YouSaid · the spoken record

Donald Hoffman

lines on the record: 200
first: 2022-06-12
most recent: 2022-06-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Your son and your daughter Didn't exist. That was a portal. You're having contact with consciousness that you never would have had before. But now you've got a son or a daughter. You went through this physical process. They were born. Then...”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then I think we can then start to ask specific questions. When you're taking DMT or you're taking LSD or something like that, now that we have this deep model that we've reverse engineered space and time and physical particles, we've pulled them back to this theory of conscious agents. Now we can ask ourselves in this idealized future, what are we doing to conscious agents when we apply five MEO DMT? What are we doing? Are we opening a new portal? When I say that, I mean, I have a portal into consciousness that I call my body of Lex Friedman that I'm creating. And it's a genuine portal, not perfect, but it's a genuine portal. I'm definitely communicating with your consciousness. And we know that we have one technology for building new portals. We know one technology, and that is having kids. Having kids is how”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we're screwed. I think that we get little hints of it from psychedelic drugs and so forth. We get hints that there are certain interventions that we can take on our interface. I apply this chemical, which is just some element of my interface, to this, to a brain. I ingest it. And all of a sudden, it seemed like I've opened new portals into conscious experiences. Well, that's very, very suggestive. That's like the black body radiation doing something that we didn't expect, right? It doesn't go to infinity when we thought it was going to go to infinity, and we're forced to propose these quanta. So once we have a theory of conscious agents, Is projection dispute? I should say I should sketch what I think that projection is.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then once you've done that, and then you have an Einstein come along five years later and show how that explains the photoelectroelectric effect. And then eventually in 1926, you get quantum theory. And then you get this whole new way of thinking that was from the Newtonian point of view completely contradictory and counterintuitive, certainly. And maybe if Giesen is right, not contradictory, maybe if you use intuitionist math, they're not contradictory. But still, certainly you wouldn't have gone there. And so here's a case where the experiments and then a desperate mathematical move Sort of we use those as a flashlight into the deep fog, right? And so science may be the flashlight into the deep fog.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that we will incrementally be able to do that. I think that, for example, The picture that we have of electrons and photons interacting and scattering. It may have not been possible until Faraday did all of his experiments and then Maxwell wrote down those equations and we were then sort of forced by his equations to think in a new way. And then when Planck in 1900 desperate to try to solve the The problem of black body radiation, what they call the ultraviolet catastrophe where Newton was predicting infinite. Energies where there weren't infinite energies in the black body radiation. And he, in desperation, proposed Packets of energy”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's actually what I call the conscious realist perspective. Panpsychists are effectively dualists, right? They're saying there's physical stuff that really is fundamental and then consciousness stuff. So I would go with Pinker and say, look, let's just stipulate the consciousness stuff. But I'm not going to stipulate the physical stuff. I'm going to actually now show how to boot up the physical stuff from just the consciousness stuff. So I'll stipulate less.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assumptions and then trying to boot up consciousness. You've set yourself the problem. I'm starting with physical stuff that's not conscious. I'm trying to get the taste of chocolate out as maybe some kind of function of the dynamics of that. We've not been able to do that. And so Pinker is saying we may have to punt, we may have to just stipulate that last bit. He calls it the last dollop and just stipulate it as a bare fact of nature that there is something it's like. Well From my point of view as the physical the whole point, the whole promise of the physicalist was we wouldn't have to stipulate. I was going to start with the physical stuff and explain where the consciousness came from. If I'm going to stipulate consciousness, why don't I just stipulate consciousness and not stipulate all the physical stuff too? So I'm stipulating less. I'm saying, okay, I agree.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are not stupid people. These are brilliant, brilliant people. The fact that we've come up with not a single specific conscious experience that we can explain. And no hope. There's no one that says, oh, I'm really close. I'll have it for you in a year. There's just like, there's this fundamental gap. So much so that Steve Pinker in one of his writings says, look, he likes the global workspace theory. But he says the last dollop of the theory in which there's something it's like to, he said we may have to just stipulate that as a brute fact. Pinker is brilliant, right? He understands the state of play on this problem of the hard problem of consciousness, starting with physicalist.