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

“Well, it's interesting that you say introspect to the bottom. There is one, I mean, again, this isn't the same spirit of what I said before, which is it depends on what answer you give to what's beyond space-time, what answer we would give to your question, right? But one answer that is interesting to explore is something that spiritual traditions have said for thousands of years, but haven't said precisely, so we can't take it seriously in science until it's made precise, but we might be able to make it precise. And that is that they've also said something like space and time aren't fundamental. They're Maya, they're illusion. But that if you look inside, if you introspect And let go of all of your particular perceptions. You will come to something that's beyond conceptual thought. And 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, I think that each theory that we propose will give its own answer to that question. So when the physicists are proposing these structures like the amplitude and cosmological polytopa, sociohedron, and so forth, beyond spacetime, we can then ask your question for those specific structures and say how much information, for example, does evolution by natural selection and the kinds of sensory systems that we have right now give us about this deeper reality and why did we evolve this way? We can try to answer that question from within the deeper. So there's not going to be a general answer. I think what we'll have to do is pause these new deeper theories and then try to answer your question within the framework of those deeper theories knowing full well that there will be an even deeper 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 there's been that idea that with neuroscience, we have to have in some sense a top-down model of what's being computed and why that we would then go after. And same thing with trying to reverse engineer a computing system like your laptop. We really need to understand what the user interface is about and why we have, what are keys on the keyboard for and so forth. You need to know why to really understand all the circuitry and what it's for. We don't evolution of a natural selection does not tell us the deeper question that we're asking, the answer to the deeper question, which is why what's this deeper reality and what's it up to and why? All it tells us is that whatever reality is It's not what you see What you see is just an adaptive fiction.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An algorithm, how is it being computed? What are the algorithms? And then the hardware. How does it get instantiated in the hardware? And so to really do neuroscience, he argued, we needed to have understanding at all those levels. And that really got me. I loved the neuroscience, but I realized this guy was saying, if you can't build it, you don't understand it effectively. And so that's why I went to MIT. And I had the pleasure of working with David until he died just a year and a half later.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. In fact, what got me into the field that at MIT was work by David Maher on this very topic. So David Maher was a professor at MIT, but he'd done his PhD in neuroscience studying just the architectures of the brain. But he realized that his work was on the cerebellum. He realized that his work. As rigorous as it was, left him unsatisfied because he didn't know what the cerebellum was for. And why it had that architecture. And so he went on my T&E was in the AI lab there. And he said he had this three-level approach that really grabbed my attention. So when I was an undergrad at UCLA, I read one of his papers in a class and said, who is this guy? Because he said, you have to have a computational theory. What is being computed and why?”
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 lesion it here, what happens and so forth? And if you go and lesion in a computer, it's very, very clear that lesion experiments on computers are not going to give you a lot of insight into how it works.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go deeper to actually find the next, you know, just like what Einstein did to Newton. What are we going to do to Einstein? How do we get beyond Einstein and quantum theory to something deeper? Then we have to actually let go. And if we're going to do like this automata kind of approach. It's critical that it's not automata in spacetime, it's automata prior to spacetime from which we're going to show how spacetime emerges. If you're doing automata within spacetime, well, that might be a fun model, but it's not the radical new step that we need.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, if they're thinking about these as outside of space-time, then that's what we have to do. That's what our best theories are telling us. You now have to think outside of spacetime. Now, of course, I should back up and say we know that Einstein surpassed Newton, right? But that doesn't mean that there's not good work to do Newton. There's all sorts of Newtonian physics that takes us to the moon and so forth, and there's lots of good problems that we want to solve with Newtonian physics. The same thing will be true of spacetime. It's not like we're going to stop using spacetime. We'll continue to do all sorts of good work there. But for those scientists who are really looking to...”