"Nothing You See is Real" | Donald Hoffman

[Music] space time the sun and the moon physical objects everything that we see inside of space and time is just our visualization tool the reality we're interacting with is nothing like the visualization tool there's nothing like space and time [Music] we've made the rookie mistake of assuming that our headset vr our visualization tool is the final reality it's just a rookie mistake it's like someone who's played grand theft auto so long they have no idea there's a reality besides grand theft auto we're like that right now if you just look at your face in the

mirror if you look what you see directly is just skin hair and eyes that's all that's all you see and if you looked inside if someone opened your skull up and you just see neurons and and so forth but what you know firsthand that you cannot see is your hopes your dreams your aspirations your love of music your your mood it's all in vr experience no physical object including my body is conscious strictly speaking my brain isn't conscious because my brain in fact doesn't even exist unless i render it right so if you're playing grand

theft auto i'm playing a vr version of i got the steering wheel in front of me i'm holding the steering wheel if i look to the side i no longer render the steering wheel and there is no steering wheel when i look here i render it and now there is a steering wheel the same thing is true strictly speaking of neurons and brains they're there when you render them they're not there when you don't it's a vr system that you render objects in space and time as you need them because they're part of your visualization

tool and then you garbage collect them you delete them when you don't need them your life in my life right now is we're in a simulator a space-time simulator and we've been given like an ai system we've been given certain intrinsic desires so my wife is an artist so there's billions of humans and there are billions of different ways that we explore in music in art and literature in science various kinds of science meditation so we're it's sports there are all sorts of ways that consciousness is exploring through us and there is not like one

is the best i don't know what we're doing outside of space and time that's part of what i want to understand is what are we actually doing we don't see i don't know what i'm actually doing i know what i'm doing under a description like i'm moving my hand right now and if i grab a steering wheel in my car i know what i'm doing under a space-time description but i don't know in ultimate reality what i'm really doing it's just like the vr player when they turn the steering wheel in grand theft auto they

know what they're doing in the language of the game i'm turning a steering wheel but what they're really doing in terms of the super computer right which in that metaphor would be the deeper reality they're toggling voltages and magnetic fields and circuits that they have no idea there's there's probably trillions of voltage togglings going on for one turn of the wheel all they see is a turn of the wheel that's their notion of cause and effect trivial the real cause and effect is trillions of voltages getting toggled in fractions of a second it's much much

more complicated so when i talk evolution i'm only going to be talking about assuming the headset now i'm within the framework of the headset because evolutionary theory is only a headset theory it's not a theory of consciousness beyond space and time consciousness is like a kid in a candy store it's a never-ending exploration that is in principle never-ending we call tom and don are just parts of this overall exploration of of consciousness and all of its possibilities our little bit that we're exploring right now as rich as it seems to us is trivial compared to

all the possibilities that girdle says are out there i can imagine a square i can imagine a cube now go up one more dimension imagine a cube in four dimensions my brain halts and my mind catches on fire nothing happens that's only four dimensions i can't even go to four dimensions i mean how that that's terrible is it's just an incredible limitation i can only see three dimensions of color red green dimension blue yellow and so forth there are some pigeons that have four color receptors presumably they're in an extra dimension of color that i

can't even imagine what it's like can you imagine a specific color you've never seen before as rich as our world seem we know that there's a rich possibility of conscious experiences that we can't even concretely imagine but consciousness itself on this theory is exploring all these possibilities and right now we're sort of stuck on this little headset three dimensions small amount of color that we can see and so forth we thought it was the whole world no it's just it's a little headset it's a it's a prism my imagination is stuck in only three dimensions

my colors are stuck in a certain range now here's the challenge suppose we chase that down so we say okay there's going to be this ongoing dynamics of consciousness constantly going beyond what it knows but there's going to be a dark side to it because going into the unknown means letting go of what you know and that can be terrifying where literally you don't have concepts all of your current concepts are inadequate for those who meditate i mean when you go into silence it's both healing and terrifying right if you really let go of all

thoughts you and go into the void it's it's sort of it can be scary like you want to go back into you grab back on your it's a life jacket right you grab on to your teddy bear your thoughts how would consciousness precisely this this vast social network project mathematically into space time clearly there's a projection i'm interacting with tom's consciousness i'm not seeing that consciousness i'm seeing skin hair and eyes i'm seeing a space-time projection i'm not actually seeing your emotions i'm not seeing your mood but i am genuinely interacting with your experiences it's

a genuine interaction and so there is a projection from this conscious realm into space time we can take what we understand in the headset and pull it backwards if we can project from consciousness to the headset then we can try at least to go from the headset and pull backwards it's a fallible enterprise but it may help us to open our minds to the possibilities for deeper theories of what's going on outside the headset so so the reason i'm doing this is because i i can't even imagine a specific color that i've never seen before

i can't imagine in four dimensions in other words i take it as a given that i'm deeply deeply limited in my imagination and i need all the tools i can get to help me step outside of my headset and try to guess the unfathomable outside of there so you