The Future of Scientific Research

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And that's why I love it because I can secretly sit at the table and listen to my mother in law talk about me in Spanish and she doesn't even know that I know what she's saying. Go ahead, be a stealth bilingual spy like me. Visit rosettastone dot com slash star talk to get twenty percent off your Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when you sign up today . You'll get unlimited access to all twenty five Rosetta Stone languages plus all new sapphire learning tools. Jas Laura Emigos Leia Rosetta Stonew ismo Coming up on Start Talk's special edition is real ity real ? Do you want it to be? I'm going to say no because then I do not owe anything to Visa . Coming up . What neuroscience says about the nature of reality, Start Talk, special edition. Welcome to Star Talk . Your place in the universe where science and pop culture coll . Start Talk begins right now . This is Start Talk's special edition . Today, we're going to be exploring the nature of reality. Really? Really reality . We got Gary O'Reilly, Gary right to my right, former soccer pro. Announcer. Yep, and my co host . And we got actor Commed ian . Chuck Nice. Yes. How you doing, man? Oh, the Lord of Nice. The Lord of Nice. Wow, I have well okay. Yeah, I like that. Let's deal with it. So set the picture here. What do you think? In theore thetical 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 guests. This one's gonna go deep as I'm looking forward to it. All right, let's see where it takes us. We've got Professor Donald Hoffman. Donald, welcome to Start Talk. Thank you very much, Neil. Good to be with you all of you. Yeah, your 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. No , it shuts fire. 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 don't really see the full picture. I mean, I agree with you. Who would disagree with that? But you're bringing in evolution blame for this. So can you could catch us up on what you mean by that? 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 just to be clear, when you say fit, you don't mean it like in a fitness center. No , right It's not a crunch gym crunch. Right. Please remind us what evolutionarily what the word fit means. 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 clearly Darwin had no children He went no, they will kill you . And I don't mean like murder. I don't mean just having them will kill you . Okay , so we're trained to not run off the cliff to run the opposite direction of lions. Right. What else are we really good at? Well, avoiding poisons and things like that, finding right mates, so we don't try to mate with trees or rocks or things like that. So we speak for yourself there, Don. I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry. There are so many had to do this. And so many people have conjured up an image. Right. Of a drunken Saturday night. Okay. I'm sorry. a Gheoad Dan, continue . Right. 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 ent ails that 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 successful , then you need to see reality as it is. And what I have done with some colleagues aanit Parkosh, Manish ing and others is to look at the mathematics of evolution. It turns out Darwin wasn't a mathematician , 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 of the time, but maybe not as often as we thought we would. Stephen Pinker has published a paper on that idea. He has some good arguments for why 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 was that when we looked at the mathematics , the answer was the probability of zero. Yeah, so now I have to we have to back up a bit. Yeah. What do you mean by reality? If you assign a zero to it, I want to know what it is you just zeroed out. Wow, so yeah, 'cause I mean, mathematically reality would have to have a value if it equals zero. If at some point you want to give it a zero. Right. It seems to me the teeth on that line is pretty reality looking rather the cliff ledge feels pretty real to me. 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 the. And 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 angel or something like that or eating you or eating you, then that for that lion that's a that's a very, you know, that's a very good payoff, right? That's but if it's if it's looking to be to eat and is tries for a rock is going to 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? Okay , I still don't know what you're talking about. So I don't mind representing these forces that operate on your evolution, 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. Oh, I'm going to get there. No Let me see the lion. That's the lion. Yeah, get to me before the lion does. 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 . It's in the nature of scientific theories just to see what they say . All I'm doing is saying, this is what Darwin's theory says 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, it's snake hungry or wanting to mate and in action like feeding, fighting, fleeing, or ma,id and then I'll give you a number for how good that was, how 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. And when I say almost surely, that means one hundred percent of the time. Basically. So maybe I want to 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 . Absolutely that's exactly right, Neil. Okay. Okay, so that's all I mean, I mean I think that's pretty , you know , reasonable and feasible to accept . Right. So it doesn't matter to me that it's real . It's a different statement from saying it isn't real . 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 a 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. 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 in science without these tools , our measurements would suck because we would have to rely on our senses our senses. And our senses are never sufficient to measure things properly. All right, so pick up from there Don. There are species here on planet Earth that the reality is maybe a mantis shrimp that can see so many different colors a bat that exists with sonar , birds that can register light on a UV spectrum . Their reality is different to us surely. These are all sensory capabilities. We' were just not able to process the data? Is that what we're trying to say here? 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 exam ple. All right. So 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 males fly around looking for eligible females and if a male finds one, he elites and mates . And so they've done that for who knows how long? Tens of thousands of years. It's been a very successful life for the Jew 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 male jewels. So these guys will throw them out into the desert and jewel beetles flock all over these bottles . They get on them, they crawl all over them, trying to mate , and the females aren't getting anything. This is just all bottle. Because the guys are idiots. What else is new? I'm going to say that that's more an admonition against beer Those are the truest beer goggles ever. Okay, so that evolution ary element got hijacked by the beer bottle . That's right. So the beetles, the males, have full body contact with the bottle. They're crawling all over it, and yet they can not 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. And they didn't need to know more than that. They need to know basically they had to know. Right. I'm going to go with Neil's assertion that they're idiot . Because 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 . Do you ? Okay Okay. . 