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

“Apparently, if you split the corpus callosum, the personality of the left hemisphere and the religious beliefs of the left hemisphere can be very different from the right hemisphere. And their conscious experiences can be disjoint. One could have one conscious experience. They can play 20 questions. The left hemisphere can have an idea in its mind, and the right hemisphere has to guess. And it might not get it. So even within you, it's more than just one consciousness. lots of consciousnesses. So the general theory of consciousness that I'm after is not just human consciousness. It's going to be just consciousness, and I presume human consciousness is a tiny drop in the bucket of the infinite variety of consciousnesses.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's beyond human consciousness. Human consciousness, from my point of view, would be one of a countless variety of consciousnesses. And even within human consciousness, there's countless variety of consciousnesses within us. You have your left and right hemisphere.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. It feels like something to have a headache or to feel upset to your stomach. It feels like something. And so I'm going to grant that in this theory there are experiences and they're fundamental in some sense. So conscious experience. So they're not derived from physics. They're not functional properties of particles. They are sui generis. They exist. Just like we assume spacetime exists. I'm now saying spacetime is just a data structure. It doesn't exist independent of conscious experiences.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what do we want? And here, again, there's no hard and fast rule, but what you as a scientist have to do is to pick. You think are the minimal assumptions that are going to allow you to boot up a comprehensive theory? That is the trick. So, what do I want? So, what I chose to do was to have three things. I've said that there are conscious experiences. Feeling of headache, the smell of garlic, experience in the color red. So that's a primitive ethereum. And the reason I want few primitives because those are the miracles of the theory, right? The primitives, the assumptions of ethereal, the things you're not going to explain. Those are the things you assume.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we think that we want to have a model of consciousness, we as scientists then have to say what do we want to write down? What kind of mathematical model are we going to write down? And if you think about it, there's lots of things that you might want to write down about consciousness. It's fairly complicated subject. So most of my colleagues are saying, let's start with matter or neurons and say what properties of matter could create consciousness. But I'm saying that that whole thing is out. Space-time is doomed. That whole thing is out. We need to look at consciousness qua consciousness. In other words, not as something that arises in space and time, but perhaps as something that creates space and time as a data structure.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, right. It's useful for theories like thermodynamics and also for understanding brain networks in terms of individual neurons and neurons in terms of chemical systems inside cells. That's all very, very useful. But the idea that we're getting to the more fundamental nature of reality, no, when you get all the way down in that direction, you get down to the quarks and gluons. What you realize is what you've gotten down to is not fundamental reality, just the irreducible representations of a data structure. That's all you've gotten down to. So you're always stuck inside the data structure. So you seem to be getting closer and closer. I went from neural networks to neurons to neurons to chemistry, chemistry to particles, particles to clerks and gluons. I'm getting closer and closer to the rail. No, I'm getting closer and closer to the actual structure of the data structure of space and time, the irreducible representations. That's what you're getting closer to.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. The idea that somehow being smaller in space and time, or space-time, is a fundamental nature of reality, that's just wrong. It turned out to be a useful heuristic for thermodynamics and so forth and several other places reductionism has been very useful. But that's in some sense an artifact of how we use 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
“My feeling is not the dead end kind of thing. I think that what the physicists are finding is that there are the structures beyond space-time, but they project back into space-time. And so spacetime, when they say spacetime is doomed, they're explicit. They're saying it's doomed in the sense that we thought it was fundamental. It's not fundamental. It's a useful, absolutely useful and brilliant data structure. But there are deeper data structures like cosmological polytop. And spacetime is not fundamental. What is doomed in the sense that it's wrong is reductionism.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. It's like earth, air, fire, and water is not wrong. There is earth air, fire, and water. That's a useful framework, but it's not fundamental.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they're stuck with this old framework because if they weren't stuck like with Earth, air, fire, and water, you could actually make progress. So it doesn't matter how smart you are. If you start with Earth, air, fire, and water, you're not going to get anywhere, right?”