly, that's a, great, that's a great way of talking about homomorphism. I'll use that in the future.

• 1:04:47AJ Gentile?

  I just gotta catch them up. Perfect. Because it's hard to keep up with you.

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the stunning answer, so the whole, all the arguments that I've given and so forth, all you need is this one argument. Payoff, there's tons of payoff functions, what fraction of them actually could shape you to see the truth? Oh, 0%. So what's the probability that we've been shaped to see the truth? 0%. It's that simple. It's, I give the whole argument in one 30-second clip. The set of payoff functions is big, the ones that are homomorphisms, probability 0, therefore we don't see the truth. Just that simple. So all the other arguments that people have, now, here's an argument against me, though. So people will say, "Look, Don, this may, this is all highfalutin math, it sounds really great, but here's the fact.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  You shot yourself in the foot, logically." Right, you started off with Darwin's theory of evolution, which assumes that there are physical objects, like organisms and resources, in space and time, competing with each other. So it's a physicalist framework, and then you're using Darwin's theory to show that there is no such thing as organisms in space and time, and so you've used your theory to refute the foundations of your theory, so you should just go learn some logic, Don. This is stupidity.

• 1:06:06AJ Gentile?

  I've seen this.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:08AJ Gentile?

  I've seen this.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  I've gotten it in publications.

• 1:06:11AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  In philosophy journals.

• 1:06:13AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  And I get it in almost every-

• 1:06:15AJ Gentile?

  That's where I saw them, in the journals.

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, in the journals, but I also get that all the time in comments on YouTube videos and so forth.

• 1:06:22AJ Gentile?

  Oh, don't read that, don't read those. Stick with the journals.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, the journals, absolutely, absolutely. So the reply is very, very straightforward.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

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• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  Every scientific theory starts with assumptions. No scientific theory is proving its assumptions, it's assuming its assumptions. Those are the miracles of the theory.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  The theory is saying, if you grant me those assumptions, please, then I can explain all this other wonderful stuff. And if it's a good theory, it will. If it's a really good theory, it will give you the mathematical tools to really explore the scope of that theory. But it's going to be a finite scope because it's not a theory of everything because it doesn't explain its own assumptions. So no scientific theory is a theory of everything because no scientific theory explains its own assumptions.

• 1:08:08AJ Gentile?

  There can never be a theory of everything.

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  There can never be a theory of everything, just that simple. The argument is drop dead simple. Every theory has assumptions and they don't explain. So a good theory, though, will give you the mathematical tools to explore its limited scope. It's not arbitrary scope, it's limited scope. But a great theory will give you the tools to actually understand the limitations of the assumption themselves. So a great theory will actually tell you that the assumptions themselves are not the final word, which we knew altogether. I mean, we knew that before, that the assumptions cannot be the final word, there's going to have to be a deeper theory.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  So I'll give you an example, Einstein's theory of spacetime together with quantum mechanics, so quantum field theory. That theory, among its assumptions are that space and time is fundamental, that quantum fields are defined over spacetime. And then Einstein plus quantum, then when you look at the mathematics, it turns out that spacetime itself falls apart at what's called the Planck scale, 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. So here's a case where the theory says we're going to start with quantum fields in space and time, that's the assumption.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  And then it proves that spacetime itself cannot be fundamental, that it falls, that it has in fact no operational meaning at the Planck scale. So no one comes along and says Einstein should have, and the quantum guys should have learned some logic, they can't use their own theory to prove that spacetime isn't fundamental. They assume spacetime is fundamental and then they prove it's not. Those stupid guys, they should just, you know, they should go and learn some logic. No one says that. This is actually viewed as a breakthrough. This science is so rigorous, so mathematically precise, that it can show you the limits of its own assumptions. That's how we make progress. We knew that the assumptions could not be the final word, but a theory that tells you

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  exactly where those assumptions fall apart is exactly the kind of tool for the best rigorous science. And so what I'm saying about evolution is that yes, Darwin started with physical objects, organisms in space and time, fighting for resources in space and time. And when we look at Darwin's own theory with John Maynard Smith's mathematical version of it, we see that his theory is brilliant enough to show that the very assumptions of physical objects inside space and time is not fundamental. He was able to show that that cannot be the final word. So it's a brilliant theory. So that's the way science works.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  We will never have, there's infinite job security in science in principle, there'll always be deeper assumptions. What we don't want to do is to fall into the trap that Max Planck pointed out, which was that science tends to move forward or progress one funeral at a time. It's better for us to let our theories die, to know a priori, our assumptions are just assumptions. We don't have a theory of everything. In fact, my own view is we are 0%, always 0% of a theory of everything. That's all the science knows. And yet, that's important to have that 0%.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  It's rigorous and it's 0%, so it should be very, very humbling. And it means that the next generation does not have to worry that the older generation did it all. No, no, no, no, you will always have plenty to do, there's always new opportunities in science.

• 1:11:53AJ Gentile?

  You want the new generation to just start with theory of everything is 0% and go from there?

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  Well, I would like them, what the new generation has to do, of course, is to take the current theories very, very seriously. You have to study them, you have to do your homework, you have to know them backwards and forwards. There's, you don't have a prayer, at this level of sophistication in science, you don't have a prayer of doing something new until you've really spent several years really mastering what we've got and then allowing yourself to think out of the box and say, what are the new deeper assumptions that we could bring to this thing? So I get emails all the time from people who haven't done their studies and they've got their new theory.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  And you look at them and you realize they have no idea what, I mean, they're, they need 10 years of study before they can even begin. And using an AI is not going to help you.

• 1:12:49AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  You can't make this gap up. You have to know the theories, you have to have really gropped them yourself, otherwise you will be misled by the AI, you'll be misled to think that you've got your new theory of everything and it's unfortunately a waste of time. Now, if you've done your homework, if you've spent the years and really mastered the theory, then it's safe, I think, to use AIs as an assistant as you're trying to develop stuff because you can then step back and evaluate what's going on and you can have the AI push you around. But if you don't actually yourself know the current theories, then you can't know when the AI is taking you down a dead end.

• 1:13:22AJ Gentile?

  That's right, AI is great for pattern recognition, but there's no intuition there. You have to already know the subject matter.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right. So, but if you do it, then it's a helpful tool.

• 1:13:31AJ Gentile?

  Of course. Before we get into trace logic, photons, the aha moment, let's kind of build the foundation with conscious agents, what are those in your framework?

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  Yes. So if I'm going to say that consciousness is fundamental and I want to be a scientist, I've got to have a mathematical model. And that's no small order. The idea that consciousness is fundamental has been around for thousands of years and there has not been a single mathematical model of scientific merit anywhere. It's truly stunning to think about that. Consciousness has been around, the idea that consciousness is fundamental has been around for thousands of years and...

• 1:14:14AJ Gentile?

  Do you think it's stunning there's no model for that? It seems, everyone's surprised that you have one.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's stunning because the model that I have is so simple. It's truly, to me, it's stunning that the, in retrospect, the model is simple and, but of course, even in my case, I just discovered a big step in it just five months ago. So I've been at this for 40 years, so that...

• 1:14:49AJ Gentile?

  Well, I want to get to that moment because it helped me understand as well. When I finally was able to grasp it, it took a little bit of reading to kind of get what you meant with the math and with trace, A implies B and all of that. But I finally got it, it made a lot of sense.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  Oh, great, great, great.

• 1:15:06AJ Gentile?

  And the way the universe ticks at different rate, it ticks at a certain rate, all that stuff is, it's very interesting.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  Yes. Well, so yeah, so I'll just say that what I had to do, and what my team had to do, so Chetan and Bruce and others that have been working with me, now many others, is we have to have a mathematically precise model of consciousness. And so what we, what you want to have the simplest thing that you possibly can, you don't want to have a Rube Goldberg device, you want to have the most cut down. So ultimately, the idea that we have is this, what's the, for just a conscious observer, we'll do agency in a minute, but just for a conscious observer, what's the minimal, minimal thing that you would want?

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  Well, observers have certain experiences that they can have, maybe like I can see red, green or blue or something like that. So I'm going to list the experiences that this observer can have. And the other thing that seems necessary is to say, those experiences can change. I'm seeing red now, maybe I'll see blue next or red next or green next. And that's the minimum I could imagine. They're experiences and they change. And what's the most general mathematical object that you can use to do that? Well, you list your experiences in like a column and then for each, a row next to each experience, you say, what's the probability that if I'm having this experience, I'll go to that experience or that experience? You just list all the transition probabilities. That's it. That's called a Markov matrix.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  That little thing I just talked about, so simple, it's just, it's called a Markov matrix and it was discovered by Markov in 1905, so...

• 1:16:48AJ Gentile?

  So let's use the traffic light example because that helped me understand it.

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  Okay. So with the traffic light, you have red, green and yellow?

• 1:16:55AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:16:56Speaker 04

  In this particular case, it's a very simple matrix. If you're seeing red now, the probability that you're going to see red next is zero, but you're, and probably you're going to see green next is one.

• 1:17:09AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  Probably you're going to see yellow next is zero.

