YouSaid · the spoken record

Donald Hoffman

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200
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2022-06-12
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2022-06-12
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  1. “Needs to know what is not. It needs to know what you are, you have to say, Oh, I'm not that, I'm not that. That wasn't important, that wasn't important.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Sort of in my face when I sent a text goodbye. But then as soon as I'm better, sort of like, okay, I sort of don't want to go there, right? Okay, so. I am my body. I go back to the standard. I am my body and I want to get that car. And even though I was just about to die a year ago, so that comes rushing back. So consciousness immerses itself fully Particular headset Gets lost in it and then slowly wakes up.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And the question that you asked what is it all about? Somehow it's related to that. Why does being Why doesn't it just stay without any forms? Why do we have experiences? Why not just have, when you close your eyes and pay attention to what's behind you, there's nothing. Why don't we just stop there? Why didn't we just stop there? Why did we create all tables and chairs in the sun and moon and people, all this really complicated stuff? Why? All I can guess right now, and I'll probably kick myself in a couple years and say that was dumb, but all I can guess right now is that somehow Consciousness wakes up to itself by knowing what it's not. So here I am. I'm not this body. And I sort of saw that.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And maybe that's going to be a profound part of the final answer to start with the I don't know. It's quite possible that that's really important to start with the I don't know. My guess is that if consciousness is fundamental and a girdle girdles incompleteness theorem holds here and there's an infinite variety of Structures. Consciousness to some sense explore. That maybe It's about this is something that Anak and I talked about a little bit, and she doesn't like this way of talking about it, and so I'm gonna have to talk with some more about this way of talking. But right now, I'll just put it this way, and I'll have to talk with her more and see if I can say it more clearly. But the way I'm talking about it now is that A sense There's being And then there's experiences or forums that come out of being. That's one deep, deep mystery.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And I'm the author of space and time. And space and time is just one little data structure. Many other consciousnesses are creating other data structures. They're authors of various other things. So realizing, and then realizing that I had this feeling that growing up going in college, reading all these textbooks, oh man, it's all been done. If I'd just been there 50 years ago, I could have discovered this stuff, but it's all in the textbooks now. Well, believe me, the textbooks are going to look silly in 50 years. And it's your chance to write the new textbook. So, of course, study the current textbooks. You have to understand them. There's no way to progress until you understand what's been done. But then... The only limit is your imagination, frankly. That's the only limit.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I would say the universe is a lot more interesting than you might expect. And you are a lot more special and interesting than you might expect. You might think that you're just a little... Tiny, irrelevant. 200 pound Person in a vast billions of light years across space. That's not the case. You are, in some sense, the being that's creating that space all the time every time you look. So waking up to who you really are outside of space and time. As the author of space and time, as the author of everything that you see?”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Not a being, but just being. And you and I share being, then you and I are not separate. There's no reason to fight. We're both part of that one being and loving you is loving myself because we're all part of that one being. The spiritual traditions that point to that, I think are pointing in a very interesting direction. And that does seem to match with the mathematics of the conscious agent stuff that I've been working on as well. It really fits with that, although that wasn't my goal.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “In many... Traditions not all. One I was raised in, so my dad was a Protestant minister. We tend to think of God as a being. But I think that that's not right. I think the closest way to think about God is being, period, not a being, but being, the very ground of being itself is God. I think that's the... And from my point of view, that's the ground of consciousness. So the ground of conscious being is. We might call God, but the word God has always been, for example, you don't believe the same God as my God, so I'm going to fight you. We'll have wars over because the being, the specific being that you call God is different from the being that I call God, and so we fight.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I get little glimpses of a love in the sense that I'm not separate. It's a love in the sense that I'm not different from that. You and I are separate, then I can fight you. But if you and I are the same, if there's a union there.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, there are two levels I would think about that. There's love in the sexual sense, and then there's love in a deeper sense. In the sexual sense, we can give an evolutionary account of that and so forth. I think that's pretty clear to people. In this deeper sense, Right, so of course I love my wife in a sexual sense, but there is a deeper sense as well. When I was saying goodbye to her, there was a deeper, much deeper love that was really at play there. That's one place where I think That the mixed bag from spiritual traditions has something right. When they say, love your neighbor as yourself, that in some sense love is fundamental. I think that they're onto something Something very, very different, profound. Every once in a while, I can get a personal glimpse of that. Especially when I'm in the When I can really let go of thoughts,”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's almost like I have, I feel like I have real skin in the game. It really is scary. I really was scared when I was about to die. It really was hard to say goodbye to my wife. It really pained. To then look at that and then look at the fact that I'm going to walk away from this anyway, and it's just an interface. So it's trying to put all this stuff together and really grok it, so to speak, not just intellectually, but grock it at an emotional level.