Part Two: How Consciousness Creates Our Reality. Why Science & Spirituality Can’t Explain Reality and the Scientific Breakthrough That Could Change Life As We Know it.

What if space and time aren’t real, and consciousness is the true fabric of the universe? In this mind-expanding conversation of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Donald Hoffman, pioneering cognitive scientist and author of The Case Against Reality, breaks down the revolution currently shaking science to its core. Could everything we experience — even space and time — be just part of a virtual interface our minds use to survive? Dr. Hoffman explains why consciousness (not matter) might be fundamental, what could exist beyond space-time, and why merging science and spirituality may be the only way to solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He also breaks down why: - Reality may just be what we perceive through a VR headset - Thinking you are your body could be one of humanity’s greatest dangers - AI will never truly be conscious - Consciousness doesn’t arise from physical processes, but might create them - Darwin’s Theory of Evolution may suggest our world isn’t real at all - Technology could be clouding our ability to perceive God - Recognizing a higher consciousness naturally leads to compassion and love for others - Building a scientific framework for spirituality could allow science to finally confirm what mystics have always known - His mathematical model of consciousness may reveal a collective mind & even prove the existence of God - His theory of the observer could unlock real magic: time travel, instant knowledge downloads, limb regeneration, and more We may have discovered the first layer of the Simulation’s software; once we understand it, can we manipulate it to create magic? But with this potential power comes danger — if we unlock reality’s source code, what happens next? Dr. Hoffman believes that if science proves consciousness is fundamental, confirming spirituality itself, the impact on humanity will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If consciousness really is the code behind reality, this might be the most important conversation of our lifetime. Don’t miss it! Dr. Donald Hoffman’s book, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes: ⁠https://a.co/d/5HoGhug⁠ https://a.co/d/5HoGhug Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Viallick.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. In the first part of our conversation with Dr. Hoffman, he talked a little bit about what it means to go outside of the framework of spacetime as we know it, and how reality is essentially a headset that we wear, at least our perception of it. In part two, we're going to talk about evolutionary theory. We're going to talk about how Darwin's theory does not explain everything that we're experiencing in this spacetime continuum. We're also going to talk about the current research that Dr. Hoffman is participating in. He's been working on this for nearly 40 years, and for the last year and a half, he's gotten

• 0:47Mayim Bialik?

  very close to an understanding of what we would describe as a collective consciousness. We're going to talk about the places that spirituality and religious tradition intersect with mathematical theories in this part of our conversation with Dr. Hoffman. We cannot wait for you to hear part two.

• 1:03Jonathan Cohen?

  We touch on the possibility for time travel, the ability to visit galaxies other than our own, what it means to unlock such a powerful technology, and the risks and potential improvements to our lives that come with us, and what it means for us to better understand intuition, telepathy, and psi abilities.

• 1:27Mayim Bialik?

  Here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Donald Hoffman.

• 1:33Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you describe why it is, maybe evolutionarily, that more people haven't had access to this? Because what we've seen from near-death experience, what we know from psilocybin and other psychedelics, what we know from deep meditation, is that it used to be believed that the brain actually had to work harder to perceive more, but really what's happening is the brain has to quiet down to perceive more of "reality." Can you explain why it is that... Maybe more people have been on a path to survive versus experience what is outside of space and time?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yes, it is interesting that when you take these drugs, often it's sort of relaxing certain things of the brain as opposed to... So it's almost like the brain is shielding you away from some aspects of reality, cutting it down somehow, which is an interesting point of view. And that does fit with the... You might claim that it's just a headset. The headset is, in some sense, a way of taking something that's really complicated and putting it... For example, in the Grand Theft Auto game, you're dealing with some computer that what you're really doing is toggling millions of voltages in a precise order in a very, very

• 2:54Speaker 02

  quick time to turn your steering wheel and hit the gas and so forth. That's what you're really doing in this analogy. If you had to actually toggle those voltages, good luck. All that, that's too much reality. So all you want to see is a little steering wheel and a dashboard and a red Mustang. You don't want to toggle the millions of... So in some sense, yeah, spacetime is something that's sort of filtering out most of reality. And so when you take a drug that starts to break down the filter, you might get little glimpses out. So it does make sense in that framework, absolutely.

• 3:30Mayim Bialik?

  Talk a little bit about human evolution in terms of why... Obviously, we are wired for all sorts of experiences. And when we learn what we can learn from indigenous communities, who in many cases remain very, very linked to the earth, to the seasons, to our place in the universe, there's a real leaning into that. But by and large, what we see is this tendency away from that for survival, for a selection of mates, for a propagation of the species. Can you talk about why evolution favors not being in touch all the time with this level of spiritual consciousness outside of this reality and where it fits in?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  So now I'm going to talk... I'll be very explicit about the context at which I'm going to talk. So now I'm going to be inside spacetime. I'm going to assume Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, right? So that's my framework now. And I'm going to talk about what that theory entails. Now, it's a brilliant theory and in inside spacetime, if you want to talk about organisms and their behaviors, there is no better theory than Darwin's. So I first want to give kudos to Darwin's theory and especially evolutionary game theoretic descriptions of it. There, so it's wonderful. I've used it also in consulting with companies for marketing and advertising. It works. It's a very, very powerful theory.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Now, most people think Darwin's theory is going to entail that, you know, it's survival of the fittest and of course, the fittest are those who see the truth, right? If you don't see the truth, you're not going to be very fit. So, so of course, we've been, we've evolved to, to know reality, or at least the parts of reality that we need, maybe not all of reality, but we need to see some parts of reality accurately to, to survive and compete. And when you look at Darwin's theory carefully in evolutionary game theory, you find, and by the way, Steven Pinker has a wonderful paper in 2005, titles, so, so how does the mind work? I think is the title of the paper. I highly recommend it.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Steve gives several reasons for us to, to understand how evolution could lead us away from veridical understanding of the world. So, so that I recommend to people to, to read Steve's paper on that. So, but I'll just say, the, the work that I've done with my colleagues that, that sort of really puts the nail in the coffin here is we look at the mathematics of evolutionary games and there's something called a fitness payoff, right? So, so a payoff is suppose I'm, I'm hungry and I want to eat and I'm a human being.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  If I, you know, eat a

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Piece of broccoli or eat an egg. That's, that's very, very good. If I eat a poisonous mushroom, that's, that's bad news. That's not, so there's, there's what we call a fitness payoff. There's a human being with an action I want to eat. And in a context like that, I have a magic, I have a nasty mushroom that could kill me. Or I have a piece of broccoli that would, that would be helpful to me. I'm going to get a payoff if I choose the mushroom versus the broccoli. So, so that's what fitness payoffs are. They're sort of, you pick an organism like, you know, Hoffman, an action like eating and a context. You know, like, you know, there's a mushroom, poisonous mushroom, so forth. So you can look at these fitness payoffs and what we did, what we showed was

• 7:12Speaker 02

  payoff functions do not have any information about the structure of the world.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  That's the key point about faith. There's nothing in evolutionary theory that requires payoff functions to have, to code any structure of the world, for example, metric structure or an order, partial order structures, any kind of mathematical structures. Any payoff, when you look at evolutionary game theory, it puts no limits on the payoff functions. Any, you know, pick your, pick your payoff function. It doesn't say this is the class of payoff functions that are allowed in evolutionary theory. No, it just says there's some payoff function.