• 1:17:11AJ Gentile?

  Right. So this is why we're building the matrix.

• 1:17:13Speaker 04

  So that's right. So the first row is 0, 1, 0. Now for the green row, the probability that you're going to see red next is zero, probably you're going to see green next is zero, probably you can see yellow next is one. So that row is 0, 0, 1. Then for yellow, the probability you're going to see red next... Is one and then zero for green and zero for yellow. So that's how you so that's the matrix for that's simple case. And that's a very interesting kind of matrix. It's a cyclic cyclic matrix. But most Markov matrices aren't cyclic. They're more complicated than that. But that gives the idea.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  But now just imagine we're just going to make this following statement. All possible observers are represented by all possible Markov matrices. So these Markov matrices could have maybe one has a thousand experiences, some tastes and colors and smells and other things. Some might have a trillion, some might have a googol.

• 1:18:17AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:18Speaker 04

  And it goes off to infinity. So you could have infinite matrices. So just imagine, if you can, it's hard, the space of all possible matrices of all possible dimensions. That's the space of all possible observers. So the idea is very, very simple. But when you say, we have no reason to exclude, right? I don't have any reason to exclude any set of observations or transitions. So I'm just going to say that all possible observers are all possible matrices, and it's an infinite space. So that's what we do. But so each matrix now, think of it as is an observer window. It's it's just a way of looking. It's a way of seeing like the traffic light. That's a way of seeing.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  And if you look at a traffic light, that's what you see. It's spinning around. But other things are much more complicated in this room. Now, now we probably need trillions. We need matrices of trillions and the probabilities are quite complicated and so forth. So that's a but all of those are passive observers. If you're just sitting there, you're looking through this window and you're not doing any action, you're just watching. What about agency? How do you get the notion of agency? Well, the idea would be suppose a clean way of thinking about agency is I'm looking through this window, but now I want to change and look through that window or that window or that window. So how do I want to model that mathematically? Well, remember what I did with observations?

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  I said, here are the possible observations I could have, and I'll just talk about how I could move around on those observations. I'm seeing red now, now move to green now. So I moved around on observations and I wrote down the matrix for how I moved around. Well, now I want to move around on windows. So I have all these observer windows. There's an infinite number of them. So I'm going to have a policy about I'm looking at through the world at the world through this window. Now I want to move and look at the window through this window and so forth. That's I call that a policy. And what is that? That's another Markov matrix because it says, here's the probability if I'm looking at this window, that I'll look through this window or that window or that window. So it's another Markov matrix. And I can then say, well, what's the set of all possible policies?

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  What's all the different ways I could move through all these windows? Well, it's an infinite, an infinite collection of Markov matrices.

• 1:20:35AJ Gentile?

  But it's also another matrix, isn't it?

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  Well, it's not itself a matrix. It's an infinite collection of Markov matrices. And then I could say, well, now I want to change the policies. I mean, I have this policy. Now I want to change to this policy. So I can now walk around on policies. So you can see this goes off to infinity. This is what we call recursion. So that's that starts to get us the notion of agency now because the passive observer windows are a very, very minimal notion of agency. There is some notion of agency that you can get there, right? If you if you take a Markov matrix that's ergotic, anywhere, anytime that you change the start state, it will always go to the same long term behavior. And so in some sense, that's a weak notion of agency. It's always trying to get to the same place.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  But that's a very weak notion. But now with the policies, you're moving around on these windows. That's a little bit more agency. When you can change the policies, that's even more flexibility. Now I'm changing how I'm moving around. But then as you go meta, meta, meta, you're getting ever more sophisticated agency off to infinity. So this gives you a way of unpacking the notion of agency from the most trivial, namely the observer windows, which are mostly passive, all the way out to infinity, which is infinite flexibility of agency. So this, for me, is so beautiful because it means that we don't have to take on all of agency at once. We can go through the recursion once, really understand just the policies, understand what they can do, really master that.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  Once we've done that, we can then go on and do the meta policies and so forth. And so we can so it gives science a way to really go through this from the least complex to the most complex. But now the thing that's really quite, quite interesting about this, I haven't told you the most fun part, that's the recursion. But the most fun part, well, first I should say that this idea, I should tip my hat to Leibniz, who around 1700 in his monodology was was basically saying something like this. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I suspect that he might like this approach.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

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• 1:23:11Speaker 01

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• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  Leibniz said, we need to start our science with perceiving entities, observers. He called them monads. And we need to, he was quite religious. So we need to, we need to have some kind of pre-established harmony. And he was thinking about God having set up this pre-established harmony so that they are coordinated somehow, that they're not just random observers, you know, just completely disconnected from each other, doing whatever. There had to be some kind of coordination. And at the time, of course, Newton was also trying to get a mathematical model to found science. And Newton also was quite religious. He wrote more theology than he wrote physics.

• 1:24:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep. Did more alchemy than he did physics.

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  More alchemy, that's right. But and so I think that he would have liked to have a situation where he could put, you know, consciousness and observers fundamental, but the math just wasn't there.

• 1:24:39AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:24:40Speaker 04

  And so I think what happened was that Newton said, look, we've got to go with what we can do. So he can write down F equals ma and, you know, F equals G m1 m2 over r squared for gravity. We can do that kind of stuff and we can get going. We need to so that set of equations gives you a more physicalist, machine kind of universe. And so science got started in a machine kind of universe because that's what we could do with the mathematics. I think Leibniz was right, and I think Newton would have liked to go that direction, but the math just wasn't there to do that.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  But now I think I can show you something that looks like this pre-established harmony that Leibniz was looking for. So I've got this whole set of observer windows. So we'll forget the agency for a moment, just the observer windows. Suppose that I'm looking at, say, 10 colors. And there's a matrix that's governing how I see those 10 colors. So that's that's that's my window. But suppose as I'm looking through that window, someone somehow shuts off seven of the colors. So I can't see those seven colors. So I'm still looking, trying to look through the window, but I can only see three of the colors. Well, now I'm going to get effectively a three by three matrix on those colors.

• 1:26:02AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  That's induced by the big 10 by 10. So there's all sorts of hidden stuff going on in those other seven colors that I can't see.

• 1:26:10AJ Gentile?

  But they're there.

• 1:26:11Speaker 04

  But they're there. They're hidden, but I can't see them.

• 1:26:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  But they're but they do influence what I'm seeing in the three by three. So that

• 1:26:18AJ Gentile?

  It's a good way of explaining this.

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah. And so that thing is called the trace matrix. And for those who are more mathematically sophisticated, I do have to make a clarification. With matrices, there's another notion of trace that's even more common. You take a matrix and you you add up the diagonal elements. So 1 comma 1, 2 comma 2, 3 comma 3, n comma n. You add up all those numbers and that's called the trace. So that's, I'm not talking about that trace. That is, of course, a notion of trace, but that's not the one I'm talking about. This is more sophisticated. The one I'm talking about for mathematicians is called the Schur complement, S C H U R complement. So you take a big matrix and you induce a matrix on a subset that you can see.

• 1:26:59AJ Gentile?

  Right, like a trace element, a small part of it.

• 1:27:02Speaker 04

  That's right. And this so this small part is in effect reflecting the whole, but just through this smaller window. It's almost like the smaller one is observing the whole, but through the smaller window.

• 1:27:13AJ Gentile?

  And that's your trace.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  And that's the trace. And here's, here's what I discovered about two years ago. I realized, so by the way, I should say, the trace is not me. This notion of trace is has been known for maybe 50, 60 years. So I didn't invent that. What I discovered a couple of years ago was that that gives us the trace relationship is a partial order on all Markov chains. It gives you a logic. For those who know a little bit of mathematics, it's not Boolean. So Boolean logics are the ones that we are more most comfortable with. You can take ands and ors and

• 1:27:47AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  Complements and so forth. So this

• 1:27:51AJ Gentile?

  But Boolean fits into your theory at the local level, doesn't it?

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  It does at the local level. So so this logic I call the trace logic. It has, it's not Boolean, but it has an infinite number of Boolean sublogics. So there's so for you take any matrix and you look at all of the matrices that are traces of it, and all of those matrices together form a Boolean sublogic. It's really, really pretty.

• 1:28:17AJ Gentile?

  It's elegant.

• 1:28:18Speaker 04

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:28:19AJ Gentile?

  So the the local Boolean is the base of all of it.

• 1:28:23Speaker 04

  That's right. You have an infinite number of these local Booleans, but how they get tied together, we're still trying to understand. This is, this is nasty math. We're still trying to grok this. But I still remember about two years ago, when I, working with Chaitan Prokashin, I said to him, Chaitan, I believe that this trace relationship will give us a logic. It's a partial order and it gives us a logic. And his, his response was, Don, that's too pretty to be true. But then he went off and proved it. What we had to do is, what he had to do was to prove that it has a transitive relationship. And so he proved that and we had the logic.

• 1:29:00AJ Gentile?

  Transitive, so the trace A implies B?

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  That's right. So the trace of a trace is a trace. So I have a big, so I have a 10 by 10 and I trace it onto 5, and then I trace the 5 down to 3. I get the same answer as if I went from 10 right straight to 3.