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I seem to be wired up Evolutionary psychology says, I'm wired up, right? All these defensive mechanisms, I'm inclined to lie if I need to. I'm inclined to be angry, to protect myself, to have an in-group and an out-group, to try to make my reputation as big as possible, to try to demean the out-group. There's all these things that evolutionary psychology is spot on. It's really brilliant about the human condition. And yet I think evolution, as I said, evolutionary theory is a projection of a deeper theory where there may be no competition. So, how I'm in this very interesting position where I feel like, okay, according to my own theory, I'm consciousness. And maybe this is what it means for consciousness to wake up. It's not easy.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I've meditated for 20 years now. And I would say averaging three or four hours a day. But it's put a new Urgency, but urgency is not the right word because it's riveted my attention, I'll put it that way. It's really riveted my attention and I've really paid... Spend a lot more time looking at what spiritual traditions say. By the way, again, not taking it with a grain of salt. But on the other hand, I think it's stupid for me to ignore it. So I try to listen to the best ideas and to sort out nonsense. We all have to do it for ourselves, right? It's not easy. So what makes sense, and I have the advantage of some science, so I can look at what science says and try to compare what spiritual tradition, I try to sort it out for myself. But then I also look and realize that there's another aspect to me, which is this whole emotional aspect.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Scares the hell out of you, right? But there was, you're just feeling so bad anyway that sort of, you're scared, but you're just feeling so bad that in some sense you just want to stop anyway. So I've been there. Faced it just a year ago”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Sent her a goodbye. I was in the emergency room and it attacked my heart and had been at 190 beats per minute for 36 hours. I couldn't last much longer. I knew they couldn't stop it.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Me that goes to the feels like it goes to the core of my being rebelling against these ideas. So here it's very, very interesting for me to look at this because here I'm a scientist and I'm a person. The science is really clear. Local realism is false. Non-contextual realism is false. Space-time is doom. It's very, very clear. It couldn't be clearer. And my emotions rebel left and right. When I sit there and say, okay, I am not something in space and time, something inside of me says, you're crazy. Of course you are. And I'm completely attached to it. I'm completely attached to all this stuff. I'm attached to my body. I'm attached to the headset. I'm attached to my car. Attached to people. I'm attached to all of it. And yet I know as an absolute fact I'm going to walk away from all of it. I'm going to die.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And that is built into what I'm saying with this theory of consciousness. If consciousness is fundamental, space-time itself is an act of fact creation. It's an interface that we create, consciousness creates, plus all the objects in it. So local realism is not true. Quantum theory is established. Also, non contextual realism is not true, and that it fits in perfectly with this idea that consciousness is fundamental. Things exist as data structures when we create them. As Chris Fuch says, the active observation is an act of fact creation. But I must say, on a personal level, I'm having I spend a couple hours a day Sitting in meditation on this and facing the rebellion.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And so we can predict, we can set up in quantum theory, you can set up, and there's a paper by Chris Fuchs, Quantum Bayesianism, where he scouts this out. It was done by other people, but he gives a good presentation of this, where they have a sequence of something like nine different quantum measurements that you can make. And you can predict with probability one what a particular outcome will be, but you can actually prove that it's impossible that the value existed before you made the measurement. So you know with probability one, what you're going to get, which you also know with certainty, that that value was not there until you made the measurement. So we know from quantum theory that the act of observation is an act of fact creation”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Right, but Einstein was a realist, right? He was a famous realist in the sense that he was very explicit in a 1935 paper with Podusky and Rosen, the EPR paper where they said If without, in any way disturbing a system, I can predict with probability one the outcome of a measurement. Then there exists in reality that element, that value. And we now know from quantum theory that that's false. Einstein's idea of local realism is strictly speaking false.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And this is the reality right now. And all of that other stuff is an interface story. But this conscious experience right now, this is the only reality as far as I can tell. The thrust of it's a story. But that is, again, not my default. That is I have to make a really... Conscious choice to say, okay, I know intellectually this is all an interface. I'm going to take the headset off and so forth. And then immediately sink back into the game and just be out there playing the game and get lost. So I'm always lost in the game unless I literally consciously choose to stop thinking.