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I often talk about the virtual reality headset metaphor. It's a very very good step away from our assumption that space and time and the world of objects that we see around us every day is the true nature of reality. It's not. There was a moment in which I realized everything that you've done, Don, all this mathematics means anything that you see in the world around you is your construct. That hit me in the face so hard. It is still of course taken me decades now to emotionally recover from that and to to come to terms with it and years of meditation to let that go and to to just think this is just all a VR headset and I'm just rendering this stuff on the fly. Plato says um what we're seeing is at best like the shadows flickering shadows of objects on the wall of a cave and and he says that's what everyday reality is like is only seeing at best flickering shadows. Plato's cave at the deepest level says to me that there is ultimately no scientific theory of everything. There is no spoken theory of everything. It goes exceedingly deep. The best I can put it in words because we have to use words here. Whatever you are infinitely transcends anything that you could ever say or experience. That doesn't mean that you're divorced from reality. I'm saying you are you are the reality. Don Hoffman, I must also publicly do this. It's always such an honor to have you in the mind meld. You have such a unique, brilliant mind, and you are exploring questions that I I know that I'm interested obviously in, but the audience is also absolutely centrally interested in. These are questions about the nature of reality, questions about consciousness, questions about what we are, what we're doing here. But you approach them from such a deep technical rigorous level as well which is something that is in extremely extremely short supply. So really really excited for this as always. >> Thank you for having me Michael. It's always a pleasure. It's my third or fourth time now and it's always a pleasure to talk with you and I love the hard questions that you ask and it pushes me in good directions. So thank you very much. >> I'll see what I can do. I'll see what I can do. Um, I'm not going to start there exactly, but I do want to acknowledge, yes, we've been having this conversation on and off for for years now. And and I have seen your thoughts evolve for sure. And in this new essay, you know, I was I I did want to bring this up. You only glancingly bring it up, but I was so glad that you did glancingly bring it up, which is essentially comparing the way that we experience to the famous Plato's cave allegory. >> Yes. And my actually my most popular video that I've ever done was on Plato's cave. And I tried to go deeper into it than this sort of, you know, surface level analyses because it's so true on so many levels and it's one of those rare allegorories that it almost seems like there's there's no end to how accurate it is. Um, I thought maybe it would be a good way to both review your theory and your view of reality as well as sort of like captivate the audience with with what's really at stake here and and what are we really grappling with in terms of the limitations that we perceive reality through. >> Yes. So Plato's cave is extremely famous and rightfully so. Plato suggests that our everyday experience of space and time and objects and the physical world um which feels to us so real. It feels like it is the ultimate reality emotionally and we we live our lives as though it's the final thing. We we get excited about success. We get upset about failures that that we feel the stakes are very very high. We're really we're really in this thing with both feet and and fully immersed in it and it feels very very real and our emotions uh correspond to that. And yet Plato says um what we're seeing is at best like the shadows, flickering shadows of objects. Uh so there's a fire in a cave and um there are prisoners um looking at the the wall of the cave and they and they can't see the real world. They're stuck in this cave. All they can see are flickering shadows from a a fire and and shadows cast by objects running in front of the fire, people moving in front of the fire and so forth. That's all they can see. And Plato says someone then leaves the cave and goes outside and sees the real world and and can't believe what they're seeing. Comes back and tell the people in the cave and and they don't believe that person either. And and he says that's that's what everyday reality is like is only seeing at best flickering shadows on on the wall of a cave. And I think if Plato were around today, he would love the VR virtual reality metaphor. He he used one of the best metaphors he had at the time and a fairly low tech version, but that's what they had. And I think that Plato was pointing to something that even the VR headset metaphor and the cave metaphor are still not strong enough. It's it's really an a deeper point of view that many spiritual traditions have talked about. The Tao de Ching says basically the towel that can be spoken of is is not the true towel. >> And what what these traditions say is anything that you can talk about >> is still at best a shadow on the cave. Anything that you can talk about. >> Yeah. >> And and that's that when you start going there, that starts to get a little scary because, you know, it's one thing to say, well, it's a VR headset to take it off. Now I see the real world. No, what you're seeing is still another description. It's another something that you can talk about and so it goes very very deep and and I'll I'll point out that this has something to do also with the nature of the limits of our scientific theories. >> Yes. >> Right. So scientific theor and I'm a scientist of course I love science and I think that it's an incredibly powerful tool and I encourage anybody with those proclivities and talents to go into science. It's it's we we need it. But on the other hand, every scientific theory starts with assumptions. And it doesn't explain its assumptions. It assumes them. And you can always then say, okay, well, I'll give you a deeper theory that can explain those assumptions. And you can hopefully, but when you do that, if you succeed, you'll have new assumptions at the start of your new theory. And this goes on at infinitum. So Plato's cave is also telling us something about the nature of scientific theories as well. Yes, >> if if we're going to talk, I think using scientific theories is one of the best ways to talk because it's rigorous. It's mathematically precise. It gives us tests to to show the limits of what we're saying. It gives us, you know, points to experiments and so forth. So, allows us not to be dogmatic um without some checks on our dogmatism. It it gives us clean checks on dogmatism. And of course, scientists are people. We will be dogmatic now and then you know like anybody but the science itself done properly will put a restraint on that and tell us when our dogmatism is misguided and and dogmatism is always misguided. >> So so what it does then is it actually says Plato's cave at the deepest level says to me that there is ultimately no scientific theory of everything. In fact there is no spoken theory of everything. So it's it goes e exceedingly deep. Now I often talk about the virtual reality headset metaphor because I think that's a a very very important metaphor and it's a very very good step away from our assumption that space and time and the world of objects that we see around us every day is the true nature of reality. It's not. It's not at all. and the the VR headset is the current good metaphor for that. But it's, you know, it's an update of Plato's cave. But ultimately, even that metaphor of the VR headset, um, as scary as it might be to some people, is not taking you deep enough. You've got to go deeper. It's got, but but it's a good first step. If you can get used to the VR headset, that's going to really help you think out of the box for the next level of scientific theory. And I'm very interested, of course, as a scientist, in getting the next level of scientific theory. But I have no illusion that my next level is the final level or even close or or that I'm even approximating the truth. It's at best a better description of a perspective of reality at best. Um, so, so there's this, it goes very deep. I would say that what it what it tells us is that there's infinite job security in science. That there's no scientific theory is even close to being the theory of everything. If you think there's a theory of everything, you really don't understand what we're dealing with here in science. It's it's it's and we you know, some scientists in the past have thought, oh, we're close to the theory of everything. And it it's always embarrassing because two or three generations later, people look back and sort of giggle about what you thought was the final theory. And that'll be true of us. We think we're close to a theory of everything. A 100 years from now, they'll be talking about the concept concepts we didn't even have in mind that were foundational concepts that weren't even anywhere in our theories. And that's going to be going on indefinitely in in science. So, it's better just to be humble at every moment and say the these are our best theories. We're trying to get the cleanest, most rigorous mathematical theories with the cleanest experimental tests so that we can move on and go past the um inevitable limitations of our concepts and our our ideas right now. >> Right? >> So Plato's cape goes goes very very deep and I'm sure that all this stuff um I'm sure Plato could um tell me much more. Um he was pretty quite deep. >> Yeah. Particularly, do you remember the divided line that's that's presented along with Plato's cave by by Socrates Plato? >> So, remind me about the divided line. >> You're you're going to love this, Don. So, so essentially, it's both a epistemological line and an onlogical line. It's it's it's making statements about >> reality itself and it's making statements about knowledge itself and various sort of kinds and purities of knowledge. But essentially as you go up this divided line which maps over sort of stages of the cave itself, you know, you start all the way at the bottom. You essentially have naive realism, right? Like I'm seeing these shadows on the wall, therefore it's real. Just above that, you have uh like doca is the Greek, I believe, and it it basically translates to like opinion, right? Well, this person said this and uh plus my senses say that, so that must be reality. But then you start to get into the higher kinds of knowledge. And as you get into the higher kinds of knowledge, you get actually further away from the physical and from your senses. So then you get up to to Dionoya, right? Which is like our uh not rational what's the word they use uh uh discursive kinds of reasoning, right? Where where we can create logical arguments, we can create mathematical formulas and and that's a very high kind of knowledge. You can make things abstract. You can make very complex arrangements of ideas, but that's not the highest kind of knowledge. The highest kind of knowledge is this mysterious thing called noisesis. And noisis, I always have trouble trying to describe it, but I'm actually curious how how you might conceive of this. Sometimes they'll say it's something like direct intuitive apprehension of a form or it's some kind of almost like instantaneous knowing where once you know it, you can't unknow it. And it's also sometimes presented as a state of knowing and being at the same time where where you where sort of like epistemology and ontology dissolve because it's like you you are what what you know on some level and um >> Yes. I I I think that that to this day for for me at least works unbelievably well as a as a sensemaking mechanism, but also it it attempts to explain something that almost stretches the limit limits of the human mind to try to explain this this weird state of you know like once something clicks in your mind or something you gain a skill or you it becomes like a nonpropositional kind of knowing that you no longer need You know, every time you ride a bike, you don't need to be like, "And then I put my foot on the thing and then I pedal and it's just like, no, you just you just do it in this like like there's this like logos over the top of the whole process and it just unfolds instantly or something and and try and you can't put that in to any kind of theory, right? Like it's something that is like >> over the top of a theory or something, but it's it also transcends theories completely. It it transcends the mind. It it has to that's I I I agree. So you you come to the end of theories even mathematical theories even the most abstract formal mathematical theories you have to go even beyond that you know Girdle's incompleteness theorem. >> Yeah. >> Um tells us that you know as powerful as mathematics is and and of course Girdle loved mathematics that it's incomplete. any formal system that we write down um that is at least rich enough to do arithmetic will be incomplete and that's going to be true of any scientific theory. It's any any scientific theory is built on assumptions. those assumptions will have a certain scope of explanation which if if there if it's a good theory. Um, of course anybody can write down a bad theory with with no scope but but a good theory will have some scope of of explanation but there will be there will be limits. And that's not because we're in some kind of logical bind here. We're not not for example one might say well you you've gotten yourself in a logical bind. You assume the truth of your assumptions and then you prove that they're not deeply true. what you what you shot yourself in the foot. And and Girdle didn't assume the truth of the axioms. He only assumed that they were consistent. And that's what all we have to do in our scientific theories. We assume the consistency of our assumptions. We don't have to we we don't have to assume that they're true. In fact, I would say the the the right scientific attitude is to assume these are probably not true. They're they're they're not the final truth. But I want to make sure they're consistent. And I want to see if I use these tools, what is the explanatory scope of these tools? And the remarkable miracle is that over and over again, great scientific theories have an incredible scope of explanatory usefulness. And so we should take that gift at the same time enjoying it and using it, but at the same time recognizing that that doesn't mean we've got the truth. We just have a consistent set of axioms that works for a certain explanatory scope. And if they if the consistent axioms are deep enough and rich enough, then they will under the work of someone as brilliant as as Girdle show their limitations and show that they, you know, that there's a limit to what they can explain. So it's it's very um common in the in the philosophy of science um for for philosophers to say that a scientific theory cannot prove the limits of its own assumptions. And I disagree that that's that's the whole in fact in some sense that's the glory and power of science. So we're not assuming that the assumptions are true. We just want them to be consistent and find their limits including the limits of the the very assumptions themselves. But on the spiritual realm that you were mentioning, you know, it gets toward what spiritual traditions are saying. And I there's there's something that I just learned a few weeks ago. Um >> I was raised in fundamentalist Christian spiritual tradition. So was um and there's this very famous saying from Jesus, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, right? >> Mhm. >> And so I looked at it the message I got growing up was uh that meant you sort of be very afraid God's really angry with you and he's coming back, right? That's sort of the ang message I got. Um, and I decided a few weeks ago, you know, it's easy enough now with with AI to look at things in the original Greek and understand what the original Greek words are, right? There's no reason for you to take it secondhand anymore, anybody's translation. You can go say, "Okay, what was the exact Greek word? Okay, what does it mean? You give me some context from the original, you know, the time of Jesus. What did that word mean back then?" And it turns out the word repent, which I thought means very afraid, God's mad, it means nothing like that at all. It's the word is metaninoi. You mentioned no. Yeah. No way. It's it's it's like metamorphosis, but it's so metamorphosis is is in some sense a transformation of the body. Metaninoi is about transforming your mind. Jesus is basic. He was saying um transcend your thought processes. Transcend your mind. In other words, let go of your mind. the kingdom of heaven is already within you. But see, he was pointing to something very, very different. Not not a mad god who's coming down because he's angry. He was saying, let go of the restriction of your thoughts. Step out of Plato's cave. >> Let go of your thoughts altogether, and then you will find inside yourself the kingdom of heaven, which is entirely outside any thought. So that that rings