“Infinity Is An Illogical Thing!” Piers Morgan vs Prof Donald Hoffman on Theory Of Reality
Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California Donald Hoffman does a lot of thinking about the nature of reality - and he says our current scientific understanding of that fundamental question is all wrong. In his latest essay on the subject, entitled: 'Consciousness and its Spacetime headset' Hoffman writes: "The probability is zero that what I see resembles anything in objective reality, whatever that reality might be” So, what might that reality be? Professor Hoffman joins Piers Morgan for an in-depth discussion. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. OneSkin: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PIERS at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Consciousness Before Space-Time00:15:13
People will be watching this thinking they're watching a new real life version of the matrix here.
Who created this avatar world you're talking about?
The way I'm trying to approach this mathematically is to have a mathematical notion of consciousness, which can vary in its size to infinity, and a logic on the space of all Markov chains that allows me to say we can all be projections, interesting traces is the technical term, traces of this higher consciousness.
And that logic actually gives you time dilations and length contractions in a very interesting fashion.
What we're seeing is not just a headset projection of reality, we're seeing a headset projection of one kind of an infinite reality.
There's an infinite number of these infinite realities.
So there's a lot to explore.
And space-time then is not the final frontier.
Elon Musk, then, when he talks about we have to colonize Mars and we have to have space travel on, is he wasting his time?
No, I think it's, yep, why not enjoy the game?
Why not explore?
Professor Donald Hoffman does a lot of thinking about the nature of reality.
And he says our current scientific understanding of that fundamental question is all wrong.
In his new essay on the subject entitled Consciousness and its Space-Time Headset, Hoffman says the probability is zero that what I see resembles anything in objective reality, whatever that reality might be.
So what might that reality be?
Well, Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, joins me now.
Welcome to you, Professor.
How are you?
Good.
How about yourself, Pierce?
Well, I'm curious.
Am I here?
Well, absolutely you are in my interface.
So it's very much like if you're in a virtual reality game and you see the avatar of other players, then the avatars are real avatars, but they are just avatars.
And the reality beyond that game is far more interesting, perhaps, than the game itself.
It's far more complex.
So the basic premise of your argument is that we shouldn't assume that what we consider to be reality is actually reality.
Yes, I'm saying that space-time is not fundamental.
It's not the fundamental nature of reality.
And I'm a cognitive scientist, so it makes little sense that a cognitive scientist would be saying this.
It's physicists who should be saying that kind of thing, right?
High-energy theoretical physicists.
But they are.
The way they put it in many cases is to say space-time is doomed because they know that it falls apart at the Planck scale, 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds.
It no longer has any operational meaning.
And so they're not just throwing up their hands and saying ove.
They're actually going beyond space-time and they're finding positive geometries.
And it's well funded by the European Research Council.
They have 10 million Euro initiative to find these geometries and study these geometries beyond space-time.
So it's not just a cognitive scientist saying this, it's physicists who are going beyond space-time right now and finding very interesting structures.
So viewers who are watching this, who have no knowledge of your work or a great sort of deep understanding of the kind of language you're using, take space-time, for example.
What is the kind of layman's explanation for what you mean by space-time?
Right.
So we typically think of the world in terms of space.
So my location in space and then my coordinates in time.
You know, I'm in California at 11:17 in the morning California time.
So I have a spatial location and a temporal location.
And that was the case, the way physicists thought about it until Einstein.
And in 1905, his special relativity paper basically sealed the case that we can't take space and time as separate.
have to view them as perhaps trading off.
You can trade off time and space.
They interchange.
And so now we talk about space-time in physics and it's space-time, not just space and time separately, that has been considered the fundamental reality.
But now our physics is telling us that we have to go to a deeper reality beyond space-time.
And we're finding stuff.
Mainstream physicists consider the theory of space-time to be fundamental.
to our understanding of relative, but your position is that we've got it, I think, the wrong way round is your position, that space-time doesn't create consciousness.
Consciousness comes first, and space-time is a creation of that.
Is that an accurate representation of your view?
That's an accurate representation of my view.
But I would say, by the way, that for high-energy theoretical physicists, it's the mainstream view now.
I mean, most physicists are not high-energy theoretical physicists.
They're not dealing with the limits of space-time.
But when you're at high energies, then all of a sudden you're forced to face the fact that it falls apart at the Planck scale.
So most physicists would say, oh, it's fine to work with space-time.