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 . I am so happy to welcome Noko as a sponsor to Start Talk. Established in nineteen fourteen, Noko provides industry leading battery power solutions including jump starters, tire inflators, battery chargers, lithium batteries, and a wide range of accessories. 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Man, I'll let the good doctor go first, but I've never done psychedelics, nor do I have any intent to do so. I know 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 Rayman Zurich, it's about mind expansion, man. I don't want to expand in a place that is farther away from objective reality. Okay, well , it's all you now, Don . Right. So I myself have not taken any psychedelics, but I'm collaborating with people who have and who are doing research 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 just 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 do not exist when they're not perceived. Oh no, that's quantum . No, look at that. Yeah, you went total string theory on us. No, he went total quantitative neural quantum quarter ledge on that. 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 cor vette 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 , when I'm not, they're seeing their red corvette. They're not seeing it one that I see. Describe the game of adult peekaboo. That's one . But explain to me 'cause I've never played Gran Theft Auto. Does it render only the direction you're looking in to save CPU? That's right. That's typical of things. So it knows which way you're looking. Right. Okay. So it doesn't make sense if you're not looking at it for it to be rendering because you can't see it anywhere. This has been the major argument in simulation theory where why would the programmer waste computer power simulating things that no one is conscious of? That's right . Right. 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 and you get digging right to the right. Way cheaper cheaper, way , way more accessible to the program mar than creating everything at all there all at once that's my theory on the speed of light if there's a simulation . But 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. Okay so Einstein had a theory that's your hypothesis. I just want to Oh sorry you're absolutely right . Yeah. That's my idea. All right, so you both thought. Yes, my thought. All right. So you've both tapped into simulation theory. Don is that what's in practice here? I mean, are the realities layered and one within another ? Simulation theory, as is typically put out, like Nick Bostrom and others who are Elon Musk are interested in the in it. So I'll say at top level, yes, this is very, very similar, but also 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 an 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. A real a real thing . And that's why 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 space time is doomed . As many high energy theoretical physicists say, space time 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. 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 principled a principled 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 I mean, it's very possible that we don't have the computing power to do it because we go ahead. Wait, okay, so all you just said yes , 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 what happened before the Big Bang. That's a fronti er. 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? So where I'm taking us is that for the last thirty or forty 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 Hamarovs, quantum collapse of mic rotubules theories, various there's lots of specific mathematically precise theories . And when you ask them, okay you have a theory of observation, conscious experiences . What specific conscious experience can you explain ? And the answer is zero. And this is 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 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. And that's the point I'm trying to make. Make sense. So Don, as you know, in biological circles, there's a lot of talk lately about emergence . Like the flocking of bird s. You know, if you can analyze every cell of a bird and every molecule within it , it doesn't say flocking flocking. Yeah 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? 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. A chat bots conscious . 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 of the summation of many brains . But will you deny them consciousness? Because I don't think Turning Turning Wood. Most of my colleagues would say that they're conscious. And 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 be whether or not one can actually use neural activity or some kind of algorithms to actually give theories, not just claims, but a theory of specific conscious experiences. I like the taste of mint. 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 taste of mint and here is why . Or for example, in the case of integrated information theory, a theory of neural activity and more general than neural activity, a theory about how the right kind of causal structures could 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 success es well for humans as well as chatbots. So you can't you can't, you know, blame chat bots for that. Yeah. Absolutely. So I think 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 . In fact, it's the other way around. Space and time and everything inside them emerges as a trivial headset from consciousness. 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 heavy. But I mean, why couldn't it be a quantum manifestation ? So in which case, when does spacetime cease to exist? And at what scale, what level are you saying that that stops to happen ? 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 ten to the minus thirty three centimeters and ten to the minus forty seconds three. Yeah',s it a blank. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So just to be clear here , spacetime, as we think of it, as a continuum, as described by Einstein , is very successful accounting for what we see in the universe . What we find is that on these I can't even call it granular scale is way smaller than that , there's a breakdown and the general relativity does not play nice in the sandbox with the quantum. Right. But most people are betting on the quantum because of how successful. Yeah, they would yeah, it has been. If I were you, I'd bet I'd bet on the stick with the quantum. Stick with the quantum. But before you even go further on that garret , Don , I want to just assess layers of reality, not in a in not in a programmer 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 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 nineteenth century, we can create a machine that can make a measurement that does not use your neurons . Right. And I can say, I'm looking at a furry thing with a mane and big teeth and it weighs eight hundred pounds and then it walks on a scale. The scale registers eight hundred pounds. A picture gets taken of it. It's got a mane, it's got big teeth , and ten minutes later, I am mauled . So I have a hard time embracing your statement that evolution prevents me from seeing the objective reality of what just happened. 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 critical a 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 nineteen eighty nine paper from Bit was basically saying we have to reboot our physics with some what he called obser ver participants. And Frank Wilch has said the same thing. We need to have a theory of the observer . 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 a unitary one evolution that'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. Let's try to understand how to understand what are different perspectives and views and observations? 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 let me add to your comment that we don't have a theory of observation that's definitely true, but as a correlator to that, we don't have a full theory of measurement. Right. And they're related. They're related because the wave functions your wave function collapse is consistent through all those who measure . Correct. And but it's right, except what if you're not measuring it, it's not collapsing . So they're related. Yes. Right. So I don't want to 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 . 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. Correct. But we can all then look at that measurement and agree what it says without having trust someone's testimony for what they observed. Or are you saying that the agreement itself is a shared perception ? 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 translate between Neil's frame of reference and Chuck's frame of reference to say even though they got different answers, we can make understand that they somehow agree. There is no transference into Chuck's frame of reference. Right. He has his own absolutely. Let me tell you something right now it's a mess up in here . Okay, so we talked we've talked about how we as humans can perceive and our frameworks, et cetera. 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 then get carried away now looking at a fourth, fifth , sixth dimension in which these problems that we've fumbled with are solved. But before you get there, that's an important question. Okay, that I address in my recently published book . Uh , take me to your leader . There's a whole chapter on alien powers that they could have. And there's currently reading that so I haven't gotten to that. You haven't got that. There's a story by Voltaire of all people written in the mid eighteenth century where he imagines one of the earliest total alien fictional stories imagined where there's an alien twenty six miles tall and stay with me He's in the NBA and I feel very good. The next he's joining the next minute here . They're going to win another championship I don't know we got the number is just twenty six miles and he has seven thousand 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 way. to Look at look a at an US 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 are senses have no access to like the ultraviolet ultraviolet and the infrared. Right. 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 the 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 you could say. Give it to him . And then what you have is a delusion. No, no Let them have their sixth , but say I have another dozen. So nice. 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 ultimate ly were able to bring to our awareness. I don't want to speak for Don, but I think he's saying that somehow our perceptions and those machines are tied together. 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, twenty dimensions, have senses built into them that we can't, you know, for example , you know, electric sensing in water, things like that. I think sharks can do that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So this so your headset horph? Metaphor, thank you . That was the word I was looking for. He sense that sense So that headset metaphor is quite potent with regard to your aliens who are coming to visit. Yeah. It is. And in fact, I'm collaborating with Andrew Gallamore, 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. Love me high dimensional aliens. That'd be the funniest thing ever. Well, believe it or not , I met higher dimensional aliens while I was doing Iowas . I'm not even lying By the way, did you know, maybe did you know this? I only knew it researching for my book. Go ahead. 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. I did not know that. It's an alien subgroup and they want to get together, see if they're actually somehow cross dimensional communicating with aliens. And they compare notes. 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 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? 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 strong dimension 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? As a scientist, I'm hard nosed and I'm completely agnostic, but I want to do experiments. And so I'm actually design ing experiments with Andrew Gallamar, 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 twenty 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 Nuana , 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. Good way to test. ify Wow. So we're coming up with experiments like that 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 But you need to I feel the same way about out of body experiences where if you're on the bed , I get someone to write something that's facing upwards. And 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? A roses are red or some simple phrase that would be easy to remember and to read. So yeah, that's that you're doing exactly the right science minded testing . 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 it's actually if DNT is actually changing a parameter in the headset that says you were stuck with a three dimensions of space, but DMT is now taking you to four or five. And it's just a parameter change and we can we can actually see more dimensions than we hadn't seen before. I certainly want to know that and find that out. So what in evolution would have allowed that to even be accessible to us ? Well , what's interesting is when you look at there are high energy theoretical physicists who are studying structures outside sp ofacetime now, as you probably well know, they're called positive geometries. And the European Research Council has a ten million euro initiative . And there are many, many high energy theoretical physicists and mathematici finding structures outside of spacetime . And when you look at these structures they have one of some of the structures something called the amplitude heater and has a parameter and 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. You can have ten , 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 chance 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 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 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? Because your fault? You know? 