with what the eastern traditions have been saying. It's just been because of our English translations. We we didn't understand what Jesus was saying in the original coin a Greek um um version. Of course, he didn't speak in coin a Greek. He spoke I guess in Aramaic or something like that, but the the earliest written versions are in co Greek. So, that's where the closest we can get to what he originally said. And he's basically saying not to be afraid, but to um essentially let go of any thoughts at all. And then you will find the deeper reality that he calls the kingdom of heaven. Remarkable. >> So yeah, so well said. And I couldn't agree more. I I I so deeply regret that I didn't go into classics sometimes because I am so into Plato and I'm so into Helenic philosophy and the neoplatonic tradition and even just you know the small smattering of Greek words that I've learned over the course of of reading uh some of the dialogues and looking up words exact same way as you trying to clarify things you you just realize the richness and and the depth >> yes >> of these ideas that they were talking about and and how much of a shortfall all there is in English a lot of the time and and you see like I see why they chose that word but really you need like four or five different words and to tie them into all these different concepts to to really get it and and >> absolutely >> speaking speaking of transcending your assumptions. Your theory in general is all about transcending your assumptions about reality particularly in a naive realist kind of way. particularly in the kind of way that there's a light there, there's a camera there, there's a dawn right there, and all those things are either exactly as they appear to be or they're at least some serviceable representation of the reality that is there, right? But your theory says no. your your theory says not not only is it not 1% of the reality, it is 0% of the reality. And and that's something that even my myself as someone like I I am I've drunk the Don Hoffman Kool-Aid. I I I think I I've immersed myself in the Don Hoffman core to to various degrees. But even still, you know, I I I listen to you and I agree and I think, yeah, I think Don is on the right track. I think he's right. And then a little time goes by and I and I I go back to, you know, but maybe it is kind of like Plato's cave where even though the shadow on the wall is not clearly that's not reality, right? It's derivative of something real. It's derivative of the light that's that's shining down. So there's still something real there. But you stick very closely to this point that not only do we not perceive reality. We don't see it. It's not reality at all. There is 0% of reality within the human experience. >> Um, and I want to z I want to zoom in on that. Why why isn't it like a little tiny infantessimal uh really low resolution part of reality rather than absolut but it's absolute zero? >> That That's right. I I see no by the way I would love to be able to say what you're saying that there is some small connection that we've got to something that we can hang on to that's real in our in our perceptions and as as far as I can see there's anything that can be talked about anything that can be described by a concrete experience is a flicker of a shadow on a cave and not I mean so I understand where you want to go and I would love to go there too and I can't I it's just logic precludes me from going there. What I can say though I mean there is something that we would like to hold on to and what I can the best I think I can hold on to is is this when I sit in utter silence and let go of every thought and I just am. There's just I am with with no commentary about what that I is and what am is anything at all. Just just pure existence. That's the closest. But but there's no description. As soon as you put any word, >> any experience kind of thing on it at all, >> then then you've stepped away from. So, so the best I can put it in words because we have to use words here is to say that whatever you are um infinitely transcends anything that you could ever say or experience infinitely. And that but that's but that doesn't mean that you're divorced from reality. I'm saying you are you are the reality and to really know yourself. So the the traditions that say you know meditate and and let go of thoughts that's really the only way to be in touch with who you are in in some sense directly. But my guess we're here for, you know, it's not an accident that we're here in a three-dimensional space, one-dimensional time world experiencing the richness of what that seems to be part of what we need to do. And we seem to need to be lost in it. We all almost everybody I know gets lost in this. We believe that we are the little you knowund 200lb body that we are and and you know we we take ourselves very seriously and our careers very seriously or whatever you know our art or whatever we're doing very very seriously uh even though we know by the time you know a 100 years from now we're gone probably no one's even citing your work anymore no one's looking at your work you know it's and if I asked you who was the richest person on the planet you in in 1852. >> I have no idea. Who cares? Right. And that's so so so we have to it's important for us to do this. And yet we deep down know that ultimately we walk away from this >> and no one else is going to care what we did. But but yes, it's not useless. It's not pointless. And my guess is that there's an infinite number of these headsets that we go through. we go through that to really this is just one very rich but very very limited perspective on who you are. Enjoy it. You're going to take this headset off and there's an infinite number of others and somehow to know who you are um involves looking at yourself from an infinity of different rich perspectives and getting lost in each perspective and waking up and then realizing I transcend that. And that's the best I can say right now about how to understand who you are. It's going to take an infinite number of headsets. And this one, as rich as it is, is probably completely unlike other headsets. I mean, you can't even think out of the box big enough to think about what the next headset would be like. You can't. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. I was I was gesturing before because I was going to say I completely agree in my case, Don, but I think in in your case, in a hundred years, your ideas might just be starting to make sense. Like your your ideas might actually just be be starting to put into actually some applied permutations in terms of where I think your science, your theory could go. And for me, obviously, I'm tracking for a lot of the people who are um familiar with your work, I think they're all tracking. But before we move on from the sort of core claims that you make about reality, um I'm not sure if we hit all the regular bullet points. You know, clearly we've we've communicated the idea that not only is this reality in air quotes that we exist in limited, it really actually represents 0% of the greater reality. Um, but I don't think we've covered how you've come to that conclusion and why that must be the case and why it is that materialism just utterly fails to explain any of it. So maybe we could we could take a side step there to just review those points and then and then move forward. >> Well, yeah, I came to it through a long process of um re research and and selfexamination. So, as I mentioned, I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian uh framework. My dad was for a while a minister. And so, I I got that point of view quite deeply. Uh but you know, in college, high school, I was getting something different. I was getting Darwin's theories of evolution. I was getting a very physicalist point of view. And so was, you know, I decided by the time I was 17 or 18 that I needed to figure this all thing out for myself because I was getting two authorities, very, very different authorities saying very, very different contradictory things. And I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. And I decided the question I wanted to answer was, are we just machines? That was how I put it to myself. Are we just machines? And I figured that the physicalist point of view said we were just machines and the spiritual said we we're not. And I would go after that. And I figured the best way to do that was to actually see how far a machine could go. So I ended up at MIT in in the artificial intelligence lab. There we're building machines as you know as deeply as we could at the time. That was I was there from 79 to 83. So I I was lucky enough to to know Marvin Minsky and take a class from him at his house, the the founder of artificial intelligence and to be >> there um you know debating with him and others at the found you know near the foundations that had been going on for you know the 70s. So by 79 it had been going on for for a few years but >> what did can I ask you sorry to interrupt what did artificial intelligence look like in those days? Was it like largely theoretical? Um because clearly you know computing power was infantessimal compared to what it is today. So what when you say you know early days of artificial intelligence what are we what are we talking about >> right? So in the early days a lot of it the the idea of neural networks was known >> but Minsky had a theorem about perceptrons that showed fundamental limitations in the computational power of perceptrons. And so for a while there neural networks um weren't being explored because we thought that they had certain fundamental limitations. And it turned out it was a limitation not of neural networks in general but just of the perceptron model. and and and so work out of UC San Diego um in the 80s um then showed you know MSY's serum of course is true but but it doesn't put anything limitation on on neural networks more generally and then the explosion on neural networks came but at the time then at MIT we were trying to build I was working on um computational vision so I was working on how how could we build basically vision systems that could drive cars was sort the idea we're we're you know that's here we are now in in 2020s um and that's that technology is is still not quite there right we our cars still can't be driven safely by themselves um >> it's pretty good now it's pretty good now >> it's pretty good it's it's it's getting there but we were so I I worked on how in SE from 79 to 83 I was working on how do we see in 3D how can I take two-dimensional camera images and compute a 3D world so that that was the the stuff I was working and and that kind of thing was was going on there. There's a big um computational vision group there. David Maher was the the leader of it. He was my advisor and he he died when he was 85 in in in he was 35 years old when he died >> uh from leukemia. So it was a a great tragedy. But I I was his last student. Um and I got to to to work with David and and Whitman Richards who is a brilliant um psychophysicist. So looking at the um experimental aspects of human vision and so we're trying to combine computational models that would how in principle could a computer system see in 3D from moving images and then how in fact does the biological vision system work. So it was a a very very rich time. But the whole field was still doing the kind of AI where you're trying to build it all yourself. You're not you're not trying to build a neural network which will become intelligence. You're trying to solve the problem yourself. And and and now we found that of course we still need to do that as scientists to try to understand these things ourselves conceptually. >> But ultimately to get these fast useful machines neural networks have proven to be um um very effective. once we got past the perceptron limitations. Right. >> Very interesting. Yeah. And and I I just want to take a side step to acknowledge that it's it's really interesting how similar of a path you've taken to Feder Rico in some ways, Federico Fine, because this is another person who came deep out of computer science uh investigating AI um was under the assumption that you know, yeah, humans are probably very complex machines. They're probably a lot like computers. But then something funny happens seemingly when you become an expert in the nuts and bolts of how AI and computers actually work. You see the limitations of those systems and why they're very not humanlike and very seemingly not conscious. Um >> I know Federico. >> Yeah, I love Fed Rico. He and I are very very good friends. He um he supported my research for several years, my my team very generously. He's shared his thoughts. So I I have only good things to say about Feder Rico. He's he's a a brilliant um scientist and of course engineer inventing the the >> microprocessor. I mean what how many people can say I invented the microprocessor. He he did it. So he's brilliant and and uh I've benefited a lot listening to his ideas about um consciousness and and spirituality. >> Yeah, I'm a big fan as well. I've talked to him a couple of times on the show. Probably at least at least one of the conversations was since you and I have spoken last. May maybe both of them though. I can't remember time dilates all of that all of that kind of stuff. Um but anyway, so so yeah, you're you're kind of explaining this trajectory of how you got to where you are where you've come to this conclusion that not only do our our you know our senses mislead us, but really we see 0% of reality. So so that that was a little bit of a sidebar there, but let's let's continue down that path, >> right? So as I began to do the the more rigorous research at MIT looking at what machines could do, what what are their strengths, what are their limitations, what is it about humans that might or might not transcend what we could do with AI. So that kind that kind of question was the way I was trying to frame it. and and then I you know also started um in 2000 a little after 2000 to in include you know meditation into my daily life. So I started just exploring meditation which was different. I mean I that was not something I got from a fundamentalist Christian point of view. We didn't do meditation. In fact on occasion some pastor or something would say that don't do that. They would explicitly tell us that you shouldn't do that. So, so, so I explored anyway using meditation as as well and began to look at the structure of the scientific theories that I was looking at and slow and then started looking at evolution by natural selection, you know, and the evolutionary theory. So, you know, in in 2006, I started to look at evolutionary game theory and to really ask, okay, how if if we evolved by natural selection, um what's the chance that we're going to see reality as it is? So, I was putting all these, you know, AI, my own meditation practice, evolution by natural selection, uh understanding of human vision, trying to put it all together. And I I finally came to the conclusion, aha, first scientific theories have assumptions and those assumptions are limited and no there's not so there's no scientific theory of everything. That's that's that's a you know a mic drop point for a scientist. That's a real big hurdle to get over. There is no theory of everything. When you really grasp what that means, it's it's you have to stop and really take it in. Um and and it requires a balance. On the one hand, I think science is one of the the best tools that humankind has, and it's a fantastic counterpoint to dogmatism. And dogmatism is is horrific. it it's it just holds us back. >> On the other hand, science is so rigorous that it tells us that it can't be the final word. And that's that's that's incredible. And so I I've slowly came to the point of view and and I I should say slowly because you know what you're trained on as a child is something that's deeply ingrained in you. And at least in my case, it it took years, decades for me to be able to step back and get an objective view of what I've been taught, what I had been what I believe before I was old enough to even be rational. So you these things were already pre-programmed in you, right? So it's really a matter of looking at your programming and and realizing it is just programming. It's not the truth. stepping it's a it's a big it's a big emotional as well as intellectual process and where I am in the process right now is to to say um I cannot let go enough of my preconceptions >> the what I have learned is anything that I think is true back away from it it's it's it really have you have to step back um but what I and and Be prepared to be wrong. Try to be precise so that you can find out as quickly as possible what the limits of your ideas are. That's the key, one of the key things. Be as precise as you can be so that others and yourself can figure out what are the limits of your ideas. Every idea has limits. Every idea has limits. No. And you might say, well, aha, there there you've got an absolute. What what what's what's interesting is I'm saying that even my my it's it's like girdle is incompleteness ceremon literally I was thinking that >> it's just it's just that it's saying the mathematics is telling us I'm a beautiful