• 1:29:15AJ Gentile?

  What did he say when he called you from Heathrow after he proved it?

• 1:29:18Speaker 04

  Um, well, I think it was fairly a matter of fact, yeah, it's true. And I was, I was, I, I, I believed it was true. I, I, I believe it true. But I was, but when Chaitan says it's true, then I, I know it's true.

• 1:29:32AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  Because Chaitan is brilliant and he doesn't usually make mistakes. So, so I was really quite pleased. So it's this beautiful logic. And now you can see that it applies to the observer windows, but not just to the observer windows. Now it applies to the policies, the first level of agency, because there, that's a whole set of Markov kernels. So there's a trace logic on them, and then there's a trace logic on the meta policies and the meta meta policies and so forth. So you get a recursion of these trace logics all the way out to infinity. And I want to propose that this is the pre-established harmony that Labanis was looking for.

• 1:30:14AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  So there's all these observers and they're tied together by this beautiful recursive mathematical logic. So we, we are still trying to understand this logic. This is, there's a lot of mathematics to be done on this.

• 1:30:30AJ Gentile?

  How's the establishment responding to this?

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  Well, it's, the theorem is true, so.

• 1:30:41AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  So, so there's no problem with, with, with the theorem.

• 1:30:44AJ Gentile?

  But if Chaitan proved this, that means others can.

• 1:30:48Speaker 04

  That's, that's right. But in fact, for a mathematician, this is falling off a log.

• 1:30:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:30:54Speaker 04

  To prove that theorem is, I mean, Chaitan was, flew to Heathrow while he was waiting in the, you know, he had Heathrow for something, he, he proved it. So it's, it's the kind of thing where a brilliant mathematician like Chaitan can prove it pretty quickly.

• 1:31:09AJ Gentile?

  So that's just, logic is just logic.

• 1:31:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:31:12AJ Gentile?

  So how do we bolt your philosophy onto it that makes it controversial?

• 1:31:16Speaker 04

  Right. So, one way to look at what I've just said is that I just did discover this new structure and recursive structure on the set of all Markov chains. So that's, that's a contribution to mathematics. And as a contribution to mathematics, it's not controversial at all, I don't think. But now I'm interpreting this as applying to consciousness.

• 1:31:40AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:31:41Speaker 04

  And that's very controversial. So, so, and here's the kind of thing that gets publicly stated about this. So, so there will be, there is, I don't know if I'll mention the person's name, but a very, very prominent person with YouTube said about this, that this is complete nonsense. Of course, Markov chains are, are fine, but to use them for consciousness, this person said, you see, Markov chains are used for standard stuff like, like predicting the weather, predicting stock markets and so forth.

• 1:32:12AJ Gentile?

  Nuclear fission.

• 1:32:13Speaker 04

  Nuclear fission.

• 1:32:14AJ Gentile?

  Google PageRank.

• 1:32:16Speaker 04

  That, that's right. So it's, exactly. It's just used for all this stuff. And, and to say that it applies to consciousness is, is nonsense. There's nothing in the mathematics that says this is consciousness. So the mathematics doesn't care about consciousness. So for Hoffman to even say that it's about consciousness is, is, is just a rookie mistake. So a lot of people have said this. And, and my.

• 1:32:40AJ Gentile?

  I've seen that, but I haven't seen them explain how you're making a mistake.

• 1:32:43Speaker 04

  No, they just say that. They, they just say that that is a mistake, and they don't say how that is a mistake. And, and I'll explain how it's not a mistake now.

• 1:32:51AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  The math, it never tells you what it can be applied to. So the fact that, I mean, you could also say, you, you're using Markov chains for stock markets? There's nothing in the Markov chains that said they could be applied to stock markets? You're using it for weather? There's nothing in Markov chains that this should be applied to, to, to weather? So as soon as you see that, you really, the, the, the claim, you can't use it for, for consciousness is silly. It's just, it's plain silly, because you could apply it to any other application. The math does not tell you any applications. It said, this is a structure. When you use it in science, what you do is say, I think that this scientific arena might profitably be modeled by this structure. Maybe it's stock markets, maybe it's weather, maybe whatever it might be.

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  In my case, I'm saying consciousness. And now, I think what's really going on is, the argument that they're giving is not the real reason that they don't like it, they just don't like consciousness. So they're, they're, what they're really saying is, consciousness is nonsense. And so you're trying to attach nonsense to Markov chains. And, and you could be right, maybe consciousness is nonsense. We'll see. Right now, physicalist approaches cannot explain a single illusion of conscious experience, much less conscious experience. So, you know, if, if in 50 years, we're still batting 0, I would say it's, it's over for physicalism. It's, it's, it's over. And if we can start with a theory of consciousness modeled by Markov chains, and we can do some

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  real work with that, and we can talk about the work, like building up spacetime.

• 1:34:23AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:34:24Speaker 04

  Then I would say, it doesn't prove that consciousness can be modeled by Markov chains, but it sure makes it a pretty interesting scientific hypothesis. Certainly not nonsense.

• 1:34:34AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's build that bridge. Let's go, let's go from the chains to consciousness, because we haven't really built that bridge yet, how we get there.

• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  Right. So, so the idea, the reason that I was intrigued by, by using Markov chains for consciousness is that we do just have, at the very, very most elementary level, the experience of colors, shapes, and even more complicated things, three-dimensional objects and so forth, and they're changing. So at the very, very minimal level, the, this Markov model works. Now, one objection might be, Markov chains have a finite history. I mean, they have a finite memory in the sense that the next, the next transition is determined by the current state of, of the chain.

• 1:35:23AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:35:24Speaker 04

  So, some people say, well, that's a finite memory kind of thing, and, and that's just way, way too limited. But it's not, because it's well-known in Markov chain theory that you can easily create bigger, more complex states. You can take a series of 20 states and make it one state. So as, as much history as you want, you can build it into states. So it's, it's really, there's no, no limits. And you can have an infinite number of, of, of states and make your histories as long as you want. And you can make the individual experiences quite complicated. I mean, it could be not just something, I mean, I use red, green, and blue because it's very, very simple.

• 1:35:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  But it could be, you know, a particular three-dimensional shape, a sphere or a cube or so forth. And then you can go even more complicated things. So, so the kinds of experiences that you can have can be arbitrarily complicated. So, so it seems to me that it's a good hypothesis to use these Markov chains on what I call the recursive trace logic. This, the recursion of Markov chains, policies and meta policies and so forth, with the trace logic, as a theory of, of observation and agency, because it's the most general and comprehensive, the least assumptions. There are experiences and they change. It's amazing. That's all I assume. There are experiences and they change. That's it. Literally, that's it.

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  Everything else, and then I say, and the best way to do that is, is model it with Markov chains. That's, that's all I assume. The recursive trace logic just falls out of that. It's, it's, it's just a theorem. So, I love that in a scientific theory. You make a minimal assumption. I'm going to start with consciousness, and I'm going to model it as experiences that change. The minimal model I can give is Markov chains. Oh, by the way, no one noticed it, but there's this partial order, the trace logic on all this, and it's recursive. And this gives us a theory of agency. It's just that simple.

• 1:37:15AJ Gentile?

  So consciousness is just a state that can change?

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  Um, but the, it can change, but the policies and meta policies are doing it in sort of an agentic way. And in some sense, they're saying, given that I'm looking at the world through this window, now, these are the different ways that I want to, you know, want, want to look. So that brings in a notion of agency and a notion of, of time, which is quite, quite interesting. Because you can't choose what next window you're going to go to until you have a, a current window. So, so there, it brings in a very observer-centered or agent-centered notion of, of time. And some of them might say, well, you're not, these are just Markov chains. You're not showing any deliberation.

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  You're not showing any rational reasoning or, or reasoning here. Or, you know, like, what are the goals that you're, and, and the payoff functions that you're trying to minimize or maximize in, in your choice? And, and I would just say that these are different levels, different ways of describing the same thing. If you give me a decision theoretic description of an agent that says, I have these goals, I have these kinds of actions that I can take, I'm modeling these kinds of worlds, and so I can then model what these actions would do toward my goals in these different worlds. And you can write it out that way.

• 1:38:39AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:38:40Speaker 04

  But ultimately, you're going to have, when you write it down, you'll get a Markov chain. Says, what's the probability, given that I'm in this world, that I'll go and do this thing or go to that world? So, so there are just different ways of describing the, the same thing. So I like the Markov chain because it has this recursive trace logic. And I think also because it's looking to me like we'll be able to show.

• 1:39:06Speaker 04

  How we can build spacetime and quantum theory from just this recursive trace logic. So I should say, I've been very, very hard-nosed in this interview about the physicalists, right? I've said, "Look, they start off with space and time and physical objects as fundamental, then they owe us a precise physicalist account of conscious experiences," or the illusion of conscious experiences. "No hand wave. Show me how we get the illusion of the taste of mint from neurons," or whatever you want. "Show it to me, or why should I believe you?" So turn around, now what my colleagues will say to me is, "Don, great, you've got this nice mathematics and you're claiming it's consciousness. Great.

