E167 - Donald Hoffman: The Greatest Discovery About Reality & the Consciousness Behind It

Cognitive scientist and author Donald Hoffman returns to share discoveries reshaping how we understand perception, consciousness, and reality itself. Drawing from evolutionary game theory and quantum physics, he reveals why we don’t see the world as it truly is—and what that means for science, spirituality, and awareness. Hoffman bridges rigorous mathematics with timeless wisdom, showing how awakening to truth means seeing through the interface of perception to what lies beyond. 15% off Bon Charge order (Code KNOWTHYSELF): https://boncharge.com/knowthyself Up to 43% off MUDWTR order + free frother: https://mudwtr.com/knowthyself To get your free shilajit today: https://fractalforest.co/knowthyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 00:00 Intro 03:45 The Probability of Seeing the Truth 10:20 Fitness vs. Truth in Evolutionary Theory 17:30 The Limits of Our Perception 24:15 How Language Shapes Reality 31:10 States of Consciousness and Altered Perception 38:50 The Virtual Headset of Space and Time 42:04 Ad: Bon Charge 46:35 Physics Agrees: Spacetime Is Doomed 54:25 The Mystery of the Observer 1:02:10 No Theory of Everything 1:10:40 Consciousness vs. Physicalism 1:19:15 Neural Correlates and the Illusion of Causation 1:27:45 The Case for Consciousness as Fundamental 1:29:38 Ads: MUDWTR, Fractal Forest 1:36:20 From Science to Spirituality 1:45:10 Introducing Markov Chains 1:53:30 The Birth of Trace Logic 2:04:20 Time Dilation and the Mathematics of Perception 2:18:10 Beyond the Headset: Infinite Consciousness 2:36:30 Science, Mystery, and Humility 2:54:40 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://x.com/donalddhoffman https://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Against-Reality/dp/0141983418/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Most of us assume that what you see is what you get. We assume that the moon is there even if you don't look. The bottom line is the probability is zero.

• 0:35André Duqum?

  All right, so reality is not the way that we perceive it.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  You don't see the truth. The reason is because it's infinitely complicated.

• 0:42André Duqum?

  If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to perceive it, does it still make a sound?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  This has been a big problem in science, until I discovered the trace logic. And just six months ago, I think I found the key that I've been looking for for 40 years. This is the first time I've actually talked about this. But the interesting thing is, spiritual traditions have been saying this for thousands of years. And now, the best science says that. The best science does not say you're just a lump of atoms that happens to have some consciousness. Now, the smart money is on, yeah, you and I are one. From this bigger point of view, there's infinite exploration, and the exploration is you. And a lot of the exploration will be done, as the mystical traditions have said, in silence. And that silence itself is tapping into this infinite wisdom that everybody is.

• 1:33André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself Podcast. Our guest today is back for the third time. We love him so much, and I'm excited to dive into this conversation, exploring the nature of reality and its many different aspects. He is a cognitive psychologist, an author, a consciousness researcher, and somebody whose extensive research in both consciousness and evolutionary game theory has positioned him uniquely to be a pioneer in emerging discoveries around the nature of reality that really shakes up our intuitions and notions of what it is in the first place. Donald Hoffman.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Thank you, Andre.

• 2:10André Duqum?

  Good to be back.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  That's great to be here again, the third time. Thank you very much for having me back.

• 2:14André Duqum?

  Yeah. I think it's going to be great to set a bit of the framework and set the stage, not assuming people have tuned into the previous two conversations. Let's start off very baseline.

• 2:26André Duqum?

  Can you explain to the layman how we don't see reality as it is?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Right, so most of us assume that what you see is what you get. I see a car, that's because there really is a car there. I see the moon, that's because the moon really is there, and so forth. And, and we assume, those who know evolutionary theory, for example, might say, well, and the reason we know that we see the truth is because we evolved to be fit. And to be fit, you should see the truth, right? The more accurate your perceptions are, the better you should see the truth about reality. And those who think that this isn't reality, if you don't think that car is real, if you step in front of it, you'll find out that it is real, that it can hurt you. So those are the kinds of intuitions that we all have.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And it just turns out, when you look at evolutionary theory carefully. So Darwin didn't have mathematics. He gave a beautiful theory, but there wasn't any mathematics. But John Maynard Smith, in the 1970s, mathematized Darwin's ideas. And it's a field called evolutionary game theory. And so now we can take Darwin's ideas and look at mathematical theorems about what's entailed by his theory. And you can ask the question, what is the probability that organisms are shaped by evolution to see aspects of reality as it is, truthfully? And the bottom line is, the probability is zero.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  That's the bottom one. When you do the math, the probability is zero. And the reason is slightly technical, but not too hard. And that is, there's something called the fitness functions, right? They describe for a given organism, if you take this action and you're in this state, what the consequences, the fitness consequences, will be for you. And by fitness, evolutionary theory, of course, means the chances of successfully reproducing. So that's the measure of fitness that we're talking about. The probability of reproducing successfully. So when you look at these fitness payoff functions... Since they're what's shaping the sensory systems of the organisms, right?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  That's what's shaping evolution in evolutionary game theory. These fitness payoff functions. They depend on the state of the world, the organism, its actions, and you get a payoff. Like, for example, just to be very concrete, if I'm a human being and I'm standing in the middle of the 405 freeway at 10 o'clock in the morning, that's a bad place to be, and my fitness payoff is death, right? That's really a dumb thing to do. So whereas, you know, so you can see, you have, you take an organism, put it in a place, put it in an action, and then you get a number, you know, thumbs up or thumbs down for your, for your fitness payoffs. So these are functions, and for those who know some mathematics, they are just functions. And it turns out there's no constraint on these functions in evolutionary theory.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  There's no constraint that says they only have to be continuous, or they have to be quadratic, or there's just no, there's no constraint from the theory. So Darwin's theory doesn't tell us these are the kinds of functions. So, given that, we ask, what is the probability? We can just look at the space of all possible fitness payoff functions and ask, how many of them will shape organisms to perceive aspects of reality? Very, very, you can just assess it with mathematics. And it turns out, 0%. 0, it doesn't mean none, but it means 0%.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So if you're a betting person, the good bet is against seeing the truth. Now, someone can come back and say, "Well, I don't like that." I mean, and most, a lot of people do. They come back and say, "I don't like that." And latitude is perfectly fine. I have no skin in the game. I don't care, I'm just telling you what the current theory says. The current theory says, all fitness payoff functions are equally likely. And I say, "Okay, they're all equally likely, then the probability that you see the truth is zero." Now, someone can come along and say, "Well, then I'll show you why they're not all equally likely." Perfectly fine with me. Go ahead and do that. But I haven't seen anybody do that. But that is the right response to my... Now, here's, here's a response that I get a lot.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  That is, I think, a mistaken response. The response is, look, Darwin started his theory with physical organisms competing in space and time for physical resources, like mates and food and so forth. And now you're saying you're using Darwin's theory, a mathematical version of it, to prove that the probability that space and time and organisms and food and so forth are almost surely not the nature of reality. So, Hoffman, you should go learn some logic.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  You started with the assumption of space and time and physical objects and payoffs, you know, fitness payoffs for food and so forth. And now you're saying that that physical stuff is not the nature of reality. You've shot yourself in the foot logically. So go back and learn some logic. And this is actually, I mean, this is not just informal. I mean, there are philosophers who've published papers on this, where they, in prestigious journals, where they make exactly this kind of argument that I've caught myself in a logical bind. And so this raises an important point about science. And it's very elementary.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Scientific theories start with assumptions. Like Einstein, the special theory of relativity. He started with the assumption that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames, and that there is no special inertial frame. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. And he said, if you grant me those two assumptions, then he could build actually relativistic spacetime with all the changing clocks and meter stick lengths and the whole bit, came from those assumptions. And...

• 8:57Speaker 01

  But he didn't explain the assumptions. He assumed those assumptions. And actually, toward the end of his life, Einstein said, "I still don't know what light is. I've spent my life thinking about light and working on light, and I don't know." So he doesn't know why the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames, or why all inertial frames have the same laws of physics. But those are his assumptions. And this is true of any scientific theory.

• 9:25André Duqum?

  And when you say that, by the way, you just mean the speed limit on the universe, essentially.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Right. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

• 9:33André Duqum?

  And he didn't want to spend most of his life figuring out why, but just kind of went with that assumption.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think Einstein wondered a lot about why.

• 9:42André Duqum?

  Yeah, but like...

• 9:43Speaker 01

  But he couldn't answer the question. If you assume it, then you get the structure of what we call Minkowski space coming out of it. And of course, I think you can, within any scientific theory, you can say, "I'll give you a new set of assumptions that are deeper, and from my new set of assumptions, I'll explain your previous assumptions." But here's the key point. No scientific theory can ever be a theory of everything. Period. Anybody who doesn't have a wink and a nod when they talk about their theory of everything is missing the point. I think a lot of brilliant physicists who talk about a theory of everything know that they're not talking about a theory of everything,

• 10:28Speaker 01

  but they really just mean the unification of certain theories that are not unified now. But there are a lot of people who think that we could get a theory of everything, and I'm saying, no, never. Even if we worked for a billion years and had a billion Einsteins working for a billion years, we would never have the theory of everything. We'd get 0% of reality. And the reason is, every theory starts with assumptions, and it doesn't explain its assumptions. It assumes them. And therefore, every theory has two properties. If it's a good theory, it has a scope of explanation. So there is a scope of things that it can explain. By the way, most theories don't.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Most theories, and I get them in emails a lot, most theories have no scope whatsoever. There's nothing there. But a good theory has a scope, but it's a limited scope. It's not everything. It's not a theory of everything. And then, so they have a scope, and they can tell you, if it's a good theory, they'll give you mathematics to explore that scope. But if it's a great theory, not just a good theory, but a great theory, it will give you the tools to figure out the limits of explanation that were entailed by the very assumptions that started the theory. Because a theory must start with assumptions, it has limited scope.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  The only question is, does the theory itself give you the tools, is a great theory, to give you the tools to find that necessary limit or not? And what I'm saying is, Darwin's theory, with John Maynard Smith's Mathematics of Evolutionary Game Theory, is a great theory. We knew upfront that it couldn't be the final theory of everything, and it turns out to have the tools to say that its very foundational assumptions, of course, are not the final truth. But we knew that that's true for any scientific theory. You give me a scientific theory, tell me its assumptions, and I will tell you something that's not the final truth, those assumptions.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  So, a theory that gives you assumptions, that lets you come back and tell you that those assumptions aren't the final word on truth, is a great theory. And those are the theories that we look for. So, it's, for those who have said that I'm shooting myself in the foot, they completely misunderstand the foundations of science itself and the scientific enterprise. It's not, the false interpretation is, science is the crawling towards the ultimate truth, and we're going to get there, maybe, who knows, maybe the century we'll get there. That's just false.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  The right approach, or I'll put it this way, a deeper approach to understanding science, is to note that every scientific theory starts with its own assumptions, and therefore...

• 13:26Speaker 01

  It has limited scope of explanation. And if it's a great theory, it will use its own assumptions to show the limits of those assumptions and to show that they can't be the final. But most theories aren't that good. Einstein's theory, as Einstein's theory, I must say, together with quantum mechanics. So quantum field theory, which brings together quantum mechanics and Einstein theory, and also general relativity. Together, that package tells us that spacetime cannot be fundamental. So that's in the physics side. And in Darwin's theory, Darwin's theory by itself agrees that physical objects in spacetime can't be fundamental.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So here we have quantum field theory and evolutionary theory telling us that spacetime and its objects are not fundamental. Now, we already knew that none of our assumptions are fundamental. It's just great to have these theories being so powerful that they're telling us that these assumptions are not fundamental. So that's the fundamental orientation that people need to have about this thing. It's not about shooting yourself in the foot. No theory has the final assumptions. Some theories are so deep that their assumptions tell you that the assumptions aren't true.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  They're not the final word. But most theories aren't that good.

• 14:55André Duqum?

  We're gonna keep diving into all of that. But to keep making our way through this in a digestible manner, I'm curious, because when you speak to how the likelihood that evolution has shaped sensory systems to see objective reality is effectively zero, and perception is reality in so many ways. As human beings, we kind of share generally a similar sense through our sense perceptions and sense organs, this experience of life. And it seems like we see reality as it is because it's ubiquitous within our experience. It's all we've known. And yet, I think what's helpful in seeing and breaking down this notion of it being

• 15:36André Duqum?

  connected to what reality actually is, is seeing the variance in how perception occurs within all life. And so I'm curious, what comes to mind when you think about all the different?

• 15:51André Duqum?

  Life forms and animals and their sense organs and how they perceive reality, where if you put them side by side to us, our experience of life is completely different. And yet, we both feel like it's the way reality is to us, because it is for us.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's a great question, and there's a lot to say on that. But one thing I'll start with is to point out that I actually don't know what your perceptions are like.

• 16:20André Duqum?

  Right.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I

• 16:21André Duqum?

  Can assume.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Assume that, you know, I pick up this cup and I say, yeah, it's sort of a cup with got some bins in it, and it's got some tea in it, and you would agree. But I have no idea what your experience is. I assume that it's very much like mine. And part of this is because we learn to talk by something called ostensive definition. So if you're a child, you know, and your mom or your dad is there, and you're like 18 months old, and it's time for you to learn some words. And there's a rabbit on the floor. And mom or dad points and says rabbit. And if the child's at the right age, they get it. You

• 17:02Speaker 01

  only have to point once or twice and say rabbit. And but if the child, if you did it when they were six months old, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And if you do it with a rat, it doesn't work. If you take a rat and point to a rabbit and say rabbit, it doesn't work. Why does it work with a child? Well, the child already had its own experience and conceptualization, so to speak, organization of it as a rabbit. And so all you do as a parent is you name, you give the words for the experience the child already has. You're not

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Giving the experiences, the child's experience is whatever it is. And you don't know. How can you ever know? For all I know, your world could be utterly different in conscious experiences. Now, of course, you want some empirical evidence for this.

• 18:03André Duqum?

  But it is also just important to highlight that even within the spectrum of human experience, there is variance that we do know of, and there is also a lot of variance that we don't know of, that we just assume that is the same.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  That's right. So in color, so we assume, I talk about the green plants here, and a little bit of red in the carpet and so forth. And I assume that your experience of red and green and so forth is very, very similar to mine. But there are women called tetrafems, who have four color photoreceptors instead of three. Most of us have just short, medium, and long wavelength photoreceptors, and these women have four instead of just three. And they're called tetrafems. And I'm actually friends with someone who's done research on this, Kimberly Jamison, and others who have done research on this.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And they can do genetic tests, and they find these women that have the gene for being tetrafems, and put them in psychophysical experiments where you test their color discriminations, and they're finer than ours. They actually have different color boundaries and finer discriminations. They can see maybe in order of magnitude more colors than we can. So we already have empirical evidence. Again, we don't know what it's like to be a tetrafem. I don't know what it's like to be a tetrafem. No guy could ever know, and most women could never know. But even if you're a trichromat just like me, the fact is, I have no idea what your experience is like, I assume.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying it's a bad assumption. If I had to bet, I would say, there's no reason for me to disbelieve. But I just want to point out that it's a belief. It's not a...

