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 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Everything you see inside of spacetime is your construction. From a consciousness point of view, spacetime isn't fundamental. It's just a VR headset. The brain is giving us some clues about how the headset is being generated. There's some deeper reality. It's up to each of us to take off our own headset.

• 0:17Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Donald Hoffman is a cognitive science professor from MIT. He has spent his career exploring how we perceive reality and trick ourselves into believing this is all there is, when in fact, there is a lot more and we know that it's there.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  We're at this interesting intersection where high-energy theoretical physics is now saying there's something beyond spacetime, and what is it?

• 0:41Mayim Bialik?

  The hardest thing that many laypeople have to decide is do I believe in science or do I believe in God? Is there a place where those two things literally meet?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  The technologies that we should eventually evolve are going to be mind-boggling. Once you know how to program the headset, you make the laws of the headset and you can change them.

• 1:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Could this technology allow me to download a language? Could it allow me to regrow a limb?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  In The Matrix, right? Neo will all of a sudden download something and I know Kung-Fu. I'm not saying I know how to do it. I'm saying I don't see a principled obstruction. Ultimately, who are you? You are the infinite consciousness looking through a very, very small headset. You've chosen to go from infinity to just a few trillion experiences, but you are that infinite consciousness.

• 1:27Mayim Bialik?

  I love when people accidentally prove God.

• 1:30Jonathan Cohen?

  But is there a risk with unlocking this capability?

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Once you have that kind of power, you're playing God.

• 1:37Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 1:44Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Wyom Bialik.

• 1:45Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:46Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just a perception. Today, we're going to be talking about the potential breakdown of everything that we perceive as real. And you might be thinking, gosh, that sounds really heady, very meta. Guess what? It's not. What if? We were to propose to you that everything that you experience as your reality is a headset that can be taken off in very specific ways. And what if we were to tell you that there's a mathematical explanation for why that actually might be the best description of

• 2:30Mayim Bialik?

  the reality that we're all experiencing?

• 2:32Jonathan Cohen?

  We're speaking today to someone who is working on software and technology that can truly change the nature of reality and how we all perceive it, including what that means for medicine, time travel, and our overall well-being.

• 2:51Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Donald Hoffman holds a PhD from MIT. He's a professor emeritus of cognitive sciences, and he has written over 100 scientific papers, three books. His latest book, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, is a really, really incredible exploration of what we perceive, how we got to the place where we perceive what we do, and how easy it is to trick ourselves into believing this is all there is, when in fact, there is a lot more, and we know that it's there. Physics knows that it's there. Neuroscience knows that it's there. Mystics know that it's there. But

• 3:35Mayim Bialik?

  it's really the kind of information that Jonathan and I are so excited to share with you, because reality truly is an illusion. And Dr. Hoffman is going to explain how we can better understand that and how it can change the way we lead our lives.

• 3:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Right before we get to the episode, I'm going to ask a very, very quick favor. Please, wherever you're listening or watching, press subscribe right now. Here at MindBee Alex Breakdown, we are doing our very best to bring you the cutting edge of the intersection of science and spirituality. We are learning so much from these amazing guests, and it helps us to be able to bring you more episodes. We cannot thank you enough for being here, for listening, week after week. And we are so excited to bring you more episodes like this to help change your life. So take a moment, subscribe, and on to the episode.

• 4:33Mayim Bialik?

  Without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Donald Hoffman to the Breakdown.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Very, very good. Thank you.

• 4:41Mayim Bialik?

  You know, I think that the most powerful and gripping component of your book is literally in the preface. And what you tell us is that this book offers you the red pill. This is the red pill. This is the book that allows you to say, what if I submit to the notion that everything that I see and perceive and interpret is actually a projection of some sort? And we're going to need you to explain what is being projected? Who's projecting it? Why does it matter? And how does it change our lives?

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Simple questions, simple questions. Absolutely, absolutely.

• 5:28Mayim Bialik?

