Is Reality Really Real? With Donald Hoffman

Did evolution never give us the ability to see reality as it actually is? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman to explore what neuroscience, evolutionary game theory, and consciousness suggest about the nature of reality itself.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk's special edition, is reality real?

• 0:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you want it to be?

• 0:06Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say no, because then I do not owe anything to Visa.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up, what neuroscience says about the nature of reality. StarTalk, special edition.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk's special edition. Today, we're gonna be exploring the nature of reality.

• 0:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, really?

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really, reality. We got Gary O'Reilly, Gary right to my right, former soccer pro, announcer, and my co-host. And we got actor-comedian Chuck Nice. Yes. How you doing, man? Oh, the lord of nice. The lord of nice. Wow, I've never, well, okay. Yeah, yeah, deal with it. So, set the picture here. What do you put together?

• 1:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, in theoretical physics, they often ask questions about the nature of reality. But what about looking at reality from the neuroscience lens? Today, we're going to talk about the limits to our perception, the role of consciousness, and the nature of reality itself. Yes, Neil, time to bring in our guest. This one's gonna go deep, so I'm looking forward to it.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's see where it takes us. We've got Professor Donald Hoffman. Donald, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, Neil. Good to be with you, all of you.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're Professor Emeritus, you're not that old. In the Department of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine, right there in Irvine, California. You're obviously a cognitive neuroscience scientist and an author. I have, most recently here, and if you have another book, let me know, "The Case Against Reality." Nice. Shots fired. Let me tell you, I'm an expert in that. Shots fired. "How Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes." Love it. I love it. All right. So, what are you saying? We're not, we don't really see the full picture? I mean, I agree with you. Who would disagree with that? But you're bringing in evolution to blame for this.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, can you catch us up on what you mean by that?

• 2:24Speaker 03

  That's right. So, the standard view is that... Evolution shapes organisms to be fit. And surely, to be fit, we should see the world pretty accurately. Right? You want to see a cliff. If there's a cliff and not fall off, you want to see what is a mate and so forth, so.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, when you say fit, you don't mean it like in a fitness center?

• 2:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  Right. It's not a crunch gym thing.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not crunch, right. Please remind us what evolutionarily, what the word fit means.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  That's right. So in Darwin's theory, fitness really means the chance that you're going to have offspring successfully. So fitness is really one thing. Was the probability that you will survive long enough to raise your offspring successfully. That's what.

• 3:10Chuck Nice?

  Wow, okay. Uh, clearly Darwin had no children.

• 3:15Chuck Nice?

  He would know they will kill you. And I don't mean like murder, I mean just having them will kill you.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so we're trained to not run off the cliff, to run the opposite direction of lions.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else, what else are we really good at?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Well, avoiding poisons and things like that and finding right mates. So we're not, we don't try to mate with trees or rocks or things like that, so we.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  Speak for yourself there, Don.

• 3:45Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry. I had to do that.

• 3:48Gary O'Reilly?

  And so many people have conjured up an image.

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Of a drunken Saturday night.

• 3:54Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, go ahead, Don, continue.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Right, so, so the standard view, not only among people who are, you know, sort of just partially acquainted with evolutionary theory, but for people who are deeply acquainted with the theory, is to assume that Darwin's theory entails that, um, most of the time, we see reality as it is. Of course, not all of the time. There are illusions and so forth, but the idea would be, if you're going to be fit in Darwin's sense of being reproductively, um, you know, successful, then you need to see reality as it is. And. What I have done with some colleagues, Chaitam Prakash, Manish Singh and others, is to look at the mathematics of evolution. It turns out Darwin wasn't a mathematician,

• 4:40Speaker 03

  but a century after he published his theory, mathematicians turned it into mathematics, and it's called evolutionary game theory. John Maynard Smith and others worked on this. So we can now ask specific mathematical questions of Darwin's theory. And the answer when we look at the mathematics is that the probability is zero that any organism has ever been shaped at any time to see any aspect of objective reality as it is. It's just precisely zero. I didn't expect that when I went into it. I expected to have the answer be that we saw reality some other time, but maybe not as often as we thought we would. Steven Pinker has published a paper on that idea.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  He has some good arguments for why, you know, there are pressures from evolution not to see reality as it is. So Pinker's already been there, and I know he's talked with you before. And so what I was surprised, though, when we looked at the mathematics, the answer was the probability is zero.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so now I have to, we have to back up a bit.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean by reality? If you're going to assign a zero to it, I want to know what it is you just zeroed out.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Wow, so yeah, because, I mean, mathematically, reality would have to have a value if it equals zero.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If at some point you're going to give it a zero.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it seems to me the teeth on that lion is pretty reality-looking.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cliff ledge feels pretty real to me.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  The interesting thing about the mathematics is you don't have to specify what reality is for the mathematics to still give you the theorem. So whatever, so I don't have to assume what reality is. I can just look at the structure of evolutionary theory and say, suppose there is some reality out there, and there are these so-called fitness payoff functions. So Darwin talks about payoffs, and the payoffs really are effectively, if I have an organism... Like a lion in a particular state, like it's hungry, and it has some actions to take, and one of them might be eating, you know, a leopard, or eating an antelope, something like that.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or eating you.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Or eating you, then for that lion, that's a very, you know, that's a very good payoff, right? But if it's looking to be, you know, to eat and is priced for a rock, it's gonna have a very poor payoff. And so you can have these abstract payoff functions. And so we don't have to know what reality is. We can just look at the property of these payoff functions. And we can ask, whatever reality is, what's the probability that a payoff function would tell you about that reality?

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I still don't know what you're talking about. So I don't mind representing these forces that operate on your fitness, on your survival. I have no problems abstracting those to mathematical elements. But I need you to tell me that the lion that is chasing me isn't real, and you're not saying that.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm gonna get there.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, damn.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  That's just the lion.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just the lion. Get to me before the lion does.

• 7:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, then let me just dovetail that real quick. Is it possible, then, that the probabilities don't mean anything? If the fact that they come out to zero, but yet the lion can still eat you, and, I mean, that's pretty real to you. I mean, is it very possible that although the probability, you know, equates to zero, that maybe that's a particular probability that has no value to us?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  It's in the nature of scientific theories, just to see what they say. Right? All I'm doing is saying, this is what Darwin's theory says, when we mathematize it. And Darwin's theory says there are these things called payoffs, right? If you, you know, you pick an organism, like the lion, its state, hungry, or wanting to mate, and an action, like feeding, fighting, fleeing, or mating, and then I'll give you a number for how good that was. How, you know, that's what the payoff functions are. And whether or not you like Darwin's theory, I'm just saying this is what the mathematics of Darwin's theory says. And when you look at that mathematics, then it says, the payoff functions do not have information about reality. Almost surely. When I say almost surely, that means...

• 9:01Speaker 03

  A hundred percent of the time, basically.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So maybe, I'm gonna reword what I think you're actually saying, and you tell me if I'm completely off the point. What you're saying is, it doesn't matter whether it's real in any objective sense. All that matters is whether the organism responds in a way that is in the interest of its own survival.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  That's exactly right, Neil.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's okay.