• 1:39:47Speaker 04

  Where then does spacetime and quantum field theory and the Born rule and all this stuff come from? You've got all this nice stuff for consciousness. What you owe us is, show me Einstein's special theory of relativity, general theory of relativity, quantum field theory, and eventually quantum gravity. Give us non-locality, give us the Born rule, give us the Big Bang."

• 1:40:09AJ Gentile?

  Can you give us this?

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  Well, I just gave my colleague Niffa and Chaitan tentative proofs of getting special relativity and general relativity. It looks very, very plausible to me, and I'm working on the Born rule.

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• 1:41:29AJ Gentile?

  So are you integrating time dilation and space dilation?

• 1:41:34Speaker 04

  I am, and I can give an intuition about why we might expect that this would work.

• 1:41:41AJ Gentile?

  Please.

• 1:41:42Speaker 04

  So one thing that Einstein taught us is, for special relativity, is suppose that you're on a train and you're going past me. I'm sitting at the train station, I'm watching you, you're going past me, and you have a clock and you have a meter stick. And I've got a clock and I've got a meter stick. And I look at AJ's clock, and for me, it looks like your clock is going too slow and your meter stick is too short. And you on the train, looking at me, you would say, "Well, no, no, Don's clock is going too slow, and Don's meter stick is too short." And that's pretty stunning. I mean, that was stunning that Einstein came up with that, and very counterintuitive, and wasn't accepted right away, and so forth. But experiments have shown that that's correct.

• 1:42:27Speaker 04

  The meter stick changes size.

• 1:42:31AJ Gentile?

  Does Minkowski spacetime factor into this?

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  That is where Minkowski spacetime comes from. This is where, when you don't have gravity involved.

• 1:42:39AJ Gentile?

  When you don't have gravity?

• 1:42:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, when you don't have gravity. So this is just Minkowski space. So Einstein did this in 1905. It wasn't until 1915 that he came up with curved spacetime. Took him 10 years to really master the mathematics for that.

• 1:42:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, is that all?

• 1:42:53Speaker 04

  Well, yeah.

• 1:42:54AJ Gentile?

  Remarkable.

• 1:42:55Speaker 04

  It was a Herculean job. Truly impressive. So how do I do that in this Markov chain theory? Why should we believe that I could get Einstein? So one thing I haven't mentioned is that it's standard in Markov chain theory to have a little counter for a Markov matrix. So every time you have a transition of state, you just increment the counter. So like with red, green, and blue, I see red, 1. Oh, now I see green, 2. Oh, now I see blue, 3. And you just keep counting as things go. So that's called an enhanced Markov chain, or, so we call it an enhanced Markov chain. This is standard stuff in Markov textbooks. It's not our invention. So notice what happens.

• 1:43:39Speaker 04

  If I have the 10 by 10, every time one of the 10 colors changes, my counter is going. So red, green, yellow, blue, whatever it might be, the counter's going.

• 1:43:48AJ Gentile?

  But only a state change?

• 1:43:49Speaker 04

  Only for each state change, right? Every time a color changes, from red to green, or red to red, right? So you could have red change to red.

• 1:43:57AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:43:58Speaker 04

  So now suppose we go back to the 3 by 3 sub-window.

• 1:44:02AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  Notice that, say, it only has red, green, and blue, and not the other seven colors. So it is only going to up its counter when red, green, or blue happen, but it won't catch yellow, purple, pink, or the others. So notice, its counter isn't going to go as fast as the big counter. The big matrix, the 10 by 10, is counting every, one of the 10 colors changing. The little 3 by 3 is only counting three of those, so it's only getting 30% roughly of the counts of the other.

• 1:44:30AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's help people understand.

• 1:44:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:44:33AJ Gentile?

  Let's have the colors changing, give me colored glasses, and let's click our counters together.

• 1:44:39Speaker 04

  Right, so suppose I have, let's keep it simple to like, then just 3 versus 2 colors, right? So I have red, green, and yellow. So we're at a traffic light. And so every time it changes from red to green, green to yellow, and then back to red, you click your thing, you click your counter. But now suppose you don't see the yellows. So all you see is the red and greens. So you only get the red, any time red changes to green and green changes to red, you click. But you don't get any of the yellows. So you're missing a third.

• 1:45:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:45:17Speaker 04

  One out of three counts.

• 1:45:18AJ Gentile?

  Right, you're clicking your counter every change, but I'm missing a third of them.

• 1:45:20Speaker 04

  You're missing a third of them. And so one clock is only going at 2/3 the speed of the other clock. And that is where we're going to get Einstein's time dilation.

• 1:45:31AJ Gentile?

  From there, so time is moving slower for me?

• 1:45:34Speaker 04

  Because your counter, you're seeing less.

• 1:45:36AJ Gentile?

  My counter's slower.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  That's right. So the reason I think AJ's counter is going slower is I don't, my Markov chain has, is not completely intersected with yours. So I'm not counting all the stuff that you see.

• 1:45:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:45:53Speaker 04

  My counter is not going, of your stuff is not going as fast as your counter does. And so your counter is going faster than, from your point of view. But the same way, that's why it's symmetric. From AJ's point of view, my counter's going too slow because you're missing some of the stuff that I see.

• 1:46:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  So that's why our counter, we get the time dilation.

• 1:46:10AJ Gentile?

  What's the minimum unit? Is that a Planck time?

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  Now, that would be...

• 1:46:14AJ Gentile?

  What's our universe frame rate?

• 1:46:16Speaker 04

  Well, in the recursive trace logic, there is no minimum. So the notion of time, the notion of time is a spacetime notion.

• 1:46:27AJ Gentile?

  There's no unit at all?

• 1:46:28Speaker 04

  There's no, in the notion of seconds, right?

• 1:46:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:46:34Speaker 04

  So if we're talking about like the Planck time, that would be 10 to the minus 43 seconds. But the very notion of second is alien to the recursive trace logic. It only has counters, it doesn't have the notion of time. But what I have to do is show that I can use the recursive trace logic, in fact, I can use 0% of the recursive trace logic to build Einstein's special relativity.

• 1:47:02AJ Gentile?

  Don't you need some type of base measurement in order to get your counters? You have to be counting something.

• 1:47:08Speaker 04

  Well, so there will be like a fundamental clicker in the recursive trace logic. But it won't have the notion of seconds tied to it at all.

• 1:47:16AJ Gentile?

  I guess it doesn't need it then, as long as it's there.

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  Well, and as long as it's there, it could be, instead of 10 to the minus 43 seconds, it could be 10 to the minus 43 trillion seconds, in fact, 10 to the minus infinity seconds. So it really can be as small as you wish. But our spacetime is stuck at 10 to the minus 43 seconds, which is actually, if you think about it, why not 10 to the minus 43 trillion? And also spacetime falls apart at 10 to the minus 33. We might think, "Oh, that's pretty small." No, what about 10 to the minus 33 trillion? Why should spacetime fall apart at 10 to the minus 33? That's a fairly shallow data structure. So what I have to do is to show how I can use the recursive trace logic, which doesn't

• 1:47:59Speaker 04

  even have the notion of seconds, it just has Markov chains with counters. And I have to show how we can create a, what I call a headset.

• 1:48:08AJ Gentile?

  I was just going to ask you about this.

• 1:48:11Speaker 04

  A VR headset.

• 1:48:12AJ Gentile?

  Because you could still make this work, this could still be physicalism with the Markov chains.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  Oh, sure, absolutely.

• 1:48:20AJ Gentile?

  It's only with the headset do we now make the leap to consciousness.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  Well, it's only with the headset that I'm able to make the leap from saying that the recursive trace logic models consciousness to say, "And here's how we get what we call the physical world out of it." So that's what, when I'm building a headset, I'm saying, "I'm starting with this universal consciousness, the recursive trace logic, mathematically described with the pre-established harmony that Leibniz wanted."

• 1:48:47AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:48:48Speaker 04

  So that's what Leibniz wanted, I think. Now I have to show you how we get Einstein's special and general relativity, how we get quantum field theory, as a special model within the recursive trace logic. And what I, I have to be very, very careful about this. I don't want to prove that the recursive trace logic forces us to see the world like through Minkowski space, or general relativity, or quantum field theory. It doesn't. All I need to do is prove that it allows us to build those structures. In fact, I would be disappointed, bitterly disappointed, if it forced me to build those

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  structures, because I want the flexibility to show that our spacetime is one of an infinite number of headsets that consciousness can build. Consciousness has the flexibility. We have, I think, my view is, ours is the, one of the most trivial and simple spacetime headsets that's available. We have the training wheels version, really dumbed down. So our view that we're like the top of the food chain, and then we're the top of intelligence, my view is, no, no, our spacetime headset is one of the most trivial ones that could possibly be. And we can show, I plan to show, and I think, I've got a version of the proof right now, but it's not real until it's published, right?

• 1:50:11Speaker 04

  So I've got a proof that I like.

• 1:50:14AJ Gentile?

  Chaitan likes it?

