What Are Traces of Consciousness? A New Breakthrough Unifying Mind and Reality | Donald Hoffman - Mind-Body Solution

Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Don, it's our 4th conversation together, so thank you so much
for joining me once again. It's my pleasure, great, great
pleasure. And thank you for inviting me
back, Tevin. Yeah, it's my pleasure, Don.
It's a privilege. We've had three very long
conversations over two hours each, so I'm not going to go
through all of them. I'd rather the listeners and
viewers go back, watch all of them.
Because we go through, we trace the path from ITP, which is

(00:29):
interface theory of perception, to conscious surrealism,
conscious ages theory. We go into the Observer.
So there's hours worth of content.
If anyone wants to watch it, please do.
And there's two lectures on the channel.
Do we see reality as it is? The other on space-time and it's
headset. So enough content to go watch,
enjoy, come back, promise. It'll be worth it.
Don, since the last time we spoke, which is 2 years ago,

(00:51):
which is crazy, you've been revisiting the framework.
What has actually changed in your own thinking in the last
two years? And what updates and
clarifications do you feel have been most significant to you?
We do have some pretty interesting clarifications and
updates just in the last year which are are are mind blowing

(01:11):
to me. I didn't it's something I've
been looking for for a long time, but to have it actually
pop out in the last year and a half is is pretty amazing.
So I'll be happy to talk about that.
The sort of the background ideasthat we need to talk about this
update is is before I've talked about notion of conscious agents
and how you know a conscious agent.
It's a it's a formal and you know, mathematical thing that we

(01:32):
using Markov chains and Markov kernels and so forth.
But but the intuition is that a conscious, a conscious agent has
experiences like the taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic,
the color seeing the color red. So it has a repertoire of
conscious experiences for humans.
It's in the trillions. We have trillions of experiences
that that we could have based onthe an experience, we can then

(01:56):
choose what decide what action we want to take.
So we would, we might have a repertoire of things we might do
and we have to decide among them.
And then once we've decided we act and in, in our model, what
we're acting on is not a physical world, but essentially
a social network of other conscious agents.
So it's one big social network like you see in all social

(02:17):
networks on the Internet. But we were having this idea
before the Internet social networks were a big thing.
So, so then the, the other agents in the network also get,
they, they are influenced, they get the experiences based on
what I do to them and they make their own decisions.
They, they send out their responses and I get perceptual

(02:39):
influences based on them. So, so it's a passing of
experiences basically and, and interactions of experiences
among conscious agents. So it's a vast social network
tweeting and following kind of thing, right.
So that is it's all mathematical.
It's each agent has a repertoireof experiences which you can

(03:01):
write down as what we call a measurable space in mathematics,
measurable space. So you can talk about
probabilities of having various experiences.
And then the mark of dynamics basically says if I have this
particular experience, what's the probability that I will take
decide to have that action, for example.
So you it's just a bunch of conditional probabilities

(03:21):
arranged in the matrix. But there's a nice mathematical,
I mean, it's, it's a very highlydeveloped branch of mathematics,
the theory of Markov chains. And that's what we're what we're
using. But the intuitions are very,
very simple. If I have this experience,
what's the probability that I'llshake take this action, that
kind of thing. Well, so one question that comes

(03:44):
up in all of this is, OK, you got this nice stuff about all
these consciousnesses, but we dohave a space and time physical
world around us, or so it seems.So how are you going to make
predictions that we can test in this space and time physical
world? For, for example, you have this
nice theory of conscious agents,but can you actually show how we

(04:07):
get Einstein's special theory ofrelativity out of it?
Can you show how we get general relativity?
Can you explain where quantum theory comes from in in other
words, it's it's theories of consciousness are a dime a
dozen. We've had theories of
consciousness going back thousands of years.

(04:27):
Have any of them ever given us aprediction, for example, that
they can show you how Einstein'sspecial or general theories of
relativity come out? No, nothing.
There's nothing on the table. So on, on this.
So there's been spiritual ideas like this for literally
thousands of years. But from the scientist point of

(04:47):
view, now, of course, in their own term, the spiritual things
are making great contributions. And, and it's about human, you
know, development and self realization and so forth.
But ultimately, you know, scientists want to say, you know
it, where's the beef in terms ofempirical predictions?
So give me space-time, give me Einstein space-time in
particular. And, and there's nothing on the

(05:08):
table there, right? There's not a single paper that
says here's my theory of consciousness and here's
precisely how you get Minkowski space.
There's nothing. And of course, conversely, as
we've talked about before, there, there are many, many
physicalist theories that are trying to understand
consciousness. And these have been around for

(05:28):
for quite a while too. But what's interesting there is
if you ask all these physicalisttheories, and I'm and I'm good
friends and colleagues with mostof the players who are doing
this with it and they're brilliant.
They are they're very, very smart people.
But if you know, if you ask themand I, I do in in conferences.
So what specific conscious experience does your theory

(05:51):
predict? Like the taste of mint or the
smell of garlic or whatever might be.
I want you, you have a mathematical theory of
consciousness. Great.
What is the mathematical model? For example, an integrated
information theory that you knowwhat's the the Markov kernel and
they actually they use Markov matrices as well in a different
way. They use them to to describe the

(06:14):
causal cause and effect structure that they claim is
what's required to a maximally integrated cause effect
structure that will be identicalto the conscious experience.
So great. So it's very, very specific.
For each conscious experience, there's going to be a mark of

(06:38):
matrix which has the, the maximally integrated Cos effect
structure. So give me one.
Yeah. And I, I, Stuart Hameroff knows
well Christophe Cohen and and and and others to Noni and so
forth who are working on this will, you know, they know I'm

(07:00):
going to ask them that question forever together on stage.
And right now they'll sometimes say we can do something about
space, but but I'm talking abouta specific conscious experience
like mint or color red and there's nothing on the table.
And, and it's not because they're not trying.
They are and they're very, very smart.
It's just, it can't be done. It's actually a principled

(07:21):
problem. So, so I'm just saying that to
say that both sides have issues here on the spiritual side,
we're saying consciousness is first.
They've been around for thousands of years and no one's
put anything on the table in terms like space-time.
Give me Minkowski space. But on the other side, the
physicalists haven't been able to put anything on the table in
terms of real conscious experiences.
So we're it's really, it's amazing here it is 2025 and

(07:45):
neither side has put any points on the board.
And, and the physicalists will say, well, that's not fair.
We have these neural correlates of consciousness and we can we
can talk about that. I think that those aren't even
points on the board either. So, but we can we can get into
that later. But in terms of the theory of
conscious agents, the new, the new thing that's come out is a

(08:10):
way to connect with space-time that I hadn't seen before.
And it's something that I call the trace logic.
What I noticed not about a year and a half ago.
And I've been working on these Markov chains for 45 years, so
quite a while. And and Markov chains have been

(08:32):
around since 19 O 6 when guy named Markov first sort of
invented them. But I noticed something about
them that's that hadn't been noticed before that there is a
logic that relates all Markov chains, all Markov kernels.
Well, all these matrices. And it's, it's based on on an

(08:54):
operation that's very well known.
I didn't invent this operation. It's it's called the trace.
So if I have a big, I'll give a concrete example, like a Markov
chain that's, that's just on three colors, red, green and
blue. And it all it tells you is very,
very simple. If, if, if you're seeing red
now, what's the probability thatyou'll see red at the next
instant or green or blue? That's all this.