• 9:24Chuck Nice?

  I mean, I think that's pretty, you know, reasonable and feasible to accept.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So it doesn't matter to me that it's real, is a different statement from saying it isn't real.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Well, so what I would say is that, what Darwin's theory tells us is that we were shaped not to have a window on the world, but to have a VR headset that lets us play the game of life. That's the simple bottom line. So, most of us think we were shaped with senses that give us a mostly true depiction, a true window on reality. And what Darwin says is basically, no, you have a VR headset that lets you play the game of life, where the winning strategy is offspring. How many offspring you have. And so that's that. So the idea then is, in some sense, this is what we're perceiving is more a VR thing than a true picture of reality.

• 10:24Chuck Nice?

  I can believe that because I don't know exactly when it was, but we did an episode. We were talking about measurements. And basically, we got into this area of, in science, without these tools, our measurements would suck because we would have to rely on our senses.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our senses, correct.

• 10:44Chuck Nice?

  And our senses are never sufficient to measure things properly.

• 10:49Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so pick up from there, Don. There are species here on planet Earth. The reality is, A, maybe a mantis shrimp that can see so many different colors, a bat that exists with so na, birds that can register light on a UV spectrum. Their reality is different to ours, surely. But these are all sensory capabilities. Are we just not able to process the data? Is that what we're trying to say here?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Partly, there's so much data that we can't process, but it's even deeper than that. We don't see reality because what we've got are tricks and hacks. And I'll give you a concrete, funny example. Alright. There's a jewel beetle in the outback of Australia. So these beetles are dimpled, glossy and brown. The males fly, the females are flightless. And the males fly around looking for eligible females. And if a male finds one, he alights and mates. And so that's, and they've done that for who knows how long, tens of thousands of years. It's been a very successful life for the jewel beetles. But it turns out that there are some beer bottles that guys like to drink from in Australia. They're dimpled, glossy and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these

• 12:02Speaker 03

  male jewel beetles. So these guys will throw them out into the desert and jewel beetles flock all over these bottles. They get on them, they're crawl all over them trying to mate and the females aren't getting anything. This just all bottle.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause the guys are idiots. What else is new?

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say that that's more an admonition against beer. Those are the truest beer goggles ever.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Okay, so that evolutionary element got hijacked by the beer bottle.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  That's right. So the beetles, the males have full body contact with the bottle. They're crawling all over it and yet they cannot tell that this is not a female. So it's truly stunning. What did they learn? You would think that the males actually had been shaped by evolution to know what a female is. No, all they had was a simple hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown, the bigger the better. And that was what they were looking for.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they didn't need to know more than that. They need to know basis.

• 13:05Chuck Nice?

  No, they had to, right. I'm gonna go with Neil's assertion that they're idiots. Cause I'm gonna tell you something. We have in our species, something called real dolls. And although they call them real, we know they're not real.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you really though? Okay.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Imagine this, an alien spacecraft lands, an alien comes out, and you are the first human it ever meets. What do you do? What do you say? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I offer a guide to how to survive that first alien contact, not only scientifically, technologically, culturally, and even socially. Not only for yourself, but in that moment, you are a representative of the entire human species. You want to leave a good impression.

• 14:13Gary O'Reilly?

  If we're only able to process a minuscule part of reality, what happens to our minds when we introduce psychedelics? And maybe you could pick up on that.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man, I'll let the good doctor go first. Because I've never done psychedelics, nor do I have any intent to do so. On the grounds that the human mind barely works at all as a data-taking device in our environment. And I highly value objective reality. So if I'm going to stir in chemicals into my brain, I don't know what the objective is, but if it takes me farther away from reality, I can't, it's not calling to me. In the words of Ray Manzarek, "It's about mind expansion, man." Yeah, I don't want to expand in a place that is farther away from objective reality. So, okay. It's all you now, Don.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Right, so I myself have not taken any psychedelics, but I'm collaborating with people who have and who are doing search into this. And most of the time, I would say, the best hypothesis is they're just screwing things up, right? The psychedelics are just sort of addling your brain. But there are cases where I think it's worth scientific research to try to figure out if something deeper is going on, perhaps in the case of DMT, for example. But I should say that what I just said about evolution gives me a different view on neuroscience than you would normally hear from a neuroscientist. So I'm a neuroscientist. I love to study the brain. And I think that neurons

• 15:51Speaker 03

  do not exist when they're not perceived.

• 15:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, that's more quantum, isn't it?

• 15:55Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Yeah, you went total string theory on us.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he went total quantum.

• 16:00Chuck Nice?

  Neuro quantum string theory.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He went off the quantum ledge on that.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  That's right. So the idea is that if it's a VR headset kind of thing, what you see is what you render on the fly. So if you're in like a game like Grand Theft Auto and you see a red Corvette off to your right, well, there is no red Corvette in reality because the supercomputer has no red Corvette in it. So the red Corvette that I'm seeing is there when I look and render it. And when I look the other direction, it's gone. So the Corvette only exists as I perceive it. Now, if I'm multiplayer game and someone else is looking at a red Corvette, um, when I'm not, they're seeing their red Corvette. They're not seeing the one that I saw.

• 16:39Chuck Nice?

  They're not seeing yours. You just described the game of adult peek-a-boo.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. That's funny. Uh, but explain to me, because I've never played Grand Theft Auto.

• 16:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does it render only the, the direction you're looking in to save CPU?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  That, that's right. That's typical of games.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it knows which way you're looking?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so.

• 16:59Chuck Nice?

  Because it doesn't make sense if you're not looking at it for it to be rendering because you can't see it anyway.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been the major argument, uh, in simulation theory.

• 17:07Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where why would the programmer waste computer power?

• 17:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Simulating things that no one is conscious of.

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, just, just make it exist when you get there. So for example, if you dig into the earth, it only has to make the layers of the earth when you get there.

• 17:26Chuck Nice?

  Right, too, right.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's way cheaper.

• 17:28Chuck Nice?

  Way cheaper.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way, way more accessible to the programmer than creating everything at all, uh, there all at once.

• 17:35Chuck Nice?

  That, that, that's my theory on the speed of light. If there's a simulation.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 17:40Chuck Nice?

  The reason why you can't go faster than the speed of light is because that is the speed at which they need to create the simulation so that it can be there when you see it.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I had a theory. That's your hypothesis. I just want to.

• 17:53Chuck Nice?

  Oh, sorry. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Now, that's my idea.

• 17:58Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. You've both, you've both.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a thought.

• 18:01Chuck Nice?

  That's my thought.

• 18:02Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So you've both tapped into simulation theory. Don, is, is that what's in practice here? I mean, is, are the realities layered and one within another?