tool in fact I'm so beautiful I can tell you my limits so use use this tool but know that um there are an infinite number of quote unquote theorems that I can't prove >> so use me to prove all there is a big set of theorems I can prove And there's an infinity that that I can't. And that's sort of the perspective I I have now. And and that's why I then look at, you know, the various spiritual traditions, eastern mystical traditions very very clearly. The towel says the tow that can be spoken of is not the true towel. But when when I looked at Jesus and and he uses the metaninoi the no no word, that's also saying the same thing. >> Transcend the mind is what he's basically saying. meta mind. You like metamorphosis is transformation of the body or transcending your previous going from a caterpillar to a butterfly. You let go of the whole caterpillar thing climbing on a little thing. You can only get a few feet off the ground if you climb up. Now you go to a butterfly that's in no none of those limits. It's and that's what Jesus is really point a meta no is basically whatever your mind can do you got to meta that you got to go beyond. So it's it's not the word repent is a is a very very poor English translation because to us it means be very upset be you know self- flagagillating you know there's an angry god it has nothing to do with that at all it has entirely to do with let go of your preconceptions your thoughts your judgments of other people let go of all of it transcend your mind and then you'll find that the the kingdom of heaven and by the way that's not the kingdom of heaven as Jesus said is already inside you. It's not some place you go to. It's that that space beyond all be all all the caves, all of Plato's caves, anything that you can imagine beyond that is the kingdom of heaven which is already within you. So it's not about so so the eastern myst mystical traditions say this Jesus says it but we lose it in the translation you know into English but Jesus was basically saying the same thing ultimately let go of your Plato's cave of thoughts completely and all of a sudden you will find that you're in the kingdom of heaven there's it's not a place that you go to it's a it's something that's already in you is just hidden shrouded by all your beliefs and thoughts let them all go And there you will find the kingdom of heaven in you and in your neighbor, >> in every one of your neighbors. >> Yeah. Another one you might like, Don, to to add to to your your repertoire, which you you may be familiar with this already, but have you ever come across um the the singular fragmentaryary work of Parmenities before? >> A little bit, but I would I'm no expert in Parmenities, >> right? So it it's so interesting because he's often considered to be like the father of logic, right? Like his his philosophical school was was very well known to be this like logically rigorous um form of philosophy. But his singular extent work which is fragmentaryary that we have from a whole bunch of different later writers mostly is um it's usually translated as something like on nature. But what it is is essentially him doing some kind of soulflight thing where his consc his his consciousness goes through some kind of um journey to encounter this goddess and they I don't think they ever named the goddess but you sort of um get the impression that she is this consciousness presiding over knight or primordial some kind of like primordial you know um very root level of existence and she gives him this speech about there being two paths. One path is the path of of nature and the way things seem and the other path is the path of truth. And the path of truth she says is one there is no separation. There's no beginning. There's no end. Don't ask questions about where it came from. That's a that's a ludicrous illogical question. But then the other path is the way things seem. The the path of separateness, the path of degrees, the path of hot and cold, life and death, all these other things. So that that's just like yet another great example. >> Yes. >> Yes. There there's the way there's there's the way that everything you ever experience is going to tell you reality is. But then underneath that there's a truer level of reality that we seem to only have access to through I don't know some like I don't know boot boot level or or some some very very lowlevel I I don't even want to use a computer metaphor but I don't know whatever what better metaphor there is to use is it's almost like it's it's before binary in computer code even exists and it's like the signal that you split to create binary or turn on and turn off to create binary. It it's something like that like that that is the true reality underneath all of this multi- multiplicity uh fractal ever swirling uh forms that it takes. There's some deeper truth underneath all of that. And it's it's just remarkable how >> in in some ways we've known it for so long, >> but in other ways we're still grappling to really put it into practical use. And that's where you seem to be going is, you know, no, like what if we take this beyond the realm of ideas? What if we take this beyond the realm of philosophy and we actually ask questions about how do we formalize that? And then how and then once we formalize it, how might we actually be able to shift reality in in ways we can't even imagine? And maybe that's for later in the conversation because we're we're still sort of like laying the foundation here. But that that's where I see you being such an incredible innovator is is taking these deep philosophical truths that I think we all in intuitively feel, but we're not sure how to make them operational. we're not sure how to turn them into applied engineering or science. And of course, before we get there, we have to have, as you're pointing to, these precise formal models so that we actually can try to apply them to reality and make sure they work. And >> yes, I >> I think we sort I think I think we sort of have laid the foundation, but if I interrupted you on on that track, please please continue. Um and yeah I I think before we get to the practical part I do I do want to ask you a couple more questions about your personal trajectory actually >> because so you have this fundamentalist upbringing. You go into hard science. You go to MIT. You get a PhD. You go into cognitive science. But one of the things I'm not sure if I've ever asked you is is there a moment that you that you kind of realize like I think I'm an idealist. I think consciousness is a fundamental thing. Was was that a slow progression or was there actually a catalytic moment that that happened? Well, there there actually was an aha moment. It came in around 1987 I was working 1987 1988 I was working with uh Bruce Bennett who was a genius mathematician in algebraic geometry. Ju just to know algebraic geometry you have to be a genius but but he was a genius among geniuses he was truly stunning and and Chayon Pash we were working on a book that called observer mechanics so we published a book called observer mechanics in 1989 and and it was we were building on the research that I'd done with computer vision so we had all these math I've been doing this mathematics of how do we see in 3D and so Bruce and Chayan took it to with me to a new level, right? They're they're real mathematicians. So, we were getting these very specific rigorous theorems about how, you know, take three or four frames and four or five feature points to an object and how to compute mathematically a three-dimensional object explicitly. And a as we we did that at one point in a conversation with with Bruce Bennett about this we we were talking about the mathematics and something that he said all of a sudden I I realized everything that we were doing all the math that we were doing meant that we are creating everything that we see. It was it was there was a moment in which I realized this means everything that you've done don all this mathematics means anything that you see in the world around you is your construct and that would that hit me in the face so hard >> because we we tend to think that vision is it's just a camera I'm taking the picture in I'm just seeing what's there and even though I done that that that feeling that we're just getting an objective picture of the world is so ingrained into us that even though I'd worked on computer vision myself for years I hadn't let go of it and I when but now we had all these theorems it was like it was in my face and something Bruce said just sort of make me realize no the math is telling me Don you create everything that you see all the structure you see it's not there until you put it there Don and that was so stunning I literally had to sit out because I I went from a an old kind of realist that says I'm just seeing reality as it is to I'm making all this up. There's there are constraints on how I make it up but nevertheless I'm making it up. So there was sort of a realist to idealist a physicist to idealist flip >> that for me happened immediately. It sounds like a noises moment. >> I'm sorry. >> It sounds like a noises moment where you just like some kind of holistic clicking occurred. >> Yeah. Because it was almost like that idea had never occurred to me before. It was so it was so inconceivable. And so all of a sudden, not not only did it become it became conceivable and and you know like probably true, but it took me it is still of course taken me decades now to emotionally recover from that and to to come to terms with it and and and and years of meditation because the assumption that I am just immediately experiencing the truth when I see you know a tree and the my chair and so forth. Uh that that's so deep conviction to let that go and to to just think this is just all a VR headset and I'm just rendering this stuff on the fly. So here's how crit how crazy this is. What I'm saying Einstein said, "Do you really believe the moon isn't there when it's not not perceived?" And that's what I'm saying. You're right, Einstein. The moon is not there when it's not perceived. The moon that I see and the moon that you see are not the same thing. You render your moon. We are interacting with something, but it's not the moon. It doesn't look like the moon. And and so that's that's crazy, but the VR metaphor makes it more easy to understand. If I'm playing Grand Theft Auto and you see a red Ferrari and I see a red Ferrari, well, the red Ferrari that I see only exists when I see it. There's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer that's running the game. And when I look away, my red Ferrari is gone. It literally only exists when I perceive it. It doesn't exist otherwise. My friend can see a red Ferrari that I'm playing with um when I'm not seeing one, but they're seeing their red Ferrari is not the same as mine. And with the VR metaphor, I think it's not hard for the current generation to sort of get it that my moon is not the same as your moon, but for for my generation, this was like a a slap on the face. >> Yeah. So, so to to stretch the the VR video game metaphor as far as we can, it's not rendered until you're interacting with it or or until your character is getting into the field of experience that necessitates that thing rendering. Yet, there is some deeper logic in the code representative of the moon, of the car, of whatever object. And maybe we can get into >> Mhm. the nature of that deeper reality as we as we go in. But I I'm intuiting that if I were a member of the audience, I'd be like, "Well, holy if that's not real, what is what what is this thing underneath >> the perception that is that is uniting it?" Um, and >> yes, >> if if you think it's appropriate to go there now, we can go there now. But I I want I don't want to derail you from because I know you're on sort of a logical walkthrough of this. >> Oh, no. That's that's a perfectly next good step to go. Absolutely. So, so I'll just say that what you're pointing to is yeah, if I'm saying this is a VR um interface, then there must be some layer of software outside there that we can start to look at and and look at the code >> and absolutely and in fact I think there's an infinite number of layers. So what we can only what we can do this again gets to the idea that there is no scientific theory of everything but it's going to be layer after layer after layer that we have to unpeel. So, we can start. We can say, "Okay, we thought this space-time world is the final reality." Okay, it's not. It's just a VR headset. Can we begin to take our first steps as scientists, as people outside of spaceime, literally outside of spacetime? And now, now what I've said this at conferences, scientific conferences, I I I won't mention anybody anybody's name. I don't want to embarrass anybody. I'll say a very bright scientist at at one point as what in the world I could even be talking about, right? It's just like I I space and time is the final reality. I mean everything is inside space and time. What could you possibly be meaning Don about talking about getting a theory of science outside of spaceime? I've had that from brilliant brilliant scientists. And so I and I I completely understand this is like spacetime is everything. So what are you even talking about? We need to go outside of spaceime. That is everything. Everything's in spacetime. And what I'm saying is no, no, this is the hard shift. >> Yeah. >> Spacetime is a trivial trivial little data structure inside you. Trivial compared to what you can do. This is nothing. It's it's a trivial headset inside of you. And we can begin to reverse engineer. we can get the first layers of software outside of spaceime. Now, a very natural reaction at this point is to say, look, Hoffman's a cognitive scientist. He's not a physicist. He's no expert in spacetime. Why should we listen to this guy? I mean, it's it's the high energy theoretical physicists who are the the you know, the experts in spaceime and so forth. And and I I completely agree. They are the experts and Hoffman is not. So what what do the high energy theoretical physicists say about spacetime? And what's remarkable is this three-word phrase, spaceime is doomed. That's a quote. Neimar Connie Jamemed says this. David Gross has said this effectively. Um John Wheeler said this that spacetime is doomed. And the reason so so the the those scientists whose territory is spacetime they are the experts on spaceime are the ones that are saying spaceime has had a good run and it's over. We need to find new a new layer of science outside of spaceime. what what is and by the way the European Research Council um the ERC it's a big European funding agencies I guess like sort of the NSF um >> has a I think it's a 10 million euro initiative um for funding research on what are called positive geometries um that these physicists are finding outside of spaceime so so the the good news well the bad news is spacetime is doomed the good news is these physicists have something to say about what's outside of spaceime. Literally out literally outside of spaceime. They're finding these positive geometries outside of spacetime. And by the way, um also beyond quantum theory. So, so the idea is that spaceime is doomed and so is quantum theory. Quantum theory is doomed. It cannot be fundamental. So the structures that they're finding these positive geometries like the amplitude associed cosmological polotopes and so forth these are structures that don't care about locality that that's the key fun key property of of spaceime and they don't care at all about unitarity which is a key property of quantum mechanics. They don't care about any of those things. So we're when these physicists so this is not a cognitive scientist step stepping outside of space time. These are high energy theoretical physicists. They know what they're talking about. And I I'll tell you why spacetime is damned in just a minute. But what they're saying is we're going to go someplace where we don't have not only spacetime, we don't have quantum mechanics. We have to show that quantum mechanics and spacetime arise together from a deeper layer of something. Right now they're seeing positive geometries. I'll just call it a new layer of software outside of of the headset, but their their language is positive geometries. And and here's the the the drop dead simple reason for why spacetime is doomed. When you use Einstein's theory of gravity, his his curved space-time theory together with quantum mechanics um and you ask, you know, I would like to look at something really really small. How do you do that? Well, you have to use, you know, to see something really small, you need a a more powerful microscope, right? with with wavelengths of light that are smaller and smaller wavelengths because if the wavelengths are too big you can't see the thing. So you have to have small wavelengths to resolve finer features. That's fine as but it requires more energy. So as you you know quantum theory tells us that uh you know in fact Einstein told us you know E= H new so as you as the frequency gets higher and higher the wavelength gets smaller and smaller the energy is going up and up. >> Yeah. And then Einstein told us uh with general relativity that you're then curving spacetime more and more and