And for their jobs, it is.
But for those who are pushing the high-energy boundaries, it's no longer adequate.
So I agree with them.
And I think that it has something to do with the nature of our relationship to space-time being reversed.
I think consciousness is more fundamental than space-time.
And that I don't put on the physicists.
That, okay, none of them would perhaps agree with me on that.
Right.
So why do you think you're right and they're all wrong?
Well, I'm not sure that I'm right, but it's an interesting position to take.
And what I want to do is to see how far I can push that idea.
And what I have to do is to start with a theory of consciousness outside of space-time and show that I can actually get space-time.
Like, for example, Einstein's spatial contractions and temporal dilations.
As you move faster compared to someone else, their clocks seem to go slower and their rulers seem to shrink as they're moving compared to you.
So how do you, no one who started off with a theory of consciousness has ever explained where space-time might come from, right?
There's no theories that start with consciousness and explain space-time.
So that's what I'm trying to do right now is to take the consciousness story that has been around.
I mean, it's not new with me.
All sorts of religious traditions and other metaphysical idealism in philosophy of mind has taken consciousness as fundamental for a long, long time, far before me.
But what we haven't gotten from them is a mathematically rigorous account of how, if you start with consciousness, you can get space-time physics, no hand wave, exactly.
I mean, that's what we have to do to be taken seriously, is to get that kind of physics exactly.
Quantum field theory, general relativity, and the whole bit.
Okay.
How do you think we all got here originally?
Or do you not subscribe to any of the conventional theories about that?
Well, so I think a lot of the conventional theories on both sides, whether the spiritual view or a physicalist view, haven't really thought about us as being avatars in a virtual reality game.
So that's sort of maybe some spiritual traditions can be viewed that way.
And even Plato with his allegory of the cave and we just see the shadows on the cave could be interpreted that way.
He might have liked the view of the...
Right, right.
But just to stop you there, okay, let's assume what you're saying is correct.
But that still means somebody must have created the avatars, the world, the virtual reality we're living in.
So at some stage, that has to have been created.
So who has done that?
I mean, people will be watching this thinking they're watching a new real life version of the Matrix here.
Who created this avatar world you're talking about?
Right, so the way I'm trying to approach this mathematically is to have a mathematical notion of consciousness, which can vary in its size to infinity.
And so I start off with an infinite consciousness, but it's mathematically defined using Markov chains and so forth.
And then it turns out that there's a mathematics that I discovered, a logic on the space of all Markov chains that allows me to say there's this big infinite one.
In fact, there's many infinite ones, but we can all be projections, interesting, what traces is the technical term, traces of this higher consciousness.
And when you look at the trace operation, there's a whole logic of traces, and that logic actually gives you time dilations and length contractions in a very interesting fashion.
So the idea is we'll start off with not just a hand wave about consciousness, a precise mathematical model using Markov matrices, and then a new logic that I discovered and working on with mathematician Chaitanya Prakash.
He proved, I discovered, he proved it was a real logic.
And then we were together looking at the fact that this thing gives you the time dilations, length contractions of special relativity.
So the idea is that we might for the first time have a hint about how you could start with a mathematical model of consciousness prior to space-time and show how space-time itself comes out as just one of an infinite number of interesting projections that you could have of that one matrix.
And in the model, there are an infinite number of these matrices.
So what we're seeing is not just a headset projection of reality, we're seeing a headset projection of one kind of an infinite reality.
There's an infinite number of these infinite realities.
So there's a lot to explore.
And space-time then is not the final frontier.
See, I always have a problem with the word infinity and infinite because no human brain can ever explain to me what that really is.
Because it's all very well to say, well, it's what it says on the tin.
It's infinite.
It's never ending.
It never starting.
It just, you know, whatever it is.
How do you explain?
When I ever have this conversation, for example, with atheists, I'm a Christian, I'm a Catholic.
And I said, well, you know, the reason I believe in God is because I think there must have been and must be a superior entity that can answer the one question no atheist can ever answer, which is, well, what was there before the Big Bang?
What was there before nothing?
What is nothing?
What is infinity?
Right?
Infinity is an illogical thing for a human brain to comprehend, right?
Because we always have to have a beginning and an end of something.
And if there's no beginning and end of something, what is it?
Because a human brain can't tell me that and never has been able to.
I assume there must be a higher power.
Well, so there's an interesting point here.
I agree that infinity is a very difficult concept to wrap your head around.