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Proven fact. It's a belief that your perceptions are similar to mine. Here's a fun technological thing that someone could do. I think that we could write a multi-person AI first-person game, where people around the world could be, you know, put on a headset, be immersed in a game, that they're all playing internationally. But each headset is actually a very, very different-looking game. But there's a translation. So maybe I'm playing tennis in this one, and you're playing badminton in that one, and someone else is playing, you know, Grand Theft Auto over there. And we're all playing together.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Even though you're playing Grand Theft Auto, I think you're playing tennis with me. And I think that you could actually coordinate that, such that I'm playing and we're all interacting. But then when you change headsets, you go, "Holy smoke, you're playing a completely different game than I thought you were playing." And I think that that would be fun to do, to really shake people up and show that the assumption... Now, again, I'm not claiming that we're not seeing the same game. But I'm saying it would be fun to shake up the assumption that we are by putting together a multiplayer VR situation, where as you change, you have like a dozen different headsets, and every one of them is a different world. And you're doing something entirely different in the world,

• 21:20Speaker 01

  and yet they're all coordinated. So I think that's eminently possible, and that would really go a long way to shaking people up. And again, for all I know, your experiences are very much like mine.

• 21:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, but it is interesting how we are really only always speaking in approximations, and language is always going to be futile. And it helps us kind of speak about reality in a sort of agreed-upon, shared sense that is a lie fundamentally. But like, we can just kind of approximate what we perceive on the less than 1% available to us on the electromagnetic spectrum.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:05André Duqum?

  But we know that, before we even get into different animals and what their experience is like, that depending on the state of consciousness that we're in, and we could... Very subtly tweak our biochemistry, exogenously, endogenously, psychedelics, many different things. And the, the experience of reality changes so drastically by very minor changes. So it's just, yeah, fascinating.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Little DMT and you're in a different world. Completely different world. And then for a lot of people then shakes up very much the assumption that what I'm seeing is, is reality. I haven't done it.

• 22:50André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  But lots of people contact me and say, I have done it and I like your theory because when I go on the DMT, it says you're, and so I didn't come up with a theory because of DMT, but I get people with DMT saying this really works.

• 23:03André Duqum?

  I've seen a lot of comments on previous episodes of both the ones we've done and others where people who have explored psychedelics or DNP, for example, have really resonated because there is this fundamental, I guess, effect of your work, which is shaking up our notion of preconceived notions of reality. And, and so, yeah, let's keep going. So what, yeah, what are some other examples of life that has different access to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum with their own sense organs that you find interesting?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Right. So some birds can see the polarization of light and they use it to navigate. I can't see the polarization of light. I don't know what it would be like to experience the polarization of light. You can get a little sense of it if you wear sunglasses, right? And, and, you know, things look darker when I look over there and a little bit brighter when I look over there. So you can get some sense of it, but, but we're not actually built with polarization. There are all sorts of, well, there are animals that see frequencies of light that we can't see, ultraviolet or infrared. It's, it's truly stunning, the, the range of other experiences.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  There are some that can experience electric fields. So they actually have electro receptors and they can, and they actually use it like, I guess in waters, sharks and so forth. I'm not sure about sharks, but, but certain animals can use electric fields to detect prey and, and capture prey. And again, I have no idea what it'd be like to have an electric field around me and using that to, to detect prey. There are some wonderful books out there about just how different the animal senses are. So it's easy to find, find books.

• 24:56André Duqum?

  All right, so, reality is not the way that we perceive it. I think we can all agree upon that. And so then walk us through a little bit closer now to your understanding of sort of spacetime being a headset. How do you bridge us into the, into the deeper implications of your work exploring consciousness? And, um, yeah, when you say spacetime, it's like a headset that we're wearing.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:21André Duqum?

  Just like when you're playing Grand Theft Auto, it seems like this reality. And if you have a VR headset that you're playing, it seems like the, the reality that you're immersed in because you're so plugged into it and it's so enchanting in your experience of it.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:35André Duqum?

  But if, if perception is not objective reality, then what is perception?

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Right, so we can go back to evolutionary theory on this. So, so if I'm saying Darwin's theory entails not that we see objective reality, but it's shaping us to be fit. What, what does that mean? I mean, most of us think, well, the only way you could be fit is to see reality. And these virtual reality games give a different idea about that. If you're playing Grand Theft Auto VR, then what you're really interacting with in this situation are millions of diodes and resistors and voltages and some supercomputer somewhere. And in principle, you could play the game by toggling millions of voltages per second in exactly the right sequence.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You have to be really, really good, but it'd be millions of voltages per second. It'd have to be exactly the right sequence. Everybody who's programmed, you get one bit wrong and the whole thing falls apart. So, so you could do that, but you would lose. If you were trying to, even if you wrote the program, you would lose if you were trying to toggle all those bits one by one against someone who had just a VR headset and had a steering wheel, a virtual steering wheel, and was trying to play the game that way. And that, so the person with the headset, with the VR headset is going to be more fit, more likely to win at playing the game of Grand Theft Auto than the person who sees the reality and can toggle the bits. And so that's the notion of fitness that comes out of Darwin.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  You don't see the truth.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And I think the reason is because it's infinitely complicated. Reality, whatever it is, is infinitely complicated. There's no way, period, to understand it. You know, so it's just off the table.

• 27:26André Duqum?

  It would defeat the purpose of having an experience that allows us to effectively navigate anything.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  That's right. So all we can, all we, so reality is what it is, and it's infinitely complicated. We have a little trivial three-dimensional space, one-dimensional time headset that takes this infinity of complexity and puts it down into what looks to us like a complicated world, but it's 0% of the complexity of reality, 0%. And, and, and that's what Darwin's theory is telling us is this is a headset that is there to keep you alive in this particular game. The game of being a human being, reproducing, having a job, whatever. In that game, this is the headset you need to, to, to play that game.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  If you're an elephant, it's a different game. If you're a worm, it's a different, a different headset. But spacetime then is not the final ground of being. It's a trivial headset. It's a trivial framework compared to what's available. And I should say that, you know, I've used Darwin on this, but someone might say, well, look, you know, Darwin's not a physicist. He's not an expert in spacetime. I mean, we should go to those people, the experts. And those experts are so-called high-energy theoretical physicists. That's the right group of scientists. What do they say?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Do they come along and say, no, Darwin was wrong, spacetime is fundamental, and get used to it, Darwin was just wrong? No, they don't say that at all. They, they say, and I'm saying, like, Nima R. Khani-Hamed, David Gross and others, say, spacetime is doomed. By that, they mean it's not fundamental. It, it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, at what's called the Planck scale. It ceases to have any operational meaning. And so physicists...

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Again, high-energy theoretical physicists. So when I say physicists, I'm short for high-energy theoretical physicists in this context. So these physicists are saying that spacetime is not fundamental and we have to look for a deeper mathematical framework entirely outside of spacetime. And that's not just a distant wish. They're doing it now. The European Research Council has a 10 million euro enterprise, funding roughly dozens or even 100, I think. Physicists and mathematicians who are finding what they call positive geometries outside of spacetime. It's really quite exciting. They're finding these-

• 30:21André Duqum?

  Like the apsetohedron? Or is that-

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, the apsetohedron is one of them. The cosmological polytope, a sociohedron, and other structures. So they're finding these, almost like these monoliths outside of spacetime, these big structures, complicated geometric structures. And they allow you to actually predict correctly the probabilities of interactions, the called scattering amplitudes, for interactions of particles in spacetime. So they know they're on to something, and the math is much easier. What would take millions of terms to compute within spacetime? Like some gluons and photons and whatever, and quarks interacting?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  They can do much, much more simply outside of spacetime.

• 31:11André Duqum?

  Is it a rudimentary understanding to say, like, you wouldn't expect to go into a vacant field where no one has been and there's no form of intelligence and see a Taj Mahal structure there, for example? That would denote that there is some sort of, there is an intelligence weaving some sort of structure, or a builder, an architect, to some degree? When you look at these cosmological polytopes that you discover on the mathematical sphere, like, what does that, what question does that raise about, I guess, the meaning or why they're there?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Well, it raises all sorts of questions. We didn't know what to expect. We're taking our first little peaks outside of spacetime, just in the last, say, 15, 20 years. We're, you know, we realized, I think they knew before that, that spacetime isn't fundamental. But what do you do? How do you go outside of spacetime? What's your research agenda to do that? How do you do that? And so it's taken some very, very clever researchers to sort of say, well, how are we going to go out? I mean, I can't even see outside spacetime. So it's going to be with mathematics and intuition and logic that we're going to have to try to go outside of spacetime. And so what they're finding, so they are surprised.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  They're finding these geometric structures and the volumes are coding probabilities of particle interactions. And the structure of the vertices and so forth, the edges is coding for things like what the unitary evolutions and so forth. So it's really, it's a bit surprising. They're not seeing, what they're not showing is the dynamics, right? You might say, well, I expect to go outside of spacetime and see something moving. Although it's hard to know what it means to be moving outside of spacetime, right?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I mean, moving in spacetime means over time, something changes its space position. So you want some kind of dynamics, but not a dynamics inside spacetime. So I think that, I mean, they're brilliant. They're finding what they can find. But it's not a dynamical system. It's these objects that encode the dynamics that we can see inside spacetime. So it's connected to dynamics we see inside spacetime. But what they, well, I haven't seen them doing.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Is saying, I'm going to posit this dynamical system outside of spacetime, and then show how it projects to the dynamics we see inside spacetime. So it's more of the line of, we step outside spacetime. What can we find outside in terms of geometries that will predict what we see inside spacetime? You have to go outside of spacetime now. The game is not complete inside spacetime. You have to step outside spacetime. So that's going to be really critical for theories of consciousness, too.

• 34:17André Duqum?

  What's the one liner or two liner for people like, when you say spacetime, what are you speaking to directly? What is spacetime?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Under Newton, Newtonian physics, space was three dimensional and Euclidean, and time was the same in all places in space. So there was one big clock, and everybody had the same clock. And space itself was nice and Euclidean. Einstein, in the special theory and general theory, effectively said, it was actually Einstein's teacher who put this together, Minkowski, Herman Minkowski, but based on Einstein's work, that space and time together form a single mathematical object that Minkowski,

• 35:07Speaker 01

  we now call Minkowski space, and we call it spacetime, in which you can trade off a little bit of space for a little bit of time. So as opposed to having a single clock that's true for all observers, there are different clocks for different observers, depending on how fast you move, and different lengths of rulers, depending on how fast you move. So it's not the nice, clean, neat space that we had with Newton. This is really much more interesting, where space and time trade off, there's no universal clock, your clock. If you're moving, I mean, the fact that I just move like this with respect to you means my clock moved differently than yours during that time.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  We had different clocks, and also links were different for us.

• 35:55André Duqum?

  You see this as an example in the movie like Interstellar, where he goes on a space mission. And depending on where he goes, obviously, time relative to the human clock on Earth is different. And he comes back in like 30 plus years or whatever has elapsed in earthly time. But it might have been, I forgot what it was, maybe like a certain amount of six months or a year or something in terms of how far where he went.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  That's right. So if you're moving with respect to me, I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of myself as being still. And you're moving past me at a uniform speed. If you're at a uniform speed with respect to me, you're not accelerating. Then I will see your clock as going slower. And if you as you approach the speed of light, if you're going near the speed of light, I will see your clock very, very close to not moving at all. And if you are going the speed of light, I will see your clock as stopped. But similarly, if I'm not accelerating with respect to you, so and you're looking at me, you're going to see my clock going slower. You're going to think your clock is going just fine. You're going to see my, so now if you accelerate, that's different.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Acceleration is not relative, it's absolute. So there, so that gets more complicated.

• 37:15André Duqum?

  Wouldn't it be true then, somebody at the core of the Earth, or maybe you say like at sea level would be traveling, time would be moving faster for them than somebody like at the top of a Mount Everest or something?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  That is, that is true. The clock depends on the gravitational field where you are. But it's because

• 37:38André Duqum?

  Time moves slower in the mountains.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Right, but because you're having, you're accelerating less. So it has to do with the acceleration.

• 37:47André Duqum?

  It's all comparative, yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 37:50André Duqum?

  Okay, yeah, we can, there's so many sidebars here. But let's just kind of get back to the notion that

• 37:58André Duqum?

  Our perception is obviously not objective reality. And to go further down the rabbit hole of psychosis, or I joke, but really, what it means to be sane is to see and understand, experience reality at closer to the objective sense. Things are not rendered when they are not perceived.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:21André Duqum?

  So for people that, if that's a foreign notion to people, can you explain what that means, both in the mathematical sense and the philosophical sense, I guess?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really an important point. And that is that we assume that the moon is there even if you don't look. Of course, it's there. And that car on the freeway is there even if you don't look. And if you don't believe it, don't look away. And when it hits you, you'll know that it was real. Right? So people say it exists whether or not you look. And I'm saying that the car that you perceive is very much like if you have a VR headset on, you're playing Grand Theft Auto, and you're looking around and you look down, you see your steering wheel. So there's a steering wheel when you look, because you're rendering it. But if I look off to the side, now, since I'm not seeing the steering wheel, there is no steering wheel.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  There's no steering wheel anywhere at all. That steering wheel is gone.

• 39:20André Duqum?

  Except for potentially somebody else's experience who's rendering it.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they'll have their own experience, right? But if you look inside the supercomputer, there's no wheel in there. There's just digital bits in circuits and software. So I render the car, I render the steering wheel. When I look and I garbage collect it, I get rid of it when I look away. Someone else may look, but their experience of a steering wheel is not my experience of a steering wheel. It's their experience. Mine is gone. There is no, in the real supercomputer, there is no steering wheel anywhere. There's just bits. So that's what I'm claiming is true of all of the world that we see around us. You render the moon when you look, and there is no moon when you don't look.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  I render my foot when I look and there is no foot when I don't look.

• 40:12André Duqum?

  When you say there is no, would you apply that to people? Because when you say there is no Don, when I don't render him. Yeah, in your experience, Don is certainly there and in somebody else's experience, you're certainly there.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  That gets, that's a very deep question because now it gets to the question of what am I really? And what are you really? Right? So if you want to say, well, no, Don is really just 160 pound piece of human flesh and blood and so forth. And that's all there is to Don. I would say

• 40:50Speaker 01

  that's within the spacetime framework. And we know that spacetime framework is not fundamental. No object in spacetime is fundamental. And that includes your body or my body. Whatever you are,

• 41:04Speaker 01

  you are not an object in spacetime.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  To the contrary, spacetime and everything inside spacetime is a creation of yours on the fly. So I'm turning the whole ontology around. Most of us assume that we are little 100 to 200, 300 pound objects inside a vast spacetime universe. I'm saying that's false.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  That vast spacetime universe is a tiny headset that you're using, that you'll discard. And it's just one of countless headsets that you, whatever you are, can use. So, so when you ask, you know, is Don really there? Well, in this VR game of space and time, this pretty trivial headset, Hoffman's body is rendered when you see it or when I see it. And I don't know that what you see is what I see at all. We use the same words because we learned them by a sense of definition from our mothers. And our mothers use the same words in the same context. And I'm not saying they're not the same.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  They may be, but we don't know. But, but whatever I am is not an object in spacetime. Spacetime is a trivial, trivial framework for us to experience a projection of who we are.

• 42:36André Duqum?

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• 43:36André Duqum?