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The periodic table isn't it. It's good for chemistry, it's just wonderful for chemistry, but if you're trying to go deep, fundamental, what is the fundamental science? That's not it. You're going to have to go to quarks, leptons, and gluons and so forth. Well, now... Discovered space time itself is doomed. Quarks, leptons, and gluons are just irreducible representations of the symmetries of spacetime. So, the whole framework on which consciousness research is being based right now is doomed. And for me, these are my friends and colleagues that are doing this. They're brilliant. They're brilliant. My feeling is I'm so sad”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We realize that, of course, we want to study Earth, air, fire, and water. There's combustion science for fire. There's sciences for all these other things, water and so forth. So we're going to do science for these things, but fundamental, no, no. If you're looking for something fundamental, those are the wrong building blocks. Earth has many, many different kinds of elements that project into the one thing that we call Earth. If you don't understand that there's silicon, that there's iron, that there's all these different kinds of things that project into what we call Earth, you're hopelessly lost. You're not fundamentally not going to get there. And then after the periodic table, then we came up with quarks, leptons, and gluons, the particles of the standard model of physics. And so we actually now know that if you really want to get fundamental”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In physical processes in spacetime is fundamental. Panpsychism adds consciousness as an additional thing is almost dualist in that regard. And my attitude is our best science is telling us that space-time is not fundamental. Why is that important here? Well, for centuries, Deep thinkers thought of earth air, fire, and water as the fundamental elements. It was a reductionist kind of idea. Nothing was more elemental than those, and you could sort of build everything up from those. When we got the periodic table of elements,”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but once again, you're taking space and time and particles is fundamental, and you're adding a new property to them, say, consciousness. And then you have to talk about how when a proton and a neutron or a proton and electron get together to form hydrogen, then how those consciousnesses merge or interact to create the consciousness of hydrogen and so forth. There's a tension schema theory, which again is how neural network processes representing to the network itself its attentional processes that could be consciousness. There's global workspace theory and neuronal global workspace workspace theory. So there's many, many theories of this type. What's common to all of them is they assume that spacetime is fundamental.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are those who say, for example, that consciousness arises from orchestrated collapse of quantum states of microtubules and neurons? So this is hammer off and Penrose. So you start with something physical, but a property of quantum states of neurons. Of microtubules and neurons. And you say that somehow an orchestrated collapse of those is consciousness or conscious experiences or integrated information theory. Again, you start with something physical. And if it has the right kind of functional properties, something they call phi with the right kind of integrated information, then you have consciousness. Or you can be a panpsychist, Philip Goff, for example, where you might say, well, in addition to particles in space and time, those particles are not just matter. They also could have, say, a unit of consciousness.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me say first what most of my colleagues say. 99% are again assuming that spacetime is fundamental. Particles in space-time matter is fundamental. Most of our reductionists. And so the standard approach to consciousness is to figure out Complicated systems of matter with the right functional properties could possibly lead to the emergence of consciousness. That's the general idea So maybe you have to have neurons. Only if you have neurons, but that might not be enough, they have certain kinds of complexity in their organization and their dynamics, certain kind of network abilities, for example.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they had a game theoretic kind of thing that they'd had people do. And what they found was that when they included, so most people are trichromats, you have three kinds of cone photoreceptors. But there are some, a lot of men, 7% of men are dichromats. They might be missing the red cone photoreceptor. They found that the dichromats had an outsized influence on the final ways that the whole space of colors was carved up and labels attached. You needed to be able to include the dichromats in the conversation. And so they had a bigger influence on how you made the boundaries of the language. I thought that was a really interesting kind of insight that there's going to be, again, a game, perhaps a game where evolutionary or genetic algorithm kind of thing that goes on in terms of learning to communicate in ways that are useful. And so, yeah, you can use game theory to actually explore.