And in mathematics, there's not just one infinity.
There's a whole hierarchy of an infinite number of infinities called Cantor's hierarchy.
So just the counting numbers as the smallest infinity, but then you can go up from there to even higher and higher infinities.
But I take your point quite well that scientific theories themselves have fundamental limitations, that there's something that will transcend.
So I take that point quite well.
And I would say it this way.
I would say that every scientific theory starts off with assumptions.
And those assumptions are things that the theory does not explain.
It assumes.
So for that theory, you could think of them as these are the miracles that the theory is asking you to accept.
For example, Einstein said, let me, if you grant me that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers and that there is no special inertial frame, the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames, then I can give you space-time and it works.
But why should the speed of light be the same in all inertial frames?
Why should all inertial frames be the same?
You know, the laws of physics be the same.
Einstein assumed that he didn't prove that.
And so those are the miracles of his theory.
And science will always have theories that start with assumptions.
So there's no theory of everything in science.
There's infinite job security in science.
You can never run to the final theory.
And that's really good for job security.
But it means that we have to be very humble.
Our theories are just as deep as we've been able to penetrate so far.
Okay, but do you not find the concept of infinity ludicrous?
Because I do.
Like whenever I hear scientists, really smart people, you're obviously one.
When I hear them talk about infinity as a real thing, I was like, well, what is it?
I mean, just from a simple, call me the village idiot, if you like, but from a simple village idiot perspective, how can something be infinite?
Well, of course, the standard idea about that in terms of just counting numbers is that if you take any number as big as you want, you can always find a number bigger than that.
So that means there's no such thing as the biggest number.
Yeah, but if you go to the smallest number, which is say you start at the smallest number, say let's take one as an operative thing.
What is naught?
What is nothing?
Actually, the way we think about it is we can choose any number and take that to be the zero.
So there's sort of a...
That's very convenient, but that's a mathematical way of looking at it.
Whereas the logical human way of looking at it is, how can you have something which is never beginning, never ending?
It makes no logical sense to a simple human brain, does it?
Well, of course, I guess there's two ways to take your question.
One is to say, can I write down mathematics that shows me that that's the case, and I can.
But if I say, can I wrap my head around it in some way that cognitively makes sense?
No, I agree.
It's very, very difficult.
And the whole Cantor hierarchy completely blows my mind.
So all the infinities at the infinity of infinity is completely...
Well, the idea of having sort of superior infinities is even more preposterous, I think.
Now, here's the other issue I have with your theory, which is fascinating.
And I'm fully aware you've put a lot of work and effort into this with a very expert brain.
But say, for example, as we're talking now, the ceiling falls on your head, breaks your nose, you know, breaks your arm, breaks your leg, and incapacitates you, and you get taken to hospital.
It's your position that that hasn't really happened.
Because in a virtual reality game, you can kill things and blitz things, but nobody actually gets hurt.
You know, if you were genuinely suffering bone fractures, are you saying that isn't really happening?
I think the, well, so it really does hurt.
And I avoid pain as much as anybody else does.
I think a good metaphor to understand this, though, is if you have an icon on the desktop of your laptop and it's some important file that you're working on, some paper you're writing or a message you're about to send, if you carelessly drag that icon to the trash can, you will lose your work.
Now, your icon might be blue and rectangular in the middle of the screen, but your file is not blue and rectangular and in the middle of the screen.
The icon is a useful interface device to let you interact with the file, to copy it or delete it and so forth.
But you know that even though the file isn't literally blue and rectangular, you better take that icon very, very seriously.
If you just carelessly do stuff to it, you could lose all of your work.
So I think that's the way to think about the human body.
Embracing the Digital Skin00:03:30
Whatever, and I, you know, I think many spiritual traditions would actually agree with this, right?
When they talk about you having a soul and that's not hurt when your body dies, that's sort of a pointer in that direction.
But I'm giving a more new kind of...
Aren't you really creating a new form of scientific religion?
I mean, because really?
I mean, isn't this quite similar in terms of the way you talk about it to an actual religion?
Well, it certainly doesn't take space-time as fundamental.
It takes space-time as derived.
And so in that sense, it agrees with spiritual traditions and the philosophy of idealism that's been around for a long, long time.
Where it differs is I'm saying that we can take the spiritual ideas and make them mathematically precise, and we should.
And we should actually show with mathematical precision that space-time can arise, no hand wave.