  You are an esteemed academic and professor and thinker. And you didn't need to write the case against reality, but you chose to. And we'd like to know why? What do you feel people are missing?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Well, there is an interesting revolution happening in science right now. It's quite stunning. The assumption that space and time are fundamental or their combination spacetime is fundamental has been a very valuable and useful foundational idea for many, many decades, centuries, actually. High-energy theoretical physicists, though, have realized that spacetime cannot be fundamental. It falls apart at the Planck scale. So we know exactly where it ceases to make sense. It doesn't make sense at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. So it's not that, you know, some cognitive scientist is saying, we need to think out of the box.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  I'm just listening to what the physicists are saying, the high-energy theoretical physicists. And they're saying, we need to find a new framework that's outside of spacetime. And they're going after it, right? There's the European Research Council has a 10 million euro initiative on these positive geometries beyond spacetime that the physicists are now studying. So it's not like some maverick cognitive scientist is the first to say, hey, you know, it's over for spacetime. No, I'm cheering on what the high-energy theoretical physicists have been saying for quite a while. But I'm saying, you know, we need to look outside of physical categories, perhaps now, spacetime kinds of categories, and that's hard to do.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  I mean, this is requiring real big leaps. So what the physicists are finding are these positive geometries. They're just static objects, or like monoliths, outside of spacetime. And their shapes and volumes code for particle interactions inside spacetime remarkably. They actually give you the probabilities for various kinds of particle interaction. But why, you know, is anybody's guess about why these things are doing that and so forth? So we don't have a good framework of what's outside of spacetime. And that's the big question. If spacetime isn't fundamental, first, what could that possibly mean? What could possibly be outside of spacetime? That's the first question. Most of us go spacetime is the foundation of reality. What are you even talking about?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  So the physicists are saying, whatever spacetime is, it falls apart at the blank scale. So we have to find something outside of spacetime, and it's anybody's guess what it is. Now, spiritual traditions, of course, have been there for thousands of years. They've been saying spacetime is not, or space and time are the final reality. There's something well beyond space and time. And they've, you know, had techniques like meditation and so forth to to help you to sort of transcend the notion of spacetime. But so both sides have had a piece of the puzzle. The physicalists, the scientists,

• 8:37Speaker 00

  have had the rigor of mathematical models. And the spiritual people have had the idea that space and time aren't fundamental, that there's something deeper than that. But they've not had any mathematical tools. They've only had intuitive tools and so forth. And we can see this coming together historically with Galileo and the church, right? So here we have the clashing of the two world approaches, where the church, the Catholic Church of the time, said that they had the authority of miracles and that everybody should submit because they had the authority of miracles. And Galileo was saying, no, I've got mathematics and experiments.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  And mathematics and experiments overrule whatever you might claim on your authority. And, and so there's been this division ever since, right? Because, you know, the church put Galileo under house arrest. He died under house arrest. And he was forced to recant his scientific views about the earth not being the center of the universe. Well, you know, in retrospect, the church agreed they were wrong and they apologized. Right? So, but it took four centuries or something like that for them to apologize. But science and spirituality really diverged then, and we've seen them go separate paths. And for a while, it was sort of, you know, important to diverge because you really needed to establish

• 10:04Speaker 00

  something separate from authority. You needed to have math and experiments. But now we're at this interesting intersection where high-energy theoretical physics is now saying, oh, we now we agree that there's something beyond spacetime. And what is it? We're finding these positive geometries, these obelisks, but what do they mean? And the spiritual traditions still don't have any mathematical tools. So, so here's the position we're in. It seems like science has one part of the puzzle. We have mathematical models and we have experiments. This is how you make progress and really understanding things.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  The spiritual traditions say, we understand that there's something beyond spacetime. And, and the physicists are now saying, yeah, I think there is something beyond spacetime. How can we try to put these two pictures together? So that's where science is right now and where spirituality is. So to summarize, the spiritual traditions are outside of spacetime, but there's no math and there's no experiments. Now, some of them might say, well, yeah, there are experiments looking for like anomalous phenomena and so forth. And, and yeah, I have friends who are scientists who are looking for psi phenomena and so forth. But, but any hard no scientist is going to say,

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Experiments without a theory aren't going to move me very much. If you are doing these psi experiments and you're finding these anomalous results, I want you to first give me a theory that predicts the exact values of the anomalous results that you're getting. Otherwise, what can I say except maybe you made a mistake? If you have a theory that predicts something to the, you know, eight decimal places and you get that eight decimal place result and the other than the scientific theories around can't do it, and a couple of the labs replicates you, then of course scientists are going to pay attention, right? But just to say I've got something that doesn't fit in, they're not going to pay attention. So with the spiritual traditions and those who are thinking outside of spacetime, if

• 12:10Speaker 00

  idealist, for example, have lacked is a rigorous mathematical model that makes testable predictions outside, you know, from outside of spacetime. And what the physicalists understand now is we have to go beyond spacetime and they're doing rigorous mathematical models, but they don't know what they mean. These are positive geometries, but who ordered them, right? It's who ordered this? I want to get the best of both. I want to use absolute hard-nosed mathematical models and experiments from the scientific side, no nonsense, but I want to step outside of spacetime and take the idea that consciousness is fundamental quite seriously.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  So that means no hand wave, give me a mathematical model of conscious experience, period. And with that mathematical model, give me exactly how spacetime can arise. Again, precisely, so how does Einstein's, you know, Minkowski spaces, the flat spacetime of Einstein come out of this? Or how does the curved spacetime of Einstein come out of this in general relativity? And how does quantum mechanics come out of this? Because when spacetime is doomed, so is quantum theory. Quantum fields, for example, are defined over spacetime.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  So, so it's not enough to say, oh yeah, so we're going to go quantum on this. That's not enough. When you go quantum, you're still stuck with spacetime. Quantum fields are defined over spacetime. And if you're, if you're in non-quantum field there, if you're, if you're just doing your standard Schrodinger revolution, then you've got time as, as a parameter, an explicit parameter. And so you're, you're stuck in time. So, so it's not enough to say we're going quantum. That, that gets you not out of spacetime. So we have to really think out of the box, right? So, so spacetime is doomed. This is, now I'm quoting physicists like Nima Arkani-Hamed and David Gross. So this is not just a cognitive scientist saying this.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  So I'm just quoting some high-energy theoretical physicists who say spacetime is doomed. And, and they'll say explicitly, that means quantum theory isn't fundamental either. So we have to go outside of spacetime and quantum theory together. And that doesn't, so many of the, in the spiritual traditions who are trying to go to the next step are still holding on to quantum theory. And I'm saying, you hold on to quantum theory, you're holding on to a dead horse. This is, you've got to go beyond quantum theory.