• 1:50:15Speaker 04

  Chaitan's looking at it, and Niffa are looking. So Chaitan and Niffa are two mathematicians that I'm working with. So it's not real until they say it's real, and in fact, even then, it's not real until we do peer review publication.

• 1:50:28AJ Gentile?

  So the headset is how we perceive reality. If ours is very basic, that implies... That there's something more advanced.

• 1:50:35Speaker 04

  The mathematics makes it very, very clear that there's an infinite number of far more interesting headsets.

• 1:50:41AJ Gentile?

  Infinite?

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  Infinite number, infinite number. There's unbounded. So ours is one of the most trivial. Ours, you could think about ours as being a trace of much, much more interesting, bigger headsets in a way. But even among the 3D headsets, right, there are human

• 1:50:57AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  kind of 3D headsets. Presumably mice might see in three dimensions, some birds might see in three dimensions, and their headset is going to be a little bit different from ours. It's still three dimensional, but it's going to have different features than ours. So what we're going to want to do is I want to first prove that I can get a generic spacetime headset, a generic one. Not human, it's not mouse, it's not bird, it's just a generic one. And then what we want to do is then look at like the neuroscience of humans.

• 1:51:25AJ Gentile?

  If there's an infinite number of headsets above, that must mean there's an infinite number below.

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  There could be quite a few below, but it's hard to go below three dimensions and one dimension too far. In terms of the number of dimensions, you can three, two, one.

• 1:51:38AJ Gentile?

  So dimensionality is important.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  Well, for that kind of measure of headsets, if you're going to have dimension, now you could get rid of dimension as well. There could be headsets in which you just have topologies and not dimensions, for example.

• 1:51:49AJ Gentile?

  Right. That would make every headset a mean then.

• 1:51:53AJ Gentile?

  No matter where you are.

• 1:51:56Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, there's a, you can't think big enough. There's

• 1:52:00AJ Gentile?

  You can't.

• 1:52:00Speaker 04

  There's an infinite number of different kinds of headsets that you can

• 1:52:03AJ Gentile?

  Humans don't like infinity.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  We don't like infinity. We like to think that what we're seeing is the truth. And what I'm saying is that from this point of view, spacetime, which science thought is the final reality, and everything is inside spacetime, is in fact, one of the most trivial headsets that you could build out of the recursive trace logic. And there's an infinite number of more complicated headsets than what we've got. And I think that we are the consciousness that's capable of understanding those headsets.

• 1:52:32AJ Gentile?

  You mean our species?

• 1:52:33Speaker 04

  Our species, well, our species is a headset representation of a consciousness that is actually able to do all of this stuff. And so part of our joy here is to enjoy this headset.

• 1:52:47AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  To wake up and realize it's just a headset, and to realize the Leila thing. This is a game. We thought, we let ourselves get lost in this game, and we can smile once we wake up and realize, oh, we thought this was the whole thing. Oh, no, no, this, as beautiful as this is, as complicated as this is, as completely engaging as this world is, it's trivial compared to what you can do.

• 1:53:12AJ Gentile?

  Right. You can't see nothing yet.

• 1:53:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the idea. That's the Leila kind of thing. Let's play with this. Let's enjoy this. So, you know, relax and play with this. See what you really can learn from this. Be open, explore, and then realize that you infinitely transcend this. And the recursive trace logic puts that out mathematically. You can infinitely transcend this in the sense that there are an infinite number of other headsets that you can build.

• 1:53:35AJ Gentile?

  Is there a way to practically describe what those headsets can see?

• 1:53:39Speaker 04

  Well, there's

• 1:53:40AJ Gentile?

  My monkey brain?

• 1:53:41Speaker 04

  Well, there's one, one way of thinking about it. Just one simple way is go from three dimensions of space to four to five to 50 to a billion and so forth. So that's one way.

• 1:53:50AJ Gentile?

  Dimensions are infinite as well?

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Why not? Why not build dimensions off to infinity?

• 1:53:56AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:53:56Speaker 04

  And that's just one, that's one direction. And then you can go with the notion of dimension altogether and just try different topologies and so forth. So there's, as soon, see, that's the thing. You cannot think big enough here.

• 1:54:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:54:08Speaker 04

  And the mathematics really helps you. All these structures that mathematicians have discovered open us up to realize all the different possibilities and infinities. So, so I, I study mathematics because it really helps push me out of my little boxes, out of my little, you know, dead ends, thought dead ends, so.

• 1:54:30Speaker 00

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• 1:55:24AJ Gentile?

  I've heard you say you know enough math to get into trouble, but not enough to get out. Who gets you, who gets you out?

• 1:55:29Speaker 04

  Well, so my, my good friend, Chaitan, has worked with me since 1984 or something like that.

• 1:55:37AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:55:37Speaker 04

  So it's been 40, 42 years he's put up with me. And no, we're, we're very good. He's brilliant. I was, I've been very, very lucky to, to work with him. And Bruce Bennett worked with me until the early 2000s. And Bruce was brilliant. I'm now working with NIFA, Hermanson, who's, who's, he's an expert in Markov chains, in fact. So this is his area. And at the Trace Institute, we're, we're looking to get some more mathematicians now to, to, to work with us on this. So

• 1:56:09AJ Gentile?

  You're building up

• 1:56:09Speaker 04

  More mathematicians, the better.

• 1:56:10AJ Gentile?

  You're building up a nice roster over there. What's, what's, what's a Tuesday like at the Trace Institute?

• 1:56:16Speaker 04

  Well, right now, it's, it's distributed. So we, we meet by Zoom and so forth because NIFA is in New Zealand and Chaitan is in, you know, he's about an hour and a half away from me. So it's just the normal thing. So our meetings are, you know, on a Tuesday would be, so Robert Prentner is in Shanghai.

• 1:56:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Speaker 04

  He was a former postdoc of mine. He's now a professor at Shanghai. He's working with us. He's going to be the leader of the, of the Trace Institute. He's a younger guy. I'm 70, he's in his 40s. So it's, it's time for me to make sure that someone younger is in charge.

• 1:56:52AJ Gentile?

  What's the mission statement for Trace?

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  Well, the mission statement, I've forgotten the exact mission statement, so I'll just

• 1:56:57AJ Gentile?

  I just mean generally, what are you guys trying to accomplish?

• 1:56:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. The, the idea would be to really explore this recursive trace logic, get it completely understood mathematically, and then prove, we have nine conjectures that the Trace Institute has published on, on the site. The first is that we can build Minkowski space, Einstein's special relativity. That's the first conjecture. Second one is we can build general relativity. Third is that we can get the Born rule. One of them is that we can get the Big Bang. Another one is that we can get quantum non-locality.

• 1:57:31AJ Gentile?

  You can get non-locality out of this?

• 1:57:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely. That's the, that we can get non-locality out of this thing. So we can get everything from, of quantum mechanics. If we can't, then we're wrong, by the way. So I'm saying these, these conjectures are the things that anybody would require me to do.

• 1:57:48AJ Gentile?

  Didn't Tristan give you a challenge? Didn't he ask you to derive the Schrödinger equation using this?

• 1:57:55Speaker 04

  Well, yeah. So we have

• 1:57:58AJ Gentile?

  That would be cool to solve that.

• 1:58:01Speaker 04

  Exactly. So we, and that's one of the conjectures, that we can get all of quantum field theory. So, so not just Schrödinger equation, but get quantum field theory completely out of this.

• 1:58:11AJ Gentile?

  Nobel is probably listening. If you can get that working. I mean, is this something that practically you can release, like, hey, gang, we solved this. Conjecture four is done. Moving on.

• 1:58:24Speaker 04

  That's right. That's, that's, that's our goal in the next two or three years is to get these nine conjectures proven. That, that's the first

• 1:58:30AJ Gentile?

  Quantum field theory within three years?

• 1:58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's our goal. We're trying to show. So we don't have to show that, that recursive trace logic uniquely gives us quantum field theory. All we have to show is that it can give us

• 1:58:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  quantum field theory. But then we want to show that it could give us infinitely many other kinds of, of structures that are probably much more interesting than that. So, so, so that's what we're up to right now is, is, but we have to get this headset. The idea is that for our scientists, what's going to impress them is this, is the mathematics and the spacetime physics that we know. So Einstein's general and special relativity, quantum field theory, the Born rule, Big Bang, and so forth. If we can nail that down, and here's one just real brief reason why I'm sure we can do it. The set of, the space of all Markov chains is computationally universal. Anything that can be computed by any drawing

• 1:59:29Speaker 04

  machine can be done by Markov chains.

• 1:59:31AJ Gentile?

  I mean, the math makes complete sense to me. The jump to consciousness, I can't get my mind around yet.

• 1:59:36Speaker 04

  Ah, in what, in what sense?

• 1:59:40AJ Gentile?

  I don't know why consciousness is fundamental, is even required for this to work. I feel like this could work with, with physicalism just fine.

• 1:59:49Speaker 04

  Well, what you could do, of course, is to say, I don't like the consciousness stuff. I just want to have this be a theory of observers and agents without putting the, the consciousness label on it. And it would work perfectly fine.