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Simulation theory, as is typically put out, like Nick Bostrom and others who are, Elon Musk are interested in it. So I'll say at top level, yes, this is very, very similar, but I'll make two important distinctions between Bostrom's point of view and what I'm saying. One point is that Bostrom says, you know, we're probably a simulation and there's some geek with a computer at a different level that's programming us and making us up, but that geek is actually simulated by someone at even lower level and you can go down many, many levels until you get to the bottom level. And the bottom level, he assumes, is a physical spacetime level.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A real thing.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  And that's where I get off the train, because I say, there's no reason on evolutionary grounds to believe that spacetime is fundamental. In fact, we have good reason to believe on high-energy theoretical physics grounds that spacetime is doomed, as many high-energy theoretical physicists say. Spacetime is doomed, and they're looking for new structures beyond spacetime. So I don't want to say that, I don't want to buy that the bottom level is a spacetime level. And the second part of the standard simulation theory that I don't buy is that, the idea is that you can simulate consciousness, conscious experiences, through algorithms on computers. And I'm good friends and colleagues with most of the players who are trying to do this, and it's a remarkable thing.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  I mean, these are brilliant, brilliant scientists, but the hard fact is that, to date, there's not a single, specific, conscious experience that any scientific theory has ever been able to show we could program up. For example, there's no theory about how we get the taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic, nothing. So we are batting exactly zero right now in terms of any theory that will explain a specific conscious experience. So I think it's a principal failure. These people are brilliant, many of them are geniuses, they're good friends of mine. If we could do it, I think we would have done it. And we haven't been able to do it, so...

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I mean, it's very possible that we don't have the computing power to do it, because we're...

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, all you just said...

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I may summarize, is that we don't understand consciousness yet as we think... It exists. So I don't believe you're saying anything deeper than that. It's just a frontier, a neuroscience physics frontier. So what point are you making other than saying, we don't understand it yet? I can say, we don't know happened before the Big Bang. That's a frontier.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not trying to say anything deeper than that. If we don't understand it, we don't understand it. We have top people working on it. So where are you trying to take us there?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  So where I'm taking us is that for the last 30 or 40 years, there's been concerted effort by many brilliant neuroscientists and computer scientists. And a number of theories proposed, for example, integrated information theory, Penrose and Hameroff's quantum collapse of microtubules theories. Various, there's lots of specific mathematically precise theories. And when you ask them, okay, you have a theory of of observation, conscious experiences. What specific conscious experience can you explain? And the answer is zero. And this is one after.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still a frontier. And what I tell people is, you know, by the way, of course, there's a book published on consciousness three times a year. Okay, like a number, it'll be pretty close. And and that is evidence we don't yet understand consciousness. Because if we did, all the publications would stop and we'd be on to some other subject. So the more that's published on something, it's evidence of how little we understand. That's the point I'm trying to make.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  Makes sense.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Donna, as you know, in biological circles, there's a lot of talk lately about emergence. Like the flocking of birds. You know, if you can analyze every cell of a bird and every molecule within it, it doesn't say.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Nothing indicates flocking.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flocking, yet together, they all sort of know what they're doing. So might consciousness be something emergent within our evolutionary tree? Or is it, that is, you need these other base ingredients and then consciousness manifests atop them all? Or do you think it's built into our code?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  So most of my colleagues who are, you know, scientists who are studying consciousness from a physiological or computational point of view, would think that consciousness somehow emerges from either properties of algorithms or properties of neural activity or so forth.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a chat, a chatbot's conscious?

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has consciousness emerged, given they have access to every word we have ever posted on the internet? That's a big slice of anyone's brain, uh, of, of the summation of many brains. But will you deny them consciousness? Because I don't think Turing would.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Turing would. Most of my colleagues would say that they're, they're conscious. And, and I, I would say that the whole question is framed the wrong way. We're starting with something inside of our headset and we're asking if the headset can generate consciousness. And I think it's the other way around. The consciousness looks at itself through infinitely many different headsets and spacetime is just one of them. And the proof of this will, will be whether or not one can actually use neural activity or some kind of algorithms to actually give theories, not, not just claims, but a theory of specific conscious experiences. I like the taste of mint.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Give me an algorithm and a theory that says this must be the taste of mint, a scientific theory that says this must be the testament and here is why. Or for example, in the case of integrated information theory, a theory of, of neural activity or, and more general than neural activity, a, a theory about how the right kind of causal structures could be conscious experiences. I would again ask them, give me a specific integrated information causal structure that must be the taste of mint. Right now there is zero on the table. There are no successes.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, for, for humans as well as chatbots. So you can't, you can't, you know, blame chatbots for that.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think my, my view is consciousness does not emerge from algorithms. It does not emerge from neurons. It does not emerge from anything inside space and time whatsoever.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  In fact, it's the other way around. Space and time and everything inside them emerges as a trivial headset from consciousness.

• 24:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So are we looking at mathematics as the key to a solution? Are we looking here at consciousness being a quantum, I want to say thing, but that sounds really clumsy and, and heavy, but.

• 25:06Chuck Nice?

  I mean, why couldn't it be a quantum manifestation though?

• 25:08Gary O'Reilly?

  So in which case, when does spacetime cease to exist and at what scale, what level are you saying that that stops to happen?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Well, on the very last question, I can say that it's not me saying it, but actually the high-energy theoretical physicists tell us precisely where it stops. It stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a Planck scale.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  That's Planck.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, yeah. So, so just to be clear here, spacetime, as we think of it as a continuum, as described by Einstein, is very successful in accounting for what we see in the universe. What we find is that on these, I can't even call it granular scale, because it's way smaller than that, there's a breakdown, and the general relativity does not play nice in the sandbox with the quantum. But most people are betting on the quantum because of how successful it has been. If I were you, I'd bet on the quantum. Stick with the quantum. But before you even go further on that, Gary, Don, I want to

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  just assess layers of reality, not in a programmer's sense, but there's still the lion, the matter of the lion that has teeth. And I see teeth, and those teeth will eat me. And so, I cannot embrace your statement that that is some kind of virtual reality that does not correspond with an objective reality. Because I can, as a scientist, this is what we've been doing since Galileo, and especially since the 19th century, we can create a machine that can make a measurement that does not use your neurons. And I can say, I'm looking

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  at a furry thing with a mane and big teeth, and it weighs 800 pounds, and it walks on a scale, the scale registers 800 pounds, a picture gets taken of it, it's got a mane, it's got big teeth, and 10 minutes later, I am maul'd. So, I have a hard time embracing your statement that evolution prevents me from seeing the objective reality of what just happened.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Well, so, a couple, I'll just say that the evolution says the probability is zero that any measurement gives you a true picture of reality. But the issue that you raised about observation is really a critical one. I think it's, in fact, the central issue before science today. What's remarkable is that science does not have a theory of observation. And that's one of the biggest open problems in science that's widely, widely recognized. I mean, John Wheeler, in his famous 1989 paper from Bit, was basically saying, "We have to reboot our physics with some, what he called, observer participants." And Frank Wilczek has said the same thing, "We need to have a theory of the observer."