more. And what happens is when you get to 10 theus 33 cm when you try to get that small then all of a sudden you've got so much energy which is equal to mass according to Einstein equals mc^² so much mass into such a small region of space that you create a black hole and the very thing that you're trying to observe disappears into a black hole. So, so the very concept of spacetime has no operational meaning. At 10us 33 cm, 10 the - 43 seconds. It ceases to have any operational meaning. So, it's over for spacetime. It spacetime falls apart exactly at at and if you if you get frustrated and say, "Well, let me um try harder. we try to even a smaller wavelength of light and put more energy. All you do is you get a bigger and bigger black hole. >> Right? >> So what this is telling us is that spacetime is a a very shallow structure. It it it doesn't go very deep. It goes to 10 theus 33 cm and then it just falls apart. It's not like 10 theus 33 trillion cm. It's just 10us 33. So it's so we thought it was the final reality. No, it's a it's a a thin thin data structure that we're that we're using and and so is time. And that's a hard one to wrap your head around. What what in the world does it mean that time is just a data structure? So, so that's why spacetime is doomed because our the our best theories of of our best scientific theories of spacetime tell us it's a very shallow data structure and it it cannot be the final >> and so the physicists are now by the way the ERC uh there have been conferences that they've funded where I think they're like a hundred participants these are like PhDs in mathematics and high energy theoretical physics that are now exploring what's beyond spaceime. So this is not some crazy cognitive scientist who's talking out of his out of his field. These are the real experts in the field saying let's put 10 million euros in this and let's really get the best and brightest high energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians looking for this what's out outside. So we're taking the headset off. We're taking space-time headset off. And what do we find? We're finding these monolithic structures out there. So, it's much like um um 2001 a space odyssey, right? Where there's >> we're the apes and there's this monolith sitting there and we're we're we look at it and go very significant. We're we're cooting and hollering and pounding on it. What does it mean? You know, by the way, um I'm not calling these physicists and mathematicians apes. They're brilliant. But as as a species compared to what we need to understand it it feels like we're you know in the same position as the apes were with the with the monolith. I mean it's just like okay we found this stuff. What what does it mean? So that's where we are. We're trying we got these geometries are sitting there outside of spaceime like the amplitude and soed and so forth. So these genius I'm going to be very very clear these genius mathematicians and high energy theoretical physicists. They're geniuses. They're finding this stuff. But we don't we don't have any dynamical theories yet. What what dynamical theories outside of spaceime >> could generate these positive geometries? What what what do they mean? What is it what are they telling us about a deeper understanding of the nature of reality? So I think those questions are are are wide open >> and it's even an interesting question to ask what do we mean by dynamical theories outside of spaceime? What is a dynamical theory when you don't have the notion of time? So that's yeah so that's sort of um we're taking the first steps outside and I I'm also working in that same direction. And I'm trying to get a theory of consciousness that starts outside of spacetime. And I'm also working with with some brilliant colleagues Jayton Pash, Robert Prrenner and and and and others um that I can you Manish Singh and others to try to understand how we could get a theory of consciousness prior to spacetime and then to show how spacetime could emerge as simply a headset that's constructed by by consciousness. But once again, we have to have a mathematical model of what we mean by conscious agents. Um, yes, consciousness is outside of space time. >> Yeah. Beautiful. We we we've now assembled a fantastic launchpad, I think, for for where this conversation can go. Uh and and just to sort of summarize for the audience, Don is saying not only do our perceptions deceive us in terms of what the true state of reality is, our best models fail, spacetime fails, spacetime does not tell us what reality is. Even quantum theory and nothing within quantum theory, particles, whatever, none of these things are fundamentally real. So with that being the case, the question is okay, what is the next deeper layer of reality after these things and as you're pointing to it seems to be these geometric structures outside of space and time and the reason it seems to be these geometric structures is because these mathematicians and physicists some of whom work at places like CERN who are like as you're pointing to these uber geniuses who are trying to penetrate into the deepest layers of reality or uh or air quotes reality that that we can are finding, wo, there are these weird geometric laws that even these super complex scattering events seem to obey and you can actually make fairly simple pictures of these geometries that all of these interactions obey. So there seems to be these deeper geometric structures. Even saying somewhere is is is deceiving because it's not like a place you can go. It's like a layer of several layers of software down or hardware down or something. Um, but they seem to be there like like these almost these Pythagorean or Platonic, you know, sources that are kind of controlling the very ground level of our reality, of our simulation, our headset, whatever, whatever word you want to use. And then, you know, you have to kind of assume that even over the top of that or even deeper than that, there's something even more fundamental. And I think unless you go the direction Don is going where you assume you're going to keep running into this question unless you settle into the idea that it's got to be consciousness. It's got to be consciousness that's deeper than any of these structures, any of these realities, any of these models. Because if it's not consciousness, what I mean, what else could it be, right? There's there's really no other answer in my opinion other than consciousness. And that seems to be where where you're headed. Yes. So I I agree the the high energy theoretical physicists are finding these these geometries are like diamonds highdimensional diamonds outside of spaceime >> and the reason they're studying these is because they're interested in trying to find a way of describing how particles interact inside spaceime. So at the Large Hadron Collider and other colliders, you take, you know, protons or some kind of high, you know, particles and smash them together at high velocities and see what what happens, all the particles that come out of it. And that seems to be a really good way of understanding nature at at at small scales and the particle nature particle nature of of reality inside spacetime. And when you try to compute mathematically the probabilities of these kinds of particle interactions and what's going to happen uh you can do it with fineman diagrams there Richard Feman came up with these ways of using spacetime and quantum theory so locality and unitarity to compute these and and you can do it and and he gets the right answer uh inside spacetime and but it turns out that um when you do it that way to just compute the amplitude which is a fancy word for probability. It's a it's a complex valued function that when you take its amplitude squared you you get the probabilities of the scattering events to get these amplitudes for a very simple scattering process. takes hundreds of pages of algebra uh using fineman diagrams and and the problem in in the 80s 1980s was they you know they were trying to build these colliders and the the experimentalists said to the theorists look you know we can't we have to look at millions and millions of interactions and compute things quickly you know several hundred pages of algebra for each interaction just isn't going to do it and no supercomputer can keep up with that >> so can you um please please simplify things. And so a couple of mathematicians Park and Taylor in the mid to late 80s um came up with a a a new formula for one class of particle interactions that took several hundred pages and cut it down to something around you on the order of 30 pages. And it was like a miracle. People were going, you know, these guys are complete geniuses. They it's and and then a little bit later Park and Taylor they'd spent so much time on this they guessed >> a formula >> it was just one or two terms and it turned for this class of interactions it turned out to be right and this is like holy smoke I mean >> you can do it with fman diagrams inside space and time locality and unitarity ex you know explicit and it takes hundreds of pages of algebra but you get the right answer or you can there's some thing going on here. You can get it with just one or two terms that you can compute by hand. And people, well, okay, this is, you know, we we just got lucky. But then there began to be a series of, you know, discoveries u including something called the BCFW recursion relations with Whitten and and his graduate students in the early 2000s or mid 2000s >> began to realize that this was not just a one-off. There was something going on here that you fineman gives you the right answers using space-time computations but there was something going on where if you let go of the unitarian locality so you let go of spacetime and quantum theory you get the right answer and it's much simpler so that suggested that we should explore this and so then Nemo Connie Hamemed and and other many other physicists began to go okay we maybe this isn't just a oneoff or a twooff maybe this is really something that we should explore and of course they were brave because you know they're starting to take a a a step out of spaceime so they were very very brave to do that but they've been rewarded they found you know Nema and his colleagues um found the amplitude published in 2014 so this is not that old this is 12 years ago that the first like clean positive geometry came out and then in the last 12 years they found the associ our usefulness cosmological polytopes and and and other structures. So much so that a couple years ago the ERC then said, "Okay, this this looks real. We need to put money into it." So, so, so yeah, it's looking like the physicists are finding the high energy theoretical physicists are finding these geometries outside space time. But I would say the current state-of-the-art is we know they're useful because their their their structure, their volumes, their surface structure, their edge structure is is coding for the scattering probabilities inside spacetime and the kinds of events. So it's really struct amazing. Why is a structure outside of spaceime that doesn't care about space and time or unitarity? It doesn't care about quantum theory. Why does that structure code for um these scattering events? And by the way, I should say that um there this is still a work in progress. There are scattering events that they haven't yet got the positive geometries for. So it's not that they we can say we've got positive geometries for every scattering event, but they keep finding that they can do more and more and more. So that's why it's very very promising. And there's also something called there are also combinatorial objects called decorated permutations. So like normal no shuffling cards or permutations and these also in some cases are enough to classify and describe um almost completely certain kinds of scattering um processes. So we have positive geometries and these decorated permutations um that are structures that seem to transcend spaceime and yet so this is a hint about some kind of layer of software or something outside of space time and so the geniuses are on it and and there but what what I'm what I'm looking at then is to say we should go back to something that Wheeler pointed out and is yes his 1989 paper the it from bit paper very very famous it from bit paper wheeler was saying we have to there he says fundamentally there is no space no time and no spacetime at this at the microscopic level he he's very very clear right at the start of his paper we're going to as physicists we're going to have to set understand that fundamentally there is no space there is no time and there is no spaceime and somehow He said, "We're going to have to understand what he called observer participancy." That somehow the act of observation, asking questions of nature, specific questions of nature, and getting specific answers back. That observer participancy process is at the core of all science and is going have to be at the core of our next generation of of physical theories. And he has this loop that we have observer participants generate information generates space-time and spacetime loops back to the observer participants. So he's saying there's this loop between observation information spacetime observers in a in an infinite loop. And he says we need >> we have to crack that loop. >> We've got to we have to start there. And that's and and that's the interesting thing about quantum theory and also the previous theories and the what is the role of the observer I should say in science the observer is is important right we can't ignore the observer in science because scientific theories are created based on our observations We have to have careful experiments with with welldesigned you know equipment like the large hydron collider or or you know the James web telescope and so forth. We have to have really precise equipment >> but ultimately that equipment leads to experiences in the minds of the scientists. Without those ex without those conscious experiences in the minds of the scientists, there is no scientific theory because the scientists are the ones who create the scientific theory. And so we need to have an understanding of how our experiences justify the kinds of theories that we're going to have and how our theories then close the loop that show that our experiences and our theories all form one coherent system. Now the observer has been in in Newtonian physics the observer was assumed to be irrelevant in the sense that it affected nothing and so you didn't need to have a theory of the observer so it wasn't really even mentioned in Einstein's theories of um spacetime the observers are mentioned Einstein talks about observers but they're basically clocks and coordinate systems there's there's not the notion of an observer interfering or affecting the outcome only the motion of the observer changing the time and you know time dilations and length contractions. Mhm. >> But in quantum theory, uh, the formalism doesn't let you ignore the observer anymore because >> you have a linear differential equation, the Schroinger evolution um when you're not observing the system, the unitary evolution. So it's linear but it's unitary. And then when you um observe you get the wave function collapsing to a single outcome. >> Right. The most famous version of this is the double slit experiment. >> The double slit. Exactly. And so so the the problem is this and this is this is an open problem in in quantum theory. You have a superposition of possibilities for what you might see and what you might measure according to the shorting revolution and it evolves unitarily. When you actually observe you get one outcome one. Now there have been attempts to say we do something called decoherence. There's a process of decoherence where you can try try to explain it but it turns out the decoherence process will give you a um it gets rid of the complex superposition and it leads to a um a linear mixture but it doesn't give you a unique outcome. So so there are attempts to try to make decoherence solve the measurement problem and and they fail. They they they get half of the way but we we can't get half of the way. We need to get to one answer and decoherence does not get to one outcome. And here's the problem. Any physical system in quantum mechanics must be described by the shortinger evolution by unitary evolution. That means that no physical system described by the shortinger revolution can collapse the wave function. Period. Can't do it. Just can't do it. So we have this strange thing that we're starting we're assuming a physical world. The physical world is described by unitary evolution. Unitary evolution cannot give you a unique outcome. So that description of the physical world cannot give you a theory of measurement. Period. Unable to do it. And decoherence doesn't get you anywhere near the solution of that problem. So that's why this has been a problem not for you know a couple months. This has been 100 years. This has been a hundred years since we've had Shortinger's equation. >> 100 years. >> And so that's I mean so and these are I mean 100 years of geniuses working on this thing. >> So so we have so and that's what was sort of I think pushing on Wheeler. Wheeler was saying okay look this measurement problem can't be pushed under the rug. We're going to have to start with observer participency and the information generated by observer participants somehow get spacetime and then have the observers fit into that whole cycle. >> Yeah. >> So that's that's where I'm headed. That's exactly where what I'm doing with my team. We're we're saying uh we agree with Wheeler. In fact, in his 1989 ed from bit paper, he cites my book observer mechanics with with Bruce Bennett and Chayan Pash. So he cites our book as the kind of thing that directions that we might want to go in this where we were trying to get a mathematical model of what we called participators observers that were participating and trying to >> so so he he cites our book and so that's we can talk more about it but what I'm trying to do just at top level now to sort of give the big picture >> is to say >> we're proposing a dynamics of observer participators we call them conscious agents So Wheelers, observer participators, we're calling them conscious agents. And the big picture is we're saying that we think we'll be able to get the decorated permutations and the positive geometries as representations of the asmtoic behavior, the long-term behavior of this dynamics of conscious agent. So there's a big dynamics. So the next layer of software can be outside of spaceime. The first layer of software outside of spacetime is a bunch of conscious agents in a dynamical interaction. And when you look at their long-term behavior, you can describe it in terms of decorative permutations and positive geometries and they're then they project into space time. That's the big picture. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, so again to try to summarize for the audience and for my own sake, there's this long-standing problem within science of understanding that the observer is relevant, is always relevant, but then what is an observer? Is it is it you know, and I I was going to go down this the whole like sidebar of there's all these different quantum interpretations, right? like there's there's the multiverse theory, there's a Copenhagen interpretation, there's super determinism, and they're all kind of ways to try to >> at least in part address that and and other things. But let's not get lost in that and just say no one has really formalized this idea of what the observer is and how exactly the observer and you know the the inherent agency involved in doing anything could actually be made into a formalized system. And and that's what you've done with conscious observers is you've actually made mathematically precise statements about what are these observers? What is an observer? What effect do they have on reality? What is their role um in in uh making reality as we know it uh I guess appear to us as as a at least in your field as a cognitive scientist. So you've actually done this. You've created this system. And not only have you created a system that relies on the notion that consciousness is fundamental, you've actually created a model for what these observers are and what these conscious agents are. Um, and in doing that, you've actually taken the first steps to showing how you can derive all of physics from consciousness. Not not consciousness from as an epiphenomenon from physics or from neuroscience, but flipping it around to the other point of view that no, all of this comes out of consciousness. Um, so yeah, I think so, so now we're in this like really exciting new territory where we've got this theory of conscious observers. Um, and I don't know if this is a good place to start getting into this new development or if we're not quite there yet, but >> yeah, take it take it from there. Yeah. >> Yeah. I I'll just mention because you did mention the um the other work that other of my colleagues are doing on consciousness from a a physicalist framework. I I'll I'll just say one little thing about that work f first. They're my friends and my colleagues and they're brilliant. >> They're they're they're absolutely brilliant. Um but they've set themselves up an impossible problem. They're trying to start with physical systems inside space and time and they're trying to boot up consciousness and it's it's just not possible. And so the question I asked them um and the question that you can ask anybody who says they have a theory of consciousness that's a physicalist theory is very very simple. Great. You have a theory. What specific conscious experience does your theory explain? That's the that's the only question you need to ask them. Can you explain the taste of mint? What is your precise scientifically precise mathematical description of the taste of mint? If it's integrated information theory for example, what precise maximally integrated cause effect structure which is a markup matrix, what precise matrix must be the taste of mint and could not be the smell of garlic. What are you know what how many um states does it have? >> If it has n states, what are the n squared elements of the matrix? Why do they have to be the those n squared values to be the taste of men? That's all I have to ask is what is your specific theory for a specific conscious experience. If I came to you and say, you know, I've got a theory of particle particle interactions, you go, "Oh, oh, great. Okay. Um, well, give me one, Don. You know what what specific interaction do you can you explain?" Like photon electron interactions. And I said to you, "Oh, I can't explain any specific experience. I just have a general theory of particle interactions." >> Yeah. you would rightfully say,"Well, you know, Don, come back to me when you have something interesting to say." That's not a theory. And that's where we are. And again, these are my friends and colleagues. They're brilliant. It's just not possible to boot up a theory of consciousness from physical, you know, from neurons, from from quantum states of microtubules, whatever, whatever it is, from an AI system. We can talk about AI if you want. just not possible to start from physics, physical stuff in spaceime and build up um consciousness. So if anybody says they've done it, then say, "Oh great, give me a specific example. Taste of mint, smell of garlic, whatever it is. What is your concrete example?" If they can't give you one, then say, "Well, come back when you can give me one." >> Yeah. This is a linen mill thing basically, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Like the Yeah. Like Livets had this famous thought experiment where um if you essentially the point that he's trying to get get to is you could never walk into any machinery or any construct and explain the consciousness that put it there. You can only talk about and and this is and this holds true for the for uh any technology. It holds true for the brain. Um and and that's it. I did a terrible job of explaining that, but that hopefully >> No, that's that's perfectly good, Michael. It's perfectly good. and and so but a lot of my colleagues will will will say uh liess is wrong. Yes, we can. We're working on it. We'll get you neural networks or something like that or quantum states of microtubules and and and they should they should try. Absolutely they should try. But if they say to you, I've got a theory of consciousness, then the right question now. Now when as soon as they claim to have a theory of consciousness, that's a different game. when they claim to have a theory of consciousness, then it's time to be very hardnosed and say, "Give me one. Give me a specific example." And if they can't give you a specific example, then um ask them when they will give you a specific example because that's when it's going to be interesting. So, so there there is literally nothing on the table so far in in that u and and I think it's principle. I think the failure is principled. It's not because they're not smart. They they are very very smart and they're many of them are very very good friends of mine. So, so we have to step entirely outside of space time and that's a big leap and but what if we do that then what we want to do is to have as simple a set of assumptions as possible. So if I'm going to start with consciousness outside of spaceime, what's the simplest thing that I can do? I don't want to have a Rube Goldberg device. You you want the most parsimmonious like Einstein with his special theory of relativity. He makes just two assumptions. The speed of light is the same in all um reference frames. Um and the laws of physics are the same in all, you know, for all observers, all inertial observers. So reference frame, I mean inertial reference frame. So two two axioms and you're off to the races with an incredible theory. That's what you want, not some Rube Goldberg device. So what's the minimum I mean when you talk about consciousness you can you can have lots and lots lots of axioms right and you could proliferate axioms and some some of my colleagues do that I I think there's one axium there are conscious experiences taste of mint smell of garlic so forth and they change you know I'm now I'm experiencing the smell of mint or the taste of mint and oh and now I'm having feeling a headache Oh, now there's a I I see the color red there. So, I have experiences and then some changes of experiences. That's the minimum that we have. And so, how do we what's the minimum most general formalism that we could do right down for that? Well, I'll list my experiences. So, here's my set of experiences. Here's the taste of men. So, I could have it turns out if you look at human perceptions, um our best psychopysics, psychophysics is the scientific study of of of our experiences. Mhm. >> Um, and it's a it's a beautiful field. It's it's a a very rigorous field. It's been around since 1859 or 1860. Um, it's a a wellestablished field. So, we know we have on the order of trillions, humans have on the order of trillions of conscious experiences, distinguishable conscious experiences. So, it's it's a lot of it's it's a big set for us. And and bats, you know, have echolocation. What it's like to be a bat is probably very different from anything that we can experience, right? So it's not just human experiences. We could imagine other animals with that, you know, electro reception. We know, you know, they can see, feel electromagnetic fields. Okay. Well, maybe they have something we can't see. >> Vvelt is one of my favorite concepts. Like you really trying to wrap your mind around the idea that >> other organisms have a completely different view and range of experiences than what you have access to. >> Absolutely. that completely and and so we can't >> think big enough. We have to really go beyond the human limitations. But even with just humans, we have on the order of trillions. So that's that's big enough for for the mathematics that we're about to do. So we have trillions of experiences and and then the transition. So I'm just going to the the simplest mathematics that we can do is something called a marov matrix where I just list my experiences and then I list for each experience what's the probability that if I'm experiencing red now that maybe I'll experience green next or blue next and just write all those numbers down. What are the probabilities of the transitions? Very very simple. So I'm assuming that's it. Let me define an observer as a matrix where I list the experiences and I list the transition probability. Say if I have this experience, I'll go to that experience. Just the minimal thing I can do. So I'm not talking about anything more than that to begin with. So we decided to to go with that. We just have these Marov matrices and I'll call them conscious observers. And what we've been doing is exploring them. We um what we what we're what we've discovered in just in the last year and a half is we're starting to look at the relationships of these different conscious observers. So I can imagine, you know, a conscious observer with a trillion trillions of experiences, but maybe there's a conscious observer that only has a thousand of those or 10 of those or yeah or 50 five00 million of them, >> but but not a trillion of them. How how are these observers related? How could they? So, we'd like to have some way of weaving them together. And we discovered a logic. So, this is actually a contribution to the mathematics of Marov chains that there's a logic that that ties together every Marov matrix, all all of them together. And we call it the trace logic. And it's based on a a trace operation. And the trace operation has been known for many many decades. So this is not new. Um >> okay old books on on markoff chains will talk about a trace operation. So if I have a a matrix on suppose I can see 10 colors that are you know red, green, blue, yellow and so forth 10 colors and I have a matrix of how they might change. But then suppose that I can only see say red, green and blue out of the 10. >> Yeah. So the 10 the matrix that describes the transitions on 10. Suppose that that's governing everything that's happening to me. But even though that's what's happening, I only see the red, green, and blue. So I only see three things. So I'm going to see some transitions between red, green, and blue. That's all I can see. So I'm going to want to describe my experience in terms of a three, you know, 3x3 matrix of those transitions. But I want to have some canonical way of saying if if these are the transitions on the 10 x 10 then there's got to be the the right answer for the 3x3 of what I see right and that's called the trace and there is a formula I I can tell you the formula but it may not be helpful if we want we can go into the mathematical formula and talk about it but so there is a a a precise formula that you can write down that says give me a big matrix give me any subset of it states this formula you crank the wheels and out comes the little the smaller matrix which is what you will see and that's called the trace. So that's been known. >> Yeah. Okay. >> What we discovered was that the relationship of being the trace of another matrix gives you a logic on the set of all markoff chains. So it like the logic is non-bullan. So it's a it's a it's a complex logic. A boolean logic, you know, is something that we're more used to. Ands and ors and nots and so forth are are are distributive and things like that. This logic is non boolean. But if I take any particular matrix, >> say a 10 x 10, and I look at all the matrices that are its traces. So there'd be lots of traces of it that if I just restrict attention to those matrices so the top guy and all of its traces then they form a boolean logic. So it's a boolean sublogic. So the way we then say it it's a huge it's an infinitely large logic because there's an infinite number of markoff chains that the number of states can go to infinity. You could literally, you know, in the, you know, get trillion is small that humans only have a trillion experiences, but we could go to quadrillion, sexilian, septillian, Google plaque, whatever, you know, is >> it's it's as big as you want. Um, it's nonvoo, but if you take any matrix, even you know, a seextilian state matrix and look at all of its >> the things that are under it in the trace, they form a boolean sublog, a big one. So it it is a logic. So that was a you know nice contribution to the theory of marov chains a fundamental contribution mathematically. But then we had that. So we're you know you you can see we're trying to understand we have this very simple model of an observer. We're doing whater said we're going to start with observer participency. We're going to try to build up physics from that. We got this logic that's tying all these observers together. But we still don't see how you can build physics from that. And but then we notice that if you um in Markoff theory, it's standard. This is not us again. It's it's standard that you can just keep a counter every time you change your experience in the Markov chain. You just increment your counter, right? So I see red now. So that's one. Oh, now I see green. That's two. I went back to red. That's three. So every time the you update your experience, you update your counter. So these are called we call them enhanced markoff chains. >> So So this is again standard. So these enhanced markoff chains are just standard in the literature. You can find them. They're they're sometimes called spacetime markoff chains, but we'll call them enhanced markoff chains. What I noticed year and a half ago, year and a half ago was that if I take a matrix markup matrix and it's running so the 10 x 10 matrix for the color 10 colors and I only look at the 3x3, notice that the counter on the 3x3 isn't going to be clicking as often as the counter of the 10 x10. >> Right? It says because I in my the the 3x3 only clicks if I see if red, green or blue up here, but the bigger counter is clicking red, green, blue. Also yellow, purple, orange, black, >> seven other possibilities, >> seven other colors, right? Yeah. So, it's clicking quite a bit more often. And as I was looking at that, I thought, wait, that sounds a little bit like time dilation in Einstein's theory of relativity, right? See, Einstein has this notion that if not just a notion, but he's got the mathematics of spacetime