• 14:47Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:31Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:15Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  In my book, The Case Against Reality, I'm proposing that the first step is to understand that spacetime from a consciousness point of view, spacetime is just a headset. There's some reality outside of spacetime and it's being filtered through a headset. So if that's the case, then there are certain things that we should expect. We should expect that objects don't exist when they're not perceived. Right? If you're, and the reason for that is the following. Suppose that you're playing a virtual reality game like Grand Theft Auto. And you see in front of you a red Mustang that you're chasing, for example. Well, there is no red Mustang in the supercomputer that's running the game.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Right? There, if you look inside, there's diodes and resistors and voltages and so forth. There's no red, there's no red Mustang in there at all. So where is that red Mustang? Where does it exist? I certainly see it. So I'm looking, I see a red Mustang. If I turn my headset that way, I no longer see it.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  And that's because I'm no longer rendering it. The pixels on my screen are no longer rendering something that I see as a Mustang, a red Mustang in front of me. So. But you can say, but every time you look back, you'll see it. Absolutely. Every time you look back, you'll see it. And the other players, if it's a multiplayer game, they'll all say, well, you know, Don, look away from the red Mustang. I look away and I can still see it, Don. So that proves that the red Mustang is really there. No, it just means that you're rendering it in your headset when I'm not rendering it in mine. So what I'm, the first metaphor I propose in my book, basically, is to say, if you're having a hard time imagining what it could possibly mean that spacetime isn't fundamental, here's the metaphor that will really help you.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Think of it as a VR headset. Everything that you're seeing is a VR headset. And all the reasons that you might give for why it couldn't possibly be the case that I'm creating everything I see, just take it into a VR set, context, and ask your question there. And you'll realize that all the things that you think are drop dead proofs that you're seeing reality as it is, just are not. So that's the real simple thing. So that's the, one of the big things I do in my book is to just really help people to grasp with the virtual reality metaphor, how it could be that when I'm not looking at the moon, you see the moon, and yet the moon doesn't exist when it's not perceived, right?

• 18:53Speaker 00

  So that really bothered Einstein.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Einstein said, do you really believe the moon doesn't exist when it's not perceived? And

• 19:02Speaker 00

  most of us think that's a drop dead, you know, stopping question for this whole approach. And the idea then is just simple. I render my moon when I look and you render your moon when you look. And whatever reality is, it's not a moon. That's just your headset representation, just like there's no red Mustang in the supercomputer. You render the red Mustang when you see it and you don't render it when you don't. So that's the first step. It's just a baby step, but it's the first step. I'm not yet talking about a scientific theory. I'm just trying to take the first baby step to get over the idea that this is impossible. You have to be nuts to even think this way. So we have to get over that hurdle before we can actually get into, here's how you build a scientific theory.

• 19:47Mayim Bialik?

  What did we do before there was Grand Theft Auto to use as a metaphor for reality? I'm thinking of all of the years before we had virtual reality, before we even had, you know, this kind of video game world that was constructed. There's no better metaphor, and we had Dr. Rizwan Verk on, and, you know, he basically said, "This is a simulation," right? If you look at all of it like a simulation, that is the perfect metaphor. But it's so interesting, you know, the millennia that it took, right? For us to get to this moment when we can actually use an example that people can grab on to to present some of the most sophisticated ideas in modern science. So I first wanted to give a shout out to virtual reality.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Right, well, it's a good question. Plato was trying to grapple with this very idea, and he used the best metaphor he had at the time, which was not VR, of course. It was, he had the, his allegory of the cave.

• 20:47Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  And the idea was that what we're seeing is just shadows of objects casting. You know, so there's a fire going on, and there's objects behind the fire, and they're casting their shadows on the wall. And that's what you see are the shadows of objects. So we're not seeing reality, we're seeing the shadows of reality.

• 21:02Mayim Bialik?

  I've heard some people tell the allegory of the cave tale with the people being chained inside the cave.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:09Mayim Bialik?