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reductionism has been a particularly useful kind of scientific explanation, for example, in thermodynamics, right? Where the notion that we have of heat, some macroscopic thing like temperature and heat, it turns out that Neil Boltzmann and others discovered, well, hey, if we go to smaller and smaller scales, we find these things called molecules or atoms. And if we think of them as bouncing around and having some kind of energy, then what we call heat really can be reduced to that. And so that's a particularly useful kind of reduction, a useful kind of scientific explanation that works within a range of scales within spacetime. But we know now precisely where that has to stop. 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. And I would be impressed if it was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters. I'm not terribly impressed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Observers in uniform motion, and that the laws of physics for uniform motion are that's not a reductionist. Those are saying, grant me these assumptions. I can build this entire concept of spacetime out of it. It's not a reductionist thing. You're not going to smaller and smaller scales of space. You're coming up with these deep, deep principles. Same thing with this theory of gravity. It's the falling elevator idea, right? So it's not a reductionist kind of... It's something different”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wonderful question because it really helps to clarify two different notions which is scientific explanation on the one hand. A particular kind of scientific explanation on the other, which is the reductionist. So the reductionist explanation is saying, I will start with things that are smaller in space-time and therefore more fundamental, where the laws are more fundamental. So we go to just smaller and smaller scales. Whereas in science more generally, we just say like when Einstein did the special theory of relativity, he's saying, let me have a couple postulates. I will assume that the speed of light is universal for all.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will everything else that we think we know are things in space-time? So when you say space-time is doomed, this is a shot to the heart. The whole framework, the whole conceptual framework that we've had in science, not to the scientific method, but to the fundamental ontology and also the fundamental methodology, the ontology of spacetime and its contents, and the methodology of reductionism, which is that as we go to smaller scales in space-time, we will find more and more fundamental laws. And that's been very useful for the space and time for centuries, reductionism for centuries, but now we realize that that's over. Reductionism is in fact dead, as is spacetime.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elements, atoms, and so forth are fundamental, and that therefore neurons and brains are part of objective reality, and that somehow when you get matter that's complicated enough, it will somehow generate conscious experiences by its functional properties. Or if you're panpsychist, maybe in addition to the physical properties of particles, you add a consciousness. Property as well. And then you have you combine these physical and conscious properties to get more complicated ones. But they're all doing it within spacetime. All of the work that's being done on consciousness and this relationship The brain has all assumed something that our best theories are telling us is doomed 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
“And beautiful, yeah Absolutely. And they're finding symmetries that are true of the data that can't be seen in space time. But I'm looking for a theory beyond space-time that's a dynamical theory. I would love to find, and we can talk about that at some point, a theory of consciousness in which the dynamics of consciousness itself will give rise to the geometry that the physicists are finding beyond spacetime. If we can do that, then we'd have a completely different way of looking at how consciousness is related to what we call the brain or the physical world more generally. Right now, all of my brilliant colleagues, 99% of them are trying to... They're assuming spacetime is fundamental Something that particles are fundamental, quarks, gluons, leptons, and so forth.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes. And so the new theory is that the physicists are finding beyond spacetime have that kind of tethering. So they show precisely how you start with an amplitude and how you project this high-dimensional structure into the four dimensions of spacetime. So there's a precise procedure that relates the two. And they're doing the same thing with the cosmological polytopes. So they're the ones that are making the most concrete and fun advances going beyond space-time. And they're tethering it. They say this is precisely the mathematical projection from this deeper structure into spacetime. One thing I'll say about as a non-physicist that I find interesting is that they're finding just geometry, but there's no notion of dynamics. Right now, they're just finding these static geometric structures, which is impressive, so I'm not putting”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when you look at the piece of paper, you perceptually create the cube. And when you look at it, then you fix one face to be in front and one face to be. So that's what I mean when I say it doesn't exist. Space-time itself is like the cube. It's a data structure that your sensory systems construct, whatever your sensory systems mean now, because we now have to even not even take that for granted. But there are perceptions that you construct on the fly and their data structures and a computer science and you garbage collect them when you don't need them. So you create them and garbage collect them.”