(09:16):
And then if you're seeing green now, what's the probability
you'll see green next or red or blue?
So you can see it's just very, very simple.
It's just saying there's three colors.
And for each color, you have a probability of either seeing the
same color next or one of the other two colors.
And so you get a what's called athree by three matrix.
The row, you know, the first rowsays all the probably I'll see
rednecks green next or blue necks.

(09:36):
And so that's very, very easy. Now suppose that I'm watching a
Reds and greens and Blues that are coming up and they're
governed by a particular matrix.So it's a particular three by
three matrix that's governing the probabilities.
But now suppose that I I don't get to see the the Blues.

(10:00):
For some reason, I put on a pairof glasses that doesn't let me
see blue, for example. All I see is red and green.
Well, I'm going to see a patternof Reds.
Sometimes red goes to red, sometimes red goes to green, and
there's going to be a probability there.
So I'll get effectively A2 by two matrix that describes what
I'm seeing. But that two by two matrix is of

(10:21):
course entirely determined by the big three by three, which is
governing the red, green and blue, right?
The red, green and blue is what is the real dynamics that's
going on. I can only see the red and green
part, but is controlled by the bigger matrix, right?
So that little matrix that I getjust on red and green is called
a trace. So that so that's called the
trace. So for any big matrix, I can

(10:44):
look at any subset of its states.
I can take red, green, blue and yellow.
I can just trace onto red, greenor blue and yellow or red and
yellow. There's all, all sorts of
common. I can take a trace on any subset
that I want to. So very, very, you know, simple
idea. But the unite, the nice thing is
it's, it's in general unique. There's you give me a big matrix

(11:06):
and you tell me which states you're interested in, right?
Like red, green, I don't care about the blue and yellow.
And then I will give you the matrix for the red and green and
it will be unique and it will bedetermined by the big one.
That's the trace. So simple idea.
It turns out the math is not trivial to to actually compute
the trace is non trivial. It's but the idea is very very

(11:29):
simple. Well what I noticed was the
trace gives you a logic on the space of all Markov chains.
That means I can. By logic I mean I can tell you
how to take two matrices and askcan they be combined?
If so, what is their? What is their or?
So you logic we can talk about ands and ORS and implication,

(11:54):
right? So you might say it's raining
today and it'll be sunny this half tomorrow.
That would be in and like I say,it was rainy today or it will be
sunny tomorrow. They can talk about ands and ORS
and so forth. Or I could say, you know, if I
eat this, then I will be full inhalf an hour, right?

(12:16):
So you can talk about implication.
So this is just standard logicalnotions of and or an implication
and also negation. We can say, you know, if it's
raining today right now, then it's not sunny right now, right?
So, so it turns out you can givethe same kinds of logical things
for Markov, for entire Markov kernels.

(12:38):
But all these matrices, So I cansay when does 1 Markov kernel
imply another? Well, when, when it's a trace.
So the red green matrix, that's a trace of the red, green, blue.
In my logic that will I call thetrace logic implies the larger
it entails, the larger it also. So the logic tells you how to

(13:05):
take the conjunction and the disjunction of matrices and the
implication and so forth. So it so gives you a big logic.
The logic is is complicated. It turns out some of the more
simple kinds of logics that we know are called Boolean logics.
And in in Boolean logics, they're the, they're the

(13:26):
simplest. They, they have the property
that you can, you have the distributive property and so
forth. They're they're they're the
logics that that I won't go intothem in great detail, but I'll
say they're the logics that everybody's intuitions sort of
square with. It turns out that the this trace
logic is non Boolean and it's comp it's complicated.

(13:52):
But if you take if you give me one matrix and say look at all
of the sub matrices, all the traces of it, they do form a
Boolean logic. So, so you have all these
interesting local Boolean logicsthroughout, but the global thing

(14:12):
is not, so you might say, well, you know, this is starting to
get boring. This is just mathematics.
But here, so there's one, one more little bit of mathematics
and then I'll make the connection, which is quite
interesting. So, so far it's quite simple.
The notion of the trace is very,very simple idea.
The fact that, OK, there's this logic and just trust me that it

(14:34):
gives you a way of combining, you know, 2 traces to make up
bigger, a bigger matrix. When they're compatible,
sometimes they're not compatible.
So you can't combine them. And you can also take two
matrices and find their intersection, which is their.
And so you can so, and there's one, one more thing that we do

(14:56):
with the matrices and that time that is we add a counter.
So this is standard and Markov chains is called, they actually
call them space-time Markov chains.
I'll call them enhanced Markov chains because I'm going to talk
about space-time in the physics sense.
So there's a notion of space-time Markov chains that
it's not about normal space-time, it's about technical
thing in Markov chains. So I'll call this enhanced.

(15:17):
So every time I get like in my red, green and blue, every time
I get a new color, my counter would just increment.
So I can start with 0. Now I see red, OK, that's one.
Oh, now I see blue. OK, two.
Now I'm back to red, that's three.
So I just every time I get a newcolor or if I see, you know, the
same color reappears, then my counter increments.

(15:39):
That's pretty. It's as simple as it sounds.
I'm not making anything. So that's called an enhanced
Markov chain. You had a counter.
Now what's here's what's here's the interesting thing that
anybody can see. It took me a year to see it, but
once I say it to you, it'll be just obvious.
Look at the red, green and blue case.
Every time I get the red, green or blue, my counter increments,

(16:02):
right? But what if I can only see red
and green? I can't see the blue?
Well, then I'm not going to get my counter incrementing.
When the big guy sees blue, I don't see blue.
So my counter doesn't increment and his does, right.
So my counter, the trace counterisn't incrementing as fast as
the bigger counter. And so after about a year after

(16:28):
I discovered the trace logic, and by the way, I should say
when I say I discovered it, it's, it became apparent to me
that it would probably was a logic.
And then I went to my mathematician friend and
collaborator, Chaitan Prakash, who I've worked with since 1985.
And I said to Chaiton, I, you know, I think this, this is a
logic, you know, it is a partial.

(16:49):
Technically we call it a partialorder.
So the trace gives you a partialorder instead of all Markov
chains. And he said, no, it's too pretty
to be true. I said, well, you know, check it
out. And he did and he proved it.
So he, it's it, he proved that it's, it's a logic.
And we're, we're, we've got the proof, you know, written up and
we're, we're running a paper to,to, to publish it.

(17:12):
So, so that's the interesting thing.
So the trace then the counter isn't going as fast on the
trace, the red green misses the blue.
So the red, green, blue counter is counting Blues and the red
green counter is not counting the Blues.
So I, I thought to myself, OK, that sounds like time dilation.