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “and turn off the thinker when I actually just start looking without thinking. So that's when I feel like I, all of a sudden I'm starting to see through. Like, Part of the addiction to the interface is all the stories I'm telling about. It's really important for me to get that, really important to do that. So, I'm telling all these stories, and so I'm all wrapped up, almost all the mind stuff that's going on in my head is about Attachment to the interface. And so what I found is that Essentially, the only way to really detach from the interface is to Literally let go of thoughts altogether. And then all of a sudden, even my identity, you know, my whole history, my name, my education, all this stuff is almost irrelevant because it's just now here is the present moment.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think my default mode is physical I think that that's just the default. When I'm not. Being conscious Consciously attentive”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “But they'll figure something out and we'll be the generation that is the first one that doesn't have to die. That's the kind of thing. But when you really face the fact that you're going to die, And then when I start to look at it from this point of view, that well, this thing was an interface to begin with. So what I'm really is what I'm really going to be doing, just taking off a headset. So I've been playing in a virtual reality game all day. And I got lost in the game when I was fighting over a Porsche. And I shot some guys up and I punctured their tires and I got the Porsche. Now I take the headset off and what was that for? Nothing. It was a data structure and the data structure is gone. So all of the wars, the fighting and the reputations and all this stuff where it's just a headset. So my theory says that intellectually.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Was scary. It was really a shock to the system. And then to realize that everything that has been important to me, like getting a house. Getting a car, getting a reputation, and so forth. Well, that car is just like the car I see in the virtual reality. It's there when you perceive it and it's not there. So the whole question of what am I doing and why? What's worthwhile doing in life? Clearly A big house and getting a big car I mean, we all knew that we were going to die. So we tend not to know that. We tend to hide it, especially when we were young. Before age 30, we don't believe we're going to die”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's been very, very difficult. This stuff is not just abstract theory building because it's about us. Sometimes I realize that there's this big division to me. My mind is doing all this science and coming up with these conclusions. And the rest of me is not integrating. It's just like, I don't believe it. I just don't believe this. So as I start to take it seriously, I get scared myself. It's like, It's very much, then I read these spiritual traditions and realize they're saying very, very similar things. It's like there is a lot of conversion. So for me, I have The first time I thought it might be possible that we're not seeing the truth. Was in 1986. It was from some mathematics we were doing. And when that hit me, it hit me like a ton of bricks I had to sit down. It really...”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “That's right. And yet we can go our entire lives on this. You're talking about the minimal thing for VR. We can go our entire lives and not realize that all of my life It's been like nothing behind me. We're not even aware that all of our lives, if you just pay attention, pay attention to what's behind me. We're like, oh, holy smoke, it's sort of scary. I mean, it's like nothing. There's no quality there at all. How did I not notice that my entire life were so immersed in the simulation we buy it so much?”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It's not even darkness. There's no There's no qualia to it. And yet there is a sense of being. And that's the interesting thing. There's a sense of being back. So I close my Put my attention forward. I have the quality of a gray model thing, but when I put my attention backward, there's no quality at all, but there is a sense of being.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Here's a case for just us. If this is a virtual reality that we're experiencing right now Here's something you can try for yourself. If you just close your eyes, And Your experience in front of you. Be aware of your experience in front of you, what you experience is just like a model dark gray, but there's all sort of, there's some dynamics to it, but it's just dark gray. But now I ask you, instead of having your attention forward, Your attention backward. What is it like behind you with your eyes closed? And there it's like nothing. Real so, what is going on here? What am I experiencing back there?”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Right, there is actually a very nice question, and there's whole groups of researchers that are actually studying in virtual reality. What is the sort of minimal requirements on this system? How does it have to operate to give you an immersion experience, to give you the feeling that you have a body, to get you to take it real? And there's actually a lot of really good work on that right now. And it turns out it doesn't take that much. You do need to get the perception action loop tight, and you have to give them the perceptions that they're expecting if you want them to. But if you can lead them along if you give them perceptions that are close to what they're expecting, you can then maybe move their reality around a bit.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So Nick Bostrom's idea about the simulation is typically In a physicalist framework. So there's the bottom level. There's some programmer in a physical space time, and they have a computer that they've programmed cleverly where they've created conscious entities. So, you have the hard problem of consciousness, right? The standard hard problem. How could a computer simulation create a consciousness which isn't explained by that simulation theory? But then the idea is that the next level, the entities that are created in the first level simulation then can write their own simulations and you get this nesting. So, the idea that this is a simulation is fine, but the idea that it starts with a physicalist base, I think, isn't fine.