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 draw on a piece of paper, a little sketch of something that is called the Necker Cube, it's just a little line drawing of a cube, right? It's not a flat piece of paper. If I execute it well and I show it to you, you'll see a 3D cube and you'll see it flip. Sometimes you'll see one face in front, sometimes you'll see the other face in front. But if I ask you, which face is in front when you don't look? The answer is well, neither face is in front because there's no cube, there's just a flat piece of paper.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we projected into Einstein's spacetime, gives us things that look like neurons and neural networks and synapses. So we have to reverse engineer it. So there's going to be lots more work for neuroscience. It's going to be far more complicated and difficult and challenging. But that's wonderful. That's what we need to do. We thought neurons exist when they aren't perceived and they don't. In the same way that if I show you, when I say they don't exist, I should be very, very concrete.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Axiom systems, you will find out what goes within that axiom system and what testable predictions you can make. So I don't think we're untethered. We continue to do experiments. What I think we won't have that we want is a conceptual understanding that gives us a theory of everything that's final and complete. I think that this is, to put it another way, this is job security for scientists. Our job will never be done. Just job security for neuroscience because before we thought that when we looked in the brain, we saw neurons and neural networks and action potentials and synapses and so forth. And that was it. That was the reality. Now we have to reverse engineer that. We have to say what is beyond spacetime. Is going on? What is a dynamical system beyond?”
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 no problem there. We can only test things in terms of what we can measure with our senses in space and time. So we're going to have to continue to do experiments, but we're going to understand a little bit differently what those experiments are. We had thought that when we see a pointer on some machine in an experiment, that the machine exists, the pointer exists, and the values exist even when no one is looking at them. that they're an objective truth. And our best theories are telling us no. The pointers are just pointers, and that's what you have to rely on for making your judgments. But even the pointers themselves are not the objective reality. And I think girdle is telling us that not that anything goes, but as you develop new”
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 learn from our negative example, right? Exactly, right. Right, power does corrupt, and I think that you can think about that again from an evolutionary point of view. But I think that your question was a little deeper, and that was, does the evolutionary interface idea sort of unhinge science from Some kind of important test for the theories, right? We don't want. Does it mean that anything goes in scientific theory, but there's no, if we don't see the truth, is there no way to tether our theories and test them? And I think...”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Veracity of those and trustworthiness of those few central controllers. And we have ample evidence time and again that's often betrayed. So it makes good evolutionary sense, I would say, to have a decentralized, I mean, democracy is a step in that direction, right? We don't have a monarch now telling us what to do. We decentralize things, right? Because if the monarch, if you have Marcus Aurelius as your emperor, you're great. If you have Nero, it's not so great. And so we don't want that. So democracy is a step in that direction. But I think the DeFi thing is an even bigger step and is going to even make the democratization even greater. So that's one level of.”
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 a great question. On the financial side, there's two levels, at least that we could take your question. One is strictly evolutionary psychology of financial systems. And that's pretty interesting. And there, the decentralized idea, the DeFi kind of idea in cryptocurrencies may make good sense from just an evolutionary psychology point of view. human nature being what it is putting a lot of faith in a few central controllers depends a lot on the”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best scientific theories in physics, for example, and also now evolution are mathematical. So our theories are going to be going to have their own assumptions and they'll be mathematically precise and there'll be theories perhaps of everything except those assumptions because the assumptions are, we say please grant me these assumptions if you grant me these assumptions then I can explain this other stuff. So you have the assumptions that Are like miracles as far as the theory is concerned, they're not explained. They're the starting points for explanation. And then you have the mathematical structure of the theory itself, which will have the girdle limits. And so... My take is that reality, whatever it is, is. Always going to transcend. Conceptual theory that we can come up with.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything, everything, right? A final theory of everything, right? I think that my own take is for what it's worth, is that Girdle's incompleteness theorem sort of points us in that direction, that even with mathematics, Of any finite axiomatization that's sophisticated enough to be able to do arithmetic, it's easy to show that there'll be statements that are true, that can't be proven, can't be deduced from within that framework. And if you add the new statements to your axioms, then there'll be always new statements that are true but can't be proven with a new axiom system.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, one critical constraint on all of our theories is that they are empirically tested and pass the experiments that we have for them. So no one's arguing against experiments being important and wanting to test all of our current and any new theories on that. So that's all there. We have good reason to believe that science will never get a theory of everything.