• 28:11Speaker 03

  And what's remarkable is, now, in the quantum measurement problem, so where we're trying to figure out how, when we make measurements in quantum theory, we have the unitary, one evolution, it's called the unitary evolution, when you're not looking, and then there's this collapse when you're supposed to be observing. And there is no theory yet about that collapse. So where science is right now is, we don't have a theory of observation. And what's stunning about that is, if you think about what science is, it's a bunch of people that are looking and talking to each other and saying, "This is what I saw. What did you see? Let's compare notes.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Let's try to understand, how to understand what are different perspectives and views and observations."

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I have to correct that. They're not saying, "This is what I saw, what did you see?" They're saying, "This is what I measured, what did you measure?" And so, so let me add to your comment that we don't have a theory of observation, that's definitely true, but as a correlate to that, we don't have a full theory of measurement.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're related, they're related, because...

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Because the wave function collapse is consistent through all those who measure.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. And, but, it's, right, except, if you're not measuring it, it's not collapsing.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they're related.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So I don't want it, so I'm still trying to take human perception out of this equation because I can build a machine to make the measurement. Now, you're a neuroscientist, so perception is everything, but coming to you as a physicist, I cannot embrace the idea that we are perceiving anything, because we work really hard to get our five senses out of the experiment.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  When you make a measurement with a physical device, it doesn't get into a scientific theory until some person actually perceives the measurement outcome.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, but we can all then look at that measurement and agree what it says without having to trust someone's testimony for what they observed.

• 30:18Chuck Nice?

  Or are you saying that the agreement itself is a shared perception?

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Well, we know from Einstein that if we both are looking at, we're both measuring the velocity of an object or the speed or the shape of an object, we're going to get different answers depending on our frame of reference. Right, but we actually know how to to translate between, you know, Neil's frame of reference and Chuck's frame of reference to to say, even though they got different answers, we can make, make, understand that they somehow agree.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is no, there is no transference into Chuck's frame of reference.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has his own.

• 30:53Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. Let me, let me tell you something right now. It's a mess up in here.

• 30:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we've talked, we've talked about how we as humans can perceive and our frameworks, etc. What if we now find alien beings who have the sensorial capacity to be able to absorb way more data than we possibly could of the reality? Are we then, and I can get carried away now, looking at a fourth, fifth, sixth dimension in which these problems that we've fumbled with are solved?

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, before you get there, that's an important question.

• 31:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That I address in my recently published book.

• 31:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh oh.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take me to your leader.

• 31:32Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a whole chapter on alien powers that they could have.

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's even a-

• 31:37Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm currently reading that, so I haven't got to that.

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You haven't got to that. There's a story by Voltaire, of all people, written in the mid 18th century, where he imagines, this is one of the earliest total alien fictional stories imagined, where there's an alien 26 miles tall.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what did this say? Stay with me. He's in the NBA.

• 31:59Chuck Nice?

  Very good. The Knicks, he's joining the Knicks next year. They're gonna win another championship.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, we got the numbers, he's just 26 miles away and he has 7,000 senses. And he comes upon other life forms and can't fathom how they can be so tiny and have so few senses and still understand or perceive the world. As we would look at a nurse one. Exactly, exactly. So, people have gone there before, but I just want to say that these machines are not only measuring things to replace our senses, they're measuring things that our senses have no access to. Like the ultraviolet.

• 32:39Chuck Nice?

  Ultraviolet.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the infrared.

• 32:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And gravitational perturbations and ionizing radiation. It has nothing to do with our senses, but we have machines that can measure them. And so, I'm quite proud of this scientific community for building what are now dozens of senses of the world, so that when someone comes to your dinner party and says, "I have a sixth sense."

• 33:05Chuck Nice?

  You could say...

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give it to them.

• 33:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then...

• 33:07Chuck Nice?

  What you have is a delusion.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let them, let them have their sixth sense, but say, "I have another dozen." So, yeah, why don't you be impressed with mine? So anyhow, I don't think of things that our senses can't detect as some magical other reality. They're just things that our machines ultimately were able to bring to our awareness.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  I don't want to speak for Don, but I think he's saying that somehow our perceptions and those machines are tied together.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yes, in the following sense, that we have, I'm claiming that our perceptions of the world are just a particular headset. We have a three-dimensional space, one-dimensional time headset with certain properties. I could imagine other headsets that have four dimensions, five dimensions, 20 dimensions, have senses built into them that we can't, you know, for example, uh, you know, electric sensing in water, things like that. I think sharks could be that kind of thing.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So this, so your headset...

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Metaphor?

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Metaphor, thank you.

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  That was the word I was looking for. He sensed that.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that headset metaphor is quite potent with regard to your aliens who are coming to visit.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  It is, and in fact, I'm collaborating with Andrew Gallimore, who is a world expert on DMT and the studies of that. And one thing that we're, I have a mathematical model of how this headset, our headset is built, and a theory of observation, and we're using that to try to begin to model how we might understand alien intelligences as having different headsets that are different from ours in ways that we can actually write down mathematics. For example, our headset may be a subset of theirs. They may have higher dimensions than we have.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love me high dimensional aliens, that'd be the funnest thing ever.

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  Well, believe it or not, I met higher dimensional aliens while I was doing ayahuasca. I'm not even lying, man.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, did you know, did you know this? I only knew it researching for my book.

• 35:08Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a subset of DMT users that all agree that they're interacting with aliens, and they have formed a subgroup within DMT user, the user group.

• 35:17Chuck Nice?

  I did not know that.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an alien subset, and they want to get together, see if they're actually somehow cross-dimensional communicating with aliens, and they're gonna compare notes.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  I would say that makes perfect sense, because in my experience, quite frankly, I had, and maybe I did, because here's the thing, I felt like the entire time, first of all, you're not high when you do ayahuasca, that's a misnomer, you are not, a misconception, you're not like, you know, "Oh my god, I'm tripping my balls off," it's no, you're, it's like your brain has been subsectioned, and you're kind of in touch with all of the different sections of your brain, but the whole time I was telling myself, "This is my perception, this is all coming from my brain," and the ayahuasca was like, "And what difference does that make?"

• 36:11Chuck Nice?

  Because it doesn't make any of this any less real. And the more I accepted that, the more expansive the experience became, and I met beings that told me that, quite frankly, the way it works is, we're in a really [BLEEP] dimension.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Don, in your new metaphor, if you can actually mathematically model that, then it becomes more than a metaphor, it becomes a tool to calculate. What confidence do you have that Chuck actually had access beyond his current dimension?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  As a scientist, I'm hard-nosed and I'm completely agnostic, but I want to do experiments. And so I'm actually designing experiments with Andrew Galenbar where we would, for example, Andrew has this technology where you can put people under DMT for extended periods of time. So for more than just three or five minutes, you can put them in there for an hour or something like that, or 20 minutes. So you can actually have extended... So what we would like to do is say, are these aliens real? In the sense that they're sort of, we can, we could have one Nuenaut, one person who's taking DMT, go and give an alien creature in the DMT world some piece of information, and then have that transmitted to somebody else, a different person.