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of work on this, so there's some interesting work called signaling games where they look at how people can coordinate. Come to communicate. There's some interesting work that was done by some colleagues and friends of mine. Lewis Nerons, Natalia Komarova, and Kimberly Jameson, were looking at Evolving color words. So you have a circle of colors, the color circle, and they wanted to see if they could get people to cooperate and how they carved the color circle up into units of words.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me answer one aspect of it that I'm more confident about. Speculate on that. Why is it that the portal is so bad with protons? And elementary particles more generally. So quarks, leptons, and gluons and so forth. Well, the reason for that is because those are just symmetries of spacetime. Technically, they're irreducible representations of the Poincar ⁇ group, thus spacetime. So Literally representations of the data structure of spacetime that we're using. So that's why they're not very much insightful. They're just almost entirely tied to the data structure itself. There's not much, they're telling you only something about the data structure, not behind the data structure. It's only when we get to higher levels that we're starting to, in some sense, build portals to what's behind space-time.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are looking so your face is not conscious, but I know that face in my interface, the lex friedman face that I create, is an interface symbol that's a genuine portal into your consciousness. The portal is less clear for a cat, even less clear for an ant. And by the time we get down to a proton, the portal is not clear at all. But that doesn't mean I'm not interacting with consciousness, it just means my interface gave up. And there's some deeper reality that we have to go after. So your question really forces out a big part of this whole approach that I'm talking about.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what is behind the entity in space-time? So I've got this spacetime interface and I just got this entity that I call a proton. What is the reality behind it? Well, the physicists are finding these big, big structures, amplitude hedron, sociohedron. What's behind those? Could be consciousness, what I'm playing with. In which case, when I'm interacting with a proton, Could be interacting with consciousness, again, to be very, very clear, because I'm not saying a proton is conscious. Just like I'm not saying your face is conscious. Your face is a symbol I create and then delete.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now when I look at a cat, I'm creating something that I still call living and I still think is conscious. When I look at an ant, I create something that I still would call living, but maybe not conscious. When I look at something I call a virus, now I'm not even sure I would call it living. And when I look at a proton, I would say I don't even think it's not alive at all. It could be that I'm nevertheless interacting with something that's just as conscious as you. I'm not saying the proton is conscious. The face that I'm creating when I look at you, that face is not conscious. That face is a data structure in me. That face is an experience. It's not an experiencer. Similar proton is something that I create when I look or do a collision in the large hadron collider or something like that.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that there's a deeper reality. I believe that there's a much deeper reality. There's the whole world of your experiences, your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams. In some sense, the face that I see is just a symbol that I create. And as soon as I look away, I delete that symbol. But I don't delete you. I don't delete the conscious experience, the whole world of your. So I'm only deleting an interface symbol. But that interface symbol is a portal, so to speak. Not a perfect portal, but a genuine portal into your beliefs, into your conscious experiences, and that's why we can have a conversation. Your consciousness is genuinely affecting mine, and mine is genuinely affecting yours through these icons, which I create on the fly. I mean, I create your face when I look, I delete it. I don't create you, your consciousness. That's there all the time. But I do.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a lot of interesting work. Some of it by collaborators of Carl Friston and others where they have Bayesnet kind of stuff that they built on and the notion of a Markov blanket. So you have some states within this network that are inside the blanket. Then you have the blanket and then the states outside the blanket. And the states inside this Markov blanket are conditionally independent. The states outside the blanket conditioned on the blanket. What they're looking at is that the dynamics inside of the states, inside the Markov blanket, seem to be trying to estimate properties of the outside and react to them in a way. So it seems like you're doing probabilistic inferences in ways that might be able to keep your life. So there's interesting work going on in that direction. But what I'm saying is something slightly different, and that is when I look at you, all I see is skin hair and eyes, right? That's all I see.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I'll talk about how you could have Dynamics without time, but the dynamics of this deeper theory, when we project it into in certain ways, then we do get spacetime and we get what appears to be evolution by natural selection. So I would love to see evolution by natural selection, nature red in tooth and claw, people fighting, animals fighting for resources and the whole bit, come out of a deeper theory in which perhaps it's all cooperation. There's no limited resources and so forth. But as a result of projection, you get space and time and as a result of projection, you get nature red and tooth and claw, the appearance of it. But it's all an artifact of the interface.