  So when you say the very well-known phrase or question of if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to perceive it, does it still make a sound? I suppose it begs the question of what do you mean make a sound? Because that is a subjective experience to an observer, and if there is no such observer, then it would not. Is that right?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Right. That's what I'm saying is that, and this gets to, yes, it gets to a very deep point, though, and that is that, what do I mean by making an observation? And this has been a big problem in science. So in Newton, it was assumed that the observer just sees reality as it is, and you could ignore the observer because the observer didn't affect what was being observed. So Newton didn't really need a theory of the observer. You just see the truth.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  With Einstein, there's a notion of an observer, but it's mostly just different observers or different clocks and coordinate systems. And there's no really deep theory of the observer beyond the clocks. In quantum theory, now you're forced to consider what you mean by an observer. Because quantum theory says that when you don't observe a system, it evolves according to what's called the Schrodinger equation. That's a unitary evolution. But when you observe a system,

• 45:16Speaker 01

  then empirical experiments tell us that what happens is not a unitary evolution. You get a single answer. Like for electron or a photon, maybe having some kind of quantum evolution under the Schrodinger equation. And that superposition of all these different paths it could be taking. But when you make a measurement, you get a dot on the screen here. And so that's where the electron or the photon landed. And so you get a single answer. And that's not a unitary process. And so that raises a deep, deep question about what do we mean by an observer?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  And quantum mechanics really can't avoid it. The problem is that if you want to say, well, an observer is just any physical measuring device. And many quantum theorists have said it. It's just a physical measuring device that takes the superposition and gives you a single. Well, no Schrodinger-evolution-described physical device can do that.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  A device that does that does not satisfy the Schrodinger equation. So we have a problem. If the universe behaves one way under the Schrodinger equation when you don't observe, you can't just call in a measuring device and say, "Well, it does it." What is your theory of the measuring device? Is it a quantum theory? Then give me your unitary operator. A unitary operator can't give you a single output. So what are we talking about here? You can't be done. They'll say, "Well, you can do it with what they call decoherence." Well, we can... The bottom line is decoherence doesn't solve the problem.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Decoherence gets rid of the complex numbers, the complex amplitudes, and it can give you a real set of probabilities. So a set of outcomes with real probabilities. But it doesn't give you a single outcome. So decoherence doesn't solve the problem either. It gives you what we call a mixed state for probabilities, real probabilities, not complex amplitudes, real probabilities of outcomes. But that's not what happens in an experiment. We get a single answer. So if decoherence is going to work, I want you to give me a single answer, not a probability on answers.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  So that's... And Frank Wilczek, who is a Nobel Prize winner for his work in quantum chromodynamics, I think, points this out, that we... Quantum mechanics needs a theory of the observer. That's really an open, nasty problem. So right now, science does not have a universally... Nothing close to universally agreed on theory of the observer. This is considered one of the big, open problems by Nobel Prize winners in quantum physics to solve that problem. So what is an observer? Right now, science doesn't have an answer. It does not have an answer.

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• 49:13André Duqum?

  How do you explain why the physicalist notion and paradigm of consciousness cannot explain a single quality or experience? Like, the reason for that? And then, yeah, we'll just set the stage a bit more of how consciousness comes into all of this.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Right, so we have been talking about conscious experiences. And most of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience who are studying consciousness are physicalists.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  And they're brilliant. They're good friends and colleagues, and they're brilliant. And they're assuming that space and time are fundamental and that certain physical systems in spacetime that have certain properties will give rise to conscious experiences. So again, it's a spacetime framework. Presumably, at the Big Bang, there were no conscious experiences. You know, space and time and physical objects just didn't have the right kind of causal or functional properties to generate or instantiate consciousness. But after billions of years of evolution, you know, you start getting the right kinds of causal structures or functional structures. And so, again, these are friends and colleagues.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  They're brilliant. And they have, for example, integrated information theory, that there are certain causal structures that are identical to certain conscious experiences. Or global workspace theory, again, certain functional properties. There's orchestrated collapse of quantum states of microtubules for Ben Rosenhammeroff. And there's many. I'm just mentioning a few.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  But the theme behind all of them is there's a physical substrate in space and time that's necessary. And if that substrate has the right properties, the right causal and functional properties generally, then it will give rise to life. And then if it has even more precise properties, that living thing will then give rise to consciousness.

• 51:28André Duqum?

  So from the mechanistic or deterministic lens that since from the origin of the Big Bang to the development of sense organs in neurology, that enough unconscious complexity would develop in a human brain, for example, that would then give rise to a certain point of an experience of itself, AKA consciousness, awareness. But yet, the smell of a flower, or the taste of a chocolate or mint, that has yet to be and probably never will be, especially through your understanding, be explained through the physicalist notion, like the experience of something.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Right. So, yes, so some physicalists will say that that physical systems with right properties will give rise to conscious experiences. Others, like Dan Dennett, would say they give rise to the illusion of conscious experiences. As a hard-nosed scientist, I want explanations of specific conscious experiences, right? So no one has put a gun to my friends and colleagues' heads to say, "You must come up with a physicalist framework and explain the taste of mint in that framework." No, they've chosen to do that. And they're making claims that there are causal structures that are identical to the

• 52:51Speaker 01

  taste of mint. For example, integrated information theory says there's a matrix. You can actually write down a Markov matrix. It's a square array of numbers, like it could be 10 rows and 10 columns, so it has 100 numbers in it, and each row is a probability measure, and that's going to give you your causal structure. So no nonsense, there's this mathematical model there, and that is, you know, if it's the right causal structure, it will be the taste of mint, or the smell of garlic, or whatever it might be. So...

• 53:20Speaker 01

  I didn't tell them to do that. I didn't say they had to do that. No one told them that. They've chosen to do that. So as a scientist, I say, okay, well, so you're proposing a theory? So, great, give me one. There's literally trillions of experiences that humans can have, trillions. Should be like shooting fish in a barrel. Pick one. Pick any experience that you want to, and give me your matrix. Tell me if it's, you know, is it a thousand by thousand? Is it 1,253 by 1,253? What's the principal reason for why it has to have that number of rows and columns? And then if it's like a thousand by thousand, well, there's a million numbers. Thousand times a thousand is a million. So, there's a million numbers, and as a scientist, you need to tell me why each number is exactly,

• 54:05Speaker 01

  each one of those million numbers is exactly the value it is, and why that's necessary for this to be the causal structure of mint. Again, I didn't tell you to do this. No one put a gun to your head. You're offering this theory, and I'm just being a hard-nosed scientist and saying, okay, that's your theory. Give me one. Give me a particular case. And I do this at conferences all the time. My buddies are up there, and they know I'm gonna do it, and the answer in every case is they can't give one. There's trillions of experiences, and zero have been explained. Zero. And it's not because these people are dumb. They are brilliant. They are, some of them are geniuses.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  You can't construct conscious experiences from unconscious ingredients. Can't be done. Just that simple. And so, that's 99% of the research in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness is of this type. And here's, here's why...

• 55:13Speaker 01

  They do it. There are incredible neural correlates of conscious experiences. Anybody who's studied in this area knows hundreds of, there's hundreds of well-known neural correlates of conscious experiences. I've studied them myself. It's a worthwhile area of study. I've been a participant in FMRI and EEG experiments and so forth. I'm not against it, I'm on for it. I'm a co-author on some. It's good stuff. It's good to find correlates, neural correlates of conscious experiences. And we even find neural correlates where we can predict from your brain activity several

• 55:56Speaker 01

  seconds before you can tell me what you're going to experience or think or do. So I can actually beat you to the punch. So most people say, "Let's hand, case closed. Case closed." I mean, if I can read your neural activity ahead of time and know what you are going to do before you can tell me what you're going to do, clearly your brain caused it. Not at all. Absolutely not. Correlation, even prior, you know, prior activity, doesn't entail causation. It just doesn't. Roosters crow near sunrise, and they're highly correlated.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  And that doesn't mean that the rooster crows cause sunrise. Train station. You see a bunch of 100 people gather at a particular train station and all of a sudden a train arrives. So just by looking at the people, "Oh, there's lots of people gathering," I can predict, you know, 10 minutes ahead of time, there's going to be a train coming, and I'm right. Is the train come because all the people are there? No. There's something deeper that you can't see. There's a schedule that's coordinating both the activity of the people and the activity of the train. That's the deeper thing that's going on here. So, and that's what I'm proposing, is, yeah, there are these correlations.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  And sure, brain activity in many cases precedes the experience, or precedes the action, or even your knowledge of what you're going to do. And you can predict it from the brain. That absolutely, in no way entails that brain activity even exists when it's not perceived.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  It doesn't. So, and I'm saying, think about, again, the train schedule. This is something that you didn't see. It's something, there's people and there's the train. What you're not seeing is this train schedule, which is different. It's deeper.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And I'm saying there's something outside of spacetime. That's if we're going to talk about causes and effects. I'm not even sure, outside of spacetime, that we should do that. But if we're going to talk about causes and effects, it would be outside of spacetime that we'd look for those causes.

• 58:08André Duqum?

  So let's go a bit more into your modeling of conscious observers and Markov chains. What are those? How would you explain that to the layman?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Right, so, and I should put that in a context.

• 58:22André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  So.

• 58:23André Duqum?

  Why that way of?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Why go after it this way? Because the idea that consciousness is fundamental is, prior to space and time, is not new. Right, the spiritual traditions and idealist philosophies and so forth have, in some cases, said this for thousands of years. And it was those kinds of traditions that were sort of against science. Like the church imprisoned Galileo for heresy, for disregarding certain spiritual doctrines that they had. And, you know, he had to recant some of his science.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  And so there's this long history between science and spiritual views that take consciousness as fundamental. And from the science point of view, we freed ourselves from the arrogant dogmatism of many of those traditions.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  And we said, let's do our own experiments. Forget authority. We don't care about authority. We want to do experiments, write down mathematical descriptions of what we see, and build our theories. And it works. Authority doesn't work. If you look at all the technologies that we have around here, cameras, watches, cell phones.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  How many of those were invented by spiritual traditions? Zero. How many were invented by physical science? All of them. So based on what works, you would say spirituality, there's no beef there. It hasn't produced anything. And the spacetime view has produced science and all the technology. The church argued that their authority was based on lots of miracles. And they should be taken seriously because of all the miracles. Today, all the miracles are from science. I can talk to someone on the other side of the world right now by my phone.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  To someone in 1850, that would have been indistinguishable from a miracle. And it's science. So when I say consciousness is fundamental, it's in this big context that we have to look at that. That was said for a long, long time. Science was the middle finger to that. Basically, it was saying, no, we're going to do something hard-nosed here. We're going to do experiments in space and time with physical stuff and look at, now we're the ones that have the miracles on our side. If you want authority, we have the miracles, not you. But now I'm saying it's time for us to step back and look at this whole thing. I'm not going back to the authority.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  I don't care less about authority. Couldn't care less. I think it was misused against Galileo, and I have no interest in it. But the idea that spacetime isn't fundamental and that somehow consciousness might be fundamental, I think, is worth pursuing. But we have to say from the get-go, that idea has given us absolutely no technology and no precise mathematics.

• 1:01:50André Duqum?

  Which if it then somehow through making this rigorous does bear fruit and technology will open up a whole new era, which we can get into. But I want to make our way through the Markov chains and...

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Right, so now the Markov chains come up because here's the issue.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  We need our first theory of consciousness, quasi-consciousness, outside of spacetime. That first theory that's mathematically precise and can make predictions about things in spacetime. So there have been quasi-theories, like you might call them, but no theories that say, "I start with consciousness, with this mathematical model, outside of spacetime, show you exactly how it projects into spacetime and make predictions that are testable inside spacetime." There's nothing on the table. And if you... And so, you know, I want to really be clear about this. I was hard-nosed about my physicalist colleagues and friends saying, "How many conscious experiences

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  you can explain?" "Zero." "Okay, and we're clear, you can explain zero, and you've been at this for decades now. Now let's turn it around." For the spiritual traditions, you've been at it for millennia, not just decades, you've been at it for millennia. How much, how many of your theories can now explain Minkowski space and curved spacetime Einstein and give us the standard model part? Zero. There's nothing on the board. So both sides have nothing, literally nothing, on the board in terms of starting with physics and booting up consciousness, there's nothing on the board. Starting with consciousness and booting up physics, there's nothing on the board. So that's the state of play.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  So what I'm trying to do now is to put something on the board. And I'm convinced that the physicalists can't do it. Because, not because I'm a cognitive scientist and don't like physics, it's because the high-energy theoretical physicists tell us spacetime is doomed. "Okay, they're the experts, and I knew it anyway, because no theory is the final word. Spacetime can't be the final word." That's just an assumption. And my theory is also going to have its own limits, but at least they'll be broader than the spacetime limits. So I'm proposing that we can model consciousness with these things called Markov chains, and

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  I'll explain just intuitively what that means. Very, very simple.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  I'll use a traffic light like I do on my little paper. Suppose you're sitting in your car waiting at a traffic light. And you're looking, you know, because you have to pay attention. And it's red, of course. And you know that, so that's your experience. I'm seeing red. And a little bit, it turns green. And then if you stay, if you're stupid and stay there for a while, it'll turn yellow and it'll turn red. So you get, with the traffic light, you can see, there's three experiences you can have, red, green, and yellow. And there's also a sequence that you'll see. If I'm looking, if I see red now, then if I can say, what will I see next? Right?

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  So the next thing I'll see is green. And then if I see green now, the next thing I'll see is yellow. So I can write a little matrix. You know, if red now, the probability is zero that I'll see red next. Probability is zero that I'll see yellow next, but probability is one that I'll see green next. And so for yellow, I can say, well, probability is zero, I'll see red next, and so forth. But probability is one, let's see, if it's yellow, then I will see red. I'm sorry. If it's yellow, I'll see red next, but I won't see green next, and so forth.

• 1:05:44André Duqum?

  So there's a sequence of experiences and probabilities attached to those sequences.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:05:50André Duqum?

  And you could take that traffic light analogy and now put it to the human experience, which doesn't just have three options, but trillions of experiences.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Trillions, that's right. So now, go from three, I did three to keep it simple, but you can just see about the transitions. But you have trillions of experiences. So now, I'm going to model you with a pretty big matrix. It's a trillion by trillion, that's a big number. I don't even know what a trillion squared is. It's a big number. So there's a trillion squared transition probabilities in this thing, and that's what I'm going to use to describe.

• 1:06:20André Duqum?

  Is there inherent limitations there? Because would you say there is a fixed, finite number of possible experiences on offer in human perception? Or is it potentially infinite?

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  My guess is that our experiences in this particular headset of space and time are...

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Immense, but 0% of the total possible experiences that are outside of this headset. So I'm not sure if our experience in the headset is infinite or not, but even if it's infinite, it's 0% of the infinity beyond.

• 1:06:58André Duqum?

  And a trillion by trillion is a big enough database.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  That's enough for my work. That's enough to challenge my little computer. And so that's, that's, couldn't be simpler, right? I mean, it's, it's basically saying you have, it's very simple. You have experiences and they change. I'll just write down the probabilities that they change. So, of course, I'm not telling you what an experience is. I'm just saying, I'm going to start with experiences. Instead of starting with space and time and physical objects and trying to explain experiences, which hasn't worked, you know, we can't explain the testament even, I'm going to say, okay, every theory starts with certain assumptions. My assumption is going to be experiences. That's where my explanation stops.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Where do the experiences come from? I don't know. For the physicalist, where does spacetime come from? I don't know, but I'm starting with spacetime. Same here. I don't know where the conscious experiences come from, but that's where I'm starting because no theory in science is ever the final theory. It makes assumptions. So yeah, is my theory not the final theory? Absolutely not. I'm starting with experiences and I then, to be a good scientist, have to show where spacetime comes from. So that's, so I have to get Minkowski space. I have to get Einstein's time dilations, right? If you're moving faster than, if you're moving past me, I see your clock moving slow, but you see my clock moving slow. If we're in uniform motion, non-accelerated.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  And I also have to explain why your meter stick looks shorter to me and my meter stick looks shorter to you. So no one's come any, come close to doing that kind of thing, starting with conscious experiences.