built on this. If you're on a train and I'm sitting at the train station, you're on the train, you're going past me pretty fast, and you got a meter stick and a clock. I'm sitting I'm sitting at the train station, you're going past me, and I look at you, I'll notice that your clock is going too slow. And also notice your meter stick is too short. But you on the train, you're looking at me sitting sitting on the at the train station. You're looking at me and you notice from your point of view, my clock is going too slow and my meter stick is too short. So we both think the other guy's clock is slow and their meter sticks are short. That's time dilation and space space contraction. So I realized, okay, this sounds a lot like at least the time dilation part of Einstein's theories. Could it be could it be that somehow I mean Wheeler is right that that it's just the theory of observers observer participency alone that could give us the structure of spacetime. Could it actually no but but you know I would be a fool not to to look. So I started to look with Chayan Pash my my collaborator. We looked at this and um didn't seem to I couldn't find any I mean any reason why it it shouldn't work for you for a certain class of marov chains not for every marov chain for now let's I'll be very careful for Einstein's special theory of relativity to start with so this is you're you're moving without gravity um so we're not going to talk about gravity just a flat spacetime >> so we just started with flat spacetime then we said Well, we have to have not just a notion of time. We're going to take this counter, this click counter is something somehow somehow corresponding to time in spaceime. And I'm seeing that the counter dilation is going to somehow correspond to time dilation in spaceime. But what about length? What about that meter stick? It has to contract. And what Einstein tells us is in flat spacetime, the contraction is the same. The amount that the meter stick contracts has to be the same factor that the time is dilated. Okay. So I said well first what is the you know what is distance and one interesting way to talk about distance there is a couple ways to talk about distance in in markov chains. If I have two states like the red and the green colors, >> y >> I can ask um how long on average how many steps of the markoff chain will I need if I if I see green now, how long on average will it take for me before I see red >> and then get back to green? That's called the commute time. The expected amount of steps from green to red and back to green again is called the commute time. And you know sometimes it'll take 10 steps maybe some one time it'll take a 100 steps next time might take three steps but on average how long's that's called the expected commute time and um some mathematicians named Doyle and Steiner in in 2017 published a paper where they said the expected commute time um maps to the square of the uklitian distance. So it's it's not the distance it's not the distance but the square of the distance um between the two states. So, so that was an a very very nice result. And so we asked then u okay. So are there is there a class of marov chains for which the ukidian distances between states as given by marov theory of steiner doyle and steiner and the the contractions that we get from this counter um would give us the flat space times of manowski space and it turns out there is there is a class of markoff chains for which and they're called the cyclic markoff chains where you literally go um like if If you if you can only see red, green, blue and yellow, you go red, green, blue, yellow, red, green, blue, yellow forever in a cycle. That's a cycle marov chain. Yeah. >> For those marov chains, you get Manowski space. >> Yeah. >> Well, you get the contractions. >> We're now I should say we're we're um >> when I say we get Minowski space, of course, that's saying we have a theorem, >> right? Right. >> So, what I can say is we've written down a theorem. I would say um I think we have a proof. I'm working with two mathematicians um Jayon Posh and and Nifa Hermanson. Um and and so I'm not going to announce that we have a proof until the mathematicians say that we have a proof. So I will just say that there's a cognitive scientist who thinks that we're doing pretty well, but he's waiting for the mathematicians to give the thumbs up to say that we have the proof. I see no obstruction. They have told me there there's no obstruction, but this is such a major result that we are not going to say we've got it until we've got it. So, I'll just say this, it's very promising and I can't wait uh until we nail it down, submit it for publication and and it comes out then then I can say but I will I will just say this uh I see no obstruction um to to this at all. It looks to me in fact that it we're being exceedingly careful, but it looks to me that it's it's almost trivial. >> The it looks like it's almost trivial, but again, it's it's trivial when I have some brilliant mathematicians working with me on it and you know and then they're doing the hard work. So, so >> so yeah, to try to bring this home for people and for myself and just summarize again. So, you were able to from this theory of conscious observers aka these markoff chains. So the the markoff chain equals conscious observer conscious agent. You were able to derive spacetime from that. When you say manowski space, you mean spacetime, right? >> Yeah. Flat spaceime. >> Yeah. Flat spacetime. So So Don was able to show that you could get spaceime. So like our model of this reality from a more basic level of consciousness, not the other way around. And he was able to do this through elegant math. Elegant math that was so straightforward that you and your mathematician collaborator were like, "Nah, this is too this is too good. This is too this is too beautiful and basic. It can't this and it no it seems to be correct." >> So yeah, absolutely. It seems it it seems to work and and again I I'll defer to my mathematician colleague collaborators to to make the final pronouncement that we that we have a clean theorem but um I I I don't see any obstruction but notice that there was only one class of markup chains that that would do this right it's for flat manowski space it's only the cyclic and most markoff chains are not cycles right they're most are going to be far more complicated but what's interesting about those is um they will lead to the curved space times of general relativity >> because there the length contraction and time deations are different. So that and and and I would imagine that there going to be some of the many of those markoff chains that won't even project into curve space time. to curve spacetime will only be possible for a subset of these markoff chains and then there'll be other markoff chains that just can't be represented in spaceime at all >> which is perfectly fine when I've been saying the spaceime is just a headset right it's it's just one little headset that we that we use >> so so this is now the the big picture on this is that the very structure of spaceime as Wheeler proposed is coming from the pattern obser of observer participancy and the relationship among observers. And so we had to do to understand that the we had to have the trace logic to understand the relationship among the observers. Right? So that was what the trace logic did. It says if you have this simple model of observers as just these markov matrices then you need to have understand their relationships. Well, the trace logic shows you this deep logical relationship among them. And then with that, then you start seeing how the time dilations and length contractions that could lead to space-time um arise. Now this this is just the first step. Now there's the notion of agency. So this is like passive observation, right? >> Now we need a notion of of agency. And that takes to a new level. So the way I'm thinking about it now, we we published a paper where we have um a loop where we have agents, we have um a conscious agent having a set of experiences, a set of actions, and they're interacting with this network of other agents. We have a have a loop and and that's one interesting model. But now that we have the trace logic, I'm thinking right now and I haven't written this up yet, but I'm thinking now about a different way of talking about agency. Take the whole trace logic. So this infinite set of observers with this logical relationship >> and define an agent on that. So agents crawl around on the trace logic is the idea. Mhm. >> So at any quote unquote moment an agent is looking at the world through a particular element of the trace logic, a particular markup matrix >> and it makes an observation. Then it says, okay, the agency part is now I'm going to change which matrix I'm looking through. >> Maybe I'll go to a little bit bigger matrix. I'll I'll expand my horizon of experiences or maybe I'll contract it. Maybe I'll maybe I'll meditate and let go of all experiences for a while. Maybe maybe I'm gonna so I'm gonna meditate and go to nothing >> or I'm going to go to a brand new part of the world and I'm going to expand my experiences. I'm just going to be open to nature. So you can imagine going small, going big and and then starting to have strategies for how you're changing your observations and moving around. So all of a sudden you get the notion of agency as as crawling around on the trace logic. And the way you'd crawl around would be again using marov kernels given my current way I'm looking which which matrix I'm looking through >> I'll have a probability distribution where I might go next which other ways of looking might I choose. So that's again a markoff matrix that does that says for if I'm looking from this element of the of the trace logic which new element will I likely go to. So we so it's going to be a we have the trace logic on the set of all markoff chains and then an agent is another markoff chain crawling on the trace logic. So it's it's >> it's pretty pretty wild. So that's going to be the notion of agency that I want to explore. Um but I should say that's an idea that I've only had in the last few weeks and we have to explore it. >> Yeah. But so so even within this though so so it's very exciting from a technical point of view but really what it is is it's putting more layers of technical understanding and it's it's putting a lot more resolution on what we've been saying this whole time, right? Like we are in this limited scope of perception. We are essentially within this headset like the the Markov chain that is me or or that that I have access to within within this field of possibilities is still limited, right? But we can but we can crawl around within a segment of of the trace of this larger um overarching structure, but we're still limited. We just because we know this doesn't mean we now have do you know the the Greek word hypoxis? >> No. >> So so uh when you if you look at some of these so prolist was really this neoplatonist who is very uh very logical and technical and he one of his most famous works is elements of theology and he lays everything out like a uklitian proof. like he starts out from a very very similar axiom to you which is like um there is a one everything participates in some aspect of the one >> but but then but and then he like lays out hundreds of other he keeps walking through this and eventually you get you get to to this metaphysical notion of there being something very similar to what you're describing in a more technical way which is that you have these like grad ations of uh a agency and ontological power. And that's like kind of what this word hypoxis means is you higher things on the chain have more hypoxis and then there's other things underneath those things that have less and less as it goes down. >> Yes. >> So, so it puts us in this constraint that you've been describing as the headset, right? or that we again we could think about as being within a game as within Grand Theft Auto. But then there's like limitations. There's there's still these limitations as to what we can do. But then the interesting question is is are these insights that you're talking about are these potential ways to increase the scope of what the headset can do? Like are are these ways to expand what a human maybe even can do? Or are we always going to be limited? I mean, we're going to be limited to some degree, of course. Like, I don't think it's possible for us to dissolve back into the one as a human being and like continue to exist. But, um, but do do you see that as a real possibility that we're going to unlock new faculties, new modes of perception, you know, things we can't even imagine right now? >> Absolutely. And so, I'll first start off with a statement that's, you know, to put some modesty on the whole thing. that is this is just the first layer outside of soft of software outside of spacetime. So it's >> so so I'm not claiming anywhere close to a theory of everything or anything like that but but I think with that proviso I think that there's magic here that you know this think about it this way if you are a wizard inside Grand Theft Auto.0 Oh, you can do all sorts of amazing things and people are impressed. But if you're the geek that wrote the software, uh you can do things that the wizard doesn't understand. You can make their car disappear. You can take the tires off their car. You you can just do magic, right? >> Basically, if what we're saying is correct, um we're going to be unlocking incredible magic. And so I I'll just give you one example of the kind of magic that goes on this time. time dilation stuff. Suppose I'm I'm able to use this big matrix. That's that's me. I'm able I'm I've got this big matrix. My time counter is going for every one of those experiences. And suppose that your matrix um is only, you know, onetenth of mine, right? So you only see >> probably is to be honest. >> Well, I should have turned it the other way. So I'll turn it around. So you got a big matrix and and Hoffman only sees onetenth of Michael's. Who who knows what it is? But so so so I'll I'll do I'll do it that way. So, Hoffman has only 10% of Michael's experiences. And um what happens then is for every click of time that I see, Michael has could do 10 times many many other things. He could do lots of other things where I think nothing's happened. For for Michael, it could be a thousand years or a million years depending on how how much bigger your matrix is. You you could you could have a thousand years to do whatever you want. And for me, it's instantaneous. That that means effectively that I'm a sitting duck, >> right? >> Compared to you. I'm a sitting duck. I mean, you can do whatever you want while I'm just sitting there in hurt unable to to do anything. >> Well, where this gets really trippy is if you ask yourself, what kind of a being would that be? like like like you know obviously this is a fun example you and me but if we really try like this really gives you some insight as to what it might be to be a higher being like a an alien an angel what whatever like whatever word you want to put on it might be something like this and maybe that's why when people have you know altered states experiences or numinous experiences they see these things that just completely stretch their ability to conceive you know like in in like going back to biblical examples Angels always be not afraid. Like I know whatever I'm looking like to you, it's looking real crazy, but like try not to freak out, you know? And and that's been my experience too with altered states is is it is absolutely that um belvelt I was talking about where I can easily make sense of reality. It is shaking, man. It is it is like, you know, trying as hard as it can to maintain homeostasis and it can't happen. So maybe that's what it's like for for for us >> in our trace gaining a very low pixel resolution of like what what that adding another integer adding another possibility to that space might be like it might be this overwhelming numinous uh mysterium tremendum kind of experience absolutely and and I've only talked about the time there's also the space as you were saying like So when you you have much more dimensions of space, if you have the big if you're the bigger trace than mine, I'm just a small trace than you, then my distances are different from yours. I I've I've got a limited set of time. I've got a limited set. You're working in a much bigger space than me as well as you got more time. So you can do stuff outside where I can't see. I You could do something inside my trace. I see. So I see an object inside the trace. you've let me see it. And then um you then do something so that all of a sudden it looks like the thing that I see in my trace moved at Mach 40, >> right? >> Accelerated at impossible or or faster than the speed of light. And but inside your big matrix, you're you're all within your own laws quote unquote laws of physics in your in your matrix. But because I'm at a much smaller matrix, it looks like magic to me and it looks like it's impossible to me. So, literally, you could be doing all sorts of stuff and I'm a sitting duck. Um, you can So, there's going to be uh the technologies that would come out of this are