(17:36):
One of the weird things about Einstein's special theory of
relativity is Einstein says, if I'm sitting here and you're on a
train and your train is going past me and I look at your
clock, I'm going to see that your clock is ticking slower
than my clock. But you on the train, if you're

(17:57):
looking at me, you're you're going by and I'm, I'm sitting
here, you look at my clock and you'll say that my clock is
going slower. So I think your clock is going
slower. You think my clock is going
slower. That's bizarre, right?
I mean, it's like, that's not, that doesn't seem right, but but
Einstein's right And it's been checked.
And then if you're holding a meter stick on the train and,

(18:18):
and you're pointing it in the direction that the train is
going and I'm holding a meter stick as well.
I, if I look at your meter stick, I'm going to say your
meter stick is short. It's not, it's not a full meter,
but you'll look at my meter stick and you'll say the same
thing. Now Hoffman's meter stick is
short. It's not a full meter.
So I thought, well so I'm getting this time is going

(18:43):
slower on the trace in the sensethat for for three clicks of the
red, green and blue, on average I'm only getting 2 clicks.
So my clock is clicking at a slower rate.
I said no, could that be Einstein's and could that be
related to Einstein? And I thought Nah, but I would

(19:04):
be a fool not to just check it out.
So I checked it out and did. I couldn't see any obstruction,
but OK. Then the next question was what
about that meter stick? What?
What is the notion of length? And, and it turns out just in
2017, Markov theorists gave us anice clean way to talk about the

(19:30):
distance between the states of aMarkov chain.
So like the what's the difference between the red and
the blue in the Markov chain? It turns out that there's a
canonical way to do it, and it has to do with something called
the commute time. And it's very simple.
What is the how many steps on average will it take to get from

(19:51):
the red, say to the green and then back to the red?
That's the called called the commute time between red and
green. So I start with red.
What's the how long will it takeme on average, you know how many
steps of the Markov chain beforeI get to green and then back to
red? And that's sort of a notion of a

(20:11):
distance. If it takes you long more steps,
then you're in some sense further away from each other
right. And intuitively and what what
the mathematicians Doyle and Steiner, so they.
There are the mathematicians whowho discovered they, they showed
that the the right formula is that the commute time is the

(20:32):
square of the Euclidean distance.
So it's not the distance directly, it's the distance
squared. So that so, so here we have it.
So I have a time counter that's just in your face and it does
dilate like, you know, and now there's this length measure,

(20:55):
which is the commute time. And so the question was in
Einstein's theory of special relativity, they have to be the
same, right? The contraction rate for they're
both related by what's called the Lorentz factor.
So, so it has to be the same. Now in in general relativity,
it's not, you know, with curves based on, but for special, I

(21:16):
need them to be the same. So I asked myself, so is there a
class of Markov chains for whichthese are the same?
And there is and it's the some something called an end cycle.
And so an end cycle would be thekind of thing you see in a
traffic light, a real traffic light with red, green and
yellow, not no blue, red, green and yellow.

(21:38):
So what you red, if you if you see red, now the next thing
you'll see is green. And if you see green, the next
thing you see is relo yellow andthen red.
So it goes in a cycle. It's those kind of chains where
there's for one state, you go only to 1 new state, the same
one all the time and that alwaysgoes to the same new state.
So you cycle. So those have the right Lorentz

(22:01):
contraction, the same as the as the time contraction.
But what's interesting is so, sonow I've been working on this,
it looks to me like I can now embed these N cycles into it
looks like I can boot up Minkowski space entirely from

(22:23):
them. So, so not we, we haven't proven
the theorems. You're not done until you're
done. But I, but I see no obstruction
looks, it looks to me, I would say 99.99%.
Now that we can, we can build Minkowski space in the limit as
the is the number of elements inyour end cycle goes to Infinity.
So this is a big traffic light, right?

(22:44):
A lot of different, you know, colors in it.
But as that goes to Infinity, you can embed it on a Taurus,
Taurus on a circle. But in, in 3 dimensions, it
would be a Taurus and you'd haveto embed three of these end
cycles and you have to have cross links between them.
There's some technical things, but it looks like in the end it
converges in the Laurentian Gromov Hausdorff can sense it,

(23:14):
it converges to Minkowski space.So there's a lot of technical
stuff I won't go into there, butit, it looks looks good to me.
So that, that's stunning. But what's also interesting is
the Doyle and Steiner result says that the commute time

(23:34):
distance is not a distance, it'sa distance squared.
So that means that the, the distance itself is the square
root that. So if I'm going to think, talk
about space-time, you know, Minkowski space-time, that
distance has to be the square root of this Markovian commute
time that's outside of space-time.

(23:57):
And when you take a square root,there's, there's not one answer.
There's two plus and minus you can eat, you know, like sqrt 4
is not just two, it's also -2 because -2 ^2 is also four.
So, so that means that if I start off with this Markov

(24:19):
dynamics outside of space-time and I'm, I'm forced to say that
there are two different kinds ofspace times that I can create,
one in which time is going in a positive direction and one in
which time and and distances areare have the opposite sign.
Well, that's parity in time symmetry.

(24:39):
That's that's a big symmetry in physics.
So it's so I mean, and that was just, I'm not even trying.
This is it's all forced on me. So I was stunned.
It, it, it, it seems like it's just falling right out.
So now what we're working on is general relativity.

(25:03):
So there first, first thing I should point out is that there
are a lot of different kinds of Markov matrices.
The the N cycles are the only ones that make Minkowski space.
And so it means that there's zero percent, 0% of the Markov

(25:24):
matrices that are available to me in this theory of
consciousness are required to make Einstein's special
relativistic space-time 0% of them.
And my guess is that when I go to the general relativistic
case, where now you're going to have curved space times, not
flat space times, there'll be a larger class of Markov matrices

(25:45):
that once again, we'll have the time dilations because you'll
have, you know, traces change the counters and they also
change the commute times. But now they change them in
different ways. They don't have to be In Sync
with each other. And that the that will then lead
to you will put in the sync thatin the sense that that there's

(26:07):
not going to be some global, youknow, at every point of
space-time in some sense in Minkowski space, everything's
the same. It's all flat.
But in curved space-time locally, you're in some sense
the time is going faster here and, and slower there, and
distances are in some sense shorter here and longer there
and so forth. So, so that's going to require

(26:29):
matrices that are not just, you know, in cycles, you're going to
be more complicated. But again, I think it's going to
be 0% of a bigger 0%, but but still 0% of all the the Markov
matrices that are that are available to me in theory of
consciousness, which means ones that that won't fit, for

(26:52):
example, are are weird ones thatto us seem weird.
They're so-called expander graph.
They have expander graphs and Pinsler metrics.
That's sort of complicated stuff.
But but there. But there's a whole class of
these matrices that just won't fit into Einsteinian curved
space-time, which means, as I expected, that space-time, even

(27:14):
curved space-time is just one ofan infinite class of headsets
that consciousness can use. So I'm thinking about space and
time not as fundamental. They're they're just
consciousness has a huge range of headsets available to it.
And Minkowski space and in Einstein's curved space are, are
just, you know, I think actuallyprobably some of the simpler

(27:37):
headsets that are available. There's only three dimensions of
space, 1 dimension of time. There's absolutely no reason why
I couldn't have 1000 dimensions of space.
What? There's just no reason.
So, so it's, it does it, I was surprised.
OK, so it looks like it's all all fitting together in this

(27:58):
way. So of course, now there's lots
of specific questions that have to be to be answered, right.
But it looks like we're about toput one point on the board for
the consciousness first series, which is Minkowski space.