• 2:00:02AJ Gentile?

  So consciousness can just be a label?

• 2:00:04Speaker 04

  It, it could. Here, here's the reason, though, why that might end up being uncomfortable.

• 2:00:10Speaker 04

  I do feel like if you hit me on the thumb with a hammer, that I feel, there's something I feel that I can't ignore, and it's not, it's a real experience, and it's an unpleasant experience. And then it feels, if anything is real, that painful thumb is, is real. And if that's not real, I don't know what is. And if the taste of chocolate isn't real, I don't know what is. The abstract structure that we call spacetime may or may not be real. But my experience right now is to look around, that's real.

• 2:00:45AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:00:46Speaker 04

  You know, Einstein gives us a mathematics that we call the spacetime mathematics, that nicely describes this. But all I know, really, first person is, I'm experiencing colors, and distances, and smells, and so forth. And Einstein stuff is great, and it works well. But I'm not sure that that's the final reality. That, that might just be a description of my particular kinds of experiences. What about, you know, a shark, or, or a bat, you know, that's using echolocation? Why should its world be anything like my world? So there are all these, you know, sensory worlds.

• 2:01:23AJ Gentile?

  Explain that to us using ants and hands.

• 2:01:25Speaker 04

  Ants and hands?

• 2:01:27AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, how an ant has a certain world that it perceives.

• 2:01:32Speaker 04

  Right. Well, so, I mean, I don't know too much about ants, and I think they use chemical signals and so forth.

• 2:01:43AJ Gentile?

  No, no, no, no. I mean, it was just an example that you used, I thought was very interesting, about how, from an ant's perspective, you can just reach down and kill that ant any time.

• 2:01:52Speaker 04

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 2:01:53AJ Gentile?

  That, that, that analogy.

• 2:01:54Speaker 04

  Oh, right, yes. So, very, very good.

• 2:01:56AJ Gentile?

  I guess it's sort of a headset.

• 2:01:57Speaker 04

  That's right. So, yeah, in fact, so, that's right. So to see that we're in sort of different perceptual worlds.

• 2:02:05AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:02:06Speaker 04

  From other creatures, yeah. Then, it's pretty straightforward, yeah. So if I see an ant crawling around on my, on my dining table, I can kill it, and it won't even know what's about to happen to it. I can just put my finger on it, and, you know, my wife probably wouldn't want to do that. She'd probably put it on a piece of paper and take it outside, and, and.

• 2:02:23AJ Gentile?

  That's nice.

• 2:02:24Speaker 04

  Try to be kind. But, so, but the ant wouldn't know in, in either case. Now, I should say, that's from my perspective, about, about the ant. From my perspective, the ant doesn't seem terribly bright. I mean, it does, it does some chemical tracing and so forth, that's, and it can do some apparently dead reckoning. It can wander around, and then dead reckon, so it does some pretty smart stuff. But from my point of view, it does, it looks pretty simple compared to a human. But if you ask yourself, from an ant's point of view, how much would the ant know about AJ?

• 2:02:53AJ Gentile?

  Nothing.

• 2:02:54Speaker 04

  Almost nothing. And it might not even know that you're there.

• 2:02:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:02:57Speaker 04

  But if it did, maybe it's representation of AJ would be as simple as my representation of an ant. You know, it's just that simple to it. So, by symmetry, I have to ask myself, so what I think of as an ant, maybe that's just because of the limitations of my own headset. Maybe if my headset is dumbing things down so much, that I'm actually interacting with this incredible intelligence, far greater than me, far more capable than me.

• 2:03:23AJ Gentile?

  And you just have a trace matrix of that.

• 2:03:25Speaker 04

  That's right. I'm just seeing a trace of this thing, and I, I'm getting an ant. So.

• 2:03:30AJ Gentile?

  And that's because all your headset allowed you to see.

• 2:03:31Speaker 04

  That's all your headset allowed you. And it also means that there could be, this is where UAP stuff comes in and so forth, that there could be other consciousnesses, or observers, if you don't like conscious, other agents or consciousnesses, or observers, that are in much bigger headsets than ours. And our headset is, to them, like perhaps the ant headset is to us. And we can go down and smash the ant any time, and they could come down and smash us any time, because we're trivial compared to them. So the, the headsets can go off to infinity.

• 2:04:05AJ Gentile?

  Let's take a quick break, and we'll come back, and we'll actually talk about those entities with, with the headsets.

• 2:04:10Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:04:11AJ Gentile?

  So Andrew Gallimore was sitting right in that chair not too long ago.

• 2:04:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:04:15AJ Gentile?

  You guys are working together, which I love. Your first project is literally titled, "Are DMT Aliens Real?"

• 2:04:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:23AJ Gentile?

  Are they?

• 2:04:24Speaker 04

  Well, I think he and I both probably agree that the emphasis on real is probably a little bit misguided, sort of, but it's, it catches attention.

• 2:04:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes. It gets funding.

• 2:04:34Speaker 04

  That's right. So the idea would be that there are all these different kinds of headsets that are possible. Ours is not the final reality. Spacetime is not the final reality. There could be all sorts of headsets much bigger than ours, that could play with ours. People in, the entities in higher headsets could play with us like we play with ants. And so, the idea then is, does DMT just screw you up?

• 2:05:09AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:05:10Speaker 04

  Make you hallucinate? Or does it perhaps somehow allow us to modify our headset in certain ways? Open it up to more dimensions, for example, maybe more dimensions of space, more colors, maybe even new kinds of conscious experiences altogether? That's, and, and if so, could the, the entities that we're seeing in the DMT space be avatars? Just like, when I talk with AJ, I, you know, I'm not directly in contact with your consciousness.

• 2:05:53Speaker 04

  I'm seeing an avatar, we call the human body, that's allowing me, with my headset, to interact with your consciousness. And you see the Hoffman avatar, allows you to interact with my consciousness. So these are, these are avatars, but even these avatars don't exist when they're not perceived. So I said earlier that.

• 2:06:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:06:09Speaker 04

  You, you render this on the fly. So the AJ that I'm seeing is, in some sense, not real, because that AJ is gone.

• 2:06:16AJ Gentile?

  Gone.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  It's completely gone. Whereas, the consciousness presumably is not gone, but what Hoffman's avatar of AJ is gone, whereas AJ is just fine. And, and so the question is, are the DMT entities good avatars? So it's, it's not saying, are they real? But, but, but we put real in because it's, it's catchy.

• 2:06:36AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:06:37Speaker 04

  So it's not that they're real, but are they genuine avatars? And one thing about an avatar is that you can sort of share information. So I could tell you something. And then, I could ask you to tell someone else, and then find out from that someone else, whether they said exactly what I told you. So that's the kind of question we can ask about these, these DMT entities. Could, could we send two people into DMT space? Is there, some avatar, there's just like, various avatars that seem to come up all, all the time?

• 2:07:15AJ Gentile?

  They do. I've been in that space.

• 2:07:16Speaker 04

  You've been in the space?

• 2:07:17AJ Gentile?

  I have. And it feels more real than this?

• 2:07:19Speaker 04

  I, I've heard that the resolution seems higher, everything seems, this seems like the low resolution.

• 2:07:25AJ Gentile?

  This seems black and white. It does.

• 2:07:26Speaker 04

  And the funny thing is, that's what the recursive trace logic is telling me. It's just saying, this is one of the cheaper headsets.

• 2:07:33AJ Gentile?

  That's right. I didn't even connect that.

• 2:07:35Speaker 04

  It's, no, this is, we really, so when I say this is a cheap headset, I really mean it. That, that we got, we, we got the, the cheap version, and they're much, much, and probably even the stuff that you're seeing in DMT is cheap compared to other stuff.

• 2:07:49AJ Gentile?

  Don, there are certain psychedelics that I do, that I don't need reading glasses for like, a week. I can just see. I can just see, colors are sharper, my, I, I just don't need the glasses anymore. It drives my wife nuts. She's like, you can read that? I said, I, it's like, superpowers, for about a week. It's something about neuroplasticity.

• 2:08:06Speaker 04

  That is, I want, see, that's the kind of thing that we have the chance to really understand with the recursive trace logic. If we understand how to build this headset, we understand what DMT is doing to change the headset, then we're going to be able to understand and reverse engineer this stuff, and, and actually come up with. Now, Nifa has actually done quite a bit of DMT, or some DMT. He's a mathematician, and he told me that he went in and saw a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube, rotating in four dimensions rigidly.

• 2:08:40AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:41Speaker 04

  So that's good evidence from, again, it's not proof, but it's good evidence from a reliable mathematician, that he was at least in a four-dimensional space, and was seeing a rigid tesseract for a fraction of a second. He, he didn't keep it for a whole second, but he saw it.

• 2:09:40Speaker 04

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• 2:10:24Speaker 04

  headset. Once we've built it, and that's going to be a lot of neuroscience, so we're going to have a neuroscience team working on this. We're going to have, there's 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses. We have to understand that is just, and this will be very slow here. The brain is a headset representation of how the headset is constructed. That's a big concept.