you you can't think big enough. >> Yeah. >> And Yeah. Right. Well, what you just described, I don't know if you want to go here, but what you just described really sounds like most people's UFO experiences when they when they see one or they try to sense one is these things are doing things that from our vantage point seem like it shouldn't be possible. It shouldn't be possible to go from sea level to 40,000 ft and then back to sea level again all within a second or two. But these are supposedly things that uh fighter pilots have captured on, you know, things that that work well enough that we're using them to like protect our our country and our interests and fight wars. And those instruments work well for those purposes. So, it seems to be telling us something about something as impossible as it sounds, right? >> Um, so maybe that's one of the only explanations. Uh well, you know, I I hadn't paid much attention to the UAP thing until there there was the um congressional hearing >> in which >> people under oath >> said, "I have been part of this. I've seen the technology. I've seen nonhuman biologics." And so at that point then I gave myself permission to think about okay. Um there is now some credible testimony here that these things may actually exist. And it's very very clear from the work that I've been doing independently that this kind of technology is easily possible from from this framework. If you're if you're if you take spaceime as fundamental, then it's hard to explain this technology. It's just sort of like the the laws of physics simply don't allow this stuff. And it's there's no way that we can see in a space-time framework. Of course, we still haven't united, you know, really united things that that in a deep way. We don't have a theory of everything in certain time inside spaceime. the standard model goes so so far but you know there are things that we might try to to do inside but still it's hard to imagine this kind of magic happening but if you switch frameworks space time is just a VR headset >> and consciousness is the creator of this headset so and we can start to describe a layer of software outside the headset then it's a no-brainer that if you are the VR designer you Oh, how it's how it's designed, then you can do magic inside the headset as I was describing the the so so I I'm actually it's almost uh scary the technologies that can come out of this. So the the trace logic is um also quite dangerous. So I think understanding the the trace logic and and and perhaps this notion of agency um is opening up a Pandora's box because if you think about it, this is a way of thinking about technologies that we simply have never had before, >> right? >> We we have all of our military systems are designed with physics inside spaceime. We've only used what we know about the inside of the headset. So we our our best military equipment is because um you know we are like the the really the the great player of Grand Theft Auto. We know how to do stuff inside the headset. >> But as soon as you get outside the headset and start playing with the software itself, uh the first you know the first country to do that is is the winner in terms of of technology. there's there's no nothing that you could do to stop it. So, this is a it's it's a it's actually a Pandora's box um that that's happening here. So, one can only hope that one of the big lessons here is where did the trace logic come from? Where did the theory of consciousness come from? It comes from the idea that there is that consciousness is fundamental and each one of us is simply an avatar expression of of a deep unified consciousness. And and so what what comes out of the trace logic is what spiritual traditions have been saying for a long time. And Jesus said it very very clearly. You'll love your neighbor as yourself. >> Yeah. The implication being your neighbor is yourself. Basically, we're and and that's really the point the trace logic does say all of us are in fact the one consciousness looking at itself through different headsets. So, someone who is smart enough to begin to use the trace logic outside of spaceime to build technologies hopefully also is smart enough to understand what this is saying. that is that the person that you're going to use this technology on is you. That person is you. >> Yeah. >> And so be careful how you use this technology because what you're doing it that any harm that you choose to do is harm that you're doing to um an avatar of yourself. Ultimately, >> you aren't your avatar. You you transcend. But to the extent that you don't want something to happen to your avatar, you should not want something to happen to the avatar of of another person. >> So I'm hoping that the the the that at the same time that we get a technological boost that we also get in some sense a moral boost from from the same place. >> Yeah. I I suspect Don and and it seems like that this is the only way I can square the circle I'm about to describe is within a lot of that same conversation one of the direct things you seem to be hearing more and more is that consciousness seems to be core to whatever the UAP technology is and of course that's very speculative and handwavy but maybe it's something along the lines of if we do add another possibility to our, you know, Markov matrix. Maybe it's not just going to be some new advanced physics technology. Maybe it's going to be something that makes that statement make sense. That there is something about consciousness and physics or about reality that's intertwined in a way that right now doesn't make sense to us. But maybe just by unlocking one more gradation of reality or one new possibility or understanding suddenly there will be some new noises. There will be some new understanding of oh this is how these pieces fit together. We we thought that applied technology like this and my qualia my conscious experience are two completely categorically different things. But maybe this is the thing that closes the gap or closes the circle or something like that. And along with that would come all kinds of epiphies and all kinds of new um hugely onlogically reorienting understandings in terms of what we are. And it wouldn't just be like a a conversation. It would be I'm I'm talking about like a knowing like a new sense or a new thing that um of course I can't describe because it's like it's like how do you describe what you don't know but but it's but it's I don't know I that's the nebulous sense that I get >> right well first I completely agree in in the following sense that what this approach is saying is that what is beyond spaceime is entirely consciousness. It is entirely in some sense psychological in the way that you were talking about. So, so yeah to the extent that the UAPs have been associated with all sorts of psychological phenomena that that also follows immediately from this the ontology of this whole approach of the trace logic. It's consciousness all the way down. And so in in fact all the technologies that look physical everything that looks to us physical is ultimately from from this point of view psychological. the the very spacetime itself is entirely a psychological construct. Everything inside spacetime is a psychological construct. Once you understand that then that opens up the technologies um that that would seem impossible in a physicist physicalist ontology. Um, and I again I don't think that we can think big enough out outside of the the box, but I see no reason why we will be limited to to um the the technologies that we have right now are going to seem um pre-industrial uh compared to to to what we're going to have. And it will be by the way also you know other experiences like people on various drug experiences like DMT and so forth. There are some some cases they seem to be um having experiences that are perhaps in higher dimensional spaces you know not just three dimensions right they they might be seeing hyperdimensional objects and and and so forth and if Einstein spacetime his curve spacetime is the fundamental nature of reality then clearly seeing in into a you know a 30-dimensional space is is only a psychological hallucination. It's not the truth. If if our ontology is that maybe a string theory there's 11dimensional thing or something like that but but yeah right now string theory is not it seems to be on the ropes um among the physicists themselves. that it doesn't seem to be working in um it's giving us a lot of beautiful insights mathematically and and beautiful insights physically but as a fundamental theory of everything I I I don't see physicists rallying around it like they used to. So, so, so when you have experiences in really high dimensional spaces under now, it's quite possible of course that those any particular experience is just hallucination. You just screwing up the brain and you know, if you hit me on the head, yeah, I'm going to see all sorts of stuff. But it's also possible in in the framework I'm working on that that could be a genuine insight that maybe >> if we take some drug um I mean so I I'm perfectly open to saying some drugs just screw your brain up and it's hallucination and there's no insight into a deeper reality period. Yeah. But but I think that there it's certainly possible and I'm not going to claim claim right now any specific drug is doing this. But I'd say it is at least in principle possible in the framework I'm working on to have a drug molecule that is already in the brain for example and we're tweaking it >> right >> and that then that's tweaking a dimension parameter right now the dimension parameter for space is d equals 3. So D the the parameter D has a value three in our headset >> and we tweak this chemical now it goes to five or 10 >> and all of a sudden um we have the same kind of architecture but this one parameter in how we build the headset gets gets manipulated. So it could be that some simple chemical manipulation in the brain could switch from three to 10 because in when I'm actually looking at the you know how how am I going to actually build space time from marov matrices so when we do these theorems so we're trying to prove this theorem right of how do we get mancowski space from the theory of conscious agents what are we doing it's not just a theorem this is the first step in building the headset. That's what we're really saying. How in principle do we build the headset? So, I'm already doing this. We're we're we're saying, yeah, in principle, we could build a headset to actually prove these theorems. We have to show how to build the headset. >> Yeah. >> And when I look at that and I see, you know, look at our theorems and it's saying, okay, this is these are the things you have to go through to to build this headset. In the theorem, there's this little parameter. I can just switch that one little parameter. I'm no longer in three dimensions. I'm in five, 10. And the and the theorem still goes through. That's the key thing. I see the theorem is still going to go through. Three is not special. >> Right? >> When I go to the curved spaceime of Einstein, now I'll be able to see how I can warp your spacetime. I I I can start to play with the curvature of your spacetime. We have several other theorems. So I've got a number of conjectures. We want to show exactly how quantum theory and the Bourne rule arises from this. >> What's the Borne rule? >> So the the quantum theory the Bourne rule is um when you make a measurement, what's the probability of the outcomes that you're going to see? >> Okay. And the and the Borne rule says if you give me the amplitude the amplitude squared um and when I say these are complex numbers you have to take the number of times this complex conjugate and add them up and so forth that the amplitude squared is gives you the probability of various outcomes. >> So that's that's the B rule. How do you turn a complex amplitude into a real probability for what you might see? So we So in other words, what what we have to do first and and we've got these conjectures written down and and we're going after it now. We're going to go after these one by one. Minowski space, curved spaceime, quantum theory, and the Borne rule, the big bang. How do how do we get a theory of the of the big bang? As we go through and and prove all these theorems, what we're doing is basically setting up all the mathematics that's needed to begin to reverse engineer the headset. And so, so the so we want so here's here's this is no messing around. This is the real deal where I plan to go. Spacetime is just a headset. Give me the precise software. how is the headset built? So, how how are we going to do that? First, with these theorems, we um by by proving the theorems, we prove that it's in principle possible and we get the outlines of the construction of the headset. to get the details. We need a little bit more information about the specifics of our I mean because there's lots of ways to build a 3D space 1D time headset to get our specific one for humans. Um the direction I I think we want to go and I'm I'm working with some neuroscientists um on this. I am a neuroscientist myself. We have to look at the brain. There's 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses. Most of my colleagues are assuming that that somehow gives rise to consciousness. I say no. No neural activity causes conscious experience. It's just the other way around. The brain is a headset representation inside. >> So I'll be very explicit. I am a cognitive neuroscientist. I'm all for neuroscience. We need more funding for neuroscience, not less. We need more rigorous research. And I also believe that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. And those are not contradictory. So neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. And we need an order of magnitude more funding for for neuroscience because it's far more difficult. The real problem of neuroscience is far more difficult than neuroscience currently understands. The brain is the headset representation of how the headset is engineered. >> Mhm. >> I'm going to say that again because that's that's >> that is the key new direction for neuroscience. The brain is the headset representation of how much of the headset is engineered. Not all but our whole body is going to be have to be studied as well. But the brain is going to be a key thing. So we have so the problem of neuroscience is to reverse engineer the brain. Not it's not just enough to understand the wiring of the brain. Once we understand that and the and the chemicals and so forth, >> that's just a headset projection of the software outside of spaceime which is far more complicated. >> So, so the big problem of neuroscience hasn't even been started yet. And it's crazy because it seems like every dimension, no matter how deep we look or how wide we look within this headset, it's like hinting at that structure over and over again. Like I'm sure you've seen these how, you know, cliche images at this point of how these big galactic superclusters look very brainlike. And to my understanding, they've done some some deeper even like peer-reviewed analysis of the similarities in architecture between, you know, galactic filaments and um galaxies and how similar they look to the brain structure in in not like a handwavy Yeah, that looks similar way, but a very precise way. And and it's the same thing when you look down into the dirt, right? the the the the mcelial mat at the at the very root level of the planet looks the same. >> So it seems like every level of intelligence >> at least within the the headset within spaceime is showing us this fractal layered intelligent structure at at every level. And the question is is what does that tell us about well there's many questions but one of the questions is what does that tell us about the level of intelligence above this one? >> Yeah. My um my understanding from the trace logic now is um our headset is one of the cheaper ones, one of the more trivial ones. we we we have and and this is a really important point and it's it's one that's hard to come to grips with emotionally. It's it's very easy for us to think that we're sort of at the top of the intelligence chain. Um I look down and I see, you know, an ant crawling around on the ground and the ant can't see what I'm doing. It doesn't know much about me. I I live in a whole world that the ant could never conceive, I would think. And so it probably knows very very little about my world and my world is far I would guess far superior and far richer than that of the ant. But now if you think about that how much do I know about the ant? I don't know too that that much about the ant. Well, I can do some studies on it, but um it's quite possible that my headset, put put it this way, I'm I know that I I'm very much rich very rich in my experience and my complexity and my guess is that the ant's headset isn't telling it very much about me, right? I'm guessing that the ant's headset just um doesn't grock Hoffman at all. But given that logic, there's a chance that my headset isn't grocking what I'm interacting with when I see all I see is an ant. Maybe all the ant sees of Hoffman is an ant. And it's not because Hoffman is just an ant. It's just because the ant headset can't see Hoffman