  They are chained to the reality of the cave, and all they see is their perception and their interpretation of shadows on the wall. However, what I would hold is that people like you, Donald Hoffman, are saying we can release those chains, and we can step outside of that cave now, and we can peer at the things that Plato only suggested that we could entertain. And for me, that's the largest revolution in science that we're able to experience right now as humans.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  That's right. So we can unchain ourselves. Now, spiritual traditions, I've said that... Over millennia, they've said, "Well, you can unchain yourself with meditation and rituals and so for prayer and things like that." And that's good. And now, I think we'll find, in science, we'll find new ways to unchain ourselves, like theoretically, to say, "We can actually go outside of spacetime with mathematics and theories that make predictions and make new technologies so that we actually no longer are hand-waving about it. We're saying, you know, 'This new technology is because something is beyond spacetime.'"

• 22:18Mayim Bialik?

  Which is the reason Thomas Campbell says he does not have any interest in psychedelic drugs. He's like, "The greatest drug is the understanding that we have, even when completely sober, of the, both the limits and the expansiveness of our perception and our reality."

• 22:35Jonathan Cohen?

  What does it mean for someone in their everyday life to be chained to a false reality or to their perception? What does it look like to be stuck in that way? If I'm trying to make this applicable to someone who's like, "Okay, I understand the concept. I understand the VR. I've heard a little bit about the fact that everything is either a simulation or a projection." What does that mean to me if I'm just going about my daily life?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Well, there's an emotional way of thinking about that and also an intellectual way. And I can maybe just briefly talk about, well, on an emotional sense, I think I am my body. Right? Because I think that objects in spacetime are real, that they exist even when they're not perceived. So this is where it gets very personal. When I say, "The moon doesn't exist unless you perceive it," that also holds for your own body. Your body exists when you perceive it, and it doesn't exist when it's not perceived. So that's where, now people start to say, "Okay, this is getting very, very weird." But that's where it's going to go.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  It leads to, everything you see inside of spacetime is your construction. None of it exists apart from your experiences. So on a personal level, to the extent that you're identified with your body, and by the way, I am. So this is a very, very deep psychological and emotional kind of...

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Attachment and people who are in the mystical traditions will say that usually it takes many, many decades of intense meditation to let go of the illusion that the chain, to use your Plato's phrase, the chain to our own bodies. So that's, so that's, I chose that one because that's right there in your face. Everybody's chained to their bodies. I am chained to my body and very, very few people escape those chains. And so to the extent that I'm afraid about dying, for example, I'm, I'm, I'm in those chains. And so I will confess, I'm chained, right? So on an emotional level, I'm chained.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Intellectually, the chain is not being able to think what could possibly be beyond spacetime. It's like, I've actually given a talk where brilliant physicists or scientists that I know will, will ask me, what in the world are you even talking about? I can't even imagine what you're talking about, something beyond spacetime. Spacetime is reality. What, what, what could you possibly mean? So that's an intellectual chain to not even be able to think outside of spacetime. But, but again, high-energy theoretical physicists are doing that now.

• 25:19Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I, I wonder, I wonder if you can sort of give us a little bit of a, you know, a primer here. When you talk about space, I think most people think like, oh, the stars, like, or maybe the Milky Way galaxy and, oh, I've heard that there are other galaxies. And when we talk about time, we think generally of a linear progression from birth to death and all of the things that we can perceive in that linear timeline. When you talk about spacetime and you talk about it being fundamental, what does that mean practically?

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Right. So, so to say that spacetime is fundamental is to say that there is this physical world that we've seen that came into existence, maybe 13.8 billion years ago at the Big Bang. And there was no consciousness to begin with, presumably at, at the Big Bang, there was just.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  High energies at high temperatures, right? And this thing is expanded and cooled down. And it's been going for all these billions of years. And it's now, you know, as far as we can see, it's it's many tens of billions of light years across, at least what we can see. Perhaps it goes off to infinity. And maybe it cycles, maybe it collapses, and maybe there's some kind of expansion and contraction and so forth. But but that's the whole story. It is now, there is the multiverse kind of take on it. So maybe there's a bunch of different kinds of quote unquote spacetimes that have different dimensions and different properties and so forth. So there there's that kind of possibility.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  But what what we're saying now in the high energy theoretical physics is the very notion of spacetime itself has no operational meaning. That means there are no experiments that you can do with it at beyond the Planck scale. All experiments are no longer sensible. So so this is a really fundamental sense in which it no longer exists. And I can say why. So suppose that you're trying to measure something that's really, really small. Right? So you need to have a good microscope. And the smaller it is, the the more powerful your microscope needs to be. And and what that means is you're using smaller and smaller wavelengths of light