• 1:08:47André Duqum?

  This is where trace logic comes in?

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Now, I can do, I can do this. Like, I can do this. And this is something we've just discovered since the last time we talked. I didn't have this. I was looking at traces. So, so I have to tell you what the trace logic is. But I'll just say at top level where we're going. It turns out that there are ways of relating different observers by this notion of trace. And this relationship among observers that we can specify mathematically turns out to give us Einstein's time dilations and space contractions. And in a very nice, clean, quantitative way, I mean, not just a hand wave, but quantitatively, for a particular class of these Markov matrices.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  And then a larger class, I think, will give us the curved spacetimes. And those two classes together are 0% of the Markov matrices, which is all the rest of this universe I've been talking about that's outside of spacetime. And our headset sees 0% of it. But at least I can show you exactly, I'm proposing, how to get exactly Minkowski space and curved spacetime from, from this trace logic. So, so the, so here's the idea of the trace logic. Let's go back to the traffic light. Keep it simple.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Suppose I'm looking at the red, green, and yellow traffic light. And let's, let's suppose it's a dysfunctional, sort of messed up traffic light. So the probabilities are, aren't nice and clean. Red could stay red, or it could go green, or yellow, and so forth.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  And suppose that you're looking, so I'm looking and you're looking, but you can only see red and yellow. I can see red, green and yellow, but you can only see red and yellow. And suppose I'm going to take my matrix and add one thing to it. Every time I transition, my experience transitions from like, maybe red goes to green or red, maybe red goes back to red. I mean, it's a transition from red to itself. I'm going to increment a counter each time a transition happens. So I've got a counter and I'm seeing red, green and yellow. And you and I are looking at the same light, but you only see red and yellow. You don't see the green. What's going to happen to your counter compared to my counter?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Well, I'm going to be going, the click every time red, green or yellow appears. You're only going to click when red and yellow appear. So your clock is going to go slower than mine. It's that simple. It's just that simple. I'm proposing that time dilation in Einstein's theory comes from the fact that these are so-called enhanced Markov chains. They're enhanced in the sense that they're Markov chains with a counter. They're sometimes called spacetime chains. In technical books like Daniel Rauvus's Markov Chains book, they're called spacetime Markov chains. But I'll call them enhanced chains. Your counter, if you only see red and yellow, will go,

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  will count fewer because you don't see the green. You only see red and yellow. I see the green, so I get a click for green, but you don't get a click. That's why your counter is going slower. Now, that's not quite deep enough because, as I said earlier, it's not just the case that your clock looks slower to me, but it's also the case that for you, my clock looks like it's going slower to you. So I gave a simple example. I have to give just a slightly more complicated one to get the full Einstein thing. Suppose we have a light that has red, yellow, green and blue. Okay. And you see red, yellow, green.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  And I see yellow, green and blue. So I don't see red, you don't see blue. We both see yellow and green.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Now, when I look at you, all I can see of you is you under my yellow, green, and blue looking, because that's all I see is yellow, green, and blue. You only see red, yellow, and green. So all of me that you can see is the yellow and green. That's all you can see of me. And all I can see of you is the yellow and green. So from my point of view, I'm getting clicks for every yellow, green, and blue. But you're only getting clicks for yellow and green. So your clock looks like it's going slower to me. But from your point of view, you're getting clicks for every red, yellow, and green. I'm only getting the yellow and green. So I'm going slower with respect to you.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  So we get the symmetry of Einstein. So, by the way, I had this trace logic for probably more than a year. I was working on it. And first, I discovered that it was a logic. So that was a new, apparently, a new contribution to the theory of Markov chains. And I should say what that contribution is and what it means by the trace. If I have the red, yellow, and green, just the red, yellow, and green, and I look, I can only see, say, the red and yellow. Whatever probabilities were governing red, yellow, and green are now going to,

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  they're going to control. Now I just see red and yellow. So I'm going to get just a 2 by 2 matrix, right? Because red could go to red, or red can go to yellow, yellow can go to yellow, yellow can go to red. So I'm going to get a 2 by 2 matrix of probabilities. But it will be controlled by the 3 by 3. There's some 3 by 3 matrix that's controlling the red, yellow, and green that you see. But it will uniquely determine what you should see on the 2 by 2. That's the trace. The smaller matrix that's determined by the bigger one is called the trace of the bigger one. And it's unique in general. So if I have a big Markov matrix on a trillion states, and I take a trace on 10,

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  that new probabilities on just the 10 states will be completely determined by the trillion by trillion. But... So what I discovered was, and I should say, I proposed this and then a mathematician, friend of mine, Chetan Prakash, proved it. So when I say I discovered, I needed a real mathematician to truly discover it. So Chetan and I discovered it together. We proved that it's a so-called partial order, or he proved it. He proved there's a partial order. I proposed it's a partial order. And so that's what we mean by logic, is that technically it's a partial order. It gives you the notion of and, and or, and negation, and implication, and so forth,

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  all the things that you would need for a logic, you know, like to say that if John is a bachelor, then John is a man, right? That's entailed by that. If, you know, and things like that. If you could take conjunctions, disjunctions, and so forth, they're propositions. So it turns out, we get an entire logic on the space of Markov chains. And so I call it the trace logic. And this is a new discovery. So we just discovered it in the last year, and I had it for a year and a half. And after, it was a year later, I was looking at this, it was just a few months ago, maybe six months ago, I was looking at it, and I noticed what I just had described to you,

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  that, oh wow, at this stopping light, my, one person's counter could be going slower than my counter, you know, because of this trace thing. I thought, could, nah, could Einstein's time Dilation come out of that? Nah, that would be, that would be too good to be true. Well, and if that was, that wouldn't be enough. I have to get Einstein's spatial contractions. The ruler sticks have to, so I said, well, okay, let me, let's see if this real, what notion of ruler stick can we get out of Markov chains? Right? Well, I've got a clock, so that's, that's easy. What about the ruler stick? And that's, well, it turns out, so I went and did some homework, and it was, there's

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  a ruler stick that was discovered in 2017, so just eight years ago, published by Doyle and Snell, two mathematicians.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  And so if you have the states of a Markov chain, like the red, green, and yellow, you can talk about the distance between states as a function of how long does it take to get, on average, from the red, say, to the green, and back to the red? Now, if it's a red, if it's a traffic light, so you go, a good traffic light goes red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow. Okay? And it's just in a cycle like that. It's a cycle. Then the commute time, the time it takes to get from red to, say, green and back again is three. Because you have to go, so I'm starting red, one step to green, then to yellow, and then back to red.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  That's three. And for this, if the commute time is the same, from green to yellow is three, from yellow to red is three. It's, all of them are three. So for, for an N cycle, if you have a cycle of N states, the commute time is N. And what Doyle and Snell proved is the commute time is the square of the distance. So the distance is the square root of the commute time, the Euclidean distance. And so, I say, okay, so we actually now know what the notion of distance is. So does it work?

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  I've got Einstein's time dilation, or time, you know, slowing down of time. Do I get the rulers contracting? And they have to contract, by the way, in Einstein's theory, the same factor. The factor that is affecting the time has to be the same factor that's affecting the distance. It's called the Lorentz factor in special relativity.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  And the answer is, the two factors for Markov chains are not the same for almost every matrix. 0% of the matrices have the right thing, but that 0% are the end cycles. So what we find then is, I get the same "Lorenz factor," exactly as I'm supposed to for Einstein, if I only look at Markov chains that are end cycles. You might say, "Well, that's not fair. I mean, you're just picking out the ones that work." Well, Einstein only used light to build the flat spacetime, only light.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  And he used the property that light has the same speed in all initial frames. That's all he needed. He only needed light. So that then puts a new burden on me. I now have to say what mass means and what light means, because light is massless. So photons of light have no mass. And in Einstein's theory, anything that goes the speed of light has no mass. And if you have mass, you never travel the speed of light. That's just the way it is. Why? That's just the way it is. Again, the theories stop. Yep. So I have to have a theory now of what is the mass of a Markov chain.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  I also have to have the notion of a speed. So the commute time that I just talked about, which is the average time it takes to get, the expected time to get from one state to another, you can now ask for a Markov, for all the states, what's the average commute time between all the states? And the average will be for the end cycle will be n. The commute time will be n. And it turns out, that is the fastest commute time. That is the fastest. Any other Markov chain that's not an end cycle will have a longer time. So these are the fastest. So the one matrix that works for me to get Einstein's time dilations and length contractions

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  to be exactly the same is the only matrix that is the fastest matrix in this commute time set, the average commute time.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  And if I, there's good reasons, and I can explain why. We can talk about something called the entropy rate of a Markov chain as the mass. So the idea about mass is something that's more massive, is more influential. It interacts more with stuff. Right? If you're close to, like, if you're on Jupiter, you'd be sucked down much more hard than you're sucked down on Earth. And if you're on the moon, I mean, you could see the astronauts were jumping way up, much higher than they could do on Earth. The moon was not as influential.

• 1:22:01André Duqum?

  More gravitas.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  More gravitas. Absolutely. So the idea is, there's some notion of influence that we needed to capture in Markov chains. And I'm proposing something called the, what's called the entropy rate. Entropy rate is a big, important thing in information theory. It tells you how much you can compress data and so forth. So error correcting codes and data compression. Entropy rate is a big, big deal in this. So it's not, it's not a new idea of mine. This was like at the foundations of information theory. Entropy rate was like, right there at the center. So it was not hard for me to look at it and go, oh, that's probably the entropy rate. Because that's, that's, the entropy rate is zero for the end cycles.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  And so they have zero mass. So here's the, here, I'll summarize it. I'm proposing that these cyclic matrices correspond to photons in spacetime. They project.

• 1:23:06André Duqum?

  Because they have no mass.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  They have no mass, and they're the fastest things.

• 1:23:10André Duqum?

  Does that mean there's a correlation between light and conscious experience? Is that the stretch?

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Well, so, so these are, this is conscious experience. And I'm proposing how the very structure of spacetime is just a conscious experience. The very, the Minkowski's structure of spacetime is literally coming from the structure of conscious experience and this trace logic entirely. And so.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Entropy rate is projecting to mass. Zero entropy rate is projecting to zero mass. The only things that have zero entropy rate move at the speed of light. So what Einstein couldn't explain, he had to assume, I'm explaining. I'm saying that the reason massive objects cannot travel at the speed of light is because no matrix with positive entropy rate has a commute time as fast as the N-cycles. They just don't. That's why. Why is the speed of light the same for all observers in all inertial frames? Because the trace of an N-cycle is an N-cycle.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  So it's always the same speed. One state per step. One new state per step in an N-cycle. So what Einstein has to assume, oh, and so Einstein has to assume that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames? And I don't. I explain why it's the same. And why is there no preferred inertial frame? The answer is because in this trace logic of matrix, there's no top matrix. There's, you can go to infinity in an infinite number of directions, and there's no top. So there's no special final inertial frame.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  So the bottom line is, a theory of consciousness outside of space-time with these Markov matrices, identify mass as the entropy rate, identify the clock counter as projecting to time, identify the commute times between states as projecting to distance, and you get Minkowski's space coming out. Now, I've shown it qualitatively here. What we have to do now is to show math, with mathematical precision.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  I can take discrete Markov N-cycles, maybe three of them, for example, interacting. And as N goes to infinity, I have to show that I can get, probably using something called Lorentz-Gromov-Hausdorff

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Techniques prove that I get exactly the structure of Minkowski space. So that hasn't been proven, but we know-

• 1:26:13André Duqum?

  That's what you're working on now?

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:15André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  We're working on that now. So, but what we do have is qualitatively-

• 1:26:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  We get the space contraction, the time dilation, they match. The interesting thing is, I mentioned that Doyle and his colleague that wrote the Doyle's paper on Markov chains, that the commute time is the square of the Euclidean distance. So the Euclidean distance has to be the square root. So to make things work, I need to also take the time counter, the counter of the conscious agents, and take its square root to get the time and spacetime. So now, you might say, "Well, that seems like Cluj."

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  It's very interesting. In physics, there's something called charge parity time symmetry, CPT symmetry. And I think we're going to get that from the fact that when we take the square root, you can have either plus or minus. When I take the commute time and take the square root of it to get the distance, well, there's a plus distance and a minus distance. And when I take the time square root, again, there'll be a plus and minus time. I believe that that will give us what's called CPT symmetry in physics, which has been shown empirically. So if this is right, then not only do I explain why the speed of light is the same in all

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  inertial frames, why no massive object can ever travel at the speed of light, why no inertial frame is special, but also where CPT symmetry comes from. It comes from the fact that the conscious agent dynamics is not inside spacetime, and we need to take square roots to get the space lengths and clock times that we see inside spacetime. It's that fact that gives us the CPT symmetry. So-

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  So I should say, summarize what we have and what we don't. What we have is a trace logic that's secure. It's a new contribution to the theory of Markov chains. That trace logic for N-cycles gives us exactly the right contractions of length and time for Minkowski space. For other matrices, those contractions will be different. The lengths and time contractions will be different. And for those, some of them, I'm proposing, and this we haven't proved, that they will project to curved spacetimes because the lengths and times are different.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  They're not exactly the same, so you won't get flat spacetime, you'll get curved. I think that that will be a larger class of matrices that work. But I think there'll still be 0% of all the matrices. And my guess is that almost all the matrices in consciousness space are too complicated. They'll have things like, they'll have expander graphs and other weird properties to them that will preclude them from projecting into spacetime. So spacetime isn't the final reality. It's a trivial 0% of the new reality that's unfolding when we step outside of spacetime and say, let's, what's our simplest, most drop-dead, stupid model of consciousness we can come up with?

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  That's what I came up with, the stupidest, drop-dead, simple model. You have experiences and they change probabilistically. Okay, what can we do with that? Doesn't sound very promising, right? You're gonna get all of spacetime physics out of that? Small chance. And that was mine, until I discovered the trace logic. And then all of a sudden, in the last six months, I realized, holy smoke.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  It could be this simple. It's really... What is the trace logic? It's saying how the experiences of different observers mesh. That's what it's about. It's all about observers and their experiences. There's an infinite class of observers and we can talk about

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  their time counters and observers that see a smaller set of states than me, their time counter is going to go slower than mine and so forth.

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

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• 1:33:41André Duqum?

  Can I try? I want to try to explain this back to you to see if I actually understand it. Or at least an aspect of it. Because I was kind of, I think, whenever I'm preparing for something, especially something that can get pretty rigorous in the scientific side, I try to, like, write it out to be able to explain it to myself and see if I actually understand it. So, quantum mechanics says that particles are described by wave functions.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:09André Duqum?

  Probability waves that evolve smoothly but collapse when measured.

• 1:34:14André Duqum?

  And so your point basically is that if you look at the long-term dynamics of these Markov chains, instead of the step-by-step transitions, the math looks identical to quantum wave functions.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Right, that's something I haven't talked about yet.

• 1:34:28André Duqum?

  Okay, right. But so in other words, quantum theory is what you see when you zoom out on the probabilistic flow of conscious experiences. So quantum states aren't fundamental, they're the shadow of deeper dynamics of consciousness.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:41André Duqum?

  I know you kind of alluded to it a little bit earlier, but haven't spoken directly to the kind of correlation there between the two.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should, I should say a little bit about that. So, so what I've done so far is to talk about how a theory of consciousness with these Markov chains and the trace logic could give rise to the structure of Einstein's Minkowski space, spacetime. But of course, quantum theory is extremely important. And so how does that come out of this?