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, got you. Right, right. Yeah. What I'm saying is. If it were true space-time was fundamental. Then I would have to agree that if there is such a thing as consciousness, given the data that we've got, that complex brains have consciousness and dirt doesn't, that somehow it's the complexity of the dynamics or organization, the function of the physical system that somehow is creating the consciousness. So under those assumptions, yes, but when the physicists themselves are telling us that spacetime is not fundamental. Then I can understand. See, then the whole picture starts to come into focus. My colleagues are brilliant, right? These are really smart people. I mean, Francis Crick worked on this for the last 20 years of his life.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think The argument I would give, and that I believed was look, when you have very simple physical systems, like a piece of dirt Not much evidence of life or consciousness. It's only when you get really complicated physical systems like NetF brains. And really, the more complicated the brains, the more it looks like there is consciousness and the more complicated that consciousness is. Surely that means that simple physical systems don't create much consciousness, or if maybe not any, or maybe panpsychists, they create the most elementary kinds of simple conscious experiences. But you need more complicated physical systems to boot up, to create more complicated consciousnesses. I think that's the intuition that drives most of my colleagues.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You chose that So, since you chose that problem, how much progress have you made? Well, You've not been able to come up with a single specific conscious experience, and you've had these brilliant people working on it for decades now, that's not really good progress.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are all theories of consciousness. There's not a single theory that can give you a specific conscious experience. That they say, here is the physical dynamics or the physical structure that must be the taste of chocolate or whatever one they want.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. No, that doesn't mean that they're wrong, it just means that they haven't done it. I think it's principled. The reason is principled, but I'm happy that they're exploring it. But the fact is, the remarkable fact is there's not one theory, so integrated information theory, orchestrated collapse of microtubules, global workspace theory”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precise structure that we need for chocolate, and why does that structure have to be for chocolate and why is it that it could not possibly be vanilla? Is there any astum? Is there any one specific conscious experience that you can account for? Because notice, they've set themselves the task of booting up conscious experiences from physical systems. That's the task they've set themselves.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And here's the challenge I would put to all of my friends and colleagues who are. One specific conscious experience. You can boot up right. So if you think that it's integrated information, and this I've asked this of Julia Tononi a couple times back in the 90s and then just a couple years ago, Julio, okay, so great and great information. So we're all interested in explaining some specific conscious experiences. So what is, you know, pick one, the taste of chocolate. What is the integrated information?”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A methodological thing. That's saying within spacetime as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space, you get deeper and deeper laws, more and more fundamental laws. And the reduction of temperature to Particle movement was an example of that, but I think that the reason that worked was almost an artifact of the nature of 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
“So, a physicalist, I would. Say, as someone who takes space time and the objects within spacetime as ontologically fundamental.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My ideas have been really shaped by several things. One is The physicalist framework that my scientific colleagues, almost to a person have adopted and that I adopted too. The reason I walked away from it was because it became clear that we couldn't start with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deeper self, which is the timeless being that precedes, not precludes, but precedes any particular conscious experiences, the ground of all experience. There's that notion of a deep capital self, but our little... Lowercase S selves could be artifacts of projection. And it may be that Consciousness is doing in this framework is right, it's projected itself down into a self that calls itself Don and a self that calls itself lax. And through conversations like this, it's trying to find out about itself and eventually transcend. The limits of the Don and Lex little icons that it's using and that little projection of itself through this conversation somehow it's learning about itself.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any projection of that one conscious agent gives rise to time even if there wasn't any time in that one conscious agent. And it gives rise, I want to, now I haven't proven this. So this is, so now this is me guessing where the theory is going to go. I haven't done this. There's no paper on this yet. So now I'm speculating. My guess is I'll be able to show or my brighter colleagues working with me will be able to show that we will get evolution of a natural selection, the notion of individual selves, individual physical objects and so forth coming out as a projection of this thing and that the self, this then will be really interesting in terms of how it starts to interact with certain spiritual traditions, right? Where they will say that there is a notion of self that needs to be let go, which is this finite self that's competing with other selves to get more money and prestige and so forth. That self in some sense has to die. But there's”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So it won't. I don't think, as I said, I don't think that I can tell you how the formless gives rise to the experience of chocolate. Right now, my current theory says that's one of the miracles I'm assuming. So, my theory can't do it. And the reason my theory can't do it is because Hoffman's brain can't do it right now. But the notion of self, yes The notion of self can be an artifact of the projection of it. So there's one conscious agent. Anytime conscious agents interact, they form a new conscious agent. So there's one conscious agent.