• 37:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good way to test that.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  So we're coming up with experiments like that where, I'm completely hard-nosed. If that can be done, I don't know if I will believe it even then. I would want to do a bunch of experiments, but at least a little.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I feel the same way about out-of-body experiences, where you, if you're on the, in the bed, get someone to write something that's facing upwards. If you have an out-of-body experience looking down on your body, you should be able to read that statement. And then come back and say, well, what does it say? Or roses are red, or some simple phrase that would be easy to remember and to read. So yeah, you're doing exactly the right science-minded testing.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  And so I'm actually hard-nosed about it and disbelieving until I have hard evidence for it. But at least this headset theory says it's possible. So since it's possible, we should really check it out. But the higher probability is just that your brain got screwed up somehow, your headset got screwed up. But if it's actually, if DMT is actually changing a parameter in the headset that says you were stuck with the three dimensions of space, but DMT is now taking you to four or five, and it's just a parameter change, and we can actually see more dimensions than we had seen before, I certainly want to know that and find that out.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What in evolution would have allowed that to even be accessible to us?

• 38:54Speaker 03

  Well, what's interesting is when you look at, there are high-energy theoretical physicists who are studying structures outside of spacetime now, as you probably well know. They're called positive geometries. And the European Research Council has a 10 million euro initiative. And there are many, many high-energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians finding structures outside of spacetime. And when you look at these structures, they have a, one of, some of the structures, something called the amplitude hedron, has a parameter n, which, when it's four, corresponds to our spacetime. One dimension of time, three dimensions of space. But these geometries then say, but we're not stuck with four.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  You can have 10, a billion, a trillion. So your spacetime is just n equals four, but our geometries outside of spacetime aren't stuck at four. We can go anywhere you want. So already, we're seeing, in high-energy theoretical physics, a point or two, this may not be the only reality, n equals four. The mathematics allows us to go to n equals whatever you wish. And four, we're sort of, we got the cheap headset. We got the cheap.

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was told, and I'm telling you right now. What you just described is something that the tribes who actually do the rituals where I was in Costa Rica, and they're called sacred geometries. That's what they're called. Sacred geometries. And in these sacred geometries, there are representations of dimensions that seemingly are infinite, but like I've described before, are like a deck of cards. They're like a deck of cards that go in all directions. But they're dimensions. Some of them larger, some of them smaller, some of them where the communication happens

• 40:46Chuck Nice?

  downward, but we're in a crappy dimension where we can't go upwards or outwards. And so we have to be communicated with from above or beside. Don, why are we in a crappy dimension? It's all your fault. And listen, I was just like this. I thought the whole time I kept saying to myself, "You're high." That's all I kept saying. But the more I talk to people like you, Don, and Brian Greene, and Janna Levin, this stuff that I really didn't have any knowledge of is kind of the basis of the experience. I'm just saying.

• 41:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so these positive geometrics, are they going to be the solution to what David Chalmers phrased as the hard problem of consciousness?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 41:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  And I think that the high-energy theoretical physicists aren't trying to do that. They are trying to understand observation. So that's a big, big problem, open problem in quantum gravity right now, especially the attempts to get quantum gravity that are forced mathematicians and physicists to say, "You know what? We've never understood the observer, and it looks like that is the obstacle. We need to go back and really understand what an observer is." And that may be the key.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if you're going to take something we don't understand in the quantum realm, and then you're going to take consciousness, which you don't really understand in the neuroscience realm, staple them together and turn that into an explanation of something that you're going to trust, feels like very unstable ground to be standing on.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Completely, I agree. So I think that we can talk about observers without worrying about consciousness first. We can just ask, "Can we get a mathematical model of observation?" And I think we can. I've got my own model right now that I'm working on, and it's a simple model of observation that doesn't assume consciousness or non-consciousness to be fundamental. It just is a mathematical model of observation. I personally think that consciousness is important and fundamental, but this mathematical model doesn't require that.

• 42:57Gary O'Reilly?

  We've said so many times when we've come together, the three of us, that the problems that we're not able to solve right now, and now I'm a scientist, right? Exactly, thank you. Requires different thinking. Do you consider yourself now in that realm? And if you are, what different thinking are you looking at we now need to take? The measures that you need to bring forward that are different, that we haven't yet thought of?

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Yes, so I think that we have to just think very, very clearly about what does it mean to observe? We need to get it to its bare essence, no extra bells and whistles. What is the absolute minimum essential for observation? We need to understand that mathematically. Then we ask, we have to ask, can we start with that and that alone to build up all of modern physics? So it's a new foundation. We don't start with spacetime because we now know that spacetime is doomed. That cannot be fundamental. We, it stops at the Planck scale. So what are, what are the new foundations going to be? I think that Leibniz was right. Leibniz said, we need to start with observation. He called them monads.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  And he said, there had to be these monads that were somehow interacting and had, had some kind of mathematical pre-established harmony.

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, Leibniz was a mathematical philosopher, all credited with co-inventing calculus. And there was some dispute between him and of course, my boy, Isaac Newton. But their discoveries are completely independent in the sense that they represent the calculus very differently with their symbology. In physics, we use a lot of Newtonian representation, but in math, it's all Leibniz's notations. So the integral sign comes from him.

• 44:44Gary O'Reilly?

  You mentioned the OGs of physics there. Are we likely through your research to find that there are slightly different laws of physics in a way that we weren't aware of?

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I, I think not just slightly. I think that we will find that our headset is one of the more trivial headsets and that other headsets have much more interesting physics.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I want to set it straight here. The history of physics is not where, the history of physics since Galileo is not where, oh, we all believe this and then later on, that's all wrong and we believe something else. That's not how it happens. We only believe something is true if it's been experimentally verified. Then we find out there's a deeper truth. Get right in your, right in your bailiwick here. There's a deeper truth in which that's embedded and that's just a special case.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't throw the baby out with the bath.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not at all. Then there's an even deeper truth. So I don't have any hesitation thinking that my, my lame ass 3D candy ass headset is legit in its world, but it's a subset of a much larger truth.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. What you're saying is exactly where I'm headed. I want to show that I can start with a theory of observation, precise, mathematical, and get quantum gravity as a special case. Without had wave. So theorem and proof, theorem and proof. So I decided to take Leibniz very, very seriously and let's get a mathematical model of observation that's as simple as possible and see where this pre-established harmony might arise. And the simplest idea that I can think of is, forget consciousness, I'm just talking observation, not consciousness, okay? So, observation, you have outcomes, so you have a list of possible outcomes, and changes. I've seen this outcome and now I'm seeing that outcome, and that's it.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  I just want to say, observation involves outcomes and possible changes of outcomes. And what's the minimum mathematics that we can use to represent that kind of observer? It's a matrix that says, here's a list of all your outcomes, and here's a list of probabilities. If you see outcome one, what's the probability that you'll see outcome two next, or outcome three, outcome four, and so forth? You just write down a matrix of all the outcomes and how they might change. And that's called a Markov chain. And what I've discovered is a new logic that unites all Markov chains. So I'm saying, my notion of observer is a Markov matrix, which shows the observation outcomes and how they might change.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  The set of all possible Markov matrices is the set of all possible observers. That's it. It's an infinite class. And I discovered a logic two years ago that has never been seen before. It's based on something that is well-known, that if I have one matrix, and I can only see a subset of its states, so I got a big 10 by 10 matrix, for example, but I can only see three states. The big matrix will induce an apparent matrix on the 3 by 3. So it's called the trace. So, for example, if you're at a light and you see red, green, and yellow, and you're seeing them change, and someone else can only see red and green, well, the red and green transitions are determined by the red, green, and yellow transitions,