• 1:35:08André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  And so here's, here's the remarkable thing that my, my collaborator, Chetan Prakash, discovered about 10 years ago or so. If you look at, I've been talking about the step-by-step Markov chain. If it's red now, it's light, and then maybe it'll turn green next, and then yellow and so forth. That's step-by-step.

• 1:35:29André Duqum?

  But then when you zoom out.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  If you step back, that's sort of, that's sort of like looking at a movie one frame at a time, but if you step back and you try to look at the whole movie in, in real time, you get a different, different picture. And when we look at Markov chains, not step-by-step, we look back at the big picture, what's happening in the dynamics of the Markov chain, the big movie. We call that the, well, the way you do that is you compute what are called the harmonic functions of these enhanced chains. So you compute the harmonic functions, and they tell you the long-term behavior, these harmonic functions. And what Chetan discovered is these harmonic functions are exactly the same mathematical functions as quantum wave functions for free particles.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  So the quantum wave functions for free particles and the harmonic functions of the Markov chains that we're looking at are the same thing.

• 1:36:19André Duqum?

  What does that mean?

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  So it means that we're proposing

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Spacetime is constructed just by the N-cycles of Markov chains, in the way I just described. And quantum wave functions are describing not the detailed dynamics of conscious experiences. They're giving just the top-level picture of it, not the step-by-step. We have, in other words, in this consciousness framework, I'm telling you every step of the way what's going on. And in the spacetime headset, quantum mechanics just says, "You don't need to look at all those details. Here's just what's happening long-term." You only get to see the big, long-term picture I'm showing you that are called the hidden variables. This is what's called a hidden variables theory of quantum mechanics. Okay?

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  So these hidden variables are things that you don't see inside spacetime. They're hidden to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics doesn't describe them. But they're right there in the harmonic functions of the Markov chains. And what's interesting about the harmonic functions, everything is real. All the numbers are real in my Markov chains. All the probabilities are real and so forth. But when you take these harmonic functions, you get complex numbers as part of taking the harmonic function. So where does all the weirdness of complex amplitudes come from? It's because you're not looking at the full reality. You're getting the top-level gloss harmonic functions, and those use complex numbers to describe the long-term behavior of it.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  So we get spacetime and quantum theory coming up. Now, I'm saying this at the top level. I already said a theorem that we need to prove about spacetime, right? So we have to prove that the Lorentz-Gromov-Hausdorff convergence works from N-cycles to Minkowski space. And then we have to prove that similar kind of convergence will work for curved spacetime, for a slightly larger class of matrices. And then we need to show, for example, well, two things. First...

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Why we're not violating Bell's theorem. So there's something called Bell's theorem, which says there aren't any hidden variables theory, roughly. So here I am, not saying I've got a hidden variables theory of quantum mechanics. Most people in the know would say, well, John Bell proved that there aren't any, so you're off your rocker. What John Bell proved was that there were no hidden variables theories that were measurement independent, local, and deterministic. But our theory is not measurement independent. In fact, it's observers.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  If anything's measurement dependent, they're observers. So we have a measurement dependent system, it's probabilistic, and it's not deterministic. So, so Bell's theorem is true, and it doesn't apply to us because we're non-local, we're not deterministic, and we're measurement dependent. So, so, so Bell's theorem is true, and it doesn't rule out our hidden variables theory at all. So, so we now have to prove, so that, that part's clear. But now what we have to prove is there's something called the Born rule in quantum theory. The Born rule says if you have this quantum complex amplitude,

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  the wave function, you have to take the amplitude squared to find out the probability of various outcomes occurring. That's a very famous Born rule. So, I've done some, a little work on it, and I think it's going to be true. But until you prove it, but I'll put it this way. I see no obstruction at all. I see no obstruction to getting curved spacetime. I see no obstruction to getting the Born rule.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  But these are very, very technical, mathematical issues. And so until we have it, we can only, so I won't promise more than I can say right now. What we do have is the trace logic is real. That's, that's, that's not going away. The time dilation, space contraction for the end cycles, that's not going away. That, that'll be there. The claim that that will give rise specifically to Minkowski space. We know the theorem that needs to be proven and we haven't proven it yet, but I don't see any obstructions. But, but again, I'm just a cognitive scientist. So this is real math. So we'll see.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  I, I don't see any obstructions right now, but it may, we may need some really hard-nosed technical, mathematical physicists to, to bring this stuff home. So, so we've, it's just been in the last few weeks that I've even known that these are the terms we need to prove. So this is, this is brand new. This is the first time I've actually talked about this.

• 1:41:44André Duqum?

  It's exciting.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty exciting.

• 1:41:46André Duqum?

  It is exciting. And I know probably aspects of it can definitely go over many people's head. I know for, for different parts, it does, it does for me, like it, there's, there's a lot to digest there, but the spark notes, correct me if I'm wrong, is that if the bedrock of modern physics and relativity and quantum theory can naturally fall out of this theory or this model of conscious observers, then it kind of reverses the chain of causality of what we think consciousness is coming out of a, coming out of matter, rather it's the other way around.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And this is something that the physicist John Wheeler was, was pointing to. So you, you got it right. And, and John Wheeler was pointing in this direction. He had a paper in 1989 that's called the IT from BIT paper. But he was, he was basically saying somehow it's all, it's got to be, from his point of view, all these observer participancy interactions has to be the fundamental thing. And somehow he said, that has to give rise to the structure of spacetime and quantum theory. He didn't know how, but, but he, he just felt like we can't start inside spacetime. We have to start with the observer participancy thing and, and.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  So the reason he's taken seriously is, I mean, he was like the advisor for Richard Feynman, and he himself was an incredible physicist on his own right. So, so, so, and he, in his It From Bit paper, Wheeler cited, I mean, I should say, I've been working on this stuff for a long time, almost 40 years. So, I mean, it's not like I decided to work on consciousness outside of spacetime. I've been working on it since...

• 1:43:28André Duqum?

  89?

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  85. So it's been literally 40 years. 80, 1985. And in 1989, I published a book with two mathematicians called Observer Mechanics. So, you know, you can see I was already, I've been, this is not like a new gig for me. And Wheeler cited my book. So in his It From Bit paper, he cites my book as the example of the kind of thing that we might want, try to do in this observer participancy kind of thing. And I read Wheeler's paper, of course, and, and I agree with him. And I, we tried to get into observer mechanics, but we didn't have the trace logic. And I didn't have the trace logic until a year and a half ago. And I didn't know what I had until six months ago.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  So, so I've been after this for, for 40 years. And just six months ago, I think I found the key that I've been looking for, for, for 40 years. And so, and it's also what, the kind of thing that Frank Wilczek was saying is we need to have some notion of the observer as, as, as a foundational concept. So what I'm saying is that Wheeler was right. It's all these acts of observer participancy that somehow build spacetime. And the thing that coordinates them is the trace logic. It's the trace logic, which is just the coordination of how your experiences and my experiences are related, how your clock is related to my clock, how, and how the distances between your experiences are related to the distances in my experiences.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  The trace logic does all of that. And when we compress it down, we get spacetime. So physics, from this point of view, the spacetime physics is nothing but a beautiful way of coordinating all the experiences of the observers.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  So it changes the whole thing around.

• 1:45:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  We thought of ourselves in science for the last four centuries as little tiny physical objects in an immense physical universe whose consciousness emerged from unconscious ingredients. And this is turning the whole picture around. Spacetime is not fundamental. We know that. It falls apart at the Planck scale. It can't be fundamental. That picture can't be right. But Wheeler's picture is a deeper picture. Observer participancy outside of spacetime gets somehow fashioned into the structure that we call spacetime.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  But it's the consciousness that's first. It's fundamental, and it gives rise to what we call spacetime. And it's the trace logic. And by the way, the trace logic is not hard. I could have thought about it 40 years ago. I just didn't think about it. It's not that hard. I don't know why it took me 40 years. I'm not that bright.

• 1:46:32André Duqum?

  Do you remember the moment that came to you? You said you were in a car?

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  I was, I think I was at home. And one problem that we've been working on is how do observers, what we call conscious agents, but we'll call them observers, how do they combine? And I have Chaitan Prakash and Robert Fretner, two really good, brilliant friends of mine, longtime collaborators. And they had been debating back and forth about a new way of combination. And I looked at what they were saying. And I just looked, and it felt wrong. But when I felt that it was wrong, I also felt, here's why it's wrong.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, I saw the trace logic. It was, it was, so it was in reaction to the trying to figure out how to combine observers and, and seeing their ideas, seeing that I disagreed with those ideas and asking myself, why do I disagree with those ideas? And that's when I saw the trace logic structure. All of a sudden, I just saw it.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  I said, because in the trace logic, it turns out, it gives you a way to join two consciousnesses into a single new conscious observer. And that, so it was that problem. How do I take two separate consciousnesses that maybe overlap? Maybe we have some similar conscious experiences. But how do we join them together into a coherent new observer? The trace logic does that. It tells you exactly what that, what that join means. So it's something I didn't talk about. This is actually, in terms of the theory of consciousness, this is also a breakthrough. It's a, it's a breakthrough that says, if you have two consciousnesses that do overlap,

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  what is the unique, bigger consciousness that could be made out of them that traces down properly to each of the two separate consciousnesses?

• 1:48:28André Duqum?

  An infinite shared space or source, which is the origin of shared experience?

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Well, so these are prior to that. So the, the, the, the, the source is deeper than that. But this, what you're talking about, the source is, is even deeper. This was just a step up on the trace logic itself. So how do I go from two conscious, consciousnesses, two Markov chains, to a slightly bigger Markov chain that properly contracts down to the two? So it's, it's very much like, the, the way I think about it. You have two hemispheres in your brain, a left and a right.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  And there are some experiments which have been done with split-brain patients. So people who had problems with epilepsy that couldn't be cured or controlled with drugs. There were surgeries done where you would take off the top of the skull, take a knife. The guy who did this, a guy named Joe Bogan, is one of the surgeons. I actually was friends with him. We would meet periodically at UCI and talk consciousness and so forth. But Joe Bogan would take a scalpel and cut the corpus callosum, which is a... So you have two hemispheres.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  There's an ethernet cable between them, connecting them. And he cut that cable, part of it or all of it, depending on the patient. And what they found was the two hemispheres now had their biggest connection was severed. There were some smaller connections, but the biggest connection was severed. And Michael Gazaniga and others then did some experiments on these patients and found that they wanted to know what's going on. What does this connection do? And what happens when you separate the hemispheres? And early experiments couldn't find anything different about these people. So some people thought, well, the only thing the corpus callosum does is put epileptic seizures from one hemisphere to the other.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  That's all it's good for. Well, no, of course, that's not the case. So what Gazaniga found was that he could isolate information to the hemispheres. It turns out that the right hemisphere only sees the left visual field, left hemisphere sees only the right visual field. And the left hemisphere gets input from the right side of the body, the right hemisphere gets input from the left side of the body. So if you give information to just the left visual field... Quickly, before you can do an eye movement, you can send something just to the left visual field and only the right hemisphere sees it. Or put something in the right visual field, only the left hemisphere sees it. But if it's on there for more than a tenth of a second, then you'll get an eye movement and both hemispheres will see it. So that's why they couldn't figure it out before.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  People were doing eye movements and both hemispheres got the information. But Gazanaga learned to, and Roger Sperry. So I should, Sperry won the Nobel Prize for this. So it would be.

• 1:51:30André Duqum?

  We just had Ian McGilchrist in here, too. We were actually speaking about this.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Okay, very, very good, yeah. So what you find is that the two hemispheres have very different personalities in some cases. In one case, the left hemisphere wanted to be, have a dust job and the right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver. The left hemisphere believes in God, the right hemisphere is an atheist, or vice versa. So here's the notion of join. So I set all that for this trace join. Somehow,

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  you have two hemispheres, which, if we cut the corpus callosum, show that they are different personalities with different religious beliefs,

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  different job aspirations. They're different. It seems like maybe part of the human condition is, we're born with two. We're actually, you're not just one person, you're two people. And what you are learning to do in this body is join them. How do I create the join?

• 1:52:29André Duqum?

  The two becoming one.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  Two becoming one and cooperating. And for a lot of us, it's not an easy process. I get pissed off at myself. What are you doing that for? You can imagine, actually, in some of these, with the corpus callosum cut, the hands fight each other. The left hand and the right hand fight. So that's in all of us. So this join of the trace logic, I was after it because I understood Roger Sperry's work and Joe Bogan. I mean, I knew Joe Bogan personally. We're friends. I knew all this stuff. It's very clear that there's some kind of separate persons' consciousnesses that are being integrated. And the corpus callosum is not the whole story, but it's the physical aspect of it.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  So I was after that join in the trace logic because I knew that that would be the key thing. If this was going to work, it would be that, to give us our first principled theory of how separate consciousnesses can join together. Because this has been a big problem in consciousness first. Theories, it's the combination problem. If you look it up, if you just Google "the combination problem in panpsychist theories of consciousness," you'll see there's a big literature, basically, it's like, "can't be done." Now, panpsychist theories are very different from my theory.

• 1:53:52André Duqum?

  What is the combination problem for people that don't know?

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  So, the combination problem is how, if I have two separate consciousnesses, can they be combined into a single consciousness? Can the subjects of experience be combined? And can the experiences themselves be combined? So, there's the subject combination problem and the experience combination problem. They're very, you know, it's an ancient, ancient problem. There are, the received opinion was that this is going to be difficult, if not impossible,

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  to combine the different experiences. So, I knew that that's been out there for a long time. Everybody says, "can't be done." And certainly, you can't combine subjects of experience. The very famous psychologist, William James, in his Principles of Psychology, has a very famous paragraph in there about, "You can't combine the subjects of experience." If you have 10 different people or 100 different people, how are you going to combine them? You can tell them all the same thing, but it's going to be 100 different people thinking the same thing, not, the subjects don't combine.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  So, I was, you know, these are, this has been a longstanding problem. And I was hoping that somehow this theory of conscious agents with the Marco stuff would give me some tools for understanding how consciousness could combine, because it seems like that's going on there. The corpus callosum seems to be something that's mediating that in the case of our two hemispheres. And so, you can see why I was going after this notion of join. But I didn't have a principled way of... Coming out the join. And it was the The trace logic is where that comes in. And then the trace logic, all of a sudden, by seeing this partial order, this logic,

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  it automatically has a join, and that solves the problem. But what I had to do was step back and see the bigger picture and see there's a whole logic. So don't just think about the join. Think about an entire logic on the space of consciousnesses. And when you see the whole logic on it, then the join falls out. And so it was that insight. So what is the logic? Is the trace? Is the trace a partial order? Being a trace, is that a partial order? And I could immediately see there's three things you have to have for a partial order. It has to be reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. And I could see the first two, but I couldn't see the transitive.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  It looked to me like it was going to be transitive as well. So I could see two out of the three right away. And so, yeah. And the third one looked really, I mean, it looked pretty, pretty secure to me. But, you know, math is math. So I said it, I told my longtime collaborator, Cheyton. We have collaborated about 40 years. So we're good friends. And I said, Cheyton, I think I've found this logic. That I think the trace is a logic on the space of all markup chains. And he said, Don, it's too pretty. Can't be true. It's just too pretty. And he was taking off for a conference in England.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  So he flew off. But when he landed in Heathrow, he said, oh, well, I'll give it a shot. And there in Heathrow, he proved it. He proved that, he proved the transitivity. And then we knew we had a logic. And then, but it took me almost a year to see. Okay, because I was focused on the join and combination problem and that stuff. And so I was really pretty happy. I thought I'd gotten everything out of it that I possibly could, and I was very, very happy. But just one day I noticed, well, wait, the trace, the counter. Is going to click fewer times on the trace than on the bigger one. Could, nah, I couldn't get spacetime out of this, no way. But I decided to check it out and it's been a six month fun ride.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  I can't believe it. So I didn't expect to get spacetime. I was just trying to get the combination problem.