(28:19):
And that, that, that'll be, you know, so when we, I was working
with Chaitan on this and we werelooking through the math and he
was trying to raise objections and we can yell.
They, they all work out. So of course it's not, it's not
real until you publish it. And so we're working on, so I
won't say that we're done, but but I will say, I would bet good
money right now on the Minkowskispace.

(28:39):
Now there's lots of hard work todo ahead on the curved.
And I'm doing my homework. You know, I'm a cognitive
scientist. So this is, you know, a little
bit of a, you know, a learn for me to, to move into general
relativity and really master it to the point where we can do
this. But you know, hey, it's worth
it. This is what what has to be
done. Then there's the issue of

(29:01):
quantum mechanics, right? So it's not enough to put
Einstein's special and general theories on the board.
Ultimately, we need to get Schrodinger's equation, for
example, and then we need to understand how they relate,
right? In other words, quantum gravity

(29:22):
kinds of stuff. So it turns out now this part
isn't new. This is something that Chaiton
discovered and we published in 2014.
So I think we, I might have mentioned it earlier in podcast
that when you look at the Markovchains, each Markov chain is
saying as we as we discussed, ifit's red now, what's probably

(29:44):
would be green next or or yellownext.
So it's sort of giving you a step by step plotting
description, but you could also think about that as you know,
it's telling you about the different frames of a movie.
But what if you step back and you look at the whole movie sort
of at a higher speed? So you look at the sort of long
term be behavior. Like if you look at a traffic
light, you would see red, green,yellow, just circling really,

(30:07):
really fast, right? That would be the movie instead
of just seeing, oh, now it's red.
Now I'm waiting on board. Now you see a movie.
So that's that's the the what's called the asymptotic behavior
in the markups. You're looking at the at the
movie at sort of a fast rate. That's the asymptotic behavior.
And when you do that, there's mathematics that you can use to
describe the asymptotics, and that mathematics, it turns out

(30:31):
Chaiton showed. So this is not me, this is
Chaiton Prakash, mathematician. I'm not a mathematician, I'm a
wannabe. Chaiton proved or showed that
the functions that describe the asymptotic behavior of Markov
chains are called harmonic functions, and these are for the

(30:54):
enhanced Markov chains where youhave a time counter.
You have to keep the the you're keeping track of the time
counter as well. Their long term behavior is
described by exactly the same mathematics as the wave
functions of free particles in quantum mechanics.
Exactly. So we have an immediate

(31:16):
connection between free particles in quantum mechanics.
They're wave, literally. They're wave functions with all
the complex values. So it turns out the Markov
chains are all real. Yeah, every step was a real
deal. I didn't talk about, you know,
imaginary numbers at any time until just now.
When you look at the long term behavior, that's when you get
imaginary numbers coming up. That's just the way you describe

(31:39):
the the long term behavior, because it now starts to get
periodic kinds of things. Long term, you start to see
periodicities and that's modeledby these imaginaries.
So, so that's one connection that we published in 2014.
So that that's been out for 11 years.
So that's, that's not new and and it's not been contradicted.

(32:00):
So that is that is 1 clean connection.
There's another connection that this is now speculative, but
I've looked at it enough to think that this is, I'll put
5050 on this speculation. I think that there's another

(32:21):
even deeper way that quantum mechanics is connected with this
trace logic of of conscious agent dynamics.
And that is when you one way to think about the trace is that
when you take a trace, you're hiding part of reality.

(32:46):
Like when I, when I saw the, thetraffic like red, yellow and
green. And that's what's really going
on say in this. But now I can only see red and
green. So I'm missing part of, I'm
missing the yellow part of reality.
So I'm that that's so I'm hidingit so, so you can think about
tracing as hiding some of reality.

(33:11):
And I it looks like there's thiswhole branch of mathematics that
it involves geometric algebra and something called Berzin
integrals, BEREZIN integrals. And it looks like this process
of hiding states that the trace does can be represented very,

(33:38):
very nicely with geometric algebra, but it can also be
represented with the compressed form of the imaginaries of
quantum mechanics. So it looks like we will get
the, the complex amplitudes coming out not just for the long

(33:59):
term behavior, but also just as a consequence of the tracing
process itself. So that that that the what
quantum mechanics. So if this is right, and so this
one again, I'm, I'm only putting5050 the, the, the, the long
term behavior 100% that's published.
It's been out for 11 years. No one has said we're wrong.
So, so that connection with quantum mechanics is strong.

(34:22):
The trace stuff I'm telling you is, is true.
Time does dilate links do contract that that is absolutely
true. And that mathematics is is well
established. The embedding of this stuff into
Minkowski space hasn't been published.
So in some sense it's not real until it's published.
But Shaitan hasn't made able to find anything wrong with it.

(34:45):
And but of course, so I'll say I'm 90 plus percent on that.
And then general relativity, I'mconvinced we'll be able to do
it, but I don't have the answer yet, right.
And then I'm thinking we're, we'll get a very interesting new
interpretation of where the complex numbers are coming in,

(35:10):
in, in, in quantum mechanics and, and generalizing that now.
Now this also gives us a new wayof thinking about The Big Bang,
right? So, so you can see all the, the,
the, the, the key has been we'llhave the conscious agent stuff

(35:31):
for, for a long time. Actually, Jaiton and I with a
mathematician named Bruce Bennett published our original
version of the conscious agent formalism, you know, book we
called that's called Observer Mechanics.
So that was 1989 we published. So we've been at this for a
while. And basically the conscious

(35:51):
agent formalism is, is a simplification of what we did in
observer mechanics. That was, that's a nasty math
book. So, so this is, but so I've been
at it for a long time. But the trace logic, if we just
seen the trace logic back then, we could have blown this whole
thing wide open back in 1989. It was, it was the, the trace
logic that seems to me is, is the, the because markup chains

(36:14):
have been around for a long, long time.
But the trace logic, the trace has been around for a long time.
Daniel Revue's book Markup Chains has it and that's 1984 or
something like that. And it was known well before
that. So that's not new, but but the
trace logic is so, so here's thehere's the the connection now
with with with The Big Bang and cosmology.

(36:45):
The weird thing about The Big Bang is it starts with nothing,
right? And then, and then space-time
starts to expand and you know, the best model we have right now
is that it's, it's accelerated. There's been some back and forth
just in the last couple weeks about, well, maybe it's not,

(37:06):
maybe the acceleration is slowing down and, and it's, I
think the, the jury is out on that, right, right.
So right now this the, the modelthat the Nobel Prize winning
result is that it's acceleratingand there's something called
dark energy. We don't know what it is.
And then there's some new, you know, the type 1 supernovas may
not be the quite the standard candle that we thought they

(37:27):
were. There's there's the big debate
going on about that right now. But anyway, there's no doubt the
universe is expanding. There's doubt whether it's
accelerating or, or maybe slowing down the expansion or
not. But it started.
No, no one's doubting there's a Big Bang and it and it and it
grew and you know, how did it grow?
What, what is, what is the energy that's making it grow?
And there's all sorts of dark, dark matter to the stuff that's

(37:51):
making galaxies behave in ways that with matter we can't see.
So it's amazing that most of reality is dark energy and dark
matter. And we don't know what it is.
What we know is it is is a tiny bit, you know, I forgot what
percent, but it's a very, very small percent of what's out
there. So what's going on?
And what is the nature of this dark energy?