• 7:51Mayim Bialik?

  So wait, can you, can you say this in normal people terms? Meaning like if I eat the broccoli, it's good for me. There's not a limit to how much broccoli I can eat, nor is there a limit to how much the broccoli can be good for me. Am I heading in the right direction?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yes, but, but this is a little bit subtler in the sense that it's, it's saying that the payoff functions don't necessarily have to know anything about the true nature of the world at all.

• 8:20Mayim Bialik?

  You know what I instantly thought of was like, um, you know, the, a pigeon getting a reward in an experiment. Right?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:26Mayim Bialik?

  So, or actually we, I, I know more about these with rats. So, you know, if you give a rat, um, you know, an opioid or cocaine. It will keep taking it. The rat will keep doing that until it dies, right? Like, it will keep doing that until it has a little rat aneurysm. The payoff itself does not know, this is enough for the rat. That's enough methamphetamine for you, experimental rat. There's no larger consciousness of what this particular payoff means for that rat.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. In some sense, you found a little problem in the whole design of the rat, because that's the reward system. And so you keep giving positive stuff to the reward system. It says, oh, well, I'll keep doing that until it falls apart.

• 9:15Mayim Bialik?

  Right, and the universe doesn't have a larger wisdom of like, or even if you think about food, you know, I studied Prater-Willi syndrome, right? People with Prater-Willi syndrome lack a satiety mechanism. So they will keep consuming, right? And that means that whatever system we are existing in does not know, well, this person has a deletion on that chromosome, and it's not going to allow them.

• 9:36Jonathan Cohen?

  It's also been described that we have been programmed fundamentally to reproduce and to survive. And that the nature of reality is something unimportant to us up until this point. But perhaps there is a transition moment in either the larger consciousness system, if one believes in that, or humans' evolution, the state that we find ourselves in, that now is somehow different, that we are looking behind the veil, looking behind the headset, trying to better understand what that means. And this would lead to your work, but also to the question of why now, in human evolution,

• 10:21Jonathan Cohen?

  is it important for us to look behind the veil and see more about the reality? Perhaps it is that... It is important for our survival as a species to know more.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  It's quite possible. If I try to stay within the context of evolutionary theory, though, for just a moment, just to look at its implications, because I think where you're going there is going to require a broader framework to go that direction. But so let's go right back to just evolutionary theory for a moment. I think one simple thing to say about it is the more calories you spend to do something, more calories you have to eat. So you're trying to do things as cheaply as possible. I love this example of the jewel beetle. This is a concrete example. So the jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy and brown. The males fly, the females are flightless, and the males go around searching for females,

• 11:17Speaker 02

  you know, flying around looking for me. And if they find an eligible female, they alight and mate. This then, these are out in the outback of Australia. And they're, for a while, they're the, some guys in Australia, we had these beer bottles called stubbies that were also dimpled, glossy and brown, just like the beetles are. And they were tossing their empty beer bottles out into the desert. And what happened was that the, these beer bottles are what we call a supernormal stimulus. The male were just flying to the bottles and alighting on them and then trying to mate. And so the jewel beetle males were just, they would swarm all over these stubbies and they had full body contact. And they,

• 12:04Speaker 02

  and they still couldn't figure out that they were not on a real female. So, so here's the case, you know.

• 12:11Mayim Bialik?

  There's so many jokes in my 14-year-old brain that are like roaming around. I will save all of them for you later, Jonathan.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  That's right. But here's, here's the case. This is how much insight males have into the females, right?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  They're mistaken.

• 12:26Mayim Bialik?

  That's not the girl for you, says your mother.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that bottle is the girl for you. So, so what's so and so you might go, well, wait a minute. I mean, the male, male beetles had successfully mated with females for millennia. And all, all you need is to throw a beer bottle out in the desert and the whole game could be over. So, so those, those males had no insight into what a real female was, literally no insight. A bottle will do a big and turned out the bigger, the better, apparently. So, so it was all sorts of jokes here. So, so that's gives you an insight as to what evolution does. It gives what we call satisficing solutions. They're good enough to keep you alive.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  So instead of, so satisficing means they're, they're not perfect, but they're good enough to keep you alive. And, you know, all you need to know about a female, apparently, is is she dimpled? Is she glossy? Is she brown? Go for it. And if she's big, hey, the bigger, the better. So, and, and, and beer bottles do that. So there you go. So that's, so they didn't learn the truth. They, they got a little hack. They, they're, they're going through, and that's what evolution does. It gives us these little simplified hacks, not the truth. But, but someone might say, well, that's just, I mean, for example, my advisor, David Marr at MIT,

• 13:51Speaker 02

  was well aware that, you know, probably flies only had hacks. But he said, but humans have, we have bigger brains and we've evolved to see the true shapes of surfaces around us. And so, and I, I, I love David. He was an incredible advisor and he's a brilliant man. On this point, I respectfully disagree with him.

• 14:13Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:14Mayim Bialik?

  I want you to keep walking this through in terms of Jonathan's evolutionary question because, you know, a lot of people would say, well, we're humans and we're very, very special. You know, we're even more special than other primates, right? We speak and we have all of this amazing thing and we can create devices to examine our own consciousness and we can create Grand Theft Auto, right? And we can create all of these amazing worlds that, that those beetles never have to live in. And so we, we can create religion if we want to. Right? We can create corporate financial structures surrounding God, and that makes us more powerful than God, right? However, there is this other consciousness, which I believe is truth with a capital T.

• 16:58Mayim Bialik?