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right Whole technical thing was to say this even if the dynamics of consciousness is stationary, so that there is no entropic time. Any projection of it, any view of it. Will have the artifact of entropic time That's a limited resource. Limited resources so that the fundamental dynamics may have no limits, limited resources whatsoever. Any projection will have certainly time as a limited resource and probably lots of other limited resources. Hence, we could get competition and evolution and nature red and tooth and claw as an artifact of a deeper system in which those aren't fundamental. And in fact, I take it as something that this theory must do. Some point just to show how networks of conscious agents, even if they're not resource limited, give rise to evolution by natural selection via a projection.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The three line proof h of xn given x1 is greater than or equal to h of xn given x1 and x2 because conditioning reduces. But then h minus 1 given x1 comma x2 is equal to h of xn. Given x2, xn minus 1, given x2 by the Markov pro And then because it's stationary, it's equal to h of x. Have to write it down Anyway, there's a three line proof.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if you have a stationary marking dynamics, any projection that you make of that dynamics by conditional probability. And if you want, I can state a little bit more even more mathematically precisely for some readers or listeners. But if any projection you take by conditional probability, the induced image of that Markov chain will have increasing entropy. You will have entropic time. So I'll be very, very precise. I have a mark of chain X1, X2 through XN, where n goes to infinity, right? The entropy H. Capital H of Xn is equal to the entropy H of Xn minus 1 for all n. So, the entropy is the same. It's a theorem that hidden x sub 1 is greater than or equal to h of xn minus 1 given x1.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a way of thinking about this whole problem now that comes out of this framework that's different. So we could imagine a dynamics of consciousness. In space and time, just abstractly Be cooperative for all we know. It could be very friendly. I don't know. And you can set up a dynamics, a Mercovian dynamics that is so called stationary. And that's a technical term, which means that the entropy effectively is not increasing. There is some entropy, but it's constant. So there's no increasing entropy. And in that sense, the dynamics is timeless. There is no entropic A trivial theorem Line”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not consciousness. Yeah. Our ideas about consciousness are pretty much on the same page. She rightly has cautioned me to, when I talk about conscious agents, to point out that the notion of agency is not fundamental in my theory. The notion of self is not fundamental. And that's absolutely true. I can use this network of conscious agents. I now use a technical term conscious agents is a technical term for that probability space with the Markovian dynamics. I can use that to build models of a self and to build models of agency, but they're not fundamental. So she has really been very helpful in helping me to be a little bit clear about these ideas and not say things that are misleading. Sure.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Annika and I just had a conversation this morning where we were talking about our ideas and what we discovered really in our conversation was that we're pretty much on the same page. It was really just”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we can get a deeper, perhaps more interesting. And then someone will say, well, now I'll go to topoy theory. And there'll be, so I imagine that there'll be conscious agents 5, 10, 3 trillion.0. Think it will never end. I think ultimately this question that we sort of put our fingers on of The formless give birth to form. The taste, the wonderful taste of chocolate. I think that we will always go deeper and deeper, but we will never solve that. That in some sense that will be a primitive. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe it's just the limits of my current imagination. So I'll just say my imagination right now doesn't Pure that deep. Hopefully, so I don't, by the way, I'm saying this I don't want to discourage some brilliant 20 year old who then later on proves me dead wrong. I hope to be proven dead wrong.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guess is that it will enable unbelievable technologies, and I'll tell you why I think it plugs into the work that the physicists are doing. So this theory of consciousness will be even deeper than the structures that the physicists are finding, like the amplitude hedrons. But the other answer to your question is less positive. As I said earlier, I think that there is no such thing as a theory of everything. So that I think that the theory that my team is working on, this consultation theory, is just a 1.0 theory. Using probability spaces and Markovian kernels. I can easily see people now saying, well, we can do better if we go to category theory.