(38:12):
And so we have a way of thinkingabout cosmology that's entirely
different using the Markov stuffin the conscious agents.
And that's the following. Suppose I have a Markov matrix
and it says, you know, here's the probabilities of if it's
red, now you'll see green next, or red, yellow or yes, a red,

(38:35):
green or yellow just to do the traffic light that everybody
knows the traffic light. Well, so I can then say, OK, let
me just run that matrix. Let me just, you know, start
sampling according to me. So what's, what's the first?
Now I see yellow. And this is not a good traffic
light. So things can happen randomly.
So, so now I see yellow, now I see green, now I see red.
So I can just write down a sample of, you know, it was red,

(38:57):
red, red, green, green, yellow, yellow, red, green, yellow.
So yeah, I just look at the sample that I get.
And so this is what we call a sampled trace chain.
So it's a trace and it's a sample trace.
So now as I look at that sample,I can say suppose that's all I

(39:21):
see is just the sample. I'm just red, green.
So I'm trying to now estimate what is the matrix, what is the
Markov matrix that's, that's governing this whole thing,
right? So I, I just, I see maybe all, I
see red and yellow for a while. So I only get a matrix with red
and yellow. So it's only a two by two
matrix. Then all of a sudden I see
green. I'll go, oh, no, I have to, my
matrix has to now be a three, you know, a three by three.

(39:43):
I have to get the green in there.
And so I start and as I get more, more colors that I see now
suppose I can see purple and blue and brown and and orange
and so forth. My matrix is getting bigger and
bigger. Now notice what's happening the
commute times between states. It's going to take longer.

(40:03):
First when it was just say red all I saw in red was the only
color. I have a one by one matrix and
it's only red and so the commutetime is 0 because red is already
at it's already 2. It's so my my distance is 0.
So I have my Big Bang and the first step in it is 0 distance.
By the the rule that the commutetime is the square of the

(40:27):
Euclidean distance, right? That's, that's the rule.
So so plus and -0 are the answers to sqrt 0 and and
that's. But now when I have two red and
red and green, suppose I get a cycle.
Just just one concrete case. So red goes to green, green goes
back to red. So the cycle time from red to

(40:49):
green is that's one step. And then green back to red is is
2. So the the commute time in fact
is just two. So now my universe has a radius
of sqrt 2 plus and minus sqrt 2.So notice I'm I'm making two
universes here. There's one universe where the
distance is plus sqrt 2. The other universes, which is

(41:11):
minus sqrt 2 and and then when Iget to red, green and blue say
now if it's a cycle, if I get toa cycle, then all of a sudden it
is going to be that takes what red to green, green to blue,
That's two steps. And then blue goes right back to

(41:33):
red. That's one step.
So it's 3. So, so that's the commute time
is 3 if it's a cycle. And that means now my universe
is not sqrt 2, it's sqrt 3. So I went from 1.4 to 1.7 and
and, and, and so you can see my universe is expanding.
So as the as my sample increases, the commute times are

(41:57):
going up as the time, as the time counter goes up.
So, so now the interesting thingis it's, it's, it's a very clean
problem. I need to find a master matrix,
pick a master matrix whose such that when I take a generic

(42:18):
sample, so I mean, because you can start your sample any way
you want to and just, and then look at so you can look at a
typical sample from from that matrix and it should give me an
evolution that matches what we have measured in our universe.

(42:38):
And I, I'm not saying that everymatrix will do this.
No, almost no matrix will do it,but there will be one that does.
And that's our matrix or that's our class of matrices, but
there's an infinite class of other matrices.
So our universe is not the universe is like in the sense of
the whole thing. Ours is 1 little, 1 little

(43:00):
headset out of an infinite number of headsets.
So, so that's going to be what we have to do is to show that we
can put out a matrix which does give us the evolution that we,
we see, you know, the inflation and, and, and all, all, all the
different phases of, of the big bank.
So that's, that's a big project.And so I mean, I'm going to have

(43:24):
to learn some, you know, eventually, you know, I just
have to find some collaborators who are real, real cosmologists.
And, and we're, we're, we have some, we have some leads.
So we're going to try to get some collaboration with real
cosmologists on this kind of thing.
Well, I think so. The Sorry, don't continue.

(43:44):
So I'll just a quick a quick summary is just.
To say no, no, take your time. Don't worry, this is exactly
what you need to do. I think it's best to get your
ideas out there. Cosmologists are watching.
This is the perfect time for them to jump on.
Absolutely. So I'd love to have a
cosmologist jump in and help us with this because there's a lot
of details in cosmology. But the the idea that that as we

(44:04):
take a sample from a matrix and we estimate a maximum likelihood
and estimate of a Markov matrix that would give rise to the
sample, for example, then those matrices themselves will have,
they will model a certain geometry.
And we can see how that geometryevolves as the matrices grow as

(44:25):
the sample increases. So my sample is increasing.
The matrices are growing in size.
They're growing therefore, in the geometries that come out
from this commute time metric, the square root of the commute
time. So I'm getting actually 2
universes branching out from oneinitial point.
So I'm getting at least time symmetry and and and and and

(44:54):
space symmetry Charge is an interesting thing.
I think that charge will also come out of this idea one way.
But here, here I'm not, I'm not experts.
So So what I'm about to say is now I'm speaking quite amateur,
but I believe that they sometimes will say that, you
know, a positron is an electron moving backward in time.

(45:16):
So if that's the case, we may, Ithink we won't have any trouble
getting antimatter effectively and, and getting charge
conjugation. So what we'll, but of course
that I'll put this out there as you know, for someone who
actually knows better, you know,come collaborate with us and,
and, and help us on this. But I think that that's going to
be the, the case. So, so it's, it's remarkable

(45:40):
that this trace logic was the missing key.
I've been out for 45 years. The trace logic was the missing
key. But now here's the interesting
thing about it. Wheeler John Wheeler in was is
very, very famous for talking about we need to have some kind

(46:01):
of notion of observer participant participators and
that somehow the universe is made-up of all the interactions
of observer participators and that the very active observation
is somehow important in creatingwhat what we observe.

(46:21):
And, and by the way, his, his 1989 paper, the IT it from bit
paper cites my book with Chaitonand Bruce observer mechanics.
He so he cites, he cites our ourbook in his paper on the IT from
it from bit stuff. So he was aware of our of our

(46:42):
work there. But what we didn't have the
trace logic. We had the notion of a bunch of
agents interacting to createspace time, but we didn't
have the trace logic to. But now the trace logic is
really confirming Wheeler's point of view that that it's,
it's a coherent well, at least for this Boolean sub logic.

(47:06):
If I take one big matrix, the Boolean sub logic is a nice
coherent interaction of these observers is really quite quite
beautiful. And the other aspect of it is it
means that there are infinite number of other in some sense

(47:30):
distinct universes, because in the trace logic you can go to an
infinite number of states. The Markov chain could have an
infinite number of states that it's operating on an infinite
number of experiences. So red, green, blue, off to
Infinity, you know, hot, cold, smells, taste, colors, things.