• 2:10:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:10:50Speaker 04

  The brain, the nervous system, is a headset representation of how the headset is constructed. So I'm not getting rid of neuroscience. I'm saying we need more neuroscience and it's going to be much harder than my colleagues in neuroscience think it is. Understanding the 86 billion neurons and trillions of synapses is just the first step. The hard step is reverse engineering it to understand the software from the recursive trace logic that is being used to build the human spacetime headset. Once we understand that, and it won't be next week.

• 2:11:24AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:11:25Speaker 04

  We can then ask the technical question, what is DMT doing to the construction of that headset? What exactly is it doing? Is it really just taking us from three to four dimensions or does it take us to more? What else is it really doing? So we'll be able to, once we do that, we'll understand the software that's building our headset. And if you think about it, once you know the software that's building a VR game, you can do miracles in the game.

• 2:11:50AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 2:11:51Speaker 04

  So you can change any rule and you're no longer bound by the rules of the game because you're the master of the game. You're writing the rules. So in Grand Theft Auto, the guy who is the wizard is wonderful. He can play all the game by the rules in the game, but the geek who wrote the code can take the gas out of the car of the wizard.

• 2:12:12AJ Gentile?

  No, he's a god.

• 2:12:13Speaker 04

  He's a god.

• 2:12:14AJ Gentile?

  This guy's god.

• 2:12:15Speaker 04

  He can do anything he wants. And so that's what we're, that's when, so I think the recursive trace logic, when we get these nine conjectures proven and we begin to understand how this headset is designed, you cannot think big enough about the technologies that will come out of this. It will make everything that we've got seem like firecrackers. And, and I'm looking forward to that. I think that it's going to open our eyes. When we see, when people see the technologies that come out of it, then it'll be game over for physicalism.

• 2:12:40AJ Gentile?

  Game over physicalism. Wow. These are, these are big goals.

• 2:12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:12:45AJ Gentile?

  To, to replicate the brain as a headset, do you actually have to create an artificial neural network or do you just do it with proofs?

• 2:12:53Speaker 04

  Well, we will, we're already sort of right now looking at the neural networks and trying to construct them through all the like very clean microscopic sections and so forth. We're piecing together what we can see inside spacetime of our, of, of the neural structures. We're putting together all the physiology of it, so it's really, really complicated process. So we need to, to continue to do that, but then we have to ask, now think out of the box. Think out of spacetime completely.

• 2:13:23AJ Gentile?

  Right, because you're only, even if you got the brain perfect, you're not seeing everything.

• 2:13:28Speaker 04

  No, you're only seeing a compression, so there's some really complicated software out here, so to speak, some software that gets compressed in this headset into what we call the brain. And it looks really complicated inside this, 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses. Looks really complicated, but it's trivial compared to what's outside, completely trivial compared to what's outside. This is all restricting. Our headset is really restricting, funneling down, losing information. So we need more money for neuroscience, not less.

• 2:13:57AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:13:58Speaker 04

  Lot more.

• 2:13:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, we're living the compressed data stream. We're not getting a lossless data stream.

• 2:14:03Speaker 04

  That, that's right. And that's what you experienced yourself in your, your own experience in DMT is that this is already feels like the lost, the lossy interface.

• 2:14:13AJ Gentile?

  It does. So you, you brought up UAPs earlier. So is that what they are? Are they objects in a higher, using a better headset?

• 2:14:23Speaker 04

  I don't know, but I can say that the recursive trace logic leaves that possibility open and it gives us a rigorous way to begin to think about it. One thing about the recursive trace logic is, as we talked about earlier, it's about attention. If I have the 10 by 10 of colors and you only see the three by three, you're, you're only paying attention to three of the colors. There's all sorts of magic that can happen outside in the other seven colors. And when you look at the trace construction, you have your visible states and, and that matrix. Then there are transitions from the visible into the invisible.

• 2:15:06Speaker 04

  So in the Markov matrix, the big matrix, you have transitions from the visible to the invisible. Then you have transitions among the fully invisible part, the seven by seven, and then you have transitions back in. So you have the exit, the external world and the reentrance.

• 2:15:21AJ Gentile?

  Wow, so that, that could explain everything from UAP teleportation to particles appearing out of the vacuum.

• 2:15:28Speaker 04

  That's right. This gives you, so it shows you how to exit from our spacetime headset, how that you could have an entire world that's far more complicated than our headset, infinitely more complicated, and then reentrances. That's one aspect of it. Another aspect is just the magician's trick. Lot of magic that happens in, in, in magic shows is by manipulating your attention. Right? I do this and you automatically have to go over there and now I'm doing something over here.

• 2:15:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:15:57Speaker 04

  So the recursive trace logic is the logic of attention. And all you, so one way that you can have these things happen is just distract and change. So again, the recursive trace logic is all about, so there are all sorts of tools that once you're higher up in the recursive trace logic that you could use to hoodwink people or, you know, consciousnesses that are stuck with smaller headsets, all sorts of tools. So I'm, I'm really excited to, to look, but right now then we have the tools that we wouldn't have in spacetime. If you're stuck in spacetime, we have Einstein's theory of gravity, we're trying to get quantum

• 2:16:38Speaker 04

  gravity, but there's, with gravity, you cannot do what these UAPs seem to be doing.

• 2:16:45AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:16:46Speaker 04

  Hover with no apparent propulsion, move at Mach 40 instantly, at 466 Gs.

• 2:16:53AJ Gentile?

  Go into the water with no displacement.

• 2:16:55Speaker 04

  Go into, that's, that's right. That's, that's just not possible with our physics, but it's certainly possible if you know the software of our headset and you play with the software.

• 2:17:04AJ Gentile?

  Right, so we're the ant then.

• 2:17:05Speaker 04

  We're the ant. That's right. And they, they, if they understand the software of our headset, it's just like the, the Grand Theft Auto. If you're the geek that wrote the software, the wizard will be stunned by what you're doing to him. He'll have no way, it doesn't obey his rules, it doesn't obey his laws. He'll say this is impossible and it's not impossible because the geek is not stuck in the headset.

• 2:17:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:17:33Speaker 04

  The geek is making the headset. So when we may be dealing with UAPs, we're dealing with perhaps higher levels that understand how our headset is built and can play with the, with the software rules.

• 2:17:42AJ Gentile?

  It feels like they're doing that. So the UAP doing Mach 40 is just hitting that quicker, faster than we can perceive it?

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  That, that's right. Or it could be distracting us, there, there, so.

• 2:17:52AJ Gentile?

  There's a trickster element to it for sure.

• 2:17:53Speaker 04

  There could be a trickster, and that's again what I was talking about earlier about the Leela kind of thing. It's, it's, they could be playing with this. It's, it's very, very clear from the technologies. If they wanted to destroy us, we would be helpless.

• 2:18:06AJ Gentile?

  Oh yeah, of course.

• 2:18:07Speaker 04

  Completely helpless. So, so it's, it's not like, there are cases where it seems like there's some kind of hostility and so forth, but if they were really hostile, we wouldn't last five seconds. So I get the feeling that there is, again, a, a, a, a playing aspect of this, let's explore more, let's play with these. And, and if it really is the one consciousness looking at itself through various headsets, it could be the one consciousness saying, I, I put myself on these really stupid human avatar headsets, really, really, I, I want to give them a little prod from a little higher headset to, to sort of wake up. So it's the, the one source consciousness playing with itself at, at various levels.

• 2:18:50Speaker 04

  But with recursive trace logic, we could begin to scientifically see how that is, is being done. But I would put a humble note on the whole thing. I think the recursive trace logic is just a scientific theory. It makes its own assumptions and I look forward to replacing it at some point. So that we'll need to go beyond recursive trace logic. But for right now, I think it's a good next step forward. But whatever conscious, the fundamental reality is, what we might call the source, it, it transcends any scientific description, including mine. So, so what I would say, the recursive trace logic is really the logic of infinite number of perspectives. It's the, it's the logic of an infinite number of perspectives that the one source can take

• 2:19:35Speaker 04

  on itself. So they're all consistent perspectives, but they're all mutually, can be mutually inconsistent, but each one by itself is consistent. Each, each Boolean logic is a consistent view, but different Boolean logics can contradict each other, but they're all useful perspectives on the source which transcends all of them.

• 2:19:53AJ Gentile?

  That's beautiful. If we, if we have evolved to not be able to perceive that, is that an impediment to the research? Is there, maybe, does the source just say, well, I'm not going to let them figure this out?

• 2:20:11Speaker 04

  Yes, so you and I are just the source, looking through a particular headset. And there are certain things, we know that the game is such that there are very few of us who, I mean, the Einsteins are very few, right?

• 2:20:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:20:27Speaker 04

  The Schrodinger's, Einsteins, and so forth are very, very few, and we're grateful for all of them.

• 2:20:34AJ Gentile?

  We are.

• 2:20:35Speaker 04

  But they're trivial. The Einsteins and Schrodinger's are trivial compared to what's out there to be discovered.