We can get all quantum field theory and general relativity and the whole bit from a theory that takes consciousness as fundamental.
And that hasn't been done before.
I think in the process, what we're going to find is that many of the spiritual ideas will survive and will be interesting.
And many of them, as we turn this thing into mathematics and start to do experimental tests, will have to drop stuff.
So I think, so I can't just say it's a wholesale embracement of spiritual traditions.
I'm saying it's embracing the possibility that they're onto something interesting and we need to make it precise.
And once we've made it precise, then we need to go back and ask, so what were the good ideas and what was the nonsense?
And there's always going to be good ideas and nonsense.
All right, but who was the original kind of creative engineer for this world that we're existing in?
That's what I keep coming back to, is that at some stage, somebody must have thought, well, we're going to make human beings, call them human beings.
They're going to look like this.
They're going to dress like this.
They're going to speak like this.
You're creating, say your assumption is correct and we're living in a virtual world, but at some stage, there has to have been a creator of this world that we're operating in.
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Limits of Infinite Theory00:15:03
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Right.
So there you're pushing the limits of my theory, right?
So every theory has its limits and you're pushing the limits of mine.
And I would certainly agree that that's an important question.
The way I would put it is this.
The mathematics I use is I have this infinite Markov chain.
So we're dealing with infinity.
We're dealing with stuff that we talked about is difficult to understand.
And then it has this infinite trace logic on it.
And all the traces are different consciousnesses that are looking at, so they're not separate.
It's interesting.
The observer and the observed are not separate.
What you're observing is the infinite observer, which is observing itself through different windows.
But there's a whole logic of them.
And then there's an infinite number of these infinities.
So if you want to call it God, there's not just one infinite God in this picture.
There's an infinite number of these in this mathematical model.
But isn't it very, all right?
But isn't it very convenient to just keep using the word infinite?
Because it gets you off the rap of actually having to explain any of these things.
Well, I would say it points to the limits of my theory, right?
So what you do with science is your assumptions are what you're putting down is to say, this is where my theory stops.
This is where my explanation stops.
So I'm stopping with an infinite consciousness that I can describe with a Markov chain.
So I say, if you grant me that, then lo and behold, I can give you space-time.
And I'll give you this new trace logic, and I get space-time.
And I think I'll give you quantum field theory and the whole bit.
So, but of course, then the next question will be, so we get that all nailed down.
Suppose we show that we can get space-time as a special case.
Then your question would be the very next thing I would do as a scientist.
It's not the first thing I'm going to do because I have to make sure this is even worth my time, right?
I have to make sure that this assumption of an infinite beginning will give me the space-time physics that we know and love.
You're never going to be able to comprehend what infinite beginning means because there is no beginning to infinity.
I suspect that you're right.
Well, I'm right.
Some meditative traditions may say that if you can let go of all thoughts and be in complete silence, maybe you are finding yourself in that infinity.
Okay, now you're slightly losing me.
Well, I just have to sit here silently and infinity suddenly becomes obvious because it doesn't.
I can shut my eyes and sit here meditating in total silence.
And I'm still going to be thinking the idea of an infinity is absurd.
And when you start talking about a beginning of an infinity, well, that doesn't exist.
So there's no beginning and no end.
None of it makes sense.
And I'm quite a sort of logical person.
I like things to, I like common sense, right?
And I don't think that you can give the answers I need from with my logical head, which make me think you're onto something concrete.
I think it's something you've imagined.
I mean, it may be you're living personally in quite a virtual reality.
I'm quite happy to accept that, but I'm not sure I'm living in your virtual reality because you haven't persuaded me.
Because you can't answer the fundamental questions.
And I say this very respectfully because you know a lot more about this stuff than I do, but just with my simple logical brain, I just don't think if you can't tell me what infinity really is or why it has no beginning and end, and then there's infinite number of infinities and so on, infinite number of gods potentially for each infinity or whatever, ultimately it comes down to what, well, I don't know what infinity means because it makes no sense.
Therefore, I can't really take the next move to your calculations about what we're living in because the initial premise seems very flawed to me.
Well, that would work perfectly fine as well, Pierce, because suppose that I agree that there's no such thing as infinity.
There's just some very, very, very, very large consciousness.
And that's the fundamental.
I could start, my whole trace logic works perfectly well with that.
So whether it's infinite or not, my theory stands.
There shouldn't be a problem.