(47:53):
We can't even an infinite numberof experiences.
And there could be an infinite number of Markov chains at
Infinity, an infinite number foreach one of them.
There's a Boolean sub logic, butthe between them, they're
incompatible right there. There's almost no connection
between them. So when we so this is the model

(48:16):
of consciousness that's coming out the model.
And by the way, I agree with thespiritual traditions that the
ultimate nature of consciousness, whatever it is,
transcends mathematics in a transcends size.
I completely agree with that, but that doesn't mean we

(48:38):
shouldn't do mathematics and science.
We we should, we should go as far as we can with the math and
science. But but our attitude should be
quite, quite humble in in the sense that no matter if we had a
billion Einstein's working for abillion years, we would still
have 0% of reality. That's that's, that's the name

(49:01):
of the game, literally 0% of reality.
And yet consciousness, for whatever reason, has chosen to
be here with mathematics lookingat itself through mathematical
lens. And there's, there's some reason
for that. So I'm not going to dismiss that
either. So, so it's very interesting to

(49:21):
say to there's two big errors. 1error is to say we're close to a
theory of everything. Mathematics is going to give us
the final truth that that's a big error, that that's, that's
hubristic and, and, and, and wrong.
The other error is to say there's no point.
Consciousness transcends mathematics.
Just sit back, don't do any mathematics.

(49:45):
That's I think both, both there's something in the middle
and the fact that we're able to,you know, you're in South
Africa, I believe, and I'm in California.
We're talking via Zoom. This is magic, right?
What we're doing is, and to anybody, say a century ago, this
would be indistinguishable, or say 2 centuries ago,
indistinguishable from magic. But we're able to do it because

(50:11):
we, Maxwell wrote down some equations and then other people
worked on them. And these equations are not the
final theory of everything, but they're not pointless.
We're doing zoom because of Maxwell's equations.
So that's what that's the reality we're in.
Absolutely. Maxwell's equations and our
current mathematics are not the theory of everything.

(50:31):
And yet you write down any othersystem of equations, we're not
going to do zoom with those equations.
We're going to do zoom with these equations and then our
current theory. And so there's something our
mathematics and our science isn't a theory of everything,
but what is important is, is it more or less accurate depiction

(50:52):
of this perspective on on reality, this perspective of the
one consciousness. So this mathematics won't hold
for another perspective. So as we if we change headsets
now, Maxwell's equations may no longer hold, we'll have to have
a new set of mathematics. So there's an infinite number of
mathematical frameworks for an infinite number of different

(51:14):
headsets that that we'll probably be interacting with.
So, and again, I'm, I'm talking way over my pay grade, but you
know, someone has to do it. We have to, it's really hard
here. We're, you know, there's almost
no one who's qualified because it's such, so many different
factors here and so, so much going on there.
But I think we have to avoid both problems.

(51:34):
We're close to a theory of everything.
It's only trivial stuff leftoverversus there's no point in doing
anything because the one transcends anything that we
could possibly talk about. I think both are mistaken and
something in the middle. Good science with proper
humility seems to be the the path.

(51:56):
Yeah, Don, I think I feel like it's been watching it from the
outside. It's almost like you're getting
access to all this new information during your search.
I mean this when you think aboutthe trace logic, it reminds me
of the time many years ago when you first sat down, looked at
reality, took evolutionary game theory and and and you guys did
the calculation and suddenly this.
But you sat there and thought, OK, we're not seeing reality as

(52:19):
it is. This sounds very similar to me.
Do you feel like it was a similar experience when you guys
figured this out it? It it I had to sit down when
when I when I first had the ideait it, it was like a Thunderbolt
from the blue. It was like, could this mean,
could this be? And when I just did my first

(52:40):
little looking at it and it wasn't just crumbling, I got
pretty excited. And then when I saw the Doyle
and Steiner paper, because I then I started looking, I go,
OK, I got to find who, who's done.
How do you get distances in Markov chains?
I had to look that up. If I'd done this work in 2016, I

(53:01):
would have been stuck because Doyle and Steiner hadn't done
their work and I am not qualified to do what Doyle and
Steiner did. They that that was technical,
mathematical work. Hoffman couldn't do it, no way.
So so I couldn't have done this before They that that result
wasn't there. So it only came just a few years
before I, but it came when, whenI saw Doyle and Steiner's

(53:27):
commute time is the square of the distance.
And I saw that that would work for N cycles.
That's when I just began to say this, This looks real.
And this is, I've been at this for 45 years and it, it finally
cracked. I mean, I, I just, I thought I
didn't know if I was ever going to get it.
But if it finally cracked open here in a way that I'd never

(53:49):
imagined. And it really taps into a couple
of interesting things. One is, you know, it goes all
the way back to Leibniz. Leibniz talked about a pre
established harmony, a bunch of monads interacting according to

(54:09):
a pre established harmony. And of course Leibniz was a
genius. He'd run circles around me.
He'd take what I'm doing right now and tell me exactly where
I'm wrong and how I'm stupid andhow I could immediately turn
this into a much more rich Franklin.
So if Leibniz were around, I would just say, what should we
do next? But but, but I think that he he

(54:32):
would say, yeah, this is like, you know, the traces are like my
monads and the the master matrixis like the pre established
harmony because it once you spell the master out, all of the
traces are defined in at least in the Boolean sub logic, right.
That Boolean sub logic is defined.

(54:53):
But then there's an infinite number of these Boolean sub
logics, which may or may not have the question of whether you
could find connections between these separate Boolean sub
logics. I don't know yet.
There, there may be, but I don't.
So that's, that's above my pay grade right now.
That's, that's an interesting question.

(55:13):
But so it connects with, with Leibniz enough.
So I think it's that Leibniz would probably like this.
He'd probably then show me exactly where it's coming short
and he would run with it and I wouldn't be able to keep up.
But this is also interesting. It's related to stuff that's
coming up in quantum physics where where physicists like,

(55:38):
like Wheeler said, we need to have a theory of the observer
participant somehow. That's really, really critical.
And Frank Wilcheck has has said the same thing.
We need to get a formalism of, of, of what is in observer and,
and even, well, I won't say even, but also in for

(55:58):
philosophers and the foundationsof physics.
They're now when they're trying to understand quantum gravity
and how how to get, get it to work.
The fact that the mathematics there, you know, Einstein's
theory of gravity is a local gauge theory.

(56:19):
So that means that you can make local gauge transformations and,
and the physical content doesn'tchange.
And that that makes asking what's what's the role of the
observer becomes really interesting because the the
field, the fields in quant in general relativity.

(56:39):
So you have values of a field atevery point in space.
In some sense that's not observable because it's not
physically real. Gauge transformation can change
all those numbers. The physical content doesn't
change, but the numbers have changed.
So you're not, you're not perceiving the numbers in the
field. What is the observer and what,
what are we doing? Then?
What, what? So this is actually not a

(57:00):
trivial issue right now in the foundations of, of physics.
And then philosophers are working on this many, many
philosophers are, are, are working on this kind of thing.
And, and it turns out that the kinds of things that they're

(57:21):
coming up with this conscious age and formalism has exactly
the right properties to give youthe kinds of observables that
they're, they're independently finding you need to, to deal
with the, the, the local gauge transformation properties of
Einstein's general relativity. So I'm in fact, I'll be giving a

(57:43):
talk in a couple weeks with, with some philosophers, the
foundations of, of, of, of physics.
So we'll be talking Turkey on this.
So it'll be be a lot of fun. I think there's a lot of back
and forth that can be really, really valuable there.