• 47:58Speaker 03

  but you can't see the yellow, so you're gonna get a different matrix for the red and green. And that's called the trace. It's a unique thing. If I give you a big matrix and say, you can only see this little window, then there's a unique matrix called the trace. And that's been known for a long time. It's a zero-surprise matrix. And what I discovered is... The property of being a trace gives you a logic on the set of all Markov chains. It's a non-bullion logic that gives you the pre-established harmony that Leibniz was looking for. And so what we're doing now, I've got a team that's working on the mathematics of this. We want to show that with this trace logic, and it's a recursive, if you, now this gets technical, it's recursive trace logic, we can build agency out of it.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  But then we can show that the idea is we can then show how to build exactly spacetime to get quantum theory, spacetime, and so forth from this.

• 48:55Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's quite ambitious. Man, I gotta tell you, that's, first of all, I need some weed right now. No. That's number one. You took Chuck to the ledge there, now he needs some weed. Yeah, you took me to the place where I'm just like, damn. But, the only thing that really, you know, I'm not gonna pretend like I really followed everything you said, except that this larger representation is not necessarily made up, but is affected by the smaller representations that you're able to see. The same way when you're looking at a light change, on the one side you see the light change from green to yellow to red, but it's the exact same transaction that's happening

• 49:39Chuck Nice?

  to somebody who only sees the light change from red to green. But they are inexorably tied together. Am I following this? They're in the same matrix. In the same matrix. Okay, I got you.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Exactly right, and I'll just pick up on that, because that will give you just a little clue about how this can get us towards Einstein's theory of relativity. What we do, is standard in Markov chain theory, to have a counter. Every time your experience, your observation changes, increment a counter, right? So, I see red, okay, that's one. Green, okay, two. Yellow, oh, three. So you just keep counting like that. Now, just think about the counter for the guy that can see red, green, and yellow versus the counter of the guy that only sees red and green. The red-green guy, his counter isn't gonna go as fast, because it doesn't see the red.

• 50:25Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  That, we claim, will lead directly to time dilation in Einstein's relativity.

• 50:31Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna tell you something else, you might need some weed.

• 50:37Gary O'Reilly?

  So Don, where else can you point this trace logic? Is it just?

• 50:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, he just spent 10 minutes talking about The Matrix. We gotta go to the movie.

• 50:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man, cuz honestly, that, go ahead, go ahead.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's, let's just.

• 50:48Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 50:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't just sidestep.

• 50:50Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 50:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Matrix movie.

• 50:52Chuck Nice?

  Especially since he's literally describing.

• 50:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially since it's my favorite movie.

• 50:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay. Well, that's another reason.

• 50:58Gary O'Reilly?

  We got one of those sweaters that's full of holes.

• 50:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so when that movie came out in 1999, there was no, it was new to many people, but no one questioned the capability of an intelligent enough system for making you think you're experiencing anything it wants to without regard to what is happening external to your physicality. And that's a headset of a sort, that's, what's the metaphor again? The, uh, a?

• 51:31Chuck Nice?

  A VR.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  VR headset of a sort, except you're going directly to the neurons. We're not even using your senses. We're not, um, and so could you just comment on the foundational theme of humans being alive and living out their lives in their own minds and not?

• 51:52Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 51:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In their bodies.

• 51:54Chuck Nice?

  And also how dreamy Keanu Reeves is.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  So, you know, The Matrix was my favorite movie at the time as well. I was, and I wrote a-

• 52:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still my favorite movie.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  It is, it probably still is, actually. I wrote a book in 1998, just the year before The Matrix came out, called Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. Exactly this stuff, so that's why I was so taken with The Matrix, cuz it was exactly what I was talking about in, in Visual Intelligence. And it gets very, very weird. Neurons, so I'm a neuroscientist and I study neuroscience and I'm all for neuroscience. We have 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses, and yet I say that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. So what are neurons? They are a headset representation of how our headset is engineered. So neurons are a headset representation of how our headset is being created.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  So neuroscience is much harder than we thought. We don't just have to understand the wiring and the physiology. That's just the baby beginning. Now we have to reverse engineer it and ask, what is the software outside of spacetime? Which, when you project it into spacetime, looks like neurons and synapses and physiology. So we have a really hard task ahead of us. As long as we're thinking we're stuck inside spacetime, and this is the reality, we're actually missing the real science that's ahead of us. The real science is spacetime is a trivial headset. Let's get on with the job of reverse engineering it and understanding the first layer of software that's outside of it. I think the positive geometries that the high-energy theoretical physicists are finding

• 53:34Speaker 03

  are a first step. And I'm hoping to show that their positive geometries are actually so-called sub-geometries of the Markov polytope that I'm working with.

• 53:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All I was asking was, do you think, as portrayed in The Matrix, you could meddle in someone's head and make them think they're living out their entire lives?

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Once you understand the software, you can play and you can do miracles. If you think about it, if you wrote, suppose you're the wizard in Grand Theft Auto, so you can drive the car as fast as anybody, you can play all the game and play all the rules inside the game. But suppose you're a geek who can't really drive, but you wrote the software. You wrote the software of the game. Well, you can turn the expert, the wizard's car into a donkey. You can do whatever you want. So once you know the software, you can do magic. And my guess is, not just a guess, if this approach is correct, when we start to understand the software outside of our spacetime headset, the technologies will be mind-blowing.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Everything that we have right now will be trivial compared to the technologies we want.

• 54:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll be the next season of Black Mirror. Where you get inside the brain. And it's a whole set of plot lines right there.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  You know what, I mean, can we for a second, because there's a lot of people...

• 54:50Chuck Nice?

  We live in a very polarized divisive time.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 54:55Chuck Nice?

  And so.

• 54:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unlike the Second World War or the First World War.

• 54:59Chuck Nice?

  Or the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War.

• 55:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the Civil War.

• 55:02Chuck Nice?

  Or the Vietnam War.

• 55:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're uniquely divisive Chuck.

• 55:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, yes, I mean, however, I will say that, you know, the difference is, in all those times, we didn't have this constant influence of manipulation called visuals and phones and social media and algorithms. And so I'm interested to hear what you think about the power that these things possess, not only individually, but societally.

• 55:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna re-ask that with fewer words.

• 55:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 55:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In what way has the algorithm hijacked our evolutionary proclivities?

• 55:43Chuck Nice?

  Ooh. Damn, I gotta leave now.

• 55:49Chuck Nice?

  I'm so ashamed of my question.

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I capture what you were saying?

• 55:53Chuck Nice?

  It all in one phrase.