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not fundamental, it's an artifact overflow. So if we really want to understand where evolution comes from. Answer the question, the deep question you asked. I think the right way we're going to have to do that is to come up with a deeper theory than spacetime. In which there may not be the notion of time. And show that whatever this dynamics of that deeper theory is.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is obvious. That's right. But when we get down to an aunt, it's obviously living, but I'll say it appears to be living. But when we get down to a virus, now people wonder, and when we get down to protons, people say it's not living. And my attitude is, look, I have a user interface. Interface is there to hide certain aspects of reality and others to It's an uneven representation, put it that way. Certain things just get completely hidden. Dark matter and dark energy are most of the energy and matter that's out there. Our interface just plain flat out hides them. Only way we get some hint is because gravitational things are going wrong within our. So most things are outside of our interface. The distinction between living and non-living.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the distinction that we make between living and non-living? Not a fundamental distinction. It's an artifact of the limits of our interface. So, this is a new wrinkle, and this is an important wrinkle. It's so nice to take space and time is fundamental, because if something looks like it's inanimate, it's inanimate. And we can just say it's not living. Now, Much more complicated. Certain things are obviously living. I'm talking with you. I'm obviously interacting with something that's alive and conscious.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So each theory makes its own assumptions and says, grant me this, and I'll explain that. So, evolutionary game theory says grant me fitness payoffs. And grant me strategies with payoffs, and I can write down the matrix for this strategy interacts with that strategy. These are the payoffs that come up. If you grant me that, then I can start to explain a lot of things. Now, you can ask for a deeper question, like how does physics evolve biology and where do these fitness payoffs come from? Now Would be that's a completely different enterprise. And of course, evolutionary game theory then would be not the right tool for that. It would have to be a deeper tool that shows where evolutionary game theory comes from. My own take is that Going to be a problem in doing that. Because spacetime isn't fundamental. It's just a user interface.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If my goal is mating, this is pointless. So I'm seeing for what I'm coding here is all sorts of actions and the payoffs that I could get. When I pick up an apple, now I'm getting a different set of actions and payoffs. When I pick up a rock, so for every object, what I'm getting is a different set of payoff functions with various actions. And so once you allow that, then what you find is once again that truth goes extinct and the organisms that just get an interface are the ones that went.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're shaped to see only fitness payoffs were the ones that were. So the idea is that objects then, what are objects from an evolutionary point of view? This bottle, we thought that when I saw a bottle, it was because I was seeing a true object that existed whether or not it was perceived. Evolutionary theories suggest a different interpretation. I'm seeing a data structure that is encoding Convenient way of looking at various fitness payoffs. I can use this for drinking. I could use it as a weapon, not a very good one. I could beat someone with head with it.”
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 so we've actually redone some of our own work based on theirs. And this is the back and forth that we expect in science, right? And what we found was that they, in their simulations, they were assuming that you couldn't carve the world up into objects. And so we said, well, let's relax that assumption. Allow organisms to create data structures that we might call objects. And an object would be you take, you would do hierarchical clustering of your fitness payoff functions, the ones that have similar shapes. If you have 20,000 of them, maybe these 50 are all very, very similar. So I can take all the perception, action, fitness stuff, and make that into a data structure, and we'll call that a unit or an object. And as soon as we did that, then all of their results went away. It turned out they were the special case and that the organisms that were allowed to only see that.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a fair rejoinder, and I think that that was the tool that we used. And if someone says, here's a better mathematical tool and here's why, this mathematical tool better captures the essence of Darwin's idea. John Maynard Smith didn't quite get it with evolutionary game theory. This thing. Now, there are tools like evolutionary graph theory, which generalize evolutionary game theory. And then there's quantum game theory. So you can use quantum tools like entanglement, for example, as a resource in games that change the very nature of the solutions, of the optimal solutions of the game theory.”