• 27:41Speaker 00

  or some kind of radiation, but I'll say light, but physicists use all kinds of radiation. It has to have smaller and smaller wavelengths if you're going to resolve finer and finer details. And that's fine. In quantum theory, that's perfectly fine. There's no, you can just keep going smaller and smaller. But it's relativity theory is the problem. As you Einstein told us that mass and energy are the same thing. And quantum theory tells us that energy is proportional to the frequency. The the smaller the wavelength, the higher the energy. So as we're using smaller, smaller wavelengths in more and more powerful microscopes, the energy is going up and the energy density is going up because it's concentrated in a small area. And Einstein tells us, well, that means you're concentrating mass in a small area.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  And at some point, the mass density is so high that you create a black hole. And you actually destroy the very thing you're trying to observe. And this happens at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 40 or 10 to the minus 43 seconds. And for me, that's very shallow. It's only 10 to the minus 33. It's not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters. It's just 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So we have a pretty cheap headset. The headset resolution only goes down to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and then it falls apart. So it really is, we're reaching in some sense, some sense, the resolution limits of this spacetime VR headset. And we, we actually know where it is.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Now that's the power, by the way, of science to, and this is a really important thing about science. Einstein starts off with the assumption that spacetime is fundamental, right? That he's, he's, that's, that's one of the fundamental ideas. And he gives us all this mathematics and quantum theory as well, assuming that the quantum fields are defined over spacetime. You put them together and they tell you the fundamental assumptions that we used to build these theories. Aren't the final word. That is what's so beautiful about science. They say, let's assume for sake of argument that spacetime is fundamental.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Then we will prove that spacetime is not fundamental and that it falls apart at exactly 10 to the minus 33 cent, or roughly 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. That's the way wonderful science works. It says, we always start with assumptions, like let's assume Einstein said, let me assume that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. And there's no special inertial frame. And then we get the structure of spacetime coming up. So we start with the set of assumptions, but we know that we don't have a theory of everything because we started with assumptions and we're not explaining our assumptions. So every scientific theory starts with a miracle or, or some miracles. We call them our assumptions, but they're the miracles of the theory. And what we say in science is if you grant me these miracles, then I'll explain all.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  This other wonderful stuff and and it works when all the technology that we're using right now to talk with each other via the internet and so forth, it wouldn't here, it wouldn't be here without quantum theory and Einstein's theories that they're beautiful theories, they work, but they, what's really powerful about them is they tell us where they stop. They say our fundamental assumptions of space and time that we built the whole theory on. Those very assumptions aren't true and they fall apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. That's not self refutation. That is beautiful science. Telling us what we knew had to be the case, that your assumptions aren't the final word.

• 31:13Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think the the application of this is then everything that we construct, like if I'm thinking of of laypeople, right? I'm thinking of people who are not operating at the high level nuclear physicist level. And they're not operating from the perspective of cognitive science, or even from the perspective of philosophy, right? Like Bernardo Castro. When, when, when we operate in the world. You know, the hardest thing that many laypeople have to decide is do I believe in science or do I believe in God? Right? And this, this conversation kind of places us squarely in the middle of it because

• 31:55Mayim Bialik?

  what we see is that science already knows the limits of what we can know. And religion already knows the limits of what we can know. But the question is, is there a place where those two things literally meet? And your answer is absolutely, and it comes from a place that is legitimate and respectable from a scientific perspective. As well as gratifying and satisfying and also beautiful from this kind of spiritual notion, right?

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Yes, so I should, I should go in that direction now, but before I go there, because it's an important distinction. Many simulation theories.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  What they'll say is that this isn't the reality. This is just a virtual reality from some program. There's some programmer at a different level of reality who's coding up some fancy thing in their computer. And you and me and this whole world, we're seeing is just a VR in that. But then that programmer herself is just the virtual thing of some lower level program. And this turtles all the way down until you finally get to some base level. And I just agree with that. So at the base level, there is a physical spacetime first. So none of them, none of these simulation theories say at the very base, I'm going to have something beyond spacetime. They say, no, there's some physical spacetime.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  The second thing they're assuming is that the computer programming can create consciousness at the next level. So that your consciousness is the result of computer programming, you know, of some computer function. And I deny both. So my point of view is superficially like the simulation kind of theories, but it has very, very deep differences. Computers cannot create consciousness de novo from just the computational structure. No one has any idea how that can be, and I claim it can't be done. And if you're assuming that the fundamental simulation is at the base level in a spacetime, then you're violating what the physicists are telling us, the high energy physicists are telling us.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  So I want to make the clean distinction between what I'm saying and the simulation theory.

• 34:10Mayim Bialik?

  There's so much conversation right now that many of us don't know if we should be listening to or not about AI, about technology, about this fusion. You know, for those of us who are parents, we thought that the hardest thing we'd have to decide was should my kid use ChatGPT to do their homework? And now the questions are. Are we as humans more comfortable with communicating with an AI friend? Or an AI therapist than with another human? As artists, many of us are curious where are places in a world where we're being told? As actors, we are necessarily not needed in certain ways.

• 34:54Mayim Bialik?

  As writers, you know, ChatGPT can do things that I can't as a writer. You know, I think many people are sort of feeling confused. You know, are there special pockets of our conscious experience? That we cannot leave to AI?

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Great. Yeah, it's a good question. So the the current AIs are these large language models. And I I use them. I use ChatGPT and perplexity and so forth. And and they're very, very helpful. But I also know how to ask them questions that reveal that they're dumber than cucumbers.