• 55:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 55:55Chuck Nice?

  I hope they still played the whole question I asked, so that people can see that you captured it all in one phrase. Yes.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Well, great question and actually quite pertinent.

• 56:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, are we humping the beer bottle?

• 56:13Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, stop doing my job.

• 56:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm allowed two jokes per episode. Okay.

• 56:21Chuck Nice?

  All right, go ahead.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  The background that I have in neuroscience and evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory has made me of interest to various companies because they asked me to help them with their marketing and advertising and product design because I know the rules of the game. And so I'll give you a concrete, there's lots of examples. I'll just say at top level, we know how to manipulate your attention to make you want things that you don't even know that we're doing. And so the answer is yes. Once you know the rules of the game, you can play them and companies pay me to do that. It's out there. I'll just give you a fun one, though, but there are many. Genes. Denim jeans.

• 57:03Speaker 03

  Your visual system has rules for how you create 3D objects. How do you create 3D shapes? So this is all part of the headset software. And shading gradients and lines and so forth are used by the visual system to create 3D shapes. When you have, when you put on jeans and they have distress, they're, you know, they're trying to make them look distressed and so forth. And they have stitching and you are telling a 3D story about the body of the person who's wearing those jeans. The only question is, do you as the clothing manufacturer, understand what story you're telling? And is it the story that you want to tell? Are you giving the person pancake butt when you didn't want to do that? Or are you making them look good? So I went to these jeans companies, well, they came to me actually.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  And so I showed them, I looked, I said, look, here, you're creating pancake butt. And here, but here's how you can change the distress so that all of a sudden you can make any shape rear end that you want. And I remember the CEO of one company, when I was giving the presentation, I won't mention the company. He jumped out of his chair, ran up to the slide screen that I was showing how I did this. And he said, our jeans make my butt look terrible. And he, so they, they bought it. They, I, and I showed them how to do it. And they then went and made the, the stitching on their jeans different and the distress different. And you can make any shape that you want, once you know how to do it. So this stuff is being used. Once you know the rules of the headset, you can play the game and no one knows that you're doing it.

• 58:29Chuck Nice?

  It's funny because the same thing happens similarly in nature. The reason why zebras have stripes is because they herd. And when they are being hunted and they run, all the stripes visually confuse the lion. Yeah, absolutely.

• 58:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most of the time.

• 58:46Chuck Nice?

  Most of the time.

• 58:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen a whole lot of zebra legs up.

• 58:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I know. I know, it's terrible.

• 58:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Humans think they're quite smart.

• 58:55Chuck Nice?

  I should have had more stripes.

• 58:58Chuck Nice?

  I knew I needed more stripes.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 59:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Humans think they're really smart, some of them do anyway, and we can manipulate each other as we've just discussed.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, and we can write code like in Grand Theft Auto.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:42Gary O'Reilly?

  But ultimately, who is writing and in charge of this holistic, this consciousness, this place you're trying to get to through your trace logic?

• 59:54Speaker 03

  There is no top to the trace logic, which is really quite interesting.

• 59:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  These mark out matrices go off to infinity in any direction that you want, and there's no top to it. So there is a pre-established harmony like Leibniz envisioned. They're all tied together with this trace logic, but there is no top, which is quite stunning.

• 1:00:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In what ways have theologians approached you as someone who's opening up a box where they can put their god?

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  Representatives from almost every kind of religion have approached me. Because I'm saying that in some sense, observation is fundamental, and it's very, very close in spirit to those who want to say consciousness is fundamental. I myself think consciousness is fundamental, but I don't have to say that for this mathematics. The mathematics can just be observation.

• 1:00:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've made that point, it's an important point. Otherwise, you're intertwined with something else that needs an explanation. Why complicate your account?

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Exactly. As far as science is concerned, I'll just call it observation, period. And we need, any scientist would say, absolutely, we need a theory of observation, bring it on. Whereas consciousness is more controversial. My own view, though, about the spiritual aspects is...

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  It comes down to a very fundamental thing about science itself. And that is, it's very, very simple point. Every scientific theory starts with assumptions. Period. It says, if you grant me these assumptions, then I can explain all this other wonderful stuff. But no theory explains its own assumptions. Now, you can say, well, I'll give you a deeper theory that explains the assumptions of that previous theory. Yes, you can. And your deeper theory will have its own assumptions.

• 1:01:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It turtles all the way down.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Right. It turtles all the way down. And so there will never be a theory of everything, in principle, because we'll never have a theory that explains its own assumptions. So there is no theory of everything.

• 1:01:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's a Gödel's incompleteness theorem, right there.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  It really is.

• 1:01:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  It's a Gödel's incompleteness theorem, so it's a scientific incompleteness theorem, as well. So when we, we sometimes talk about the God of the gaps. Well, I'm a scientist, I love science, I love the rigor of science. We do not assume that our assumptions are true in science. We assume that our assumptions are consistent. We know that they're never the final truth. We're always going to have some deeper layer to go to. What we have to assume is not that we have the truth, but that we have a consistent set of starting assumptions. If they were not consistent, then we could prove anything.

• 1:02:30Chuck Nice?

  And that's why scientists don't murder one another for their findings.

• 1:02:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Generally, that's correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are no marauding scientists on the front line. E equals mc cubed, not a square.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  And so we're infinitely far from a theory of everything. So there's not, I'm not worried about a God of the gaps. Science is infinitely far from a theory of everything. And so I don't have a theory of God. Um, and I don't want, I'm not a God of the gaps kind of guy.

• 1:03:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, God of the gaps has been replaced by aliens. You know, you don't understand something, it's aliens. And so aliens of the gaps doesn't have the same ring to it. So, so it, it, it might book, I, I coined the phrase, aliens of our ignorance. Nice. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Don, what's the timeline on this research? Which is ironic, seeing as spacetime is doomed. Do you have?

• 1:03:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got a new kind of watch.

• 1:03:25Gary O'Reilly?

  How many dimensions? So, do you have a timeline for the work that you're undertaking now?

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Yes, I have a group. We're starting something called the Trace Research Institute. And it's going to be coming out in June, actually. We are being announced in June. And I have some mathematicians and physicists working with me. And we have eight specific mathematical conjectures that I'm hoping to prove in the next three years. So that's sort of the goal, to have these proven in the next three years. And the idea would be, we start with this trace logic on observers, and show exactly how we get first special relativity, then general relativity, quantum field theory, non-locality, and so forth. And then, so that's the idea, is to start to reverse engineer our spacetime headset

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  by starting with observers that could build a spacetime headset, but they could build almost anything else. And that's the key point. Observers can build any headset that they want. Spacetime is one of the more trivial ones. It's only four dimensions.

• 1:04:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He just dissed humans right there.

• 1:04:34Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, we are very dissable.

• 1:04:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Have you looked around lately?

• 1:04:40Chuck Nice?