• 2:20:42AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:20:43Speaker 04

  And yet, you and I are fully that source, and we, in silence, go into the space of infinite intelligence that it is. So, all of us, in some sense, are that infinite intelligence, and we've chosen to play in this avatar. We've chosen to allow ourselves to have limitations, to actually just take this perspective very, very seriously, to look at reality, to look at source through this particular lens and to play. So, really, it's, we take ourselves very seriously, it's all very, very serious and so forth, but really, it's about playing with this perspective, really enjoy this perspective,

• 2:21:27Speaker 04

  and then let go of it and realize this was just a perspective, and you infinitely transcend it.

• 2:21:32AJ Gentile?

  I think I have learned your philosophy, and it comes out of your heart scare after COVID.

• 2:21:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:40AJ Gentile?

  COVID, you're running, heart's going 190 a minute for 30 hours, you're in the hospital, two surgeries, you text your wife goodbye.

• 2:21:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:21:48AJ Gentile?

  What was in that text?

• 2:21:49Speaker 04

  It was very, very short, because I was, you know, I just was in a horrible place. I was exhausted, I couldn't hardly think. I texted my wife, and then I think I texted my daughter separately. I just said, "I don't think I'm gonna make it. I love you. Goodbye." So, it was just that simple, same thing to my daughter, something like that. I don't, my heart's been beating 190 beats a minute for 30 hours. "I don't think I'm gonna make it. I love you. Goodbye."

• 2:22:26Speaker 04

  I, as soon as I did that, I laid back in the bed, to die, just to wait for it to happen.

• 2:22:36AJ Gentile?

  You were at peace in that moment, or were you scared?

• 2:22:38Speaker 04

  I was scared.

• 2:22:39AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:22:40Speaker 04

  I was exhausted, my heart was racing, so even just the racing, 190 beats a minute, it feels like you're scared to death, because your heart is racing.

• 2:22:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:51Speaker 04

  So, even though it's just atrial fibrillation, it feels to you like you're scared to death. I've only been recently starting to talk about this. At that very moment, when I leaned back, it was about 3:00 in the morning in the hospital, and I saw these two male figures standing next to my bed. I hadn't seen them before. And one of the male figures looked to the other, smiled briefly, lightly, and nodded his head. And then, all of a sudden, I felt an incredible warmth in my heart, and my heart started beating normally.

• 2:23:28AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 2:23:29Speaker 04

  So, I looked down, then I looked up, and I didn't see them anymore. And neither of them was wearing hospital garb.

• 2:23:39AJ Gentile?

  I haven't heard you talk about this part of the story.

• 2:23:41Speaker 04

  No, I haven't done it publicly before.

• 2:23:42AJ Gentile?

  Who do you think they were?

• 2:23:45Speaker 04

  I have, I didn't talk about it for several years, because I, this is so strange, that, but I realized in the last couple of years, it's like, okay, if they were hospital people, it would be malpractice to have waited 30 hours to give a patient the drug that they knew would take care of me. So, that doesn't make sense. Second, when I felt it, I didn't feel the warmth in the IV, I felt it directly in my heart, I didn't feel anything in my arm. And third, I'd never saw those guys before or since. So, I don't know what to make, so I'm just stating what I saw, and I'm here because my

• 2:24:27Speaker 04

  heart flipped from 190 beats a minute for 30 hours to instantly, like instantly, a feeling of warmth, and it was done.

• 2:24:37AJ Gentile?

  What did you say to the doctor when he came in and said, "What happened?"

• 2:24:40Speaker 04

  I was so exhausted that I couldn't even grok what was going on. All I knew was I was so glad I wasn't dead, and so glad that my heart wasn't beating like that, and I just needed some rest. So, and then I could not wrap my head around it. I tried to think out of the box, but that was so far out of the box, that I just let it go for three or four years, I didn't even think about it. I didn't.

• 2:25:04AJ Gentile?

  I believe you.

• 2:25:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:06AJ Gentile?

  Here's where I think your philosophy comes in, and it's from this story to Just for Laughs gags.

• 2:25:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 2:25:13AJ Gentile?

  That's your show that you love, right?

• 2:25:16Speaker 04

  Yes, how'd you know that? I love Just for Laughs, it's one of my favorites, yeah.

• 2:25:19AJ Gentile?

  Why? What happens on that show?

• 2:25:21Speaker 04

  Well, people are surprised, so they're set up to expect one thing, and they might get all upset, and then, in many cases, they end up laughing. So, they get into the situation, they're upset, they're all tense, and then they realize, "Oh, wait, wait, wait, ah, I didn't need to be upset, that was just a gag, the whole time." And it really does, Just for Laughs gags, sort of is, for me, a good example of what I think the whole thing is. Again, this is, the whole point is to relax and enjoy the game, and in fact, the more that you can do that, and I, I actually think about this in terms of my research progress,

• 2:26:05Speaker 04

  the more that I can relax and enjoy and be open, let go of everything I think I know, don't be any, like, egoic attachment to what I think I know. You've got, the ego is the biggest, biggest impediment to growth and discovery. So, let go of the ego, let go of attachment, let go of all that stuff, and be opened like a little child. And Jesus said, "Unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." And I really think that that's right. You have to just be open to say, "I don't know anything. As much as I've learned, I know 0%. Let me know more, and play the game." I think that's what it's about.

• 2:26:50AJ Gentile?

  I think so, too, and don't take it too seriously, and when it's over, you might be scared, but then when it's finally over, you're gonna just have a big laugh.

• 2:26:57Speaker 04

  That's right, and even being scared was part of the whole deal.

• 2:27:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:27:02Speaker 04

  Then you can go back and laugh at even being scared, but you go through, for some reason, we set it up so we want to go through that scared part, too.

• 2:27:10AJ Gentile?

  We did.

• 2:27:11Speaker 04

  That's right. It's interesting. I was scared, I mean, there's no, I'm no hero, I was scared to death, and I was really sad to say goodbye.

• 2:27:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:21Speaker 04

  So, I think, for the one, to really know itself, it has to, the source, it has to take an infinite number of perspectives, and to take a perspective doesn't mean just sort of casually, it jumps in with both feet, all in on that perspective, to really believe it's that, and it really then lives that out, and then slowly realizes that was just a perspective, and it wakes up from it. But that's how it really learns that that perspective, as rich as it was, I infinitely transcend it. And that's how, that's the best story I can tell right now about how the one is, how it knows itself, and why it does this.

• 2:28:05AJ Gentile?

  I think it's perfect. So, now, given everything that you've done, everything that you know, when you see a monarch butterfly, is it more beautiful or less?

• 2:28:14Speaker 04

  It's very beautiful, there's a preschool just down the street from me, that has a big picture of a child on a poster, looking at a monarch butterfly, and every time I go by, I go, "That was me at five years old." Don't lose the love of surprise and the joy of discovery of all the beautiful stuff that's around you right now, that you're just not seeing. So, I'd love to see that picture, it's a boy, looking at a butterfly.

• 2:28:44AJ Gentile?

  It's there for you.

• 2:28:45Speaker 04

  It's there, it's there for me, reminding me, "Relax, Don, don't get uptight, it's just a game."

• 2:28:53AJ Gentile?

  That's the message. Don Hoffman and Trace Institute, everything will be linked below, he's got to catch a flight, but I hope you'll come back, you're a treasure.

• 2:28:59Speaker 04

  I'd love to. Thank you, and thank you so much, this has been a great pleasure, AJ.

• 2:29:03AJ Gentile?

  Thanks, Don. Bye, everybody. That was Donald Hoffman. He ended on a butterfly, so let me start with the other book. The Beer Bottle Beetle is Real. Entomologist Darryl Gwynn and David Rentsz watched males in the outback mating with stubbies until they died, and their 1983 paper won a Nobel Prize. Australia changed the bottle for the beetle. Evolution built them to like dimples, not truth. That's Don's whole argument in One Insect, and I love it. Now, the new math. Don says proofs of special and general relativity built from consciousness alone are sitting on his desk. Nothing's published, so there's nothing to check. He said it himself, "It's not real until it's published." I can wave. And the hospital.

• 2:29:46AJ Gentile?

  Don's heart raced out of control for 30 hours. He texted his wife goodbye and laid back to die. Two strangers stood by the bed at 3:00 in the morning. Neither wore hospital scrubs. One smiled and nodded, and his heart flipped back to normal. He never told that story publicly before, I've never heard it. Forty years of math to prove reality is a headset, and the takeaway he cares about most is a preschool poster of a kid staring at a butterfly. That part I can verify, I watched him mean it. Don's book is The Case Against Reality. The new work is at traceinstitute.org, and everything I mentioned is linked below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 2:30:37Speaker 05

  I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth with my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends.

• 2:31:20Speaker 05

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKUltra. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:32:01Speaker 05

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:32:26Speaker 05

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come to have got the Pacific City underground. Mysterious number stations, planet circle to Project Stargate. And what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black nights that a lot of told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:33:07Speaker 05

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:33:49Speaker 05

  Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel and camels love to dance. When the feeling is right on wasting time.

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money.

• 2:34:47Speaker 01

  Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

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