  How do we get from this evolutionary way of thinking to an understanding that, guess what? As your book talks about, this is all a very, very beautiful, interesting, complicated illusion of our own perception.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  For those who say that we, you know, humans have all this advanced, you know, sophisticated abilities, I say, we do. And let's use them right now in our evolutionary arguments. So let's use those advanced abilities to understand Darwin's theory. And the mathematics of Darwin's theory says there are these, you know, payoff functions. And they shape your sensory systems. They shape your behavior. They shape the structure of your sensory systems. If you want to claim that our sensory systems have been shaped by evolution to see the truth, then the payoff functions must have information about that truth. They must be what we, this is a technical term.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  They must be homomorphisms of the structure of the world. So whatever true structures there are in the world, they have to be not lost by the payoff functions. Because the payoff functions are the things that are guiding the evolution of our senses. And when you, when you just look at current evolutionary theory and you ask it, so what restrictions do you put on these payoff functions? Do you know what? And there's none. There's no part of the theory that says, this is the class of payoff functions that you must use. They just say, there is some payoff function. Figure it out, whatever it might be in your context. Given that, I have to consider the set of all possible payoff functions. And so we do that. And we published a couple of papers on,

• 18:42Speaker 02

  this is with Chaitan Prakash, a mathematician. This, this mathematics, I can have the, I can have ideas in this area, but I can't improve them, but Chaitan can. And what we published, and with some other co-authors, is proof that essentially the probability is zero that a randomly chosen payoff function will have any information about the structure of reality. So this is why I'm being very, very careful. I'm saying, let's look at Darwin's theory in his current framework. Darwin's theory and his current formulation in evolutionary game theory puts no restriction on the payoff functions. Okay. When I look at the payoff functions, I ask, what percentage of them could tell me about

• 19:27Speaker 02

  the truth? 0%. 0% of the payoff functions could shape me to see the truth. So I conclude, on current Darwin's theory, the probability is zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see the truth. Now, you might say, well, we should change the theory. Please do. Good luck. It's not easy to change Darwin's theory. And what you'd have to do is give us a principal reason why you pick this set of payoff functions. What set of payoff functions are you going to choose? What's the principal reason for it?

• 20:00Mayim Bialik?

  When you think about symbiotic relationships, and when you think about, you know, what it means to be part of a community, right? Which a lot of people would say, oh, you know, religion helps you be part of a community, and then you do good, and then you get, I mean, not my particular religion, but, you know, then you get redeemed, right? And you get saved, right? That's our way of trying to place kind of a truth, right, on a payoff function. So, and, you know, this is true of every organized religion, as my teenager was reminding me this holiday season. You know, anytime someone's passing a basket, right, in your church, in your synagogue,

• 20:40Mayim Bialik?

  right, you're being, you're engaging in a social experiment of what does it cost, right, to be part of a system that tells you we have the truth? So what is the other side of this? So if this is the Darwinian way, and this sort of evolutionary game theory way of saying, no, the sensory systems did not evolve for us to have any understanding about truth. What would you say about especially traditions that are thousands of years old that say, "Oh, God has been talking to us this whole time, we just have forgotten how to listen," right? Because we're so consumed with buildings and cars and things like that. Is that possible, that there was a time? Or am I just romanticizing, you know, am I Margaret meeting it?

• 21:25Mayim Bialik?

  Am I just sort of romanticizing the time when, "Oh, life was simpler and then everybody was spiritual and it was all just like kumbaya all the time." Is that a possibility for evolution that technology then has interfered with?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  I think, again, Steven Pinker has done some research on this that is quite, quite interesting. And, and, and he's got some books where he looks at this. And the idea that the noble savage kind of idea, but he's done a really good job to, to make the point that in some sense, with the evolution of, of modern societies, the actual per capita homicide rates have gone down. And, and so we're actually, we, we look at, you know, World War I and II with horror and so forth. But when you look at the big picture, Pinker points out that in fact, with modern societies, the Enlightenment values that have really led to modern society and the great lessening

• 22:20Speaker 02

  of, of human suffering and so forth. So, so, yeah, I don't, now, there could, of course, be individuals in the past, I mean, Jesus and Buddha and perhaps Muhammad and so forth, that, that are, were, you know, individual examples of wonderful lifestyles. But if you look at the history of religion itself, it's not that great, right? There's lots of wars have been done in the, in the name of religion. Galileo was imprisoned, you know, wrongly. So, so we have to be very, very careful. That's why I want science and religion to work.

• 23:02Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I'm talking sort of pre, let's go before 1000. You know what I mean? Like, I'm talking like, very like, old school.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Right. My, my guess is that if you look back there, you're gonna find all sorts of evidence of pretty nasty behavior.

• 23:19Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, no, and I wasn't, I wasn't trying to sort of candy coat that. I'm just saying that it's interesting that conversations about truth that we're having in modern times about stepping outside of a scientific framework and stepping into a more spiritual kind of opening. That is in the literature of many religious traditions for thousands of years. And, you know, I come from the Jewish tradition. You know, the Kabbalists were very, very dialed into many things that the Greeks were also dialed into in terms of, you know, pre-death practices and meditative states and really like tripping outside of this consciousness, you know, even some of the, the meditation

• 24:02Mayim Bialik?

  that was done that we know about from thousands of years ago. It was literally, it was practicing ego death. It was practicing leaving your body, right?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think that there, there has been a lot of that. And, and a lot of it, I think, was very insightful. And there were individuals, you know, probably that, that at the foundations of various religions, who really, in some sense, had taken off the headset more than most everybody had, and they were seeing beyond. And, and then the, the followers hadn't taken off their headset and you get the thing devolving, right? So that's, that seems to be the pattern. You have a Buddha and, and things are great for a while and then it devolves. You have Jesus and things devolve.

• 24:42Mayim Bialik?

  It's always the publicists and the managers who make the trouble.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, so it's, it's, it's up to each of us to take off our own headset, you know? And so I think that it has been done in the past. And, but, but when you look at the history, I see individuals that took off the headset and, and learned, "Love your neighbor as yourself" really is. The deepest thing that you could do, because your neighbor is yourself. The headset illusion that I'm separate from you is the fundamental illusion. I'm not separate from you. There is a deep consciousness that's looking at itself through a Hoffman avatar and then Jonathan avatar and Liam avatar and so forth.

• 25:21Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about what, you know, collective consciousness is one of these phrases that gets thrown about in a lot of, as you call it, the hand wavy communities. But can you talk about what it might be like to picture exactly what you said in a practical and very grounded way? What does it mean to say that part of the reality that we construct is that we are separate from one another?

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Right, so this gets into the theory I'm working on right now. And the context, one context for it is, I'll go back to physics a little bit. Physicists know that they don't have a theory of the observer. They know that observations are really critical. They're central in physics, right? You do an experiment to give information to an observer. That's why you do experiments is so that observers will have information. And without experiments and observations, there is no foundation to your science. But if you look, Newton didn't have a theory of the observer. He just assumed the observer effectively didn't affect anything.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Einstein talks about observers, but they're just coordinates and clocks. That's all observer. Quantum mechanics, now the observer is front and center because you have one evolution when there's no observer and then a different evolution, a collapse, when there is an observer. But quantum theory is very, very clear that they don't have a theory of the observer. That's really a big, big, open thing. And Frank Wilczek, for example, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, says, "We need, you know, we need a theory of the observer. That's what we absolutely have to have a theory of the observer." And some, you might say, "Well, this is a little technical aside. Decoherenz will do it." And I'll just say, "No, it won't.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  It gives you, it gets rid of the complex amplitudes, but it only gives you..."