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 Green and Jan Elevin , this stuff that I really didn't have any knowledge of is kind of the basis of the experience. I'm just saying. Okay. So these positive geometrics, are they going to be the solution to what David Chalmers phrased as the hard problem of consciousness? I don't think so. . And I think that the Heinergy 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 is especially the attempts to get quantum gravity that have forced mathematicians and physicists to say, you know what? We 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. And then 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. It stops at the plank scale. So 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. And he said there had to be these monads that were somehow interacting and had some kind of mathematical pre established harmony. Laudnizer was a mathematical philosopher all credited with co inventing calculus . And there was some dispute between him and of course my boy friend, 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 Liebnz's notations. So the integral sign comes from him. You mentioned the OG's physics there. Are we likely through your research to find that there are slightly different laws of physics that we weren't aware of? 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 . But I want to set it straight here. The history of physics is not where the history of physics since Galile o 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. Yeah, you don't throw the baby out with the bathroom not at all. Right. Then there's an even deeper truth. So I don't have any hesitation thinking that my lame ass three D candy ass headets is legit in its world, but it's a subset of a much larger truth. 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 mathemat,ical , and get quantum gravity as a special case without hand wave. So theorem and prove, theorem and prove. So I decided to take legnets 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. 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 markoff chain, a markov . 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 observ ation outcomes and how they might change . 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 ten by ten matrix, for example, but I can only see three states . The big matrix will induce an apparent matrix on the three by three. 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, but you can't see the yellow. So you get to 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 boolean 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 we know this gets technical it's recursive trace logic. We can build agency out of it . But then we can show that idea is we can then show how to build exactly spacetime to get quantum theory, spacetime and so forth from this. Well, that's quite ambitious. Man there. I got to tell you that first of all , I need some weed right now. No, this is that's number one. You took truck to the ledge there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you took me to the place where I'm just like, damn. How but the only thing that really , you know, I'm not going to pretend like I really followed everything you said except that ger representation is not necessarily made up but is affected by the smaller representations that you are 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 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. That's 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 Numarkov chain theory to have a counter. Every time your experience your observation changes incremental counter, right? So I see red. Okay, that's one. Green, o,kay 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 going to go as fast because it doesn't seem to direct . Exactly. That we claim will lead directly to time dilation in Einstein's relativity. I'm gonna tell you something else. You might need some weed So Don , where else can you point this trace logic? Is it just Wait , we just spent ten minutes talking about the Matrix? We gotta go to the movie. Yeah, because honestly, go ahead. Let's just love it. We can't just sidestep. That's right. The Matrix movie. Especially since he's literally described. Especially since it's my favorite movie. Oh, okay. Okay, well that's another reason. You got one of those sweaters full of holes. Okay . So when that movie came out in nineteen ninety nine, 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 a VR VR headset of a sort except we're going directly to the neurons. We're not even using your senses. We're not and so could you just comment on foundational theme of humans being alive and living out their lives in their own minds and not wow, in their bodies? And also how dream y Keano Reeves is . So the Matrix was my favorite movie at the time as well. And I was still my favorite movie. It is, it probably still is, actually. I wrote a book in nineteen ninety eight just the year before the Matrix came out called Visual Intelligence, How We Create What Wee Exactly The Stuff. So that's why I was so taken with the Matrix because it was exactly what I was talking about 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 eighty six 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 represent ation of how our headset is being created. 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 rever se 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, 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 Heinerge theoretical physicists are finding 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. 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 of their entire lives. 