• 1:58:24André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  And length contractions and time contractions, unbelievable. I can't believe I got it.

• 1:58:31André Duqum?

  You just ordered a single meal and the whole buffet came with it.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  It came with it and, and then the fact that it was the square, that the commute times are the square of the distances.

• 1:58:47André Duqum?

  It must be there.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 1:58:49André Duqum?

  A good sign that there's a inherent simplicity, I suppose, or beauty to something that is coherent. So like, there is not, maybe, maybe not always the case, but throughout many different innovations and discoveries in the past, there is an inherent beauty to the simplicity of the discovery, which seems almost like too good to be true at first.

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more. And what's, what's really interesting about the trace logic is there's no wiggle room. It's fixed. I can't play with it. It either worked or it didn't.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  So, so I knew I was either going to get Einstein's theory or not. There was no way for me to fiddle this thing because the, the, the trace logic can't be fiddled with. That's, I mean, the trace is the trace, end of story. It's all, so he either did it or not. So I, it was too good to be true. I couldn't believe that it, that it worked. So, yeah. Assigning physical interpretations of properties of the matrix is no, there's no place really to fudge there. Commute times are commute times. That's you can't find entropy rate is entropy rate to say if you ask what are the properties that could be mass entropy rate is it and so it either worked or it

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  didn't if the entropy rate being zero didn't correspond to the matrices that that moved fastest then it would be game over for me the whole thing will be over so so right now there's no room to fudge at all in any of this which is makes me feel very, very comfortable because that it will either completely unravel and and we'll see the one thread that doesn't work and the whole thing unravels or the or the thing is really going to take off I'm hoping it takes off and it looks like it's taking off because at every step I've said okay this has to be true or the whole thing won't work let me get check it is true unbelievable I've been surprised time and again that it's worked so even as Chaitanya said he thought the whole thing was too beautiful to be true

• 2:00:53André Duqum?

  Yeah

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  So we both thought at every step this is too pretty to be true this is you know the party is going to be over and we haven't seen the party over yet so but the fact is it can't be fudged so if the party is over it will show us the party is over

• 2:01:09André Duqum?

  Which is the reward of the scientific mind to go after disproving things that you would like to be true to to make it rigorous right and

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely and of course what I said earlier about all scientific theories applies to to my theory

• 2:01:26André Duqum?

  Yeah

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  There's a going to be a limited scope for this theory of conscious agents and the trace logic but all I'm trying to do right now is to show that the scope is bigger than spacetime and the scope includes spacetime that we can actually build spacetime from the trace logic of conscious so I'm not saying that this is the final theory of everything no I will be very clear this is zero percent of reality my theory is zero percent of reality but it's a bigger zero percent than spacetime and if I can show how spacetime is a smaller zero percent than my bigger zero percent of reality that's a step science will always and only know zero percent of reality always and only but we should do it

• 2:02:12André Duqum?

  For many reasons we'll continue to get into now what is minimizing surprise and how it comes into all this for people that have like zero context of what that means

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Right so

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  The idea of minimizing surprise is quite big now in cognitive neuroscience and elsewhere. Crawford and his collaborators are using it. And it's related to intelligence in the following way. I mean, I'm not going to say it's all there is to intelligence, but it's an important aspect of intelligence. If every time I did something, I was surprised. Like every time I went to pick up this cup, it fell down and crashed. Every time I put on a shirt, I ripped a hole in it. Every time I walked up the stairs, I fell on my face. Well, to the extent that I'm surprised, I'm not very smart.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  So in some sense, the more surprised you are, the less intelligent you are. Now, again, I'm not at all saying that's the only aspect of intelligence, but it is, intelligence is not less than no surprise or minimal surprise. Now, suppose I have a big Markov matrix. Well, I'll just say the bottom line, trace minimizes surprise. That's the, the trace logic is the logic of minimizing surprise. When you have a probabilistic situation, you don't know what's going to happen, and all you can do is write down a Markov dynamics of it. And then if you have limited information, like only see this, these set of states, I can't see the whole traffic log, I can only see red and green or whatever.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  But I want to minimize surprise, the trace is the minimal surprise answer. So the trace logic is the logic of minimizing surprise. And in that sense, it is the logic of intelligence. So now there are, there are new companies working to go past large language models of artificial intelligence. I'm using the free energy principle to minimizing free energy to minimize surprise. What they really want to do is minimize surprise, but they can't do it directly, so they minimize free energy. The trace logic does it directly. It tells you exactly what the answer is. You give me any context and you give me a subset of variables, the trace is the minimum

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  surprise answer. If you want to take two probabilistic systems, you know both probabilistic systems, and you want to know what's the minimal surprise.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  System that includes the both, it's the join of the trace logic, the disjunction of the trace logic. So it is the logic of surprise. So I didn't know this at first. I was only thinking about just consciousness combining and trying to solve the combination problem. Then I was interested in, wow, maybe spacetime comes out of it because of the changing clocks. But then more recently, I've realized, no, this minimizes surprise. This is actually a logic of intelligence. So it could actually be of value technologically to be the core mathematical principle behind a new generation of artificial intelligences, which would be great fun for me because,

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  as I mentioned to you, I was in the AI lab at MIT from 1979 to 1983, took class with Marvin Minsky, worked with Bert Oldhorn and David Marr and Eric Grimson and Ellen Hildreth. I mean, I'm friends with all the pioneers in the early AI computational vision work there and John Hollerback. So it's a real love of mine, the artificial intelligence. And to have the trace logic actually be a logic of intelligence blows my mind as well. So once I worked on the consciousness side of things, I may want to switch over and look at the AI side of it as well.

• 2:06:15André Duqum?

  Yeah, so much to explore there as well. I'm curious, because it's been alluded to throughout the conversation about when we're talking about the experience of a conscious observer. As a human being, we have this experience, which, to agree, there is an overlap in what we think your experience is. And I'm curious how you think of, as you introduced in your essay that you sent me, the sense of infinite shared space or the source in which our experience is derived. What do you make of that source in which experience is derived from?

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  That's a good question. So.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  When you write down a Markov chain, like for the red, green, yellow traffic light, mathematically, before you can write down the matrix, you have to specify what we call a measurable space. This is a mathematical name, but what all it means is, you need to tell me what states are going to be in your Markov chain, like red, green, and yellow. So you have to say, there are three states, and they're red, green, and yellow. And then you have to put a structure called an algebra on them. But basically, so it's a measurable space. You list the states, and you put some kind of structure on them. Now, if you have five states, then you need to have, you know, if it's red, green, yellow, blue, orange light, then you need to have five states in a bigger measurable space.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  In the trace logic, if you're going to think about all these matrices in the context of the trace logic, then they can't each have their own little measurable space, because you have to be able to relate all of them together. So you need a big measurable space in which they're all on. So effectively, an infinite measurable space. So I need to write down an infinite measurable space of all possible conscious experiences with its own sigma algebra, which is the logic, the structure on it. So I can't just write down three. It's infinite. And it's the same for all observers. All these different traces are all different observers. So the logic itself forces me.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  It says, Don, you cannot just talk about a three-state measurable space and then a 10-state. You have to put them all on one. They're all derived from one big measurable structure. Now, so this is the mathematics forcing. So just a couple of weeks ago, I said, okay, so what is the mathematics trying to tell me here? I mean, so I've been working on the matrices and their transitions. I'm studying that. I'm getting spacetime dilations and so forth coming out of it. But what about this deeper structure? It's just sitting there. It's timeless. It's there for every different observer.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  And in some sense, all the experiences are popping out of this deep structure.

• 2:09:10André Duqum?

  Sounds very mystical.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  It sounds very schmystical to me. I was like, what? But...

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  It's math. I have to write it down. I'm forced to write it down. And so I'm forced to ask myself, what's my interpretation of this? I've got my interpretation of the states and their transitions, their experiences and changing experiences. What is this structure that's timeless? From which, in some sense, all these experiences are coming out of? And the answer is, I don't know. This is where my understanding stops. So I just call it source, because it's the source of all the experiences. But it's a timeless source, and it's the same for all observers. And it's the foundation from which all observers, all traces spring. So then I agree, then at that point, I thought,

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  wait a minute, that does sound quite schmystical, and very much like what mystics have been saying for thousands of years, that we're all derived from one source. And

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  in some sense, we're just different

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  emanations, they would say, from the source. I would say we're different headsets that the source has put on. The different traces are different headsets by which the source looks at itself. So that's the way I'm thinking about it now, is that there is this source. I can't say anything more about it than that, than except what the mathematics says right now, which is it's the same for all observers. So

• 2:10:45Speaker 01

  Andre and Don are from the same source, just different headsets. It's the source talking to the source through Andre and Don headsets.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  And I can't say anything more about the source. I can say, we can write down a measurable structure for it. There's a sigma structure, so I can say all that stuff. But that's where my, that's the limits of my theory. Every theory has a limit. There we go. The other limits are my probabilities. The probab-- when you see a probability in a theory, that's where the explanation stops. Because probability is where, you know, I can't say anything more. I'll write down a probability measure. So, so my theory has the limits right there in our face. But the limit points right where the spiritual traditions have pointed, saying that there is some source, and they will say it transcends any description.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  You can point to it with words, but as the Tao Te Ching says, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. And that, the same is true of science. The, the science can point to it. But, and we can describe perspectives on it. So, for example, spacetime perspective, that particular headset. Our mathematical descriptions can be more or less accurate descriptions of that particular projection or trace of the one source. So, so not any, it's not the case that everything is equal. And my theory, you know, earth, air, fire, and water is just as good as the standard model of particle.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  But no, not at all. In a headset, certain theories are better and certain theories are worse, provably. So, so the science is right to be really hard-nosed about the theories. Absolutely. Most theories are going to be wrong about our headset. But when we go outside the headset, it's going to be, again, just a broader headset that we're looking at. So, again, it'll be more true or false. But ultimately, you know that all of our theories, even our best hard-nosed theories, are 0% of reality. But at least we want to get that 0% right. And most theories are not even right about that 0%. So that's why most non-scientific theories aren't worth their time.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  They can dig, you know, science gets 0%, but it gets it right.

• 2:13:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:22André Duqum?

  I'm curious how you would describe what I've heard you explain of infinite infinities. If there's a potentially infinite amount of available experiences, that means that there would then be an infinite amount of conscious observers. So what does that point to about the scope of reality beyond the headset?

• 2:13:46Speaker 01

  It's the headset, our spacetime headset, you know, we think of spacetime as the final reality. No, it's 0%. It's literally 0% of reality. And in the Markov dynamics that I'm looking at, it's 0%. I can say what 0% corresponds to Minkowski space. I'm looking to be able to say what slightly larger 0% corresponds to curved spacetimes. And then the 99.99999% of it, basically 100% of it, will be beyond anything that could be actually presented in space and time. Again, partly for technical reasons, like, again, expander graphs for the Markov chains and things that wouldn't work well for general relativity.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  So, but the interesting thing is, I mean, spiritual traditions have been saying this for thousands of years.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  But now we have a new mathematical framework where we can say, at least for one step out of spacetime headset, here is a description of the infinities. These Markov chains that don't project into spacetime, even curved spacetime, they don't project. This is a first model to explore of the kinds of infinities of possibilities outside of our spacetime headset. Before, all we could say in the spiritual traditions was it's beyond what you can see in space and time. All of a sudden, now we have a mathematical model that says, well, I'm not the final reality either, but here is a way that we can talk about the next step outside of the headset. And there's infinite, there's an infinite number of new things to explore here.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  So there's plenty to explore and that infinite number of new things to explore here is 0% of reality, but it's infinitely bigger than the 0% that we had now. So we've just expanded to a new, infinitely larger space that's 0% of the final reality. And that's the way science will always progress, if it progresses.

• 2:15:48André Duqum?

  What this really makes me think of is, if you look on the planet right now, we very much so have medieval minds and modern tools. We have incredibly, increasingly exponential technologies that in a time where we face this metacrisis, where we could, you know, the wisdom to hold those tools is not to the same degree we have and what these tools can do. You look from bioweapons to AIs of, you know, all over the place. We need a radical transformation in consciousness and change

• 2:16:29André Duqum?

  in paradigm. And it seems like the way that could effectively happen is by these deeper understandings becoming self-evident by the scientific method and them becoming rigorous. You know, if you are able to effectively prove to the analytical mind that we have this shared space, that we are one consciousness, a lot of what we've been exploring today, that to me changes the, what the scientific paradigm and prevalent notion of what reality is, like on a widespread scale to where it feels like the one of the, if not the only saving

• 2:17:10André Duqum?

  graces in the coming decades where if we, if it, if something like discoveries like this don't come at this time, humanity very much so is in a position where, you know, we could go extinct. So.

• 2:17:26André Duqum?

  That's, I just feel like the immensity of it, it doesn't, it rarely happens on this podcast where I'm having a conversation around something to somebody who's at the leading forefront of a discovery that I feel like truly can be completely world-changing. So yeah, it just feels like, I feel like both the beauty and the weight of conversations like this.

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's an important point about this, and that is that if, the spiritual traditions have said for a long, long time that we all are from the one, but there's been no beef, right? Because we talked about before, it gives us no technology, the physicalist framework gives us all the technology, it gives us all the miracles, no miracles are, uncontested miracles are coming from the spiritual side. So it's easy for people to dismiss that we're all one, and you should love your neighbor as yourself, and so forth, because that doesn't work, it doesn't give us technology. And so you're just a physical system, your

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  consciousness emerges from your brain somehow, and when your brain is destroyed, you're gone, and you and I are definitely not connected, we're just separate bits of matter. That whole framework changes if we have a theory of consciousness that actually transcends what physicalist science can do. Then all of a sudden, now, the smart money is no longer on physicalist reductionist kinds of views. If the new technology and the new deeper scientific theory shows that spacetime is not fundamental, and it has this, you know, like with the trace logic, this clean implication that there's one source, and

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  it just falls right out of the mathematics. There's, again, no hand with, and that one mathematical structure, actually, if, you know, and again, I haven't proven it, but if it does give us Minkowski space and curved spacetime and so forth, the Born rule and these things I talked about, then all of a sudden, it changes the game. Now, the smart money is on, yeah, you and I.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Are one. You, I should love my neighbor as myself because my neighbor is myself just looking at me. So whatever I do to you, I'm really doing to myself. And now the best science says that. The best science does not say you're just a lump of atoms that happens to have some consciousness and you're competing with me for resources and I can do whatever I want to, to you because you're nothing, you're just a pack of neurons. I was good friends with Francis Crick. He was a wonderful man. I had lots, lots of time with him and enjoyed talking with him. But in his book, you know, The Astonishing Hypothesis says you're nothing but a pack of neurons. And of course, he was a gentleman.

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  He didn't treat people as a pack of neurons. But, but, but a science that says you're just a pack of neurons will lead a lot of people to have more.

• 2:20:29André Duqum?

  Exploitative ways of.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it can lead them. And again, I'm not saying that Francis was that way.

• 2:20:34André Duqum?

  Of course.

• 2:20:35Speaker 01

  Of course. Or any, or any of these, any of my colleagues. So my colleagues are wonderful people. They're brilliant, hardworking and moral and so forth. They're, they're wonderful. But I'm just saying that what does the philosophy itself entail? They've risen above the philosophy that physicalism entails. But with, if now all of a sudden, the new miracles are coming really from a theory beyond spacetime. If we can actually get new technology outside of spacetime and a theory that actually works outside of spacetime, then all of a sudden, it's no longer just some airy fairy mystical stuff to say.