• 27:17Speaker 02

  But real probabilities, but doesn't give you a unique answer. We need a unique outcome, and you can't get a unique outcome from the Schrodinger revolution or decoherence. So bottom line, that was technical aside for those who would want to take me down. I just put that out there for those. For everybody else, quantum theory doesn't have a theory of the observer, and it's a well-known problem. And so it's in that spirit that I'm trying to propose a theory of the observer. Right? So what do we mean by a theory of the observer? And this is with work with Chetan Prakash and Shwepan Chatterpatie and others,

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Robert Prentner, where we have a model of what we call conscious agents. So these are entities that are conscious. And so we're not just yet talking about one consciousness. We're talking about a bunch of interacting consciousnesses. Right? So we have, and the simplest, we don't want to do mathematics here, but I'll just.

• 28:20Mayim Bialik?

  Speak for yourself, Donald.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll, okay, I'll do a little bit of mathematics, just a little bit. So for those who know that we use Markov chains to describe, Markov matrices to describe observations. The idea is very, very simple. Suppose you're at a stoplight and you can see red, green and yellow lights. And if I'm seeing red now, good chance that I'll see green next, not yellow. And if I see green now, good chance I'll see yellow next and not red. And so forth. If I see yellow, I'll see red next, but not green. So given, that's just an example, given a current kind of experience I'm having like red, I can talk about probabilities of what I'm going to see next, yellow or green and so forth. I can write down a matrix of these numbers.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  And a matrix of numbers, if I see red now, it probably is one that I'll see green next. For example, those are called Markov matrices. So it's very, very simple, just. Describes if, given my experience right now, what other experiences might I have next? And with what probabilities? That's all I use, just Markov matrices to describe conscious experiences. So notice I'm assuming conscious experiences. I'm not starting with physics and saying, I'll give you a physical system in a brain, for example, or a computer that's going to generate conscious experiences. I'm saying, no, my theory starts with experiences. I'm going to start with experiences, but if you grant me that, then I will show you how spacetime, Einstein spacetime emerges.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  That's, so it's a different game, right? That's start, that's starting outside of spacetime with consciousness in a particular mathematical model of consciousness and saying, if you grant me that there are experiences, consciousness, and if you grant me this mathematical model of them, a pretty simple one, that I'll have an experience and then there's going to be some probability I'll have some other experience. That's all I'm assuming. So I have, so humans can have trillions of experiences. There's literally trillions that we could have. So it's a big matrix, a trillion by a trillion matrix of numbers, for example, about the experiences that you might have. But if you grant me that, then the claim is I can show you how spacetime arises.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  The way it arises, this is just something we just discovered in the last year. And I've been working on this. I have, I have a book on, called Observer Mechanics, that was published in 1989. So I've, I've been working on this for a little while. We started, I started working on that book like in 1986 or something like that. So it's been 40 years I've been working on this, but it just broke in the last year. And what we discovered was there's a logic on these Markov chains that no one's ever seen before. It's like, we call it the trace logic. And I can, I can describe it intuitively, but I'll just say what it does. The, it turns out that

• 31:13Speaker 02

  These different conscious observers are related by a logic. And this logic tells you how to take two conscious observers and say, can they be combined? And if so, what, how do they combine? What is the new, bigger conscious observer that they, that they form? And this is not a hand wave. This is mathematics. This is a theorem about Markov chains. So this is a theorem about Markov chains. And when we think of, when we, when we interpret Markov chains as representing conscious experiences, it then becomes a theorem about how consciousnesses relate. And what, and this logic has no top. There's no top to it.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  There's an infinite number of directions that you could go bigger and bigger with bigger and bigger Markov matrices, with more and more experiences. So this, it, it even expands my idea of what I could possibly mean by God. There's not just like one infinite, there's an infinite number.

• 32:11Mayim Bialik?

  What, what this is suggesting is that there is some sort of logic to a collection of consciousness.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 32:20Mayim Bialik?

  Which many people might call collective consciousness.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 32:24Mayim Bialik?

  And that it has, you know, it has no end, which just to bring this in, one of the names of God in Hebrew is there is no end. So that's a nice little tie in. And the idea is that there is no end to the collection of consciousness that can essentially be logically deduced.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  That's right. There's an infinite number of directions that you could go infinitely far. So it's not like there's just one infinity. There's an infinite number of infinities of, of different directions that you could go.

• 32:55Mayim Bialik?

  I love when people accidentally prove God. I told Thomas Campbell that I think he accidentally proved that God exists when he talked about entropy. To me, this is a notion of not accidental, but a mathematical explanation of what it might mean to have consciousness that is connected and then collected together.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  It, it is. And so I want to, of course, say what it can do, but I should immediately be modest about this. It's a scientific theory. And I agree with the spiritual traditions that ultimately consciousness transcends description. So, so reality, whatever it is, transcends description. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't build mathematical models. We should, as long as we're humble and we say this is just the next. So all I'm claiming is this, I think, is the first baby step outside of spacetime.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  It's not a final theory of consciousness, but it is a theory. It is a baby step theory of consciousness that doesn't assume that it arises from physical stuff inside spacetime. Instead, as I'll talk about in a minute, it shows how the structure of spacetime emerges from the logic of all these consciousnesses. But ultimately, what it means is that they're all one.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  They're all connected by this logic, each separate subset. So all possible, there's a consciousness associated with each possible subset of experiences. So there's an infinite number of experiences and you take any collection of them. There's a conscious agent for that and there's an infinite number of

• 34:37Speaker 02

  subsets of this logic that are that are Boolean. So this is that this is a little technical, but the logic itself is not Boolean. The Boolean logic is a very, very simple kind of logic. This is a non-Boolean logic, but for every one of these big matrices underneath it, if you look at all the consciousnesses that are related to that, they are Boolean. So you get this non-Boolean logic that's locally Boolean. And again, I'm not saying this is the final story about consciousness, but I'm saying when we've the first step out of the headset with mathematics, we're getting a very, very beautiful structure,

• 35:14Speaker 02

  which shows the deep unity and yet diversity and connectedness. And it's what's remarkable is, you know, Markov chains have been around since 1906, and I've been studying them myself for the last 40 years. And the key notion that we used in this is the notion of a trace. If I have a big matrix and I, you know, like say on 10 states, and then you only look at three states. So the 10 state matrix is telling you what's happening, what the probabilities of experiences are. But I'm only looking at three of them, say, you know, red, green and blue. Maybe you've got 10 colors, but I can only see red, green and blue.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  The big matrix will induce a dynamics just on the three, the red, green and blue that I can see, right? And it will be unique. If you tell me what the big matrix is, there is a unique answer for what the probabilities are for just the red, green and blue matrix that would be compatible with the big one. Okay, that makes sense intuitively.