• 35:29Mayim Bialik?

  Give me an example.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  What they don't understand what they're doing. They get confused and I actually have to. When I'm having them edit manuscripts, they will do like bloopers all the time. Bloopers that I wouldn't expect, you know, a high school student to do. And I'll get these bloopers and I have to sometimes have to go have them go four or five iterations before I get something that I finally say is is free of dumb, dumb error. So what they're good at is finding correlations. They're they're really good at they can read lots of material and find correlations. And that's what I use them for is that. I mean, before I had to do literature searches myself and it was very, very hard. And they they they've done all the literature search. But that's that's not intelligence. That's just mass memory, right? That's and then good searching procedures.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Now there are new approaches. There's an active inference kind of approach that Carl Friston and others are doing, which would be a next generation of of artificial intelligences, which I think are going to get closer to what we might call intelligence than large language models. Large language models are just correlation devices effectively. And they're very, very useful and I, you know, I'm paying for them, so I'm I'm for it. But I'm not too worried about them being smarter than me. I am impressed that they have more memory than me. But that's not a big deal. We sort of knew computers could do that for a long, long time.

• 36:48Mayim Bialik?

  Well, yeah, I'm actually trying to think of all the times in my life that someone's been like, "You're so smart." And usually I just say, "No, I'm just holding a lot of information." You know, I'm making a lot of associations or like, "I really love words and grammar." So if you ask me the difference between two words that many people would subtly interchange, I've got a really deep understanding of, "Nope, those words are not the same thing." But, you know, what makes me me? What makes me a conscious person? What makes me able to generate emotional intelligence and connections? You know, those are not things that I plan to outsource, right?

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Right, and I don't think we have to worry about AIs being conscious in that kind of sense. As I said earlier with the simulation theory, I don't think that computational systems can de novo give rise to consciousness. This is just not right. Now, they can give rise to behaviors that we enjoy, that are helpful and intelligent in certain ways. That's perfectly fine. But creating, I'll put it this way. There is no scientific theory, to date, at all, that can say for any specific conscious experience, like the taste of mint or the smell of chocolate or something, that what specific computational procedure must give rise to that experience. So if anybody says that AIs can be conscious,

• 38:08Speaker 00

  just ask them the very, very simple question, okay? We have trillions of conscious experiences. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. Pick one and give me your theory. Tell me exactly how a computer or some physical system could give rise to that conscious experience. This is not where I'm interested in science, not hand-wave. If you think that's true, give me a mathematically precise account of one conscious experience. And I will tell you, I know the field, I know the players. They're my friends and colleagues. They're brilliant. And they can't give you a single one. Not because they're dumb, it's because it can't be done. It's just simply the case that conscious experiences do not arise out of

• 38:49Speaker 00

  physical processes. And, and so that's the simple question to ask anybody. You think conscious experiences arise from, from physical systems like computers? Give me one, one, one theory that science has done, like the taste of mint or the smell of garlic. Give me one. Until you have one on the board, there, there's nothing to take, there's literally nothing to talk about. You got, you have no theory. So there's no science. Now we have court and they'll say, well, no, we've done all these neural correlates of consciousness. I mean, you're, you're a cognitive neuroscientist. Don't you know about all the, absolutely. I've, I've been involved in, in these neural correlate studies

• 39:32Speaker 00

  myself, FMRI and EEG and so forth.

• 39:35Mayim Bialik?

  You can even go down to the electrophysiological level, meaning we know what, what is happening on a sodium and potassium level for many of these things. And we know what's happening on a voltage level for many of these things. Right? This is an action potential. This is a firing, right? When you think of what we didn't used to know about, for example, multiple sclerosis that we now know, right? We know so many things about what, what, you know, at the time that I chose my major was, this is the smallest unit of understanding about the human conscious experience that we can have, right? The neuron, the voltage, right? So we can even know it at that level. But, and I have a colorblind son, you know, it wasn't until I started thinking about what he sees versus what I see and what he

• 40:20Mayim Bialik?

  perceives and what we call things and just the nomenclature, you know? And when he was little and we'd go to a restaurant and, you know, they have those kids coloring mats that they give out. And he would say to me, give me the brown for the tree trunk. And I would say, whichever one looks brown to you is brown. And he said, no, I want it to be what other people perceive as brown. Right? Like what an interesting shift in perception, right? That we can have.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Very, very interesting. Yes.

• 40:48Jonathan Cohen?

  We recently spoke to a staunch materialist who

• 40:52Mayim Bialik?

  Is on the back of your book. It's Steven Pinker.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're good friends.

• 40:57Jonathan Cohen?

  We should have a debate because his perspective, when it came up, the question came up is consciousness in the brain. Created by physical processes in the brain or outside of the brain in a larger consciousness system, which you know can bridge us into spirituality. His perspective was, we know neurosurgeons who have opened the brain of people who are awake and tapped different parts of the brain and created feeling, emotion, and even visual experience. So from his perspective, everything is hardwired in the brain and what are you talking about, you silly, non-materialists? Like, you don't know what you're talking about.