  We really are dissable.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Well, actually, I'll turn that around now. I'll say something about you and me. We are not our avatars. These bodies in three-dimensional space, one dimension of time. You know, there's a Neil avatar, there's a Chuck, and then Don. All these avatars are just avatars. You're not your avatar. This is just an avatar and a headset. So this is where it does sound spiritual. Now, whoever you are, whatever you are, it's not something inside space and time. Space and time is inside you. That's your creation on the fly. You're rendering your body. So my hand is something I render on the fly when I look at my hand. And with that, otherwise, there is no hand.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  The hand is just a headset avatar representation.

• 1:05:31Chuck Nice?

  Is there a way I can render a few choice bigger parts?

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Well, DMT.

• 1:05:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I gotta land this plane here. Let me ask you the ultimate skeptical question.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:05:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's say you come out with this account of all that your ambitions hold for you. What prediction can you make from that new formulation? That will give confidence that the new formulation is real?

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Well, of course.

• 1:06:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what you described, it sounds like you're in a position, you've constructed this literal matrix to account for everything. And is that any different from the, you know, how the leopard got its spots? The Richard Kipling just-so stories? I'm gonna make an explanation, that's how I got it spots, and here we are. I'm gonna make an explanation, which is why you don't see this, and you'd make that, and we got a spacetime here, and it collapses there, and we got relativity, boom. Give me a prediction.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  So, the first thing we'll have to do is to first show that we can get, for example, all of special and general relativity and quantum field theory. We have to do that first, right? But then, we can take the next step, which is to say, you know, Einstein had to assume that the speed of light is the same, is the same in all inertial frames, and that nothing could go faster than the speed of light. That's an assumption. What if we can prove that? What if we can show from this deeper theory that it must be the case in your headset that the speed of light is the maximum speed? Now, all of a sudden, something that Einstein had to assume, we show follows from the theory of the observers.

• 1:07:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be a good one, by the way.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  That would be, that would be one of my first ones that I want to go to. And I can give you a little hint as to where I think it's gonna come from. It turns out, in a Markov chain, there is something called a commute time. How quickly you can go from one... Um, observation to another. And there is a maximum commute time, a minimum commute time, and therefore a fastest transition. And it's something called cyclic Markov chains. And so the direction I'm going to be going is that because there is a maximum speed of transition in Markov chains, that's where the speed of light maximum is going to come from. So that will be a completely new.

• 1:07:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll come out of the construct.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  A new construct for it. But that that will just be the beginning because then I want to actually show, once we go into these higher dimensions, I can then start building technologies. Remember, I my clock, if I have a bigger spacetime than you, my clock is ticking a lot more than you. That means I can do miracles. Right? That because for two ticks of your clock, I might have a million ticks of my clock. So I can be doing all sorts of stuff. So this may be how I'll explain UAP kind of phenomena that seem to violate the laws of physics. They do violate our laws if you're stuck in our headset, but they may have a headset in which their clock is ticking a million times to one tick of ours.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  And so what looks like instantaneous acceleration to us is for them a walk in the park.

• 1:08:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or just a fuzzy video artifact of a monochromatic data-taking device. But, okay.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:08:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One or the other. So I got you. So it's the experience of something that would be normal in their reference frame that to us looks extraordinary or even miraculous.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Right. That's right. And there's another aspect of this that that's really quite interesting. If you think about, I look around and I see an ant and I ask myself, how much does the ant see about me? Now, my feeling is probably nothing, almost nothing. It doesn't know anything about me. But then, and if you ask, okay, so how would it represent me? It might not even represent me at all, but if it does represent me, it's something trivial. Well, now turn it around. I see the ant as fairly trivial. But remember.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  This is just a headset. The headset dumbs things down. It's quite possible that what I see is an ant. I'm actually, the reality that I'm interacting with is so transcendent, so much bigger than me, that if I could actually understand it, I would fall down speechless before it. But my headset turns it down into a tiny little ant. So this gives us a sort of a different way of looking at everything around us. What I'm seeing is my headset dumb down representation of something that's not inside the headset. So it changes the whole game of how I look at the world. I see an ant, and I have no idea what I'm really dealing with. All I know is, my headset is so stupid, that it's just showing me an ant. That's what I know.

• 1:10:17Gary O'Reilly?

  So, just touching on Darwin's theory, origins of species, etc. Obviously, pre-internet, pre-computers. Are you kind of telling us that it is the most amazing theory, and all it needed was mathematics to show how amazing it was?

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Well, I think that Darwin's theory is brilliant, and evolutionary game theory, the mathematics, really brought out all the wonderful power of Darwin's theory. But now I step back, it's a theory that's sort of tied to our headset, right? Every scientific theory has its scope, and also its limits. So I think, inside the headset, Darwin is the best theory that we have for understanding biology inside of our headset. Once we get outside the headset, I will want to find a deeper theory and show how Darwin's theory is a special case of something far deeper. So, but that's going to be the thing-

• 1:11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're getting greedy.

• 1:11:12Gary O'Reilly?

  No, that's, that's-

• 1:11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Einstein wasn't good enough, you're gonna throw Darwin into the pot.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Right. Science must always get to deeper theories. We always expect that our theories are just stepping stones, right?

• 1:11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. I love that.

• 1:11:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, good way to put it.

• 1:11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Professor Hoffman, this has been delightful conversation. Thanks for giving us a peek into your madness.

• 1:11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to say that again? Okay, thanks for giving me a peek into your genius. How about that?

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  And they are the same thing.

• 1:11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're the same thing. There, or rather, a peek into your headset.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  That's been a great pleasure and a lot of fun. I enjoy laughing with you guys.

• 1:11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So, good luck with that. Do you have a good website for people to track? Or is it all secret?

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  I have, for those who are scientists, you do Google Scholar on Donald Hoffman, you'll find a hundred papers that I've got on Google Scholar.

• 1:12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Google Scholar, people don't know, gains access to research journals and provided there aren't other Donald Hoffmanns out there, you'll know, get all of his papers. But it's pretty easy to filter.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, so we're announcing a trace research institute, which is going to be pursuing this research in the summer of 2026.

• 1:12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the greatest value there, which we've ever, we've seen since the early 90s, when I think NASA was early out of the box to recognize the value of multidisciplinary thinking.

• 1:12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't ask, how would a physicist do this? They said, let us take on the topic of origins. Well, there's the origins of the planet, of life, of the solar system, and everybody got together in the coffee room and, and got to, got to share notes in ways that were previously siloed. So, in this new institute, you're going to have mathematicians, presumably biologists.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neuroscientists.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any room for astrophysicists?

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. We want to go to the theory of the big bang.

• 1:13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you need a job?

• 1:13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gainfully employed here, I'm just checking.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We, actually, one of our conjectures is a new way of modeling the big bang from the Markov chain. So, we have to do it all, or go big or go home, basically.

• 1:13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. There he is. I don't think we need to say anything else after that. Okay, sir. Thanks for joining us.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

• 1:13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On StarTalk. All right, this has been StarTalk Special Edition. What do we call this one? The? The nature of reality. The nature of reality. And in the end, it's just a matrix.

• 1:13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Yeah, Ray. How's your Neil? All in. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.