The one interesting thing about that is if it's finite, we might not get Einstein's point that there's no special inertial frame.
That one infinite might be a special inertial frame.
So that would be an interesting technical question, right?
For me.
So the math.
Should I be able to ask Einstein if he's also been living in this virtual reality that doesn't really exist in human form?
Why can't we just beam him back and ask him?
We don't have the technology yet, but once we understand what's outside space-time headset, I'm thinking there could be some amazing technologies.
Every time we get a new advance in our theories, for example, of Einstein's theory of space-time led to the atomic bomb, right?
Once we understood E equals MC squared, that unleashed a whole new way of, you know, and that was coming from realizing that space and time are the same thing.
They can be traded off.
Do you believe in time travel forwards and back?
I think that ultimately we're going to see that time itself is just an interface variable.
It's not fundamentally real outside of space-time.
There's a philosopher-physicist named Emily Adlum who talks about a Sudoku point of view, that there's just some kind of big structure that's the fundamental structure.
And that's what I'm proposing here.
I'm proposing that this big structure, time emerges as a projection, but the structure itself sort of is what informs that whole projection and what looks like time.
So when Meta, for example, have brought out literal new headsets with the glasses and you can see everything through those, including, I'm told, you know, they can put you into a football match in another country and have you sitting next to the manager and all this kind of thing.
Is your position that actually that is really what's going on anyway?
I think that's a very good metaphor for what's really going on, that we're taking what we see as the fundamental reality and it's just a virtual headset, a virtual reality.
And we're some deeper consciousness looking at itself through a small headset, a small...
So this, whatever the big matrix is, if it's not infinite, it's a lot bigger than what I'm experiencing right now.
Is Elon Musk then, when he talks about we have to colonize Mars and we have to have space travel on so is he wasting his time?
No, I think it's you know, why not enjoy the game?
Why not explore?
But once we start to explore the mathematics outside the headset, once we get the mathematics, as the ERC is doing right now with the positive geometries, we're going to be discovering new laws of science, not physics, I guess, but beyond space-time physics.
And once we understand those, I think we're going to get technologies that are going to be indistinguishable from magic.
We won't have to travel through space-time.
We'll be able to travel around space-time, for example.
If I have a video game like Grand Theft Auto, and you're a wizard in it, and you can drive your car as fast as anybody and do all the tricks, that's great.
But if I, the person who writes the code, I can take the wizard's car and give him a flat tire or move the car from one place to another immediately.
I know the rules, the code of the game, and so I can do miracles compared to mathematics.
Okay, all right.
The great thing about this is I don't know if you're right or not, because it may be we are, right?
I mean, I've got an open mind about everything.
The older I've got, the more open my mind gets because I'm like, well, you start thinking about mortality, you start thinking about life in a different way, and I don't know.
You know, maybe you're right, and maybe we are living in a weird little matrix world.
You know, you think about people having crazy dreams and premonitions and people who think they've died and then being brought back.
There's all sorts of stuff goes on, which doesn't make a lot of sense to a human mind, right?
In its view of human existence.
So you might be right.
Do you think that there are aliens, or is that also just all part of the game?
Well, I think that we see around us all sorts of alien kinds of intelligences.
I look at a snail or a termite or whatever.
Whatever their world is is completely alien to what my world is.
But beyond that, I think if consciousness is fundamental, the distinction we make between living and non-living is not a principled distinction.
Just like the distinction, right, for example, we're on a Zoom screen and some of the pixels I see are Pierce's face pixels and others are Pierce's coat.
And I might say, well, the coat pixels aren't alive, but the face pixels are.
And, well, pixels are just pixels.
That's a mistake on my part.
Some pixels are giving me an insight into what Pierce is thinking and if he agrees or disagrees, and the coat pixels are not.
And I think the distinction we make between living and non-living, between conscious and unconscious, is not a principled distinction.
It's an artifact of the limitations of our space-time interface.
I mean, a lot of people okay.
A lot of people think that when artificial intelligence learns to self-design, Stephen Hawking said this to me himself, that will be the end of civilization as we know it, because they'll basically conclude that humans are a waste of time and they'll kill us all and they'll get on with a robotic life.
But could AI, in your estimation, could it be your savior where it actually cracks the matrix, gives you the answers to all these things?
Could an AI have a more superior way of solving this puzzle?
Well, so the question about whether AIs could be made to be conscious is an interesting question.