• 41:33Mayim Bialik?

  He basically called us hippies. He basically called us hippies.

• 41:36Jonathan Cohen?

  And that we think silly things. So how, from your perspective, is that wrong or misguided?

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Well, Steve is a good friend and he's helped me many, many times over the years. So I have only good things to say about Steve. And he's brilliant. So first, I would say, of course, there are all these neural correlates of consciousness, absolutely, and we should study them. And I'll make it even stronger. We know that recording from certain areas of the brain, I can predict in certain experiments, several seconds before you know what you're going to do, what you're going to do, what you're going to choose, for example, to do, or when you're going to do it. But these correlations, and Steve would know this, I mean, he knows this, that correlation doesn't at all entail causation. It's just that simple.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  So the standard example that we give is, for example, rooster crows are correlated with sunrise. But that doesn't mean that rooster crows caused the sunrise. They're correlated. But that doesn't quite get to the one I got earlier, which is, you know, I can know from brain activity several seconds before you know what you're going to experience or think and so forth. So how do you deal with that one? Well, think about it again this way. At a train station, you see a crowd of people, a few hundred people gather several minutes before a train comes. But if I see those, if I see the people crowding there, I can predict that there's going to be a train, with high probability that there's going to be a train.

• 43:04Mayim Bialik?

  But part of that is, you know, from what we know of what happens in like, you know, in the premotor cortex, all of that simply means that our observation of action

• 43:14Mayim Bialik?

  Is not the same measurement that activity is actually occurring on. There's nothing magical going on, right? It's just that what we can perceive is quote later than the activity in the brain. So I can kind of explain that one away. But I understand that before we understood premotor cortex and all these things, we assumed that everything that we're experiencing is happening in this space and in this time, when that's actually not accurate. So we can kind of explode that concept out to really any form of measurement or perception is what you're saying.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so, so the key thing is to think of the brain itself as just a virtual reality system that we're looking at. And we can play with that VR system. And the headset, the space-time headset that we have is so sophisticated that it's giving us some clues about how the headset is being generated. Right, so there, so I'm saying that space-time isn't fundamental. It's just a VR headset. There's some deeper reality that, that engineers this headset that gives us this headset view out on the deeper reality.

• 44:23Mayim Bialik?

  So that's where we kind of need to go. Because the first thing I think of is when people do high doses of psilocybin, they get in touch with something outside this realm. They experience ego death. They experience, you know, leaving the body, not just psilocybin, but I don't need to list all the amazing, you know, substances that exist. But also, I'm going to go ahead and Terrence McKenna you. When people take DMT, they claim to see elves that they say are actually running the entire show. And that once the headset is removed, we see that, oh, it's literally a mechanistic thing where these little elves are like programming everything. Do I need to believe that elves are existing and programming this reality? I don't know.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Well, I'm a hard no scientist. It may not sound like it when I'm talking about taking off this headset, but I'm very, very hard no scientist about these things.

• 45:13Mayim Bialik?

  I'm not being facetious. I'm literally saying that for a lot of people who are seriously in this field, they say, guess what? We know how to remove the headset. Yes, you could get there with deep meditation, but the universe has given us these incredible compounds that quiet down all of the noise of like, how do I look today? And why is she saying that? And what if this? And what happens when I die? What if it's like, guess what? We're all just like a floating collective consciousness and there are little elves.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Right, so my attitude about it, so I've been, I was very hard on the scientists just a moment ago by saying, "Give me a specific theory for a specific conscious experience. You can't do it? Okay, come back when you've got something of interest." Now I'll do it the same thing to the spiritual sides, right?

• 46:03Mayim Bialik?

  I was gonna say, now the spiritualists are gonna get it.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Right, so the spiritual sides have been at this for thousands of years, and they've had all these interesting phenomena and so forth. And they've said for thousands of years that space and time are not the fundamental reality. Consciousness is the fundamental reality. So that means that they owe us, ultimately, a theory of what's outside of spacetime and how it gives us Einstein spacetime. So what is your theory of consciousness?

• 46:35Mayim Bialik?

  The spiritualists don't owe you anything, though. The spiritualists would say, "We are so outside of this spacetime fundamental conversation that we don't even exist in a plane where there is the kind of proof that science even needs," right? There's that branch of spiritualists, too.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  I'll put it this way, this is maybe just a functional fact. If you want people to take you seriously in this age, you need to do something to show that this isn't... We have lots of evidence of hoaxes and mistakes and illusions from the spiritual side. I'm not saying it all is, but some of it is, and we don't know how much of it is. So what we need from that side is a theory that says, "This is a spiritual reality outside of spacetime," or at least a description of a first level. I mean, I empathize and agree with spiritual traditions that say that ultimately reality transcends description. That's perfectly fine. But...