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll give two answers. There's one problem I think we can solve. We haven't solved yet. And that is the reverse of what my colleagues call the hard problem. The problem of how do you start with conscious experiences in the way that I've just described them and the dynamics and build up space and time and brains? That, I think, is a tough technical problem, but it's in principle solvable. So I think we can solve that. So we would solve the hard problem, not by showing how brains create consciousness, but how networks of conscious agents create what we call the symbols that we call brains. So that, I”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's so when I write down Probability space for these conscious experiences. I say, here's a probability space for the possible conscious experiences. It's just like when I write down a probability space for an experiment, like I'm going to flip a coin twice. And I want to look at the probabilities of various outcomes. So I have to write down a probability space. There could be heads, heads, heads, tails, tails, heads, tails, tails. So any class in probability, you're told write down your probability space. If you don't write down your probability space, you can't get started. So here's my probability space for consciousness. How do I want to interpret that structure? The structure is just sitting there. There's going to be a dynamics that happens on it, right? Experiences appear and they disappear, just like heads appears and disappears. So one way to think about that fundamental probability space is that corresponds to consciousness without any content.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope so. I've got my hands full with what I'm doing right now. But I can just say at top level how I would think about that. That would get at this. Consciousness without form. This is going to be really, this is really tough because consciousness without form versus the various forms that consciousness takes for the experiences that it has.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, that's the right question. And when I say that I took conscious experiences as fundamental, what that means is in the current version of my theory, I'm not explaining conscious experiences where they came from. That's the miracle. That's one of the miracles. So I have two miracles in my theory. There are conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate and that there's a probabilistic relationship when certain conscious experiences occur, others are more likely to occur. Those are the two miracles that...”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the proposal. And therefore, what I have to do in terms of the hard problem of consciousness is to show how dynamical systems of conscious agents could lead to what we call space and time and neurons. and brain activity. In other words, we have to show how you get space-time and physical objects. Entirely from a theory of conscious agents outside of spacetime, with the dynamics outside of spacetime. So that's, and I can tell you how we plan to do that, but that's the idea.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because when we have two of these conscious agents interacting, mathematics, they actually satisfy the definition of a conscious agent. So in fact, they are a single conscious agent. So in fact, one way to think about what I'm saying, I'm postulating with my colleagues, Chaiton and Chris and others, Robert Prentner and so forth. There is one big conscious agent internally complicated. But fortunately, we can, for analytic purposes, break it down all the way to, in some sense, the simplest conscious agent, which has one conscious experience. One. This one agent can experience RED 35. That's it. That's what it experiences. You can get all the way down to that.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet they're real color experiences. And so in that sense, I'm saying, now take that little baby step. Oh, there are women who have color experiences that I could never have. Well, that's shocking. Now take that infinite. There are consciousnesses where every aspect of their experiences is like that new color. It's something utterly alien to you. You have nothing like that. And yet these are all possible varieties of conscious experience.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing happens. And that's just one color. I'm asking for just a color. We actually know, by the way, that apparently there are women called tetraphs. Who have four color receptors Just three. And Kimberly Jameson and others who've studied these women have good evidence that they apparently have a new dimension of color experience. The rest of us don't have so these women are apparently living in a world of color that you and I can't even concretely imagine. No man can imagine them.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the following sense. If I ask you to imagine a color that you've never seen before. Anything happened? Nothing happens”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying something similar in spirit, but importantly different. There's an infinite variety of mathematical structures, absolutely. Mathematics isn't the fundamental reality in this framework. Consciousness is. And mathematics is to consciousness like bones are to an organism. Need the bones. So mathematics is not divorced from consciousness, but it's not the entirety of consciousness by any means. And so there's an infinite variety of consciousness and signaling games that consciousnesses could interact via. And therefore worlds, common worlds, data structures, They can use to communicate, so space and time is just one of an infinite variety. And so I think that what we'll find is that as we go outside of our little spacetime bubble, We will encounter utterly alien forms of conscious experience that we may not be able to really”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guess is that. If consciousness is fundamental, Consciousness is all there then the only thing that mathematical structure can be about is possibilities of consciousness. And that suggests to me that there could be an infinite variety of consciousnesses Avengingly small fraction of them use space time data structures and the kinds of structures that we use. There's an infinite variety of data structures. Now this is very similar to something that Max Tegmark has said, but I want to distinguish it. He has his level four multiverse idea. He thinks that mathematics is fundamental. And so that's the fundamental reality. And since there's an infinite variety of endless variety of mathematical structures, there's an infinite variety of multiverses in his view.