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “The connection with the amplitude. The permutation matrices are the core of the amplitude, and it turns out they're the core of the asymptotic description of the conscious agents.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I'll do just the high level thing. So the high level is the long-term behavior of the conscious agent, Nemics. So that's the projection of just looking at the long-term behavior. I'm hoping will give rise to the amplitude hedron. The amplituhedron then gives rise to spacetime. And so then I can just use their link to go all the way from consciousness through its asymptotics through the amplitude and into spacetime and get the map all the way into our interface.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So there's so called Burkhoff polytope. All the vertices of this polytope, all the points are permutation matrices and all the internal matrices. Are Markovian kernels that have the uniform measure as a stationary measure”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So just a very, very high level, and I'll keep it brief, the structures that the physicists are finding, like the amplitude, it turns out they're just static structure. They're polytopes. They remarkably, most of the information in them is contained in permutation matrices. So it's a matrix like an end by end matrix that just has zeros and ones. That contains almost all of the information. And you can, they have these plabit graphs and so forth that they use to boot up the scattering. You can compute those scattering amplitudes almost entirely from these permutation matrices. From my point of view, I have this conscious agent dynamics. It turns out that the stationary dynamics that I was talking about where the entropy is increasing, The stationary dynamics Sketched out by Permutation matrices.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Things are ephemeral. And here's why you shouldn't be worried about the ephemeral nature of things, because you're not a little tiny entity inside space and time, quite the opposite. You're the author of space and time”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “The stuff that I thought I was. Something that I create on the fly and delete. So, this is completely radical restructuring of how we think about possessions, about identity, about survival of death and so forth. This is completely transformative. But the nice thing is that this whole approach of conscious agents, unlike the spiritual traditions, which have said in some cases similar things, they said it imprecisely. Is mathematics. We can actually now begin to state precisely here's the mathematical model of consciousness, conscious agents. Here's how it maps onto spacetime, which I should sketch really briefly. And here's why”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “They have certain wisdom, I can point to nonsense I won't go into it, but I can also point to lots of nonsense. So the issue is to then to look for the key insights. And I think they have a lot of insights about the ephemeral nature of objects in space and time and not being attached to them, including our own bodies, and reversing that I'm not this little thing, a little consciousness trapped in the body. And the consciousness itself is only a product of the body. So when the body dies, the consciousness disappears, it turns completely around. The consciousness is fundamental. The body... My hand exists right now because I'm looking at it. My hand is gone. I have no hand. I have no brain. I have no heart. If you looked, you'll see a heart. Whatever I am, Is this really complicated thing unconsciousness? That's what I am.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “In fact, it's just the opposite. You create that mansion every time you look. You're something far deeper than that mansion. You're the entity which can create that mansion on the fly. And there's nothing to the mansion except what you create in this moment. So all of a sudden, when you take this point of view, It has all sorts of implications for how we interact with each other, how we treat each other. And again, a lot of things that spiritual traditions have said It's a mixed bag. Spiritual traditions are a mixed bag. So let me just be right up front about that. I'm not promoting any particular, but they do have some insights.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “This gets cashed out in mathematically precise science. It's saying ephemeral, yes, in fact, it lasts for a few milliseconds, a few hundred milliseconds while you look at it. And then it's gone. So the whole idea Why are we fighting? Why do we hate? We fight over possessions. Because we think that we're small little objects inside this pre-existing spacetime. We assume that that mansion, that car exists independent of us and that somehow we, these little things, can have our sense of self and importance enhanced by having that special car or that special house or that special person.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “These are all, it's just like people in a virtual reality simulation. And there's this Porsche. And we all see the Porsche. Well, that Porsche exists when I look at it. I turn my headset and I look at it. And then if Joe turns his headset in the right way, he'll see his Porsche. It's not even the same Porsche that I see. He's creating his own Porsche. So these things are exceedingly ephemeral. And now, just imagine saying that that's my Porsche. You can agree to say that it's your portion, but really the Porsche only exists as long as you look. So this all of a sudden, what the spiritual traditions have been saying for a long time.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Lot. And it's sort of scary. We all know that life is ephemeral. And spiritual traditions have said, wake up to the fact that anything that you do here is going to disappear. Even more ephemeral than perhaps we have thought. I see this bottle I create it right now. As soon as I look away, that data structure has been garbage collected. That bottle, I have to recreate it every time I look. So I spend all my money. I buy this fancy car. That car, I have to keep recreating it every time I look at it. It's that ephemeral. So, all the things that we invest ourselves in, we fight over, we kill each other over, and we have wars over.