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Then they go on and give descriptions about elves and so forth. So if you're going to give descriptions, then then as a as a modern person, I demand descriptions that make sense, that make predictions. I have no interest in in any descriptions, except as is, you know, a stimulation to the ideas to to get to a deeper theory. But I want a theory that gives me, for example, Einstein's Special Theory Relativity. I want the length contractions and time dilations from so you start with consciousness, you give me spacetime, and you give me exactly the Lorentz transformations. If you do that, doesn't mean you're right, but at least now you're on the field.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  You're you're playing the game that makes you of interest. And so if you can start with a spiritual framework and give me quantum field theory or general relativity, something like that mathematically, then I'm interested. And until then, I will listen to your ideas with respect, but there's no science on the table. There's you've given me no so I'm not going to take your thoughts as a scientific theory. I'll take them as perhaps inspirations that might lead to a scientific theory, but you're not playing the game yet. The game is give me the mathematics that makes the predictions.

• 48:58Mayim Bialik?

  And I appreciate that. And I think and also I'm not speaking on behalf of, you know, spiritualists. And I think it's important to to discuss. This came up a lot when the telepathy tapes kind of swept the nation and, you know, Joe Rogan, in particular, you know, brought that to brought the telepathy tapes to many people's, you know, kind of consciousness, as it were. You know, one of the things that Jonathan and I find challenging and we're excited, you know, to continue to tackle is You know, with all due respect, I do understand that if people believe that they have an understanding, right, of something that is outside of this realm, like so outside

• 49:42Mayim Bialik?

  of the realm that they have either had direct experience, or they believe that they have collected enough anecdotal stories to form a belief system, this is where I think we get this tremendous divide. Because you do get people who say, "I am operating so far outside of this reality that even the words you're using asking me to come up with a theory and an equation," it doesn't obey that, right? And for me, this is the most interesting part of the conversation that we're having, is how do we take people who would say that any formulaic, you know, any, any study, any double-blind, any placebo

• 50:25Mayim Bialik?

  conversation, the rules of something outside of this fundamental spacetime existence simply do not apply, right? So when people say, "Oh, if someone can do remote viewing, we'd all be doing it and everyone would win the lottery," that's not true, because that's assuming that if one person can do something, everyone can do it. And what happens with psi phenomenon is, we may be witnessing a different kind of evolutionary favoring of certain skills, certain perceptions, certain openings, that may not obey the kind of rules of a double-blind Kaiser study.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Well, so that's a very good point to bring up. And I would say the following, that so someone might say, "I'm having these experiences, telepathy and so forth, outside of spacetime and so forth." My first attitude would be, "Okay, great. I mean, I'm open to listening to these kinds of things as stimulations for ideas, for scientific theories." But if they then go on and say, "Okay, but, but this transcends any particular science, and there's no point in trying to go beyond space and time," and they say, "You won't be able to do it." Then my attitude is okay. That is a prediction. You're saying we won't be able to do it. So let's try. And if we actually come up with a theory, a mathematical theory of consciousness,

• 51:47Speaker 00

  which we know is not the final word, but it is a step of consciousness outside of spacetime, and it does give us spacetime back, then you were wrong. So there is a way to falsify their position, which is to get a theory, a first step of consciousness outside of spacetime, that does predict the structure of substance. In which case, then I would then have to say that I would distrust the rest of their intuitions. Now, I wouldn't discard them, but I wouldn't trust them. So I think the bottom line from that line of argument is to say, they may be right. The only way we'll find out is if we try to give a mathematical theory of consciousness outside of spacetime. And if we'd get one that works, then those who said that they knew it couldn't be done

• 52:31Speaker 00

  were flat wrong.

• 52:33Mayim Bialik?

  Great, that's really helpful.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Now, they may still have insights that we want to listen to, but that particular claim of theirs would be flat wrong. So we'll see. I think we'll be able to do it, and I don't think it'll be that hard, frankly, to start with a theory of consciousness and get Einstein's special relativity and general relativity coming out of it.

• 52:53Jonathan Cohen?

  And this is what you're working on, right?

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:59Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with Dr. Hoffman. There is so much more that we're going to get into in part two, including how Darwin's theory cannot fully explain what we are experiencing or how we got here. Dr. Hoffman's also going to talk about what religious and spiritual traditions can communicate to us that is consistent with the mathematical models that he operates in as an explanation, not just for our perception of reality, but for the future of what our reality can look like.

• 53:33Jonathan Cohen?

  He's also going to talk about the breakthrough work that he has spent nearly 40 years understanding and how that is evolving right now, becoming ready to implement. I know for me, when I... Spend time exploring the intersection of science and spirituality. I feel more inspired, less alone, more creative. And it helps me really understand myself and the world around me. If you want more of this content, deep dive into MindBee Alex Breakdown on Substack, where we release content we save just for that platform and for our growing Breaker community. So, check it out. MindBee Alex Breakdown on Substack.

• 54:14Mayim Bialik?

  And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  It's MindBee Alex Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction, one. And now she's gonna break down, so break down. She's gonna break it down.