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 really quite interesting. So the issue he raises is a very, very deep one, and one that I think we should take quite seriously. Which is how shall we think about the reality of the contour's hierarchy, ALF 1, ALF 2, and all these different infinities, versus just... More algorithmic approach, right? So where everything's computable in some sense, everything's finite, as big as you want, but nevertheless finite.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A reality. That's a big debate in mathematics. The intuitionists versus the ones who take, for example, the real numbers as real. And that's a fun discussion. Nicholas Giesen has a physicist had really interesting work recently on how if you go with intuitionist mathematics, you could effectively quantize Newton and you find that Newtonian theory and quantum theory aren't that different once you go with it.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be very precise. So, for example, if I have a unit square on the plane. And I use a measure in which a probability measure in which the area of a region is this probability. Then, if I draw a curve in that unit square, it has measure precisely zero, precisely, not approximally, precisely zero. And yet it has infinitely many points. So there's an object that for that probability measure has probability zero, and yet there's infinitely many points in it. So what I mean when I say that the things that are probability zero can happen infinitely often in principle.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the first simulations, right? So that would be a limit. We had one or two payoff functions we showed the result in those. At least for the genetic algorithms. And they said if you have 20,000 of them, then we can find these conditions in which Truth seeing organisms would be the ones that evolved and survived. And so we looked at their simulations. And it certainly is the case that you can find special cases in which truth can evolve. So when I say it's probability zero, it doesn't mean it can't happen. It can happen. In fact, it could happen infinitely often. It's just probability zero. So probability zero things can happen infinitely often.”
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've gotten some pushback from professional colleagues and friends who have tried to rerun simulations and try to the idea that we don't see the truth is not comfortable and so many of my colleagues are very interested in trying to show that we're wrong. And so the idea would be to say that somehow we did something as you're suggesting, maybe something special that wasn't completely general. We got some little special part of the whole search space and evolutionary game theory in which this happens to be true, but more generally organisms would evolve to see the truth. So the best Pushback we've gotten is from a team at Yale. And they suggested that if you use thousands of payoff functions, so we, in our simulations, we just use a couple, one or two.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This wrong attitude forever. The attitude we should have is a century from now, they'll be looking at us and laughing at what we didn't know. And we just have to assume that that's going to be the case. Just know that everything that we think is so brilliant right now, our final theory of a century from now, they'll look at us like we look at the physicists of 1890 and go, how could they have been so dumb? So, I don't want to make that mistake. So, I'm not doctrinaire about. Any of our current scientific theories, I am Dr. Nairabout. This, we should use the best tools we have right now.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I take them very, very seriously. I study them. I look at their implications, but none of them are the gospel. They're just the latest ideas that we have. So the reason I study evolutionary game theory is because that's the best tool we have right now in this area. There is nothing else that competes. And so as a scientist is my responsibility to take the best tools and see what they mean. And the same thing the physicists are doing. They're taking the best tools and looking at what they entail. But I don't, I think that science now has enough experience to realize that we should not believe our theories in the sense that we've now arrived. In 1890, it was a lot of physicists thought we'd arrived. They were discouraging bright young students from going into physics because it was all done. And that's precisely the wrong attitude.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could then just look at how the genes evolved. And what we found was what he found was that basically you never even saw the truth organisms even come on the stage. If they came up, they were gone in one generation. They just weren't. So they came and went even just in one generation. They just are not good enough. The ones that were just tracking, their senses just were tracking the fitness payoffs were far more fit than the truth seekers. So an answer at one level, I'm going to give an answer to a deeper level, but just with evolutionary game theory, because my attitude as a scientist is I don't believe any of our theories.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my graduate students, Justin Mark, did some simulations using genetic algorithms. So there he was just exploring. We start off with random organisms, random sensory genetics, and random actions and first generation is unbelievably. It was a foraging situation. They were foraging for resources. Most of them stayed in one place, didn't do anything important.