• 2:21:15André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  You're all one. It's, it's, it's now, the burden of proof is on the person who wants to say, no, we're not all one.

• 2:21:25André Duqum?

  Can you speculate then, what would be some of the most impactful innovations from discoveries outside of spacetime? It seems like in so many ways, you're taking stuff straight out of sci-fi films.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  It blows my mind what the possibilities are. But the one way to think about it is to, again, think about the Grand Theft Auto example. Suppose you're a wizard at Grand Theft Auto. You've done it for years and you're the best in the world. You can drive your car faster than anybody. You can do all the tricks inside the game. That's quite an accomplishment. But if I'm the geek who wrote the code for Grand Theft Auto, I'm not stuck inside the rules of Grand Theft Auto. I make the rules of Grand Theft Auto and I can play with them. And I can take the gas tank of the wizard and empty it. I can give him a flat tire. Or I can make his car move from point A to point B without going through the space.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  I can just transport it, not through space, but effectively around the space. I can do miracles vis a vis the person inside Grand Theft Auto. What I can do is miraculous because I'm not inside Grand Theft Auto's space. I'm creating it. So as soon as we're not inside spacetime, the technologies, if, once we understand how to work with technologies outside of spacetime, it's like being able to write the code of Grand Theft Auto outside of Grand Theft Auto. Anything's possible. Literally, all the technology that we have now is trivial, absolutely trivial compared to what we can do. What you can do inside Grand Theft Auto is trivial compared to what the hacker can do who's writing the code.

• 2:23:05André Duqum?

  Would you list a few?

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  Sure. One thing is the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galaxy. It's like 2.3 or 4 million light years away.

• 2:23:24Speaker 01

  That's our nearest galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies, at least billions of galaxies. So getting there is a bit of a problem. Getting to our nearest neighbor is a bit of a problem going through space.

• 2:23:35André Duqum?

  You have to abide by the speed limit.

• 2:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can only go the speed of light. And so it's, and if you're massive, and hopefully we will retain our mass, we can't go the speed of light. So as long as you want to have a body, you cannot go the speed of light. And so even your great, great, great, great, great grandkids, put them on a ship, they're not going to get there in time. And that's our nearest galaxy. So there's this whole, 46 billion light years across the way you can see, or 92 if you look both directions or something, some massive thing, billions of light years across. And we can't get to the one that's only 2.3 million light years away, much less the tens of billions.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  So, but if spacetime is the final reality, then we're stuck. We have to go through spacetime, and oh, I'll just have to go faster and have great, great grandkids. But if spacetime is just a headset, and we learn the software, we can just move ourselves from here to there, just like the person, the geek can take the Grand Theft Auto car and say, it's no longer at Lincoln and Fifth Street, it's now over here on 23rd Street and so forth, and just give them the new coordinates, and there you are in the new location. So we will be able to have technologies that are indistinguishable from magic.

• 2:24:59André Duqum?

  Interstellar travel. What else?

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  Good question. I've been so busy with...

• 2:25:05André Duqum?

  It's fun to speculate.

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  Let me see what other technologies, because you can see my focus has been more on nailing down the technology itself.

• 2:25:17André Duqum?

  One step at a time.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  But that one was obvious, the Andromeda galaxy thing was obvious. Will?

• 2:25:28Speaker 01

  Well, we may be able to warp spacetime itself. Once we...

• 2:25:33André Duqum?

  Time travel?

• 2:25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, because time itself is merely a projection.

• 2:25:41André Duqum?

  Seems like you could bend reality at your will in many ways.

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  You will be able to, but not in the way that most people would think where if I just

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  focus and concentrate hard enough, I can change it. This will be technology. This will be... But it's going to be an interesting kind of technology.

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  So here's the trick about it.

• 2:26:10Speaker 01

  The only tools we have are in spacetime, right?

• 2:26:14Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  So we have to understand how those tools are related to the structures outside of spacetime. And that's what I'm working on, on the mathematics of that. We have to reverse engineer our headset in great detail. So for example, cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain. And most of us in my field have thought of the brain as creating consciousness, and it doesn't. But I still think we need more money for cognitive neuroscience because what we have to do is reverse engineer the brain and ask, what is the nature of this conscious agent dynamics outside of spacetime that projects into what we call neurons and neural activity synapses and so forth? Because that's how our headset is being created.

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  So once we understand cognitive neuroscience better and understand how to pull it back to the dynamics of conscious agents and the trace logic outside of spacetime. So if we're really understanding the details of our trace, what is our trace that's giving us this spacetime headset?

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  Then we'll be in a position to say, okay...

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  What tools within the, because right now, all I can do is use tools inside this trace. Now, I haven't thought about that. Now, is there any way for me to get tools outside the trace? That I don't know. I'll have to think about that, maybe. But certainly, we can use tools inside the trace, but we'd have to know exactly how those tools get pulled back into operations behind spacetime in the conscious state. And once we understand that, then we'll be able to manipulate things. It'll depend on how crude that mapping is, because we may be precluded from doing too much in the world behind spacetime if our tools in the pullback are too crude. But my guess is that there'll be, even if they are crude,

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  there'll be some new magic that we can do anyway. But then there's the question of can we directly start to access tools, not through our headset? And some spiritual traditions have talked about that kind of thing, where you aren't limited by the spacetime headset. And I'm not writing anything away, but I'm saying, right now, those things are on the schmystical side of things where, it doesn't mean they're not true. It just means that if they're true, they're not made rigorous enough yet for someone hard-nosed like me.

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  But they may be true, and I would want a hard-nosed way of saying that they work and why they work.

• 2:29:34André Duqum?

  I mean, again, through speculation, but if it is technically possible, and we get there one day, whoever would be the pioneer and therefore have control or ownership first would essentially have the capacity to play God. And that raises so many moral questions and power imbalances. And I know it's further down the line, and it's not here yet. But if that is the case, and these technologies are birth, whoever, individual, organization, country, has access to such technology first, I mean, that would just completely change the hierarchy of...

• 2:30:15Speaker 01

  Completely. What I would...

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  Hope, maybe even expect, is that someone who really understands this theory of consciousness well enough to be able to do that technology would deeply grasp its implication, that what you do to others is literally what you're doing to yourself, not figuratively, not some platitude. You are literally, when you torture that person, you are literally torturing yourself. If they really grasp that,

• 2:31:02Speaker 01

  then I think they'll be careful of how they open Pandora's Box.

• 2:31:07André Duqum?

  It's a good wish. It's a good wish.

• 2:31:09Speaker 01

  But your point is well taken. I'm not dismissing your point at all. It's well taken.

• 2:31:13André Duqum?

  Just a thought, I think.

• 2:31:14Speaker 01

  No, it's an important thought.

• 2:31:17André Duqum?

  What other thoughts around, when you look at the Fermi paradox, and you look at how big and vast this universe is with seemingly no observable life, why is it so silent out there? If there is potentially, probabilistically, so many more inhabitable planets with similar conditions to Earth, yet we cannot pick up signs of alien life?

• 2:31:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:31:44André Duqum?

  I'm just curious, your thought process around how alien life could very much so be operating through different rule sets or a different headset in which would explain why we cannot, in this third dimension, interact or seem to pick up them to the same degree we would originally think. So I'm curious what your thoughts are there. If there are potential alien life out there in the universe, which would be more probable than not, that might be very well operating within a different headset of sorts, different dimension, if you will.

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  That's right. And it's been a bit of a puzzle, as you mentioned, the Fermi paradox, that it's a huge universe, billions of light years across.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  If there's life out there, why haven't we seen it? What's going on here? And right now, there are no uncontroversial bits of evidence of life anywhere else except here on Earth. So it's quite an interesting paradox. And I mean, there's a great book by Sarah Murray Walker. She's worked with Lee Cronin and others on Assembly Theory of Life. Very, very interesting theory. And I've had the pleasure of talking with Lee on a podcast and discussing it with him. And they have a nice, interesting model of life where it's you have the Assembly Index

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  for objects and the more complicated, the more steps, the minimum steps required to build an object, the greater its Assembly Index. And if you have multiple copies of an object with high Assembly Index, then they suggest that that's indicative of some higher information processing system of life. And so it's an interesting theory, but it's still inside spacetime. And even if it's, if you try to expand it outside of spacetime, it's still a more computational kind of model of life, an information processing kind of model of life.

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  So my framework is different from that. And I'm saying that life itself is fundamental. There's no inanimate information process that gives rise to it. So it doesn't emerge from information processing of inanimate systems, that life itself, consciousness, is fundamental. So then your question comes even stronger. The Fermi paradox, okay, if life is fundamental, why don't we see it? I mean, just here on Earth, that's very, very strange. So how can, isn't this, isn't the Fermi paradox really good evidence for the physicalist's

• 2:34:45Speaker 01

  point of view? Look, it was all just matter from the beginning. We're just lucky on this one planet that that matter got complicated enough that life and consciousness emerged. So get rid of your consciousness first theories. The very lack of life and consciousness elsewhere shows that the physicalism is really the way of thinking about things. And, and so I turned that around and say, look, life is all around us. Consciousness is fundamental. We have a headset that gives us 0% of that reality. It's so the headset is losing all this information. So, so the aliens, where are they? You know, they're all around you. They're screened off by your headset.

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  What you can see are other people. You can see organisms and worms and so forth. You can see life and bacteria and so forth. But when I look at a rock, most of us say, well, when you look at a rock, you're interacting with something that's fundamentally inanimate. It's not, not living at all. And I say, not at all. You're interacting with a consciousness, the same consciousness that you are, but your headset has given up. Your headset says, look, I, I'm not telling you all reality. I'm telling you 0% of reality. And all I'm going to tell you now is I'm telling you about a rock. Behind that rock, there's an infinitely complicated consciousness, of course, living.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  So life is there as well. So there is no principal distinction between living and non-living things. That's not a principal distinction. And people who've been working on the problem of life have been trying to give a definition. What is the principal distinction between living and non-living and haven't been able to do it. And again, they're brilliant. The reason they can't do it is because it's the wrong problem. The problem is your headset.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  Is screening off life. It can't deal with the profundity of life. And so it desiccates it, literally desiccates life into inanimate, what we call inanimate matter. But behind that inanimate matter, if you could take off the headset, there's life and consciousness that would blow you away. So where are they? They're all around you. Just take off your headset.

• 2:37:13André Duqum?

  Actually, it makes a lot more sense when you look at things like the Fermi paradox and you're trying to find out why there isn't as much life bursting out there in the universe to the degree we would assume. But when you look at it from the lens of the limitations of our own headset, then you could see, oh, okay. It's just, we have a very limited scope on what we can perceive as life, you know, in the cosmos.

• 2:37:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, you know, we've always been told to be humble. And we always feel like, well, maybe I should be humble. But of course, that's just me trying to be good. But when you look at life through this lens, for example, the trace logic, and you realize that you know, 0% of reality, then it's no longer just sort of like a good idea to be humble. It's sort of like, it's in your face. If you're not humble, you're just flat stupid. So humility is just being intelligent and being proud and arrogant is really dumb.

• 2:38:24André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:25Speaker 01

  It's really stupid. So if you think you've got the theory of everything and we're that close to, you know, we're just a little bit more past the standard model, then it's easy to be arrogant because we're close to knowing everything. But when you realize, even if you get that next step past the standard model, you know, 0% of reality.

• 2:38:46André Duqum?

  Why is that good news? That there would be no final theory of everything? That reality itself will always transcend any theory we have of it? Why is that good news?

• 2:38:55Speaker 01

  Because you'll never be bored. You'll never be bored. Because from this point of, this bigger point of view, you are the one, the source. And There's literally no end of exploration of who you are and who your neighbor is. So your neighbor, and even that little worm, is a window. An aphid, a bacterium, are all windows. Even just a rock are windows on infinite exploration. So imagine a world in which at some point you'll know everything. That's a pretty boring world. Now, now I know it all, that that's all it was.

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  That's that, well, I think that's not the world we're in. We're in a world in which there's infinite exploration and the exploration is you. You are, but you transcend any scientific exploration. I'm a scientist, so when I say that, I'm not saying don't do science. I spend my life doing science. I'm all for science, but I'm all for doing it very humbly and saying,

• 2:40:07Speaker 01

  I'm here learning zero percent of myself, but it's a true representation, as true as I can, of this perspective on myself. But this is just one of countless perspectives. And when I die, I take this headset off and it's time for a different perspective. So, so, and all the time I'm seeing all the different, I mean, these beautiful plants, a different headset, perspective on the, on the one consciousness. So it's great because there's never going to be boredom. There's infinite exploration and a lot of the exploration will be done, as the mystical traditions have said, in silence.

• 2:40:53Speaker 01

  So I think that there's, and I do this now myself in my own scientific research. Of course, you do your mathematics, you do your, you study hard, no nonsense, no BS. But then if I want new creative ideas, I put it all aside and just sit in silence. And that silence itself is

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  Tapping into this infinite wisdom that everybody is.

• 2:41:18André Duqum?

  I think breeds reverence back into the human experience where from the purely reductionistic lens, not that everybody embodies that, the perspective of if it's all just bound a bundle of atoms, really, the best thing that you could do is extract the most of it, you know, you could use it to your benefit how you will. There's no inherent moral value or effect externally in that, in that aspect. But from this perspective, when you flip it on its head in this chain of causality, I am reminded of Thomas Berry's

• 2:41:58André Duqum?

  quote, that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

  Yes, very, very good.

• 2:42:06André Duqum?

  And the Vedantic lens of Indris Net. Are you familiar with that imagery? Yeah. It, to me, when you explain the trace logic and Markovian chain, like if it, it maps on perfectly with that almost because there is this wide net and within each jewel is reflected the, the, the others within it. And so it, it brings the coherence and connection of all life into that, into that image. I'm curious your thoughts there because it seems so consilient.

• 2:42:35Speaker 01

  I, I, I agree on both, both points. First, your point about that being a physicalist doesn't necessarily mean that you're amoral. In fact, I have many, many good physicalist friends and they're wonderful people and I trust them completely with my life and my kids and so forth. So I'm not, so I'm not, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, as you said, that these philosophies tend to have logical conclusions that move in, in different directions. But I, I agree with your point also about Indris Net, that there's something very, very.

• 2:43:06Speaker 01

  Similar in spirit, and so this could be, you know, the trace logic could be a first mathematical statement of Indra's net. And in saying that, I would say, not that it completely exhausts what the idea of Indra's net, but it's the first precise mathematical statement we could give. Maybe this Indra's net is pointing to something even deeper, right? Maybe the trace logic is just the first baby step we're taking outside of spacetime, and we will find, hopefully, much, much deeper structures. And maybe thousands and thousands of iterations of that, all at some point, you know, exploring

• 2:43:50Speaker 01

  the metaphor of Indra's net, more and more precisely, deeper levels. Maybe an inexhaustible direction to explore. And so I don't want to say, yeah, I done it with the trace logic. I would say, no, maybe I've taken the first scientific baby step in that direction, and hey, we took a baby step in that direction, and let's first nail this one down. Let's really get the math completely secure on this. So every step outside our previous series has to be really secure. Once we got that nailed down, then let's look outside the limits of the trace logic. That was fun. Now let's go on to the next thing. And maybe the Indra's net will still be a guide.

• 2:44:33Speaker 01

  Maybe it won't, but maybe it will be a guide to the next deeper step.

• 2:44:36Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 2:45:09André Duqum?