(58:03):
The stuff they're saying makes sense to me.
And the conscious Asian formalism is actually doing what
they say needs to be done. So it's it's it's it's quite.
Yeah, I can. I can tell.
Done by the excitement of your face.
You can see that there's something big happening and you
can tell that you that there's almost this there's this feeling
of just as infants, there's thisthis hood spy in you.

(58:25):
You can tell that something has happened and clearly this trace
logic has been has changed the way you guys are perceiving
this. And, and it's almost like
there's an endless possibility stream here that you that you
want to keep drinking out of. That, that, that, that that's
right. And, and what's remarkable about
it is that it's to any mathematician in this area, it's

(58:45):
simple, right? This is not hard math like the
kind of stuff that you're dealing in loop quantum gravity
and these other kinds of things,or there are all sorts of
attempts to get a theory of quantum gravity.
And the math is very, very difficult.

(59:05):
The trace logic is, relatively speaking, very, very simple.
So and what's what's been remarkable to me is in trying to
make the connections with physics, at every step, I've
realized there is only one option open to me.

(59:27):
This works or the game is over. At every step I've I've realized
there's no, there's no wiggle room here.
There, there's, there's if I can't define this physical thing
in this way, I'm done. And at every step ago, this is
probably it. OK, let me, let me look.
OK, I'll probably this will be the end of it.
And at every step there is one and only one answer and it and

(59:50):
it and it fits. So it, it doesn't mean there's
always going to work. But but so far it's if it's not
true, it's really leading me on,put it that way.
I love that. So it's, I was saying earlier, I
mean, it's almost, it's like forsome people, I mean, when they
look at idealism or they take itinto the mystical realm, the,

(01:00:12):
the spiritual realm, these, these revelations are not,
they're not coming from a mystical side in your sense.
This is a very scientific quest.This is a very scientific
grounded journey and, and, and to see this happening in that
way, though it's still, it's still quite fascinating to see
it happening. And it's almost like you're
getting these answers from the universe itself.

(01:00:33):
So it's, it just fits beautifully.
And I think there's a poetic nature to this.
We're a physically grounded scientist working on something
that's considered to other physics, to other physicists,
something let's say more mystical that.
And I'm not, I'm personally not that religious, but for me it's,
I think it's beautiful to kind of see something like this
happen. And it's like a mystical side to

(01:00:54):
it as well that I think is quiteadmirable.
Yeah, yeah. And and, and, and again, you
know, I there may be a hole somewhere and I'll, I'll find
out that, you know, I've been LED along by the math.
But, but you know, Shaitan is a pretty hard nosed customer and
he, he hasn't seen anything wrong yet.

(01:01:15):
So, and when we published, you know, the, the, the connection
with quantum mechanics that I mentioned the, the harmonic
functions and giving us the quantum wave functional, that's
been published and that's been around.
No one said no on that. Yeah, done looking at.
So it let's before we move into because many of a lot of the new

(01:01:37):
discoveries have come with this trace logic.
And so you guys wrote about thisin 2024.
I think you guys already had a version of this published where
you guys discussed traces of consciousness.
But obviously you guys have updated and addressed a few more
things. Sorry, anything you want to add
to that? Well, that, that that's new.
You're right. We have a, a, a traces of
conscious paper. It's we're, we're revising it.

(01:01:58):
So it's we're still and it's hard.
One thing that's held it back iswith the trace logic and then
this new connection with with space-time showing that.
So when we had the trace logic in the last year, but when we
realized we can get Minkowski space with a, we need to put

(01:02:19):
that in the in this paper. If we can have the trace logic
and a section with that says we can get as is the N cycles, N
goes to Infinity, we get Minkowski space.
No hand wave Lorenzian Gromov Hausdorf convergence is real and
and and so that that would be I've been I've been looking to

(01:02:41):
show that we could get a space-time headset from
consciousness for decades. This would be our first.
Here's how you get the foundation of a headset.
It's not the whole headset, but this is the foundation of a
space-time headset and we can get it.
So I want to put that in the paper before we get filed this.
Case so this is literally a a new discovery for you guys and

(01:03:02):
something quite groundbreaking that shifts and changes
everything metaphysically, philosophically, mathematically.
Before I before I ask you specific questions about that,
because I've read the paper that's that's upcoming and I've
seen the sections you're talkingabout, am I allowed to talk
about certain aspects or should we just wear it rounded?
Sure, we can. OK, cool.
Before we dive into that, Don, something I wanted to ask you

(01:03:22):
was, when you look at your work over the last few decades, do
you feel that anything when you look back feels not incomplete,
misleading or need a conceptual upgrade?
Well, there is one point that I think has confused a lot of
people and it's about our work on evolution of a natural

(01:03:44):
selection and our claim that we have evolved not to see the
truth. And people claim that I've made
a big logical error. Me and my team have made a big
logical error and, and the argument goes like this.
So Hoffman, I'll just put it on me.

(01:04:06):
Hoffman says that, you know, he starts with Dharma's theory of
evolution, but natural selection, Darwin's theory says
that there are organisms in space and time competing for
resources in space and time. And Hoffman then uses
evolutionary game theory, which is, you know, John Maynard
Smith's mathematization of Darwin's ideas.

(01:04:30):
And, and he uses that to, to show that he claims that the
probability that we see reality as it is is 0.
Well, but if the reality of seeing if probably is 0 that we
see reality as it is, that meansthe probability is 0 that
organisms in space and time exist and that they're, that

(01:04:53):
they really are resources, they're competing.
In other words, the whole physicalist framework of Darwin
now is, has been falsified. So I've used Darwin's theory,
which assumes physical objects in space and time, like
organisms and resources, to prove that the probability is 0,
that those things are real. So clearly Hoffman has no idea

(01:05:15):
how science works. He, you know, you shouldn't go
shooting yourself on the foot logically.
And, and so we shouldn't pay attention to this stuff.
So that's, and, and I get this alot.
This almost the universal reaction to, to, to that work,
and not just by casual observers.
It's it's been published in philosophical journals like

(01:05:36):
serious ones, Synthase by serious philosophers who are
really quite bright. So of course I owe a response on
to this. And my response is quite simple
actually. The key point to note is that
every scientific theory starts with assumptions.

(01:06:03):
That's the big point right there.
Just that simple. Every scientific theory starts
with assumptions. These are the statements that
the theory says. Please grant me these
statements. I can't explain them.
I don't explain them if you, butplease grant me these these

(01:06:25):
assumptions. And if you do, then I can do all
this other wonderful stuff. So Einstein said, please grant
me that the speed of light, it is the same for all observers,
no matter how fast they're moving, and that the laws of
physics are the same in all inertial frames.
What is light? I don't know.