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, David Marr, again, my advisor at MIT. In his book, Vision suggested that the more primitive sensory systems were less realistic, less foridical, but that by the time you got to something as complicated as the humans, we were actually estimating the true shapes and distances to objects and so forth. So his point of view, and I think it was probably not an uncommon view among my colleagues that, yeah, the sensory systems of lower creatures may just not be complicated enough to give them much truth. But as you get to 86 billion neurons, you can now compute the truth, or at least the parts of the truth that we need. When I look at evolutionary game theory,”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be what consciousness, at least part of what consciousness is about, is this discovering itself, discovering its possibilities, so to speak. We can talk about what that might mean, by going from the nonconceptual to the conceptual and back and forth.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will be a place where they get many of their ideas and that they then pull into the conceptual realm. And I think many of the best scientists Einstein comes to mind, right? Where these guys say, look, I didn't come up with these ideas by a conceptual analysis. I was thinking in vague images and it was just something non-conceptual. And then it took me a long, long time to pull it out into concepts and then longer to put it into math. But the real insights didn't come from just slavishly playing with equations. They came from a deeper place. And so there may be this going back and forth between the complete non-conceptual where there's essentially no end to the wisdom and then conceptual systems where there's the girdle limits that we have to that. And that may be if consciousness is important and fundamental.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe we won't have to go through space time. Maybe we can go around it. Maybe I can go to Proxima Centauri and not go through space. I can just go right there directly. It's a data structure. We can start to play with it. So I think that For what it's worth, my take would be that the endless Sequence of theories that we could contemplate building will lead to an endless sequence of new remarkable insights into the potentialities, the possibilities that would seem miraculous to us and that we will be motivated to continue the exploration partly just for the technological innovations that come out. The other thing that you mentioned, though, what about just being? What have we decided instead of all this doing and exploring? What about being? My guess is that the best scientists will do both and that the act 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
“We can see them, but we know that we could never get to them no matter how fast we traveled. They're going away from us at the speed of light or beyond. So we can't ever get to them. So there's all this beautiful real estate that's just smiling and waving at us and we can never get to it. But that's if we go through space time. But if we recognize that spacetime is just a data structure, Not fundamental Not little things inside spacetime. Space-time was a little data structure in our perceptions. Just the other way around. Once we understand that, And we get equations for the stuff that's beyond spacetime.”
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 good pushback I'll put one in there for the scientists again. But sure, but then I'll take the other stuff. Side two When Faraday did all of his experiments with magnets and electricity and so forth, he came up with all this wonderful empirical data, and James Clerk Maxwell looked at it and wrote down a few equations, which we can now write down in a single equation, the Maxwell equation, if we use geometric algebra, just one equation. That opened up unbelievable technologies. People are resuming and talking to each other around the world. The whole electronics industry, there was something that transformed our lives in a very positive way. With the theories beyond spacetime. Here's one potential Right now, most of the galaxies that we see”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My own view on it for what it's worth, because I don't know the right answer, but my own view on it right now is that it... Never ending? I think that this is great, as I said before, great job security for science, and that if this is true and if consciousness is somehow important or fundamental in the universe, this may be an important fundamental fact about consciousness itself, that it's a never-ending exploration that's going on in some sense”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They claim, being in contact with the deep ground of being that transcends any particular conceptual understanding. If that is correct, now I'm not saying it's correct, and I'm not saying it's not correct. I'm just saying if that's correct, then it would be the case that as scientists, because we also are in touch with this ground of being, we would then not be able to conceptually understand ourselves all the way, but we could know ourselves just by being ourselves And so there would be a sense in which there is a fundamental grounding to the whole enterprise because we're not separate from the enterprise. This is the opposite of the impersonal third-person science. This would make science both. Personal all the way down, but nevertheless scientific because the scientific method would still be”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source