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making it mathematically rigorous and laying out the symmetries that they find there. So that's sort of the relationship between them. So it's the perceptual space-time that evolution is telling us is just a user interface, effectively. And then the physicists are finding that even the mathematical extension of that into the Einsteinian formulation has to be as well not the final story. There's something deeper.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're both telling us that the framework that you've had can only go so far, and it has to stop. And there's something beyond. And that framework, the very framework that is space and time itself. Now, of course, evolution by natural selection is not telling us about Einstein's relativistics based on. So that was another question you asked a little bit earlier. It's telling us more about our perceptual space and time, which we have used as the basis for creating first a Newtonian space versus time as a mathematical extension of our perceptions. And then Einstein then took that and extended it even further. So the relationship between what evolution is telling us and what the physicists are telling us is that in some sense the Newton and Einstein Space time are formulated as sort of rigorous extensions of our perceptual space.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you need to go deeper and show, by the way, this doesn't mean we throw away everything we've done, not by a long shot. Every new idea that we come up with beyond space-time must project precisely into spacetime, and it better give us back everything that we know and love in space-time or generalizations. Or it's not going to be taken seriously, and it shouldn't be. So we have a strong constraint on whatever we're going to do beyond space-time. It needs to project into space-time. And whatever this deeper theory is, it may not itself have evolution about natural selection. This may not be part of this deeper realm. But when we take whatever that thing is beyond spacetime and project it into space-time, it has to look like evolution by natural selection. Or it's wrong. So that's a strong constraint on this work.”
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 a pointer into a deep realm beyond space and time, but no one, I mean, what can you do with it? And they thought maybe it was a one-off, but then other formulas started coming up. And then eventually Nimar Khani Hamad and his team found this thing called the amplitude hedron, which really sort of captures the whole, a big part of the whole balowax. I'm sure they would say, no, there's plenty more to do. So I won't say they did it all by any means. They're looking at the cosmological polytope as well. So what's remarkable to me is that two pillars of modern science, quantum field theory with gravity on the one hand, and evolution by natural selection on the other. Just in the last 20 years have very clearly said space-time has had a good run, reductionism has been a fantastic methodology. So we had a great ontology of space-time, a great methodology of reductionism. Now it's time...”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took the scattering amplitude for two gluons coming in at high energy and four gluons going out at low energy. So that kind of scattering thing. So apparently for people who are into this, that's sort of something that happens so often you need to be able to find it and get rid of those because you already know about that. So you needed to compute them. It was billions of terms. And they couldn't do it even for the supercomputers couldn't do that for the many billions or millions of times per second they needed to do it. So they begged the experimentalists begged theorists and please you got it. And so Park and Taylor took the billions of terms, hundreds of pages, and miraculously turned it into nine. And then a little bit later they guessed one term expression that turned out to be equivalent. So billions of terms reduced to one term, the so-called famous park taylor formula, 1986. And that was like, okay, where did that come from?”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, but it doesn't tell you what's beyond. And so they're just looking for deep structures, like guessing. It's really fun. So these really brilliant guys, generic, brilliant men and women who are doing this work, physicists, are making guesses about these structures, informed guesses, because they're trying to ask, okay, what deeper structure could give us the stuff that we're seeing in space-time, but without certain commitments that we have to make in space-time, like locality. So they make these brilliant guesses, and of course most of the time you're going to be wrong. But once you get one or two that start to pay off, and then you get some lucky breaks. So they got a lucky break back in 1986. A couple of mathematicians named Park and Taylor.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we know that spacetime is doomed, and I should probably tell you why it's doomed, what they're saying about why it's doomed, but they need a flashlight to look beyond space time. What flashlight are we going to use to look into the dark beyond spacetime? Because Einstein's theory and quantum theory can't tell us what's beyond them. All they can do is tell us that when you put us together spacetime is doomed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Beyond that, space-time doesn't even make sense. It just has no operational definition.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are actually true of the data. But then when you look at the geometry of the facets of these polytopes, then certain of them will code for unitarity and locality. So it actually comes out of the structure of these deep polytopes. So what we're finding is there's this whole new world. Beyond space-time that is making explicit symmetries that are true of the data that cannot be seen in spacetime and that is turning the computations from billions of terms to one or two or a handful of terms. So we're getting insights into symmetries and all of a sudden the math is becoming simple because we're not doing something silly. We're not adding up all these loops in space-time. We're doing something far deeper. But they don't know what this world is about. So they're in an interesting position.