• 36:12Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, well, and it also makes sense. We recently spoke to Jan Levin, you know, in the sort of astro physical space. And, you know, she would, one of the things she does is she looks for kind of lyrical and prosaic, right, beauty in the rules of the universe. So what I hear, just, you know, as hearing about this and hearing you describe it, what I hear is that there's an order and there's a purpose to even subsets of larger collections, right? Meaning the, there's some potentially unifying concept that allows even a subset of what we can perceive or experience to have its own rhythm and its own order and its own

• 36:57Mayim Bialik?

  logic that can be expanded out, but isn't that beautiful that it can also be expanded down and I can keep also dividing it, right?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Exactly right. So this is a very non-trivial, deep connection. It's not just a, you know, a hand wave. It's a mathematically precise connection. It's called the trace. So, and there's two notions of trace. When you deal with matrices, some people think about the trace as summing the diagonal elements. That's not what I'm talking about. So I'm not summing diagonal elements. This is a much deeper notion of trace, which is taking the entire probabilistic structure of the matrix and showing you what the new probabilistic structure is for the subset. And for that, it involves an infinite computation. You have to look at all possible paths through all of the states that then go down to the subset. So it's a non-trivial, it's an infinite computation, but it turns out you can do it with closed form.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  So it's an infinite computation, but you can do it in closed form. So we call it the trace logic and we haven't published it yet. So the paper, the theorem is done. And we're getting the paper ready for publication, but it is a real logic.

• 38:08Mayim Bialik?

  I'm glad you didn't give up at year 39 because you might have been like, you know, I've been doing this 39 years and I haven't figured it out. I'm glad you kept going.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Well, I'm surprised. I mean, I had studied Markov chains for 40 years and it wasn't until a year and a half ago that I noticed this logic. I just, and I remember telling my collaborator, Chaitan Prakash, I said, Chaitan, I think, I think this is a logic, technically it's called a partial order. And I could see that it was antisymmetric and reflexive, but I didn't, I couldn't see that it was transitive. You know, I needed a real mathematician to, and Chaitan's looked, no, it's too pretty, Don, it's too pretty. And, but then he went off and proved it. So, so, so then I realized there's this, this whole logic. And then it was only about six months ago that I was looking at this and

• 39:00Speaker 02

  what it means about Einstein's theories. So it was quite stunning. So let's go back to the red, green and yellow lights for, at the traffic signal and suppose, but suppose I have like a dysfunctional one. So it's not necessarily, if red might go to green, it might go to yellow. This is a bad traffic light. So it's a dangerous traffic light, but just to keep it simple. And suppose I have a matrix for that red, green and yellow traffic light that's all dysfunctional, but you can only see red and green. You can't see yellow. Well, then what you will see is just the trace, right? The trace of the red, green, yellow onto the red and green. We take these Markov chains and we just have

• 39:40Speaker 02

  a little counter. Every time you get a new experience, we increase your counter. And these are, these are standard in the theory of Markov chains. They're sometimes called spacetime Markov chains. We call it an enhanced Markov chain. But you just have a counter that increments every time you see a new experience. And here's the obvious thing, but it took me a year to see it. So if I'm looking at the three by three matrix, red, green and yellow. And I'm counting every time I see a red, new red or green or yellow, I increment my counter. Okay, now what about the guy that only sees red and green? Well, notice that he's not gonna, every time the bigger guy sees yellow, the other, the little guy doesn't see yellow. So the, the little guy, his counter isn't going as fast.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  I just saw that like six months ago. Could that be, I mean, so the, the weird thing about Einstein's spacetime is that different observers moving at different speeds see different time, their clocks go faster or slower. And it probably isn't, but I should check into it. Maybe, maybe I could get Einstein's time dilation out of this. And it looked for certain matrices like it would work, but then, okay, what about length contraction? Einstein shows that if you're, if you look at someone who's traveling like on a train past you at constant speed, and they had a meter stick. If you look at their meter stick, you pointed in the direction they're moving, it looks like the meter stick is shorter.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  So it looks like their clock is going slow. You think their clock is going slow and you think their meter stick is shorter. But if they look at you and you're holding a meter stick as well, and they look at your clock, they'll think that my clock is, is going slow and my meter stick is, so it's, it's completely, in this particular case, it's completely symmetric. And we get that. It turns out that there's a way to assign lengths to these Markov chains. It's something called the commute time between states. So it's a technical thing, but I'll just say there's some mathematicians in Markov theory just in 2017. A, a guy named Doyle and Steiner, I think, published a paper where he shows

• 41:51Speaker 02

  um, that, that you can embed the states of Markov chain in Euclidean space by the commute times. And the commute times are the square of the Euclidean distances. So the question was, okay, I've got the clock dilation that

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Einstein, can I get the length, does it give me the length contraction? And the answer is yes, there is a class of Markov chains that works precisely to give both exactly in coordination. So, so that's what got us taking off. So now what we're doing is, is, is pursuing that. We don't have the final proof that this gives us the full structure of Minkowski space, but we do show that we get the, the right Lorentz contractions. What we have to do, and this is a conjecture we're probably going to make public, and try to get some real mathematicians, because this is now hard mathematics, is to show that the discrete Markov chain stuff that we're doing with these particular matrices are called N-cycles.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  So the N-cycles are the ones that give us Einstein's flat spacetime. We want to show that as that N goes to infinity, we get Einstein's smooth, flat spacetime.

• 43:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Directly.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. If so, that's a major breakthrough. Then the next step will go to a larger class of matrices in which the length contractions and the time dilations are slightly off, so that you get a curved spacetime. And to show that, once again, a class of matrices, when we take the number of conscious experiences to an infinite limit, in that limit, we will get the smooth spacetime of general relativity.

• 43:33Jonathan Cohen?