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 Autos, you can drive the car as fast as anybody. You can play all the game 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, you know wizards' 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. Everything that we have right now will be trivial compared to the technologies we will have. That'll be the next season of Black Mirror, where you the brain it's a whole set of plotlines right there. And you know what? I mean, can we for a second because there's a lot of people we live in a very polarized, divisive time. Sure. And so unlike the Second World War or the First World War or the Revolutionary World War or the Civil War, or the Civil War or the Vietnam War. Yeah, we're uniquely divisive. Okay. I mean , however, I will say that the difference is in all those times we didn't have this constant influence of manipulation called visual s and phones and social media and algorithms . Yeah . And so I'm interested to hear what you think about the power that these things possess not only individually, but societally. I'm gonna reassk that with fewer words. Oh , in what way has the algorithm hijacked our evolutionary proclivities? Oh yeah. I'm gonna leave you . I'm so ashamed of my question . Did I count ry what you did all in one place? There you go. I hope they still played the whole question that I asked for Jess so that people can see how that you captured it all in one phrase. Yes . Well , great question and actually quite pertinent. In other words, are we humping the beer bottle Hey man , stop doing my job . I'm allowed two jokes per episode. Okay, all right, go ahead. The background that I have in neuroscience and evolutionary biolog y 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. So once 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 . Jeans , denim jeans . Your visual system has rules for how you create three D objects. How do you create three D 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 three D shapes. When you have when you put on jeans and they have distress, you know, they're trying to make them look distressed and so forth and they have stitching and you are telling a three D 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. And so I showed them like , I said, look, here you're creating pancake button 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 me my butt look terrible. And so they bought it, and I showed them how to do it. And they then went and made 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. It's funny because the same thing happens similarly in nature. The reason why zeb ras have stripes is because they herd and when they are being hunted and they run , all the stripes visually confuse the lion. Yeah . Absolutely. Most of the time. Most of the time. I don't see a whole lot of zebra legs up. Yeah, I know. I know, it's terrible Human forts they questioned you should have had more stripes . I never needed more shoes Yes There once was a magic . Sorry , at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, we don't do fairy tales . We do real like real adventures to Mars or real journeys into the future to see how imagination can really take us to strange new worlds, and real trips into the past where we meet heroes and legends way ahead of their time. Real rockets, real astronaut s, real adventure, all at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex , discover something real. These days, we're used to getting things delivered on demand, groceries, a new gadget, or the latest book, expanding your view of the universe . And now you can add T Mobile five G home Internet to that list . Just order from T Mobile and enjoy same day delivery with door dash and you can set it up your self in about fifteen minutes no advanced engineering degree required . That means more time doing the things you actually enjoy like streaming a space documentary or going down a rabbit hole about exoplanets, asteroids, or whatever's pulling your curiosity . And those online explorations are a lot easier with the fastest five G internet . 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And we can manipulate each other as we've just discussed . Yes. Okay , and we can write code back from Grand Theft Auto. Right. But ultimately, who is writing and in charge of this holistic, this consciousness, this you're trying to get to through your trace logic . There is no top to the trace logic, which is really quite interesting. These markout matrices go off to infinity in any direction that you want and there's no top to it. So there's 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. In what ways have theologians approached you as someone who's opening up a box where they can put their God. 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 per.iod 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? Exactly. As far as science is concerned, I'll just call it observation per,iod , 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 it comes down to a very fundamental thing about science itself and that is this very simple point every scientific theory starts with assumptions , period. It says if you grant me these assumpt ions, then I can explain all this other wonderful stuff . But no theory explains its own assumptions. Now you can say , 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. Turtles all the way down. Right. Turtles all the way down. And so 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. That's a girdles incompleteness theorem right there. It really is. Yeah. It's a girdle's incompleteness theorem. So it's a scientific incompleteness theorem as well . So when 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. And that's why scientists don't murder one another for their findings . Generally, that's correct. Really? Yeah . Yeah, they're no marauding science right on the front line. Equals MCQ square . 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 the theory of everything . And so I don't have a theory of God and I don't want I'm not a god of the gaps kind of guy. Well, God of the gaps has been replaced by aliens. You know, you don't understand something as aliens. And so aliens are the gaps doesn't have the same ring to it. No. So in my book, I coined the phrase aliens of our ignorance . I see. Yeah , yeah. Don, what's the timeline on this research, which is ironic seeing the space time is doomed? Do you have to watch how many dimensions ? So do you have a timeline for the work that you're undertaking now? 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're being announced in June. And there I have some mathematicians and physicists working with me . 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 for th. And then so that's the idea is to start to reverse engineer our spacetime headset 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. Just disc human out there. Well, you know, we are very disciplined. Disciplined Goddess. Have you looked around like this? We really are disciplined. 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 Don and all these avatars are just avat . You're not your avatar. This is just avatar in 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. The hand is just a headset avatar representation. Is there a way I can render a few choice bitter parts? DMT . So I got to land this plane here . Let me ask you the ultimate skeptical question. Sure. 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 . Well, of course because what you describe it sounds like you are in a position you've constructed this literal matrix to account for everything . And is that any different from how the leopard got its spots the Rigid Kipling Just So stories. I'm going to make an explanation and that's how God spots and here we are. I'm going to make an explanation which is why you don't see this and you'd like that and we got a spacetime here and it collapses there and we got relativity. Boom . Give me a prediction. 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 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. That'd be a good one, by the way.