very well. Well, turnabout is fair play. Maybe I all when I see something and I call it just an ant. I think it's it's trivial. I could be interacting with an intelligence that if I actually understood it, I would fall >> before it in in in terror or or amazement or whatever because this thing completely transcends me. But all I can see is an ant. So it's it's very easy for us to mistake the limits of our headset for an insight into reality. >> That's the key point. What you see inside your spacetime is entirely a function of the limits of your headset. It is not an insight into the ultimate nature of reality. When I'm seeing a ladybug, that's it's that's the limit of my headset. What am I interacting with? If I actually knew what I was interacting with, I might fall down and worship it. >> But all I can see is a ladybug. So, so, so, so we have to be very, very careful to think of ourselves. The very fact that we think of ourselves as at the top of the food chain shows how benited we are. >> To the extent that I feel that I am really smarter than everything I see, that is the key evidence that I know next to nothing. >> So, what what this mathematics is telling me is our headset is one of the cheapest headsets that I could imagine in the theory. >> It's only got a d parameter of three. There's no reason why the d parameter could go couldn't go to a billion. Why shouldn't one thing I I I am frustrated. I'm sure many mathematicians are frustrated. I can imagine a three-dimensional cube. And it's very helpful to imagine things when I'm trying to solve problems. Try to imagine a four-dimensional cube, a tesseract. >> I can't do it. >> Yeah. Me neither. And I I you know and nobody can even a brilliant mathematician has to work around this limitation of our imagination. They have to use mathematics and and tricks to you and proof theorem and proof to get to the properties of these higher dimensional objects. >> Wouldn't it be nice if we had >> someone in the comments is going to say yes I can I can No. Yeah. I'm joking. I'm joking. Well, someone probably will. >> Yeah. Probably probably so. And I hope that someone can and maybe you know on the right psychedelic perhaps someone can actually go to a fourdimensional space and really see a test. I would love to get data that you know for someone you like a real mathematician saying you so we get someone who's a credible mathematician that says yeah I saw a tesseract and now we're talking about something really interesting. So if if you know some psychedelic can do that if you know psilocybin can do that or whatever that would be very very interesting. >> There there was just a sorry to interrupt but I just wanted to share this and I'll I'll try to find the graphic for it. There is a someone made an animation where there's hidden information that you cannot see unless you're on I think it might be psilocybin or it's definitely some tryptoamine where there's like there are basically like these tracers moving and you can just see the color of the tracers or something. But if you but if you're on whatever particular um you know what whatever the alkaloid is you can actually see that there's like hidden information that reveals itself under under that influence. So it could it I I do suspect and to your point earlier that that may be exactly what we're doing with with a certain class of substances that we are actually tweaking and expanding the headset to some degree. And I would love to say that I think it's just a pure flow of more real information, but I also think there's probably interference from your own mind and your own preconceived notions about reality and your own programming and your own fears and thoughts and blah blah blah. That's getting all mixed in there. So, you are getting more, but you're also turning up the volume on your own psyche and and every and everything all at the same time. And that that's sort of been my experience is it's just like more of everything. More of everything. >> Right. And and and again, you know, I'm a hard no scientist, so I'll I'll say this. Of course, we have to be open >> all the time to the possibility that the psychedelic drug is simply addling your brain and there's nothing deep to see here. On the other hand, we should should be open with rigorous experiments, no hand waves, with with credible subjects where we try to explore is there something be beyond just addling the brain. I think the the mathematics I'm working on says there's a good possibility that that's that we might be able to find that kind of thing and and if so we should we we should study it. But it's not enough to have informal descriptions of psychonauts. We we have to have more systematic hard-nose rigorous experiments. Um and you know if there are claims of interacting with entities beyond space time >> y >> then we need to substantiate those claims with hard-nosed experiments where information is exchanged from one person to the entities to some other person in a way that could not possibly have happened any other way. So so I'm very very hardnosed about all this stuff. You have to be both there. It's a balance. You have to be completely open to all these possibilities that might seem bizarre and then you have to be completely hard-nosed about testing them. So, so it's a balance, completely open, but but no BS at all in in the experiments and and and you have to be your own harshest critics. And so that's one reason why I'm I'm going after this with mathematicians and and it's a matter of theorem proof theorem proof thing about the big bang getting quantum um probabilities out of this just going down systematically the positive showing how the positive geometries come exactly out of this. So this is all and if at any point we can't do it, it's game over, right? This if if I if we can't get general relativity from the trace logic and this theory of agency I talked about. If if it's not possible, if we can prove we can't do it, then um I will have to say that um nice try, but this wasn't it. Um back back to the drawing board. So So this this is all fun. I'm excited about it, but uh you know, we've been disappointed many times before. So, so we will see. It's got to be theorem proof. Theorem proof. Not >> Yeah. >> But you have to you do have to be willing to think out of the think big, think out of the box. It's hard to think out of spaceime. Um and to be rigorous at the same time. And so that's that's the the tight rope that you have to walk. >> Yeah. I I love it, Don. and I I love everything you're doing and I deeply deeply appreciate that you are rigorous when it comes to all this stuff and all the nuance that you put on all of your thoughts yet at the same time you always display this epistemic humility and I yeah I I just I'm just so glad you're out there. I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing. Um and but speaking of theorem proof theorem proof I let's leave people with something that's not theorem proof theorem proof. >> Sure. What what what has all of this led you to think about the teiology of what a human being is? Like I I know you you clearly believe, you know, there is this one and we are sort of permutations of this one experiencing itself. We we've talked about this before. I've heard you talk about it on other podcasts, but other than that, you know, why this headset? Why this experience? I is there something that's evolving that has this like teological path or is it really just momentary thoughts in in the collective mind that's trying things out or what do you think based on all of your experiences and all of your research at this point? >> That's a it's a great question. It's a very deep one. It's one that I I think about a lot. And the the one proveso going into it is that anything I say is just another thought, right? >> And so it will ultimately be only a limited perspective. So anything I can say is never going to be the truth. But what seems to me is going on here is for some deep reason this this deepest reality that we are that you are that I am. So Michael and Don are just avatars of this deeper reality. That deeper reality that transcends any description period nevertheless chooses clearly to have this very very rich description of itself and looking at itself through Michael and Don avatars and losing itself. I mean it's it's it was a shock when I didn't when I was let go of this is the a realist view of this and started to think this might be a headset. It was it was a total shock. So, so here I am an avatar of a transcendent reality. And that transcendent reality has chosen to let itself get so completely taken up in a trivial game, a trivial perspective that it's shocked to death when it realizes that this is just a trivial perspective. And most of us are in that. So, so here is this transcendent being that if I could see you, Michael, as you were, I would fall down prostrate in in adoration, right? and and any any person the the the the most insignificant person on the planet if I really saw who they were I would fall down in I think CS Lewis wrote something about this somewhere in one of he said if you actually saw people as they really were you would just fall down in in in admiration and and and humility be before them and I think that's right so that that is the core of you know love your neighbor as yourself your neighbor the least what looks to you like the least person is transcendent. It absolutely the the infinite. So the infinite lets itself in our experience here be completely lost to lose its identity and then to slowly wake up in a period of 70 80 years and then it's over 90 years and and it's so it and and my guess is this is just one of an infinite number of headsets that it tries on. So, so here's the best picture I can say and again words are just words and the infinite transcends it. So that's the bottom line is to say even this description even if it's mindbending for you is not mind mindbending enough. So I'm if I'm bending your minds great but I'm telling you I haven't bent your minds at all compared to what it needs to be bent. But but let's try this amount of bending. There's an infinite number of perspectives. And the one infinite consciousness is choosing to look at itself through an infinite number of perspectives as a way of knowing itself. And it infinitely transcends that. So, and my my Hoffman brain is just not big enough to handle that. That just just But apparently when we shed this headset, we will be be that >> and then we'll pop into another headset perhaps. What do you what do you think about Feder Rico's idea of like the say you know this idea that there's there is sort of a um yes there is this one but there's a something like a a non-local version of you and a non-local version of me that I mean it sounds much more like a soul right it sounds much more like something that persists across physical lifetimes do are are you open to something like that like that there that there is some sort of like meta conscious agent that is not bound to space time that can that continues to exist across multiple incarnations or >> Yeah. I think um Federico and I have talked about his ideas for a long time. >> Mhm. >> And he has this notion of the one that's spinning off these subp parts and part holes. Mhm. >> And I think that there there could be in in the trace logic there is this notion that I'm part of part of a particular set of traces and so the the the direct things I'm traces of yeah there could be that there could be a relationship between that and his say notion. Um but then the trace logic is non-bullying. So there there going to be infinite number of other boolean logics. So there's an infinite number of these different say. So there could be some connection between his notion of say which is informal. It's not a mathematical. So that that's the problem, right? His theory there is is not mathematics. It's it's you know it's it's it's informal. Um and but but yeah there there it could work. Uh I would say that Federico and I and we've talked for many many hours and we're very very good friends and I would say that at at core we agree that there is this one fundamental consciousness that that it spins off different perspectives on itself. You call them say or I call them headsets and so forth or maybe um sequences of headsets that are related in in the in the trace logic somehow. Um I where I disagree with Federico in terminology is the notion of um fields. >> I think I think it's the to talk about fields could could be misleading in if it's if people are thinking about like quantum fields. Yes, >> these are fields defined over spaceime and and so if if um so I would just say that the notion of fields on spaceime is is just the wrong metaphor completely for for consciousness. If we want to think about fields outside of spaceime if >> yes >> then then then the use of of but then they're then then they're not quantum fields, right? So quantum fields are fields defined in spaceime. So, so if so that's just the thing it's a terminological thing. Quantum fields are are is just the wrong terminology because that ties you to space time. Quantum fields are defined over spacetime. But the very notion of I think Federico's idea about fields is is a good idea and and a a good pointer because any word is a pointer as long as we completely completely dissociate it from quantum fields because the very notion of quantum itself disappears outside of our headset. The positive geometries that the that these high energy theoretical physicists are finding um couldn't care less about quantum mechanics. couldn't care learity is gone. Quantum fields are gone. Nothing there. You get quantum as a projection at the same time that you get spacetime. So, so that's why we have to be very very very careful. Tying quantum somehow with consciousness is tying it to the headset. Quantum is a function of the headset. It does quantum does not transcend the headset >> and consciousness does. And so that's the big and I think I think Federico completely understands that. So it's merely a terminological thing that I'm being careful about. >> That's my sense too. Now that you said that, maybe it it just makes me wonder maybe there's a positive geometry outside of space and time that is like the true the true nature of Don or the true nature of Michael. And it and it's that that is sort of the source of of this of or uh uh another Greek word. Have we talked about sunma or sud mata before? >> No. >> Um it really reminded me of this when you were talking about if I could see the truth of what a ladybug is, I might fall down and and prostrate. That it's a it it's usually translated as like signature or a symbol >> of something higher. And that was the idea is that like everything is some kind of symbol or signature emanating from some kind of higher transcendent um reality or source or or consciousness. And then that includes us supposedly. That's what that what individuals are as well is just we're we're a signature of something >> something else something higher in the in the Markoff chain or or just a trace of of whatever that is. And I don't know, at the very least it resonates with me and it seems like you actually are going >> toward proving these kinds of things, Don. So I I've taken a lot of your time >> that's one point about the positive geometry. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> I I I like your idea of talking about them in this context outside of of space time. But but I I would make be be very clear the positive geometries like the amplrin and so forth are modeling one small part of our space-time experience and that is scattering amplitudes. >> So they're so these geometries aren't really they're probably not up to the the task that you were pointing to. I mean we need a bigger the positive geometries are going outside of spaceimer. They're they're beautiful and they're brilliant and they're groundbreaking, but they're not big enough for understanding the headset and these this notion of Federico's notion of assay. They're I don't think they're up to that job. We have to have much more complex structures which will then have to show how the positive geometries outside of spaceime come from these deeper models of the sades outside of spaceime. So and the idea will be that the positive geometries only describe certain asmtoics of the rich dynamics. So we have this very very rich dynamics but when you only look at the asmtoics that's when you get these positive geometries. So it's a really um dumbed down simplified asmtoic description. But what everything you were saying was right in terms of the ideas I just wanted to make this technical point. >> Absolutely right. >> Yeah. Well, I can't even handle the dumbed down versions. So, you Well, thank God you think that because like I said before, your epistemic humility just makes me love you that much more, Don, and love your work that much more. I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing. I I can't wait to see what comes of this latest discovery because it seems like a pretty significant one. Um, and yeah, man, I I really hope we have future conversations. >> Me, too. Thank you very much, Michael. It's a pleasure. Great questions as always and a great pleasure to talk with you.