  How does this work, and this breakthrough that you've spent so much of your life working on, change what comes next for all of our everyday lives?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Good questions. So I'm going to assume for the moment that the conjectures I'm proposing turn out to, to work. If, if it is true that I get Einstein's special and general theory of relativity from these classes of Markov chains in the limit.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Then it means we've actually taken a first, concrete, dynamical step outside of spacetime. We actually have a mathematical model that's dynamical outside of spacetime. What the high-energy theoretical physicists have found are these positive geometries, which are static entities, but there's not a dynamical system there yet. We have a dynamical system. And what I've... So first thing now I want to do is to show that we can maybe get their positive geometries from this. But then, this is the first layer of software. If this works, it's the first layer of software we've discovered outside of our headset. And so the analogy I want to give is suppose you're playing Grand Theft Auto and you're a wizard.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  And you can go faster than anybody and do all the tricks inside the game. That's pretty impressive. But suppose you're the geek who wrote the software. You know the software. Then you can take the air out of the tires of the wizard. You can give him no gas. You can take his car and move it immediately from one place to another because you wrote the code. You can do things with the code that inside the game look completely miraculous. And so what's going to happen, I think, is if this works, if this... These conjectures are correct and we do have the first layer of software outside of spacetime, which definitely gives rise to special and general relativity and quantum.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  But in quantum theory, I can talk how it arises as well. It does arise in this as well as the asymptotic behavior. The long-term behavior gives us the equations of quantum particles, you know, the wave equations for wave functions of free particles.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  But if it's correct, then we have the first layer of software outside of the spacetime headset. That means that the technologies that we should eventually evolve are going to be mind-boggling. For example, one thing that occurs to me is our nearest galaxy.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  The Andromeda is 2.4 million light years away.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Good luck getting there. You know, that 2.4 million light years away. So you have to go really fast for a very, very long time to get there. And if you go really, really fast, uh, like if you're going like a tenth of the speed of light or something like that, i- if you run into a piece of dust on the way, you're toast. So, I mean, good luck going to our nearest galaxy anytime soon through spacetime. But if we have the software for the headset and spacetime is just a headset, we don't have to go through spacetime. We should be able to go around spacetime. So we should have technologies that would be real technologies that can move us around spacetime. Now, I'm not saying I know how to do that yet. I'm just saying this is the kind of thing that opens up.

• 46:55Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and plenty of people have, you know, tried to explain anomalous things that they have seen in the sky, which seem to be traveling outside of the rules of observation, not obeying laws of gravity, physics, or the speed of light. This is one of those hand-waving ideas that people say, oh, well, it's operating outside of space and time, and of course it's going to have movement that you can't track because it's operating a different way. That's just hand-waving until you add an actual mathematical concept that explains ways that the space and time that we are operating in to even devise that potential may be limiting in and of itself.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  That's right. So it is just a hand-wave and probably most of the observations have other explanations. But if this mathematics is right, it means that there will be a whole class of things that we can do that will look like magic to our current technologies and won't need necessarily to conform to the laws of physics inside our headset. Because we're, once you know how to program the headset, you don't have to obey the laws of the headset. You make the laws of the headset and you can change them. So that's what will be fun to do.

• 48:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we just, for a second? Play a little brainstorm game that if this software proves to be solid and true, we're talking about time travel, we're talking, are we talking about regeneration of the human form? Are we talking about proving consciousness? Can you brainstorm a little bit with us to help people imagine what types of breakthroughs we may be talking about?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Well, in terms of proving consciousness, it was certainly if a theory that starts with consciousness outside of spacetime gives us spacetime and starts to give us technologies, it doesn't prove that consciousness is fundamental, but it certainly shifts the burden of proof, right? It's right now, I would say, any hard-nosed, intelligent person would have to say, between science and spirituality, which one has the most beef? Well, all of my technology is from science. None of my technology is from spirituality. That just the hard-nosed. So it's really clear who has the more credibility. But if a theory

• 49:20Speaker 02

  that starts with consciousness, all of a sudden gives us new technology that you couldn't have from a physicalist framework, then that shifts. That's that that the assumption shifts. And again, I want to be very, very careful. I never want to say that we have the final theory and that we're anywhere close to a theory of everything. I'll explicitly say there is no theory of everything. And Hoffmann is 0% of the way toward a theory of everything. Just be very, very clear about that. But I do think we're taking possibly the first baby step outside of spacetime with a dynamical theory. The high-energy theoretical physicists are taking the first baby step with their positive geometries. Hopefully, we'll see

• 50:02Speaker 02

  how those two interact, how they relate. But yeah, I think ultimately then, we should be able to Do things inside the headset that are indistinguishable from magic right now?

• 50:16Jonathan Cohen?

  I need a couple of examples because I love magic.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:20Jonathan Cohen?

  But we're in the headset. It's not probable now that we could potentially teleport from one city to another. But it may be, but like, can you give us some other examples of some of the things that could be possible?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Well, the way I would answer your question would be myself to think about if I wrote Grand Theft Auto, what could I do that would surprise the players inside Grand Theft Auto? So I could do things like I could all of a sudden you're driving a Ferrari. Oh, now all of a sudden you're driving a Mustang. I could just, why couldn't I do that? I should be able to do that. Or I should change the paint color on your car. You were driving a red Ferrari. Now it's green and now it's green.

• 51:02Mayim Bialik?

  I'm thinking of the Mandela effect, right? The Mandela effect where people supposedly collectively misremember something. Maybe it's just a glitch in the matrix, right? And what it is, is it's not the Berenstein Bears. It's the Berenstain Bears.

• 51:17Jonathan Cohen?

  But if I'm trying to think about like things that I could accomplish. My son asked me today, he asked me yesterday, in my lifetime, will I be able to download a language? Because he's trying to learn Portuguese. And I thought, I don't know, he's only 17 now, maybe. Could this technology allow me to download a language? Could it allow me to regrow a limb? Could it allow me to have communication non-verbally with anyone I choose to communicate with? Just as a starting point.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  I see no reason not, like in the matrix, right? Neo, all of a sudden downloads something and now I know Kung Fu or something like that, right?

• 51:58Jonathan Cohen?

  I would like to know Kung Fu.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  I don't, I mean, again, I'm not saying I know how to do it, but I'm saying I don't see a principled obstruction. Because if what's outside of the headset is this infinite consciousness. So what I'm saying is ultimately, who are you? You are completely transcendent. You are the infinite consciousness, looking through a very, very small headset that only has trillions of experiences. So you've chosen to go from infinity to just a few trillion experiences that you can see yourself through. But you are that infinite consciousness. So. You are transcendent and you could then play with with these rules. You could play with what you see inside this particular headset.

• 52:44Jonathan Cohen?

  And on that way of thinking, then all experiences live outside the headset that are waiting for us to access.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  That's right. I would say that our current set of experiences is 0% of the available experiences. We're 0%. In fact, in the Markov stuff that I'm doing right now, my conjecture is that the set of matrices that can possibly project into curved spacetime is 0% of the Markov matrices. There'll be an infinite number of matrices. This is this might sound contradictory. There's going to be an infinite number of Markov matrices that can project into our curved spacetime world. And they're 0% of the bigger infinity of all Markov matrices, which means I can begin to explore all these other kinds of headsets that might be out there, what they might be like.

• 53:32Jonathan Cohen?

  And if I'm someone right now who may feel lost, bored, helpless, confused about why I'm here on this planet,

• 53:45Jonathan Cohen?

  how would I start to think about these ideas as it relates to me right now? Like, how could I start integrating the idea that all of these experiences are out there for me if I'm struggling in this moment?