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And saw where we are. He said, Look, guys, I told you this 300 years ago. And he had his monodology. He was trying to do something like it's different from what I'm doing, but he had these things that were not in space and time, these monads. He was trying to build something. I'm trying to build a theory of conscious agents. My guess is that if he came here, I could just, if he saw what I was doing, he would say he would understand it immediately take off with it and go places that I couldn't. He would have been.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “But in general, the idea that we don't start with spacetime, that space and time is in some sense the forms of our perceptions, yes, absolutely. And I would say that there's a lot in common with Berkeley in that regard. A lot of ingenious arguments in Berkeley. Leibniz in his monodology understood very clearly that the hard problem was not solvable. He posed the hard problem and basically dismissed it. You can't do this. And so if he came here, he'd...”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So there's a lot in agreement. So Kant was an idealist. Transcendental He basically had the idea that Don't see nature as it is. We impose a structure on nature. And so, in some sense, I'm saying something similar. I'm saying that, by the way, I don't call myself an idealist. I call myself a conscious realist because idealism has a long history, a lot of different ideas come under idealism, and there's a lot of debates and so forth. It tends to be identified with, in many cases, anti-science and anti-realism. And I don't want either connection with my ideas. And so I just called my conscious realism with an emphasis on realism and not anti-realism. But one place where I would, of course, disagree with Kant was that he thought that Euclidean spacetime was a priori. We just know that that's false. So he went too far on that.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Is like, oh wow, all the low cherries aren't picked. This is really good stuff. This is really new fundamental stuff that we can do. So I can't wait to read the papers of the younger generation. And I want to see them.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “That's what we have to do, and that's what the physicists understand when they go beyond spacetime to the amplitude heater and the cosmological polytope, they ultimately know that they have to get back the big bang story and the whole evolution, that whole story where there were no living things. There was just a point. And then the explosion and then just particles at high energy. And then eventually the cooling down and the differentiation and finally matter condenses and then life and then consciousness that whole story has to come out of something that's deeper and without time. And that's what we're up to. We want to get that. So the whole story that we've been telling ourselves about Big Bang and how brains evolve in consciousness will come out of a much deeper theory. And for someone like me. But for the younger generation?”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Certainly understand that. My attitude about it is. If you look at the young physicists who are searching for these structures beyond spacetime, like Amplitude Hedon and so forth. Having a ball Space-time, that's what the old folks did. That's what the older generation did. We're doing something that really is fun and new. Having a blast and they're finding all these new structures. So I think that we're going to. Suc Getting a new deeper theory, I can just say what I'm hoping with the theory that I'm working on, I'm hoping to show that I could have this timeless dynamics of consciousness, no entropic time. I take a projection and I show how this timeless dynamics looks like the Big Bang And the entire evolution of spacetime. In other words, I see how my whole spacetime interface.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Maybe just a chemical or something like that. Probably more complicated than a chemical. That's why I think that the psychedelics. The psychedelics may, because they might be affecting this portal in certain ways that it turns it around and opens up. In other words, maybe once we understand what this thing is a portal, your body is a portal, and understand all of its complexities, maybe we realize that that portal can be shifted to different parts of the deeper consciousness. Give new windows on it. So in that way, maybe, yes, psychedelics could open up new portals in the sense that they're taking something that's already a complex portal and just tweaking it a bit.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “So, and I think we will get a theory of that, that we will get a theory of portals, and then we can ask how the psychedelics are acting. Are they actually creating new portals or not? If they're not, we should nevertheless then understand how we could create a new portal. Maybe we have to just study what happens when we have kids. We know that that technology creates new portals. So we have to reverse engineer that and then say, okay, could we somehow Create new portals de novo.”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Well, so every person that I see That symbol that I see, the body that I see, is a portal potentially for me to interact with a consciousness. And each consciousness has a unique character. We call it a personality and so forth. So with each new kid that's born, we come in contact with a personality that we've never seen before and a version of consciousness that we've never seen before. At a deeper level, as I said, the theory says there's one agent. So this is a different projection of that one agent. So that's what I mean by a portal is within my own interface, my own projection. Can I see other projections? Of that one consciousness. So, can I get portals in that sense?”

    2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source