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you do it in space and time, because it's the wrong framework, it's just a user interface, that's now from the evolutionary point of view, it's just user interface, it's not a deep insight into the nature of reality. So it's missing deep symmetry, something called a dual conformal symmetry, which turns out to be true of the scattering data, but you can't see it in space-time, and is making the computations way too complicated because you're trying to compute all the loops and Feynman diagrams and all the Feynman integrals. So see, the Feynman approach to the scattering amplitudes is trying to enforce two critical properties of spacetime. Locality and unitarity. And so when you enforce those, you get all these loops and different levels of loops. And for each of those, you have to add new terms to your computation. But when you do it outside of space-time, you don't have the notion of unitarity. You don't have the notion of locality. You have something deeper and is capturing some symmetries.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are different ways that you can represent it, but they're finding new structures. And by the way, they're succeeding now. They're finding, they found something called the amplitude. This is Nima and his colleagues, the cosmological polytope. So there are these like... Polytopes, these polyhedra in multi-dimensions, generalizations of simplicity that are coding for, for example, the scattering amplitudes of processes in the large hadron collider and other colliders. So they're finding that if they let go of spacetime completely, they're finding new ways of computing these scattering amplitudes that turn literally billions of terms into one term”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're saying that, and I can say exactly why they think it's doomed, but what they're saying is that, because your question was, what aspect of space-time, what are we talking about here? It's both space and time, their union into space-time as a Einstein's theory. That's doomed. And they're basically saying that even quantum theory, this is what Nimar Khani Hamed especially. So Hilbert spaces will not be fundamental either. So that the notion of Hilbert space, which is really critical to quantum field theory, quantum information theory, that's not going to figure in the fundamental new laws of physics. So what they're looking for is some new mathematical structures beyond spacetime, beyond Einstein's four-dimensional spacetime or supersymmetric version, geometric algebra signature to comma.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great, great. So this is, by the way, not my quote. This is from, for example, Nima Arkanihamed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Ed Witten, also there, David Gross, Nobel Prize winner. So this is not just something the cognitive scientists, this is what the physicists are saying.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gravity together with quantum field theory, which just comes right out of it. It's a theorem of those two theories put together. But it doesn't tell you what's behind it. So the physicists know that their best theories, Einstein's gravity and quantum field theory put together. That space-time cannot be fundamental, and therefore particles in spacetime cannot be fundamental. Just irreducible representations of the symmetries of spacetime. That's what they are. So spacetime, so we put the two together. We put together what the physicists are discovering, and we can talk about how they do that. And then the new discoveries from evolution of a natural selection, both of these discoveries are really in the last 20 years. And what both are saying is space-time has had a good ride.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even limits of the theories themselves. But they're not going to tell us what the next move is. And that's where scientific creativity comes in. So the stuff that I'm saying here, for example, is not alien to physicists. The physicists are saying precisely the same thing, that spacetime is doomed. We've assumed that spacetime is fundamental. We've assumed that for several centuries, and it's been very useful. So all the things that you are mentioning, the particles and all the work that's been done, that's all been done in space-time, but now physicists are saying space-time is doomed. There's no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the laws of physics. And that comes actually out of”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we can try to look at certain aspects of the interface, but already we're going to look at that and go, okay, before I would look at neurons and I was assuming that I was seeing something that was at least partially true. And now I'm realizing that it could be like looking at the pixels on my desktop or icons on my desktop. And good luck going from that to the data structures and then the voltages. I mean, good luck. There's just no way. So what's interesting about this is that our scientific theories are Precise enough and rigorous enough to tell us certain limits”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not of course when I talk about the user interface on your desktop there's this whole sophisticated backstory to it right that the hardware and the software that's allowing that to happen evolution doesn't tell us the backstory right so the theory of evolution is not going to be adequate to tell you what is that backstory it's going to say that Whatever reality is, and that's the interesting thing it says, whatever reality is, you don't see it. You see a user interface, but it doesn't tell you what that user interface is, how it's built.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then that is precluded. Our perceptions are there. They're there to guide adaptive behavior full stop. They're not there to show you the truth. In fact, the way I think about it is they're there to hide the truth because the truth is too complicated. It's just like if you're trying to use your laptop to write an email. What you're doing is toggling voltages in the computer. But good luck trying to do it that way. The reason why we have a user interface is because we don't want to know that quote-unquote truth, the diodes and resistors and all that terrible hardware. If you had to know all that truth, your friends wouldn't hear from you. So what evolution gave us was perceptions that guide adaptive behavior. And part of that process, it turns out, means hiding the truth and giving you eye candy.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So their perceptions are real as perceptions. We are having our perceptions, but we've assumed that there's a pretty tight relationship between our perceptions and reality. If I look up and see the moon, then there is something that exists in space and time that matches what I perceive. All I'm saying is that if you Evolution by natural selection seriously.”