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Well, just on a very personal level, then I can mention just if you want to go on at it scientifically. But on a personal level, I would just say what what this theory is saying to me is there is one infinite consciousness that that's mind blowing how complicated and expansive it is. And you are that consciousness, looking at itself through a very limited window. You're just little, you're picking at yourself through a few trillion experiences that we can have as as human beings. But ultimately, death is just taking off the headset.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  That's what death is. You are the infinite and you've just looked at yourself from this particular avatar for 70, 80, 90 years, whatever it might be. And at some point, you've had enough and you take the headset off and you look at yourself through other avatars. So you don't lose your life, you just lose an avatar.

• 55:00Mayim Bialik?

  When we speak to people who have had near-death experiences, that's often exactly how they describe it. They say that it is experienced as if they were inside of a video game in this life. And when they pull back, that's all they experience is consciousness that is connected to other consciousness and that the feeling of love, as we describe it in human terms, is the closest they can come to describing what it feels like is in charge, right? So that kind of notion of a near-death experience of removing the headset,

• 55:43Mayim Bialik?

  that feels very in line with how you're describing this from a mathematical perspective.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  I agree. It does sound very, very similar. I'm a hard no scientist, but I'm not closed-minded. So my attitude about all these things is I listen respectfully with a big grain of salt until I have a theory and repeatable experiments to confirm things. But I do not dismiss them out of hand at all. And I think that, so I agree that they're very, very suggestive, that it seems to match with this headset kind of point of view. But I guess my only caution is never be dogmatic. And that's including me about my own theory.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Dogmatism stops all inquiry, stops progress. Dogmatism about physicalism being fundamental, dogmatism about my theory being correct, any dogmatism, we should always be open to... People contradicting, offering evidence against us and so forth, logic against us.

• 56:53Mayim Bialik?

  You talked about the geometries and we've spoken about this before. I think we spoke about it with Jan Levin as well. Can you explain as briefly as you can, just so that we can sort of encapsulate it? When you say that that people are seeing different geometries, what are you talking about and how are we seeing those things?

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Okay, so the positive geometries, what they've discovered. So when I say that they're seeing, that was very, very informal.

• 57:20Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  I'll be a little bit more precise.

• 57:22Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  They're finding that if they posit these mathematical structures, something called the amplituhedron, something called an associated hedron, something called cosmological polytope and other things. So there's specific mathematical structures. They've discovered that these mathematical structures, which sort of are like, intuitively, they're like big diamonds, but high dimensional diamonds outside of spacetime, so to speak, the big geometries. The volumes and the surface structure and the edge structure captures remarkably properties of how particles interact inside spacetime. What is the probability that, you know, two particles hit each other and three particles go spraying out with different momentum and spins and so forth? These are called scattering amplitudes.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  And they're, they find, early on, they like gluon scattering amplitudes and other kinds of scattering amplitudes were coded in these. And the structure also include, so these are structures that are outside of spacetime. They don't care about quantum theory. There's no unitarity. There's no Hilbert spaces. So all the standard structure of quantum theory is not there. These are not quantum processes. There are no Hilbert spaces. And yet, the structures code for unitary, unitary processes inside spacetime and they give you the right scattering amplitudes as, as a function of different volumes inside of them. So that's what's happening right now is the remarkable

• 58:50Speaker 02

  discovery that there are these geometries that are compactly coding for stuff inside spacetime. And but the question is why? Well, you know, what is, what is the dynamic, for example, that would, that would lead to this?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's only in the last, since like, you know, 2010 or so, 2013, with the first amplitude heteron was published, was in 2013. There was earlier work suggesting this, they were finding simpler ways of computing the scattering amplitudes even in the 80s. But it wasn't until like 2013 where we got our first structure. The interesting thing about, I'll just say is, when you do these computations of the scattering probabilities for the particles inside spacetime, you have to use these Feynman diagrams and you get these, sometimes just tons and tons of terms, 40 pages of terms to compute for one interaction, one scattering interaction.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  And when you do it outside of spacetime and these positive geometries in general, you get incredibly simpler, I'm not saying simple, the mathematics, but the computational burden is dramatically less. So you don't care about spacetime, you don't care about unitarity, you don't care about quantum theory, you're outside of that, and the mathematics gets much simpler for describing what goes on inside spacetime. So the physicists are thinking, we're on to something here, but what is it that we're on to? The ERC has put 10 million euros on it, they're excited. You don't put 10 million euros on something that's a dead horse.

• 1:00:26Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, this is fascinating. I need to circle one more time to the ability to create things as unique as changing the car in Grand Theft Auto, because I listed a couple of cool ones, but also, we could potentially have abundance of food, we could have endless energy, but just as there was a race to harness nuclear technology during the Second World War, you could also imagine an infinite technology that can create all this positive could also create enormous amount of destruction. Is there a risk with unlocking this capability?

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. No doubt about it, the...

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  The nuclear power that gives us lots of wonderful electricity has killed hundreds of thousands of people as well in bombs. And the power to, you know, have unlimited energy that we might get from this new theory outside of spacetime and the power to go from here to any galaxy without any lapse of time is wonderful, but the downside is that you could make the headset really nasty for other people. And once you have that kind of power, you are like playing God vis a vis people inside this headset, absolutely. So, yeah, it's the genie gets out of the bottle.

• 1:01:56Jonathan Cohen?

  It seems as though humanity is evolving to see more outside of the headset, to try and better understand the true nature of reality. As we do that, what is your vision for how we will progress in the next five, 10, even 50 years?

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Well, my own guess, based on my own experience of myself, is even though I've studied this stuff for 40 years, and I've been working on consciousness outside of spacetime for 40 years, deep down, I don't believe it emotionally, right? Deep down, I'm still, if someone put a gun to my head, I'd be scared to death. I'm very tied to my avatar, and we all are. So my guess is, human nature isn't changing anytime soon, and we're going to continue to have these problems. If we get the new technologies, our old human nature, even though our theories are telling us that this is because we're all one, and your neighbor is yourself, and you should

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  love your neighbor as yourself, that's what this technology is telling us, that's what the technology is based on, we're still addicted to our avatars, and so we will not, most of us will not use it that way, and we will not, that's my guess. And I'm looking at myself, right? I'm looking at my own human-centered, selfish-centered Darwinian point of view, that, you know, it's survival of me. If the science really makes this turn and says consciousness is fundamental.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  And says, we really are one. If it turns out the science, this, this theory is, is a good next step. And science says, yes, this is a good next step. And this step, this next step does confirm what spiritual traditions have been saying, that you should love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself, just looking through a different headset. I think that will have a big impact.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  And when technologies are evolving, that are based on the idea that consciousness is fundamental, and that's where the technology is coming from, that will lend credence. So I think, I think it will help us pull ourselves out, but it will, it will be against, we will have to work against our, our avatar nature, which is to be self-centered. But I think it will give us the motivation to do that, to, to say, it is worth the effort to let go of my addiction to myself as the center of the world and making you my enemy, or making you, you know, my, somewhat of a different religion, my enemy, and so forth. So I think if, once, science says spacetime is doomed,

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  and consciousness is fundamental, and we are one, at least that's our next best theory, and here's the technology that comes from it, that will make people much more interested, perhaps, in meditation and, and letting go of themselves. Possibly. But, but I'm, I'm not saying it's going to be kumbaya right away. I don't, I don't think so. I just think that, right now, the spiritual traditions have no technology. So the smart person is just not gonna, they're not gonna bet on them. They, you know, if you have technology, then I, maybe you know something. Right now, the technology is on those who say, the physical world is all there is, and there's no spiritual world. But if the technology is now from those who say,

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  no, there is something that transcends the physical world, and it is spiritual. That changes the culture. That will fundamentally change it.