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now. That's right. More generally, it'll be conscious agents because, as you pointed out, am I asking for a theory of conscience only about humans? No, it's consciousness which human consciousness is just tiny sliver.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My hard problem would go in the other direction. If I start with conscious experiences, how do I build up space and time? How do I build up what I call the physical world? How do I build up what we call brains? Because I'm saying consciousness is not something that brains do. Brains are something that consciousness makes up. It's among the ephemeral experience in consciousness. I look inside, so to be very, very clear, right now I have no neurons. If you looked Would see neurons. That's a data structure that you would create on the fly, and it's a very useful one. As soon as you look away, you garbage collect that data structure. Just like that necrocube that I was talking about on the piece of paper. When you look, you see a 3D cube. Create it on the fly. As soon as you look away, that's gone”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the standard way the heart problem is thought of is we're assuming space and time are particles or neurons, for example. These are just physical things that have no consciousness. And we have to explain how the conscious experience of the taste of chocolate could emerge from those. So the typical hard problem of consciousness is that problem, right? How do you boot up the taste of chocolate, the experience of the taste of chocolate from neurons, say, or the right? How do you boot that up? That's typically what the hard problem of consciousness means to researchers. Notice that I'm changing the problem. I'm not trying to boot up conscious experiences from the dynamics of neurons or silicon or something like that. I'm saying that that's the wrong problem.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it leaves open the door for the possibility of non computable interactions between conscious agents. So we have to, if we want a theory of memory, have to build it and there's lots of different ways you could build we've actually got a paper Chris Fields took the lead on this and we have a paper called Conscious Agent Networks where where Chris takes the lead and shows how to use these networks of conscious agents to build memory and to build primitive kinds of learning”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I want to have a notion of a self, I have to build a self. I have to build learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, and planning, all these different things. I have to build networks of conscious agents to do that. It's a trivial theorem that networks of conscious agents are computationally universal. That's trivial. So anything that we can do with neural networks or automata, you can do with networks of conscious agents. That's trivial. But you can also do more. The events in the probability space need not be computable. So the Markovian dynamics is not restricted to computable functions because the very events themselves need not be computable. So this can capture any computable theory. Anything we can do with neural networks, we can do with conscious agent networks.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very useful scientific interface. It's a scale free, or if you like a fractalike. Approach to it in which we can use the same unit of analysis at all scales in studying consciousness. But if I want to talk about, so there's no notion of learning Memory, problem solving, intelligence, self, agency. So none of that is fundamental. So, and the reason I did that was because I want to assume as little as possible. Everything I assume is a miracle in the theory. It's not something you explain. It's something you assume. So I have to build networks of 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
“So here's the interesting thing. When we write down the mathematics, when you have two of these conscious agents interacting, the pair satisfy a definition of a conscious agent. So they are a single conscious agent. So there is one conscious agent. It has a nice analytic decomposition into as many conscious agents as you would.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The agent is a mathematical structure that includes a probability measure, the probability space of possible conscious experiences, and a Markovian kernel, which describes how if this agent has certain conscious experiences, how that will affect the experiences of other conscious agents Including itself”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say there's a probabilistic relationship. And then, so I'm trying to be as nonspecific to begin with and see where it leads me. So what I can write down are probability spaces. So probability space, which contains the conscious experiences that this consciousness can have. So I call this a conscious agent. This technical thing, Annika Harris and I have talked about this, and she rightly cautions me that people will think that I'm bringing in a notion of a self or agency and so forth when I say conscious agent. So I just want to say that I use the term conscious agent merely as a technical term. There is no notion of self in my fundamental definition of a conscious agent. There are only experiences and probabilistic relationships of how they trigger other experiences.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First assumption. The second assumption is that these experiences have consequences. So I'm going to say that conscious experiences can trigger other conscious experiences somehow. So, really, in some sense, there's two basic assumptions.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source