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 real experience, and it's a real adaptive set of perceptions. So it's an adaptive set of perceptions, full stop. We want to think.”
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 got n states, and they're totally ordered. And then you can have a set of maps from that world into a set of payoffs, say from zero to a thousand or whatever you want your payoffs to be. And you can just literally count all the payoff functions and just do the combinatorics and count them. And then you can ask a precise question, how many of those payoff functions preserve the total order, if that's what you live, or how many preserve the topology? And you just count them and divide. So the number that are homomorphisms versus the total number and then take the limit as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff values goes very large. And when you do that, you get zero every time.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unrelated to the probabilistic structure of our perceptions. If they were completely unrelated, then no science would be possible. So this is technically the map from reality to our senses has to be a so-called measurable map, has to preserve sigma algebras. But that means it could be infinite to one, and it could collapse all sorts of event information. But other than that, there's no requirement in standard evolutionary theory for fitness payoff functions, for example, to preserve any specific structures of objective reality. So you can ask the technical question. This is one of the avenues we took. Look at all the fitness payoffs from whatever world structure you might want to imagine. So a world with, say, a total order on it.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was something going on here. And then I went to a mathematician, Chaitan Prakash and Anish Singh and some other friends of mine, Chris Fields. But Chaiton was the real mathematician behind all this. And he's proved several theorems that uniformly indicate that with one exception, which has to do with probability measures, there's no probability of zero. The reason there's an exception for probability measures, so-called sigma algebras or sigmative classes, is that for any scientific theory, Is the assumption that needs to be made that whatever Structure whatever probabilistic structure the world may have is not”
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 exactly right. So most of us intuitively think that surely the way that evolution will make our senses more fit is to make them tell us more truths, or at least the truths we need to know about objective reality, the truths we need in our niche. That's the standard view, and it was the view I took. I mean, that's sort of what we're taught or just even assume. It's just sort of like the intelligent assumption that we would all make. We don't have to just wave our hands. Evolution of a natural selection is a mathematically precise theory. John Maynard Smith in the 70s created evolutionary game theory. And we have evolutionary graph theory and even genetic algorithms that we can use to study this. And so we don't have to wave our hands. It's a matter of theorem and proof and or simulation before you get the theorems and proofs. And a couple of graduate students of mine, Justin Mark and Brian Marion, did some wonderful simulations that tipped me off.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a theorem from evolution by natural selection. So the technical question that I and my team asked was, what is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to see true properties of objective reality? And to our surprise, we found that the answer is precisely zero, except for one kind of structure that we can go into if you want to. But for any generic structure that you might think the world might have, a total order, a topology, metric. Probability is precisely zero that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to any aspect of objective reality. So in that sense, what we're seeing is We need to see to stay alive long enough to reproduce. So in other words, we're seeing what we need to guide adaptive behavior. Full stop.”
2022-06-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #293 – Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion – How Evolution Hid the Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source