• 1:05:29Mayim Bialik?

  One of the really beautiful take home messages, and in particular, you hit on this throughout the book, is, you know, we used to be amazed at optical illusions, right? And you have many really beautiful examples of, you know, perceptual illusions and things like that in the book. And then we learned that, you know, a dog whistle is not heard by us, right? But it's heard by dogs. And there's a difference in perception ability, right, across the auditory system, the olfactory system, the visual system. We're only seeing a very limited, you know, set of wavelengths. So for me, what you're presenting is kind of the next level, you know, of this kind of conversation.

• 1:06:13Mayim Bialik?

  And I think that's something that everybody can hold on to. In the same way that you learned, right, that the auditory system, the olfactory system, the visual system has a tremendous variation, so does our perceptual system about consciousness, about intuition, and even things like psi phenomenon, things that we couldn't get our heads around. What if those are just different parts of a spiritual wavelength that you're helping us tap into with this, you know, level of scientific inquiry?

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  That would be the thing. That we can get a mathematical model of this so that it's no longer just a hand wave and then just, you know, isolated examples of, I had this experience and they had this experience. We now have a mathematical framework, which makes a coherent prediction. So we can now start to predict the psi phenomenon to several decimal places and then go measure them. Now we're playing the right game.

• 1:07:09Mayim Bialik?

  I love that. The book is The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes. Dr. Hoffman, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Wonderful time.

• 1:07:24Mayim Bialik?

  You know, Jonathan, I know that that conversation may have dived into a little bit more theoretical mathematics, but I think that, I mean, there was some really, really powerful stuff in there that I'm really glad we kind of, you know, got to weave our way through because I'm really interested in his, you know, intersection of science and spirituality, which, you know, I think he's really, really articulating. But also, there's some really beautiful implications, which I think we covered as well.

• 1:07:55Jonathan Cohen?

  No one can focus because everyone is just waiting for your Beatle jokes.

• 1:08:00Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, when you talk about the lack of discrimination of the males of that particular species, like, like, they're not even getting anything back. They're just rubbing up against a beer bottle and calling it love.

• 1:08:15Jonathan Cohen?

  They want the biggest bottle they can find.

• 1:08:18Mayim Bialik?

  You know what I actually thought? The thing that first came into my head was like, you know, and I'm speaking to, there's two very funky, independent-thinking women in the room with me right now. You know, when like, you like that guy and he's like, smart and he's funky too, but then he gets taken away by like, the cheerleader girl and she convinces him to just be like, basic? And you're like, "No, but you're special and you used to wear Doc Martens." That's what I think of the bottle. It's like, it's just a basic girl who took him away and he doesn't know what he's doing. It's not gonna lead to anything good. He should be with me. I also thought of the Taylor Swift song, you know, anyway.

• 1:08:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Which Taylor Swift song?

• 1:08:58Mayim Bialik?

  "She wears short skirts and I wear sneakers. She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers." Like, she is a bottle that was thrown in the dirt.

• 1:09:11Jonathan Cohen?

  She's a dimpled bottle. Brown and dimpled.

• 1:09:15Mayim Bialik?

  And the bigger the better.

• 1:09:16Jonathan Cohen?

  He talks about how... We perceive 0% of reality.

• 1:09:22Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, that's a very powerful statement. He loves his 0%. They're all over the place.

• 1:09:29Jonathan Cohen?

  0% chance I'm even in this conversation right now.

• 1:09:32Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, there's a 0% chance that what we're even perceiving now is part of the conversation.

• 1:09:38Jonathan Cohen?

  If I look away, you don't exist.

• 1:09:40Mayim Bialik?

  Indeed, and I think that the notion, you know, of how you apply this to kind of your daily life, you know, one of the ways is I think what Dr. Hoffman talked about. You know, what does it mean to be an open skeptic? What does it mean to say, maybe I don't know? Maybe anything that we're dogmatic about, we need to have just like a little bit of opening, you know? And if you've ever tried to have a debate with a teenager, not saying that I have recently, you know, there's this like extreme certainty about everything. And sometimes even as adults, right? We have this extreme certainty. Guess what? Maybe everything that we think we're certain about is literally a headset that can be removed. Right? What does that do to our daily life? How do we view death? Right?

• 1:10:25Mayim Bialik?

  How do we view all of our interactions, you know, that we have that trouble us? Right? You know, I've started saying that to myself when things trouble me like it's just data. It's zeros and ones, and I don't like the zeros and ones, but it doesn't change the nature of, you know, reality as we know it.

• 1:10:43Jonathan Cohen?

  And what is a projection? Like, what am I actually interpreting and experiencing right now? How much does come from my own internal bias? How much does it come from the fact that I may have a narrative about how something should be? I've heard him in other interviews talk about the nature of the narratives and the fact that we assume that we have to have something certain. One of my lines that I love the most, he said, "Who is the richest person in the 1700s in France?"

• 1:11:15Jonathan Cohen?

  You don't know, nor should you care. In 300 years, no one's going to remember who the top podcast was, or who had the most of, I don't know, Nike shoes. I love Nike shoes sometimes. So how do you then break down the way that you're impacted on a daily basis and truly find and navigate the things that are important to you, understanding that we do, how we have a precious, and until he proves his theory, finite amount of time, because maybe his theory ends up extending all of our lives for a very long amount of time. But until then...

• 1:11:53Mayim Bialik?

  I don't think, yeah, I don't think that's what, I really don't think that's what, you know, part of the equation will be. I think a bigger consciousness means more expansiveness, and, you know, as Buddhism teaches, less attachment, you know, to the here and now, including our body, including our loved ones, and especially those things that we hold most dear.

• 1:12:15Jonathan Cohen?

  If you want to check out things that are dear to us, and we hope are dear to you, check out MindBee Alex Breakdown on Substack, where the growing community of breakers is exploring the intersection of science and spirituality. And we release exclusive content that we don't release anywhere else, so make sure to check it out.

• 1:12:33Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.