And the way it's typically thought about is that we assume space and time are fundamental.
We have non-conscious matter.
But if the matter has the right kind of computational or causal properties, then maybe consciousness will perhaps emerge from that.
That's the standard view, I would say, of 99% of my colleagues who are doing this.
And I'm saying that that won't work, that you cannot get consciousness arising from unconscious ingredients.
And so far, if you ask these, and these are my colleagues and friends, they're brilliant.
If you ask them to give a specific case in which they have a theory about how a specific conscious experience, like the taste of mint, could arise from some kind of physical system, they can't do it.
There's not a single specific conscious experience that any scientific theory has ever explained on a theoretical basis.
Zero.
And it's not because these people are stupid.
They're my colleagues and friends.
They're brilliant.
And I think they're failing not for lack of effort or brilliance, but because you cannot start with unconscious ingredients and build consciousness.
That being said, consciousness, I'm saying, is fundamental.
So there are consciousnesses out there, I would claim, that transcend anything you and I could imagine right now.
So if you want a more powerful consciousness than I am or you are, and you want to worry about that, I'd say they're already out there.
We don't have to invent them.
They're already out there.
We're nowhere near the top.
When we sleep, we call it being unconscious, right?
I mean, do you think we are ever unconscious in your world?
Well, unconscious in the sense that we're unplugged from this headset for a while.
It's sort of like you're in a VR game and then you decide to take a break.
And so you take the headset off and say, you know, your consciousness.
How do you dream if your headset's turned off?
Well, so it may be that the dreaming may be your consciousness exploring somewhere else outside this headset, but maybe a lot of my dreams have spatial temporal features on them.
So it's, yeah, so it's dreaming in the context, but not quite as strict as with the headset on.
Your harshest critics, I used to be fascinated in talking to you, but your harshest critics, as you know, they call you a crackpot.
You're a pseudoscientist.
It's all a lot of nonsense.
Do you care about that?
And how do you plead to the charge that you might be a crackpot?
Well, in science, of course, the name of the game is to have rigorous theories and have your colleagues take you to the mat and go after it.
And that's how we learn.
And so I'm all for that.
But when it's done in serious science, it's not epithets being thrown about being bogus and so forth.
It's or charlatan or something like that.
It's really on the point.
It says, you know, here's this specific claim that you've made.
Here's my argument against that.
So I'm all for that kind of thing.
And anybody that comes with those, I'm happy to do it and happy to go for it.
As I said, any scientific theory is not the final theory.
And that includes Hoffman's theory.
It's not the final theory.
I'm looking forward to replacing it with something deeper.
But, you know, just saying pseudoscience, it doesn't even get on the table because until there's a real specific claim, there's nothing for me to deal with.
So I just don't pay attention to that kind of thing.
But a real technical claim, yeah, now that means the person really knows what they're talking about.
They're in the game.
They actually understand the mathematics.
And so now, yeah, I'll listen.
And if I'm wrong, I'll change.
You know, 15 million people watch you on Joe Rogans.
A lot of people are fascinated by what you have to say.
Just finally, what's the one thing you would like to know the answer to that you don't know the answer to?
Oh, well, a lot of things.
But the one thing I'd love to do right now, I would like to be able to prove that this theory does give rise to space-time exactly.
So in a paper, I've got some conjectures about how we can do that.
And I would love, if I could see those conjectures proved, and they're not trivial conjectures about how space-time arises from this theory of consciousness, then I would say we've opened the door to a fun new step of adventure in science.
It's not the final frontier by any means, but we're stepping outside of the headset as a species for the first time.
And it's exciting.
Well, unfortunately, the power of infinity does not apply to this interview.
I'm going to have to bring it to an end.
Perhaps in our virtual headset world, it will just carry on for an infinite amount of time, in which case it will be one of the longest and probably the most interesting interviews ever conducted.
But for now, Dr. Donald D. Hoffman, thank you very much.
Really interesting.
Thank you, Pierce.
My pleasure.
Stepping Outside the Headset00:00:38
I'm Piers Morgan.
I'm a black lesbian.
Hollywood has been trying to remove masculinity for it seems like the last decade.
There were tears that ran down my face, but I did not cry.
I mean, that's crying.
Thought we about a sex hate coming next.
It's quite an incredibly Americans are fat pigs and British people have effed up teeth, but we're allies.
When we say good genes are the ones.
Should trans athletes have their own category now?