  To me, this has so many far-reaching implications on what it means to be a human. What is life? What is death? How does this to you change what death is? If there is no clear demarcation of a boundary between life and death, as we were speaking to earlier, and death is then merely taking off of the headset.

• 2:45:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, what does that change? What's your perspective on that?

• 2:45:38Speaker 01

  Well, first, I don't want to sound like more spiritual than I am. Someone would put a gun to my head, I'd be afraid. I'd probably wet my pants. So I'll just put that on the table right away. So anything that I say after this that sounds like I'm super spiritual, I'll just put that right on the table, okay? So, but now I'll try to think out of the box. Death from this framework,

• 2:46:00Speaker 01

  conscious agents and the trace logic, is merely taking off a headset. And there's an infinite number of headsets. And in some sense, the whole point of being here is just to look at myself from this perspective. Nothing that I build here is going to last. If I build an empire worth a trillion dollars,

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  I'm gonna walk away from it, whether I like it or not. I'm gonna walk away from it. Everything, any book I write is gonna burn or be destroyed. Anything, so nothing you do here lasts. So it's not about making some physical structure that's going to last forever, because it's not.

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  So what is it about? It's not about being important.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  Who was the most important person in 1753? Couldn't care less. Who cares? Who was the richest person in 1844? I don't care. No one cares. No one's gonna care. It's not important. So what is this all about? Because nothing that you build lasts.

• 2:47:10Speaker 01

  No one that you love is gonna live forever.

• 2:47:14Speaker 01

  From this, from in this framework, it was really not about living here forever in this little headset. It was enjoying this view of myself from this headset, learning about myself and not being attached to this. This is just one view. This is not me. This is a really, a really interesting view of me. Wow, this is really neat. You know, going to work, doing a job, cooking food, having kids, meeting people, doing podcasts, interesting perspective on myself. And I'm going to walk away from all of this and none of it will go with me. I'm, I'll just leave it behind. But that was a perspective on myself. And

• 2:47:59Speaker 01

  there's an infinite number of these. The, once I learn to get with the, not to be afraid, not to cling to what I already know. If I can just learn to enjoy the ride. This actually gets to the minimizing surprise stuff. So the trace logic actually is a little bit about this. Here I am in a particular trace. One way to think about growing up in this framework is moving to a bigger trace. Right? Expanding my horizon, move, move to a bigger trace. Well, when you do that, if I'm on a little trace and I'm going to expand to a bigger trace, all of my transition probabilities, all the probabilities of, you know, if, if I'm seeing red now, what's the probability I'll see green?

• 2:48:42Speaker 01

  Or if I do this with my cup now, what's the probability that it'll fall? Those probabilities are all going to change. So growing up means

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  not resisting the unexpected. Because the transition probabilities are different on the join, on the bigger space. Your, your minimal surprise model worked for your conscious states. It doesn't work if you want to expand your consciousness. You have to change all of your transition probabilities to be a new consciousness in the new domain. That means you have to be willing to not resist surprise. You have to be willing to, so when the spiritual traditions say, you must accept what is, that's, that's the key. That is the step in spiritual growth. Accept what is.

• 2:49:38Speaker 01

  It turns out the trace logic completely agrees.

• 2:49:43Speaker 01

  To go from where I am to the next bigger, next bigger step of join, I have to not resist all the changes in the probabilities that are required for the new join. That's what it means to be at the new join. And then, once again, as I go even bigger, I will have to not resist those. So what the trace logic is saying is, it actually, again, it either works or it doesn't. I'm not smart enough to make this stuff up. I mean, I just saw the trace logic, that probably isn't true. And so it's not me, it's really just the trace logic itself is so amazing. It basically says what the spiritual traditions have been saying, and that is, at every step, if you want to grow, don't

• 2:50:26Speaker 01

  resist surprise.

• 2:50:30André Duqum?

  It makes me think about how the species that survives is not the smartest or strongest, but the most adaptable, the one that is, has the capacity to be flexible and change with the uncertainty of times. And there is a great, in the Buddhist tradition, sort of understanding of the yardstick for your own degree of growth is essentially your equanimity throughout the ever-changing impermanent phenomena arising and passing away, and Nietzsche, this impermanent flow of experience that we're always moving through in life, and our ability to not stay attached to one experience, positive or negative,

• 2:51:15André Duqum?

  is, that's, that's, that's a real growth as a human being.

• 2:51:21Speaker 01

  I completely agree. And in some sense, the trace logic itself is just the logic of the experiences, but the measurable space behind it is what you're pointing to and the spiritual traditions are pointing to. That is the real deep you.

• 2:51:39Speaker 01

  That doesn't get changed or affected by all the play of experiences. So that equanimity makes sense in this trace logic framework. It actually, it doesn't in the physicalist framework. In the physicalist framework, your life hangs by a thread. And if something goes wrong with your body, it's extinguished. So you need to do everything you can to try to stay as long as alive as, because otherwise your consciousness is extinguished and it's completely game over for you. This other framework says, no, your consciousness is secure.

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  The play of forms is just a headset that you're trying on and you have, you are so deep and infinite that you can play with an infinite number of headsets and never, you know, completely explore who you are. So, so there's no reason to be afraid.

• 2:52:36Speaker 01

  But within the headset, it was, it is interesting though, I guess, putting on a headset for the, for the source to put on a headset, it goes in with both feet.

• 2:52:48Speaker 01

  Let me, I'm not just gonna sort of put on this headset, I'm gonna put on this headset.

• 2:52:53André Duqum?

  Fully assume the role of a separate self.

• 2:52:55Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's right. I'm gonna, I'm gonna really go in and I'm gonna be afraid. I'm gonna let my, and I'm gonna have dramas. And I'm gonna murder myself in another, I'm gonna really go into this whole thing and, and experience the whole thing. Otherwise, it's not really looking myself completely from that perspective. So it seems to be that as well, that, that you really do look at yourself from that perspective and you go all in, so much so that you lose for a while who you are, and then you have to wake up to who you are. And that's why if you put a gun to me, I would pee my pants, because I haven't completely awakened to who I am. Right?

• 2:53:41Speaker 01

  I can see now, but the process of really integrating that and understanding who I am as the one is still a process that I'm going through. And for me, having this mathematics is a help.

• 2:53:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:00André Duqum?

  Yeah, to me, it brings a lot of gratitude for the contrast of the good and bad things that we perceive in our life. You know, I just think of on the macro scale of like the most grotesque assassinations and calamities that are happening in the planet in contrast with the most beautiful grace and devotional love and outpouring and like the full contrast of what's available within human experience is quite astounding. And when it comes to our own personal life and our own personal struggles and different things, I think it brings some gratitude in the picture that we get to have the experience of many different versions and different feelings and emotions and what they all uniquely

• 2:54:43André Duqum?

  reveal about who we are in a true essence.

• 2:54:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:54:47André Duqum?

  And I know this is something that you've personally also been on in your own health journey with on COVID with your with your with your heart. I'm curious what has come up for you on the human emotional because there's of course the logical side where you can see and, you know, philosophize about a lot of these different things. But what when it comes to approaching your own human insecurity, you know, and not just what a potential, you know, death or disease would mean for the people that love you, but also the urgency of your work and the imminent discoveries that are coming to bear fruit. I'm just curious, how is how have you navigated your own process around around uncertainties of your health and the whole process?

• 2:55:29Speaker 01

  Well, it certainly has put my assumptions that I'm just a space time physical object right in front of my face. And I can see that, you know, the fears that I have of death, you know, going to an operation for my I have had two heart surgeries and I've had my heart started restarted with electric shock five times and so forth since COVID has been.

• 2:55:55Speaker 01

  Not the way I had anticipated the last five years to be. But COVID completely changed the game and it put my mortality front and center. I mean, I think I mentioned last time I texted my wife goodbye in hospital one time. So it certainly has, I've had the headset removal right in my face a few times and the headset's going to be removed. And there's nothing like having it almost removed a number of times in the last five years to have it not just be an abstract possibility, but an in-your-face reality and to see how I feel about it and to see the fears that are there.

• 2:56:38Speaker 01

  And to fate, I mean, of course, this is a complete fact and I would have, you know, even five years ago said, yeah, of course I'm gonna die. But, but not now, not now. Maybe in 40 years or something like that, but not, not now. And like you sort of, you can sort of ignore it and put it away, but when you're on the, in the hospital and you're texting your wife goodbye, it's no longer, you know, an abstract possibility. So it's, I think it's helped me in looking outside of space-time more and, but I then still see myself getting my sense of importance or who I am by what I might accomplish, what I might discover.

• 2:57:19Speaker 01

  And so I have to look at that and go, okay, to the extent that I get my sense of who I am by what I might discover and how important that might be, then to that extent that I still don't really know who I am. Because who I am is infinitely greater than that. So if I'm still looking to, to be important in some way, then, then I don't realize who I am and who you are, that...

• 2:57:47Speaker 01

  I like watching these videos by some Canadians called "Just for Laughs" gags. And they put people in all these unusual situations and they're all taking them very, very seriously. They're worried or they're... And then all of a sudden, they find it's a gag. And you see at the end, people start laughing and belly... And I watch them all the time. It helps to laugh and so forth. It's really good for you. But it's also what life is like. We're taking it all seriously and so forth. We're gonna take the headset off and laugh. And that's what happens in these gags. You're taking it all seriously. And then all of a sudden, you find out the whole thing was a gag. And then people have a good belly laugh about it.

• 2:58:32Speaker 01

  And so, there's that aspect about do your best while you're in the headset. But don't take yourself too seriously, the egoic self, too seriously. But the thing to take seriously, very seriously, is that you are the source that's infinite. But so is your neighbor, is your source that's infinite. And you know, this, think about this in the context of death. This is one big importance symbol from Christianity, right? The deepest symbol in Christianity is Jesus on the cross, being tortured to death in the most cruel way that people could imagine.

• 2:59:17Speaker 01

  And having it ours, the most utter cruel pain. And what did he say while he was in the process of watching the people who were hatefully killing him in the worst way that they could come up with? He said, "Forgive them. They don't know what they're doing." That's the deepest spiritual thing I've ever heard, right there. And that, you know, that is the centerpiece of Christianity. And I think of all true religion is to, to have that attitude, even in the face of people who are doing that to you. Now, I'm not saying I'm anywhere near Jesus.

• 3:00:00Speaker 01

  If I was on the cross there, I'm sure I would be pissed off and I'd be, but I'm saying that that's where my own theory says I should go.

• 3:00:09André Duqum?

  Leads to that transcendent way of being.

• 3:00:11Speaker 01

  Hoffman's emotions are not there. My mind is saying, here's the theory that's going to take me there. I have a lot of spiritual growing up to do, and all of us do. But that's where the deep heart of Christianity and any true religion, it's not in killing the unbelievers, being angry with people that disagree with you. It's forgiving them in the very moment in which they're hurting you. And if we do that, our country will be a very different kind of country.

• 3:00:47André Duqum?

  It's a different level of compassion when you hold the awareness of actions that are coming from a place of unconsciousness or unawareness, where it's really hurting the person doing it as well, of course, as well as other people that it's hurting in the external world. But you can have compassion for seeing people as phenomenas unto themselves, you know? Like if you see somebody who does a horrific thing and hurts a lot of people, but then you come to find out they have a brain tumor pressing on their amygdala, it puts a different context into the picture of, okay, I can have a bit more compassion for, it wasn't full, there wasn't full agency there. I just think that it's fascinating that you can extrapolate that all the way down, that

• 3:01:32André Duqum?

  there are many different forces within us that we would not see that are consciously chosen, but for the circumstances we were raised in or whatever, like, you know, people need to be held responsible for their actions and still we get to have, have more compassion for. All of the experiences that led them to the point in which they would do those things.

• 3:01:57Speaker 01

  I completely agree. And again, Jesus on this was very, very clear. In, I think, Matthew, chapter seven, in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, "Flat out, judge not." Period. Don't judge any-- it couldn't be clearer. There was no exceptions. He just said, "Don't judge other people." Period. And then he said, but-- and he also didn't say, "Judge yourself." He said, "Notice." He just said, "Notice the speck that's in your eye." "Don't judge the other person for the-- say that the--" "Just notice the log that's in your own eye, but don't judge your brother or your sister for the speck that's in their eye." So that is the heart of Christianity.

• 3:02:39Speaker 01

  Anything that involves hatred of the disbelievers, judging of other people, is absolutely not. Christ, absolutely not. Christ is-- absolutely no judgment, is complete compassion, complete love for your enemies. Love your enemies.

• 3:02:59Speaker 01

  Love anybody who's needy. That's the heart and soul. And the deep thing is what we've been talking about earlier.

• 3:03:10Speaker 01

  When you love your neighbor, you are loving yourself. That's the deep, deep thing. When you don't judge someone else, you're not judging yourself. Do you notice the speck? Jesus said, "Notice the log in your own eye." But he didn't say, "Judge yourself for it." He just said, "Notice it." And that's why, as soon as you notice it, you're not-- you're no longer stuck in it. "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm afraid." "Oh, yeah, I was mistreating that person. Oh, I was judging that person." "So I'm not going to judge myself because I was judging you. I'm going to just notice." And that's-- you know, "I wanted to kill all those people because they-- oh, whoa, that's, you know, okay. I'm not going to beat myself up. Okay, I'm just going to-- okay, I noticed. I was very angry. I wanted to beat them. Okay."

• 3:03:53Speaker 01

  Is Jesus mad at me? No, he wasn't mad at the people who were killing him. So he's not mad at me. It's a very, very different place. And the only way it makes sense is to realize that everybody is the source, seeing from a different perspective. That's the only way it makes sense.

• 3:04:10André Duqum?

  And I think for some of us, having the intellectual comprehension of that is supportive. And then for many, you know, the taste or the experience of that being so, and through meditative contemplative practices, move the needle more. We can take it where we get it, you know? All of it's welcome.

• 3:04:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And someone who's, you know, a slow learner like me has to do both.

• 3:04:33André Duqum?

  I'm right there with you. Don, I am always so fulfilled by the conversation that we get to have. And it's such an honor, honestly, to be able to have this discussion, explore the emerging discoveries, when you get fired up about all of it. And then all the implications for how it changes when we leave these chairs and when people turn off this podcast, to move through life with a bit more empathy, with a bit more understanding, with a bit more awe and curiosity. And I think that's a great thing.

• 3:05:06Speaker 01

  It was a great pleasure. Thank you very much, Andre.

• 3:05:08André Duqum?

  Yeah. Is there anywhere you want to point people to? Any last things that are coming out? Or yeah, just where do you want to point people towards if they want to get more familiar with you, your work?

• 3:05:20Speaker 01

  Well, my book, The Case Against Reality, is more about the evolutionary side. There's a little chapter about consciousness being fundamental at the very end. And I'm working on a paper on the trace logic that will be publishing a couple of papers on it. One mathematical and so forth. So there's nothing yet on the trace logic that people can read. So this is like my first time I've really been this deep in public with the trace logic. But there, I'm hoping, within a couple of months, there will be something out there that I can give to you. And you can, if you want to, send it to your audience.

• 3:06:00André Duqum?

  Sweet.

• 3:06:00Speaker 01

  Publication. So this is actually earlier, even before my publications are out on it.

• 3:06:05André Duqum?

  No, I feel very grateful to get early access to some of the papers and things that you're sharing. It's so fascinating.

• 3:06:12André Duqum?

  Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for tuning into this episode of the Know Thyself Podcast. Let us know in which ways this was impactful to you, and I'll see you next time. Thanks, Don.

• 3:06:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:06:38Speaker 00

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