(01:06:46):
Why is the speed of light the same?
Wrong. I don't know.
Just please grant me that. And then like then he gives you
us Minkowski space. Well, you know, he gives U.S.
special relativity, which then his teacher Minkowski turned
into Minkowski space. So but that's the way science
works. You start with assumptions, and
then you prove other things. That means that no theory in

(01:07:11):
science is a theory of everything, because it never
explains its own assumptions. So every theory in science.
So this is a clean statement. Every theory in science has a
limited scope. At a minimum, its assumptions

(01:07:34):
are outside of its scope. Probably a lot more is outside
of its scope. But at a minimum, it doesn't
explain its assumptions. It assumes its assumptions.
Now that now there's two kinds of theories.
There's bad theories which don'tget published.
Hopefully then there are good theories in science, and those

(01:07:56):
are theories which give us the mathematical tools we need to
explore their scope. The good scientific theory does
have a realm of explanation, so it has an explanatory scope, and
it will give us mathematical tools to explore.
And Darwin's theory with John Maynard Smith's Tools of
evolutionary game theory does that.

(01:08:17):
It gives us mathematical tools to explore evolution and is
beautiful. A great theory does even more.
Not only does it give you the tools to explore its scope, it
gives you the mathematical toolsto find its hard limits.
Where does the theory stop? Where does this explanation

(01:08:42):
stop? We know that it stops.
That's not a question. It stops.
The question is, is the theory good enough to tell you where it
stops? Einstein's theory of general
relativity and and special relativity together with quantum

(01:09:03):
theory. So quantum field theory is a
great theory. These theories start with
space-time, right? The, the, the well, they start
with assumptions. They build space-time.
It's one of the foundational structures in in them.
So they they effectively start with space-time or the OR the
assumptions needed to build space-time, but then they tell

(01:09:28):
us precisely where space-time falls apart.
When you bring special gravity together with quantum field
theory, you find that space-timefalls apart at 10 to the -33cm
and 10 to the -43 seconds. So we can apply the same logic

(01:09:49):
that has been applied to me withwith the evolution of natural
selection. So Hoffman used Darwin's
mathematical, you know, the the mathematical theory of evolution
to show that organisms and and resources aren't fundamental in
reality. Shot himself in the foot.
Well, here's Einstein's space-time together with quantum
theory showing that space-time is not fundamental and therefore

(01:10:11):
quantum fields are not fundamental because quantum
fields are defined over space-time.
So we've used quantum field theory and gravity to show that
space-time and fields cannot be the fundamental nature of
reality. Shot yourself in the foot?
No, you haven't. They haven't shot themselves in
the foot. That's the sign of a great
theory. We knew that it couldn't

(01:10:31):
possibly be the case that we have the final found.
These are just assumptions. They're they're not the final
word. There's always going to be.
Your child can always ask you. But why?
Why should fund? Why should space-time be
fundamental? You know the thing with you,
every time you give an answer, they say, but why that?
But why that and, and, and the, the kid is on to something.

(01:10:53):
The children are on to something.
At some point we just throw up our hands and say it's just the
way it is, right? But, but in science, you can't
throw up your hands. That's not just the way it is.
That's all. That's all that we've been ever
clever enough to figure out so far.
So. So when I use evolutionary game
theory to show that organisms inspace and time competing for

(01:11:14):
resources cannot be the fundamental nature of reality,
I'm not shooting myself in my foot.
I'm saying Darwin's theory is great enough with John Maynard
Smith's evolutionary game theoryis great enough to show you the
limits of the theory. We knew there were limits.
There have to be limits. But this is a great theory that
shows you the limits. Now I should be also careful on

(01:11:38):
another point. I am not at all in sort of an
anti evolution camp, which is, you know, be very, very clear
inside space and time looking athow organisms behave and human
behavior. I know of no better theory than

(01:11:59):
Darwin's theory. It's a fantastic theory.
I've done a lot of consulting for companies helping them with
their products and advertising and so forth.
I use evolutionary game theory and and ideas from evolutionary
theory all the time and they work, they make money.
This stuff is, it's not just a hand wave.
Darwin's theory works. It's beautiful and it's not the

(01:12:22):
final word. And, and so that's the so I'm
not an anti evolutionist. I'm a pro evolutionist.
I think it's beautiful. And when I say that, you know,
Einstein's theory is space-time is doomed.
I'm not against Einstein's theories and quantum field
theory. They're, they're unbelievably
beautiful. But we knew that they're just
stepping stones. And if Hoffman's theory, if it

(01:12:45):
catches it all is merely A stepping stone and every theory
will be merely A stepping stone.I would love to live long enough
to see the next thing that overthrows my stuff.
If I live long enough, that'd befantastic.
It's going to happen. That's just the nature of the
game. So, so that's one big, big
thing. And the reason I bring it up is,

(01:13:06):
is it's not just average people with no scientific training who
bring this up. You know, I get emails all the
time. You, you didn't think about
this. But I also get it from from, you
know, serious philosophers who actually done pH their their
dissertation was on this right. The dissertation was showing

(01:13:27):
that that Hoffman has shot himself in the foot.
And you know, I can make mistakes, but but the the very
fact that I show that using the tools of evolutionary game
theory, that evolution is, you know, the the foundation of
evolution of organisms in space-time can't be the final
reality that that's not shootingyourself in the foot.
That's just how you go so, so that's that, that's a big one.

(01:13:51):
And I think it's important not so much about defending my view
of evolution as just highlighting how, how does
science really work? This is this is how science
really works. Talk about a theory of
everything that's a technical in, in, in physics.
That's a technical term that that physicists use to talk
about the unification of, you know, gravity with, with the

(01:14:14):
other fundamental forces. It's it's, it's not a claim that
we're done. Science is done.
We can all go home. Not at all.
And and that kind of theory of everything just doesn't exist.
Yeah, Yeah, Donna, I completely agree.

(01:14:34):
I think that, I mean, for anyonewho says that you're not someone
who takes evolution seriously, Imean, they don't know you, of
course. I mean, you're one of the most
passionate people when I speak to, when it comes to who speaks
to Darwin, who speaks about Darwin at least, because you can
tell that that is someone who's fundamentally shaped the way you
think in many ways. And obviously we realize that
certain theories work under certain frameworks, within

(01:14:57):
certain conversations, under certain contexts.
And for the most part, that theory works in in most
contexts. And it just happens that when
we're discussing something like this that goes beyond that
metaphysics, it's just slightly different and difficult to to do
that. But Don, I wanted to for this
for this episode, I was looking forward to it because I want
people to be excited about this new trace logic.

(01:15:18):
And I want people to know that the new traces of conscious
paper, this update is, is prettymuch groundbreaking.
So I broke this up into arcs. I figured arc one would be
connecting the first three conversations.
So now then we'll go to the deepstructure of reality, which is
the traces of consciousness updates and move into time,
causality and emergence beyond the interface.

(01:15:39):
Then the mathematics of conscious agents, the next
generation work, object hood, identity and the self in
conscious realism, the hard problem, IIT and competing
frameworks. We visited freshly and
neuroscience, AI and ethical andempirical implications overall
for this and even the meta framework and metaphysics

(01:16:00):
implications because I think implications of this is going to
be very important. OK.
Yeah, sounds like a lot, but yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So this updated version, Traces of consciousness, this, there's
a major breakthrough that occurs.
You guys want to update this paper and you want to make sure
you include all the necessary parts to it.
A major theme in the new draft is the idea that the traces need

(01:16:20):
not be representational. How does this shift your view of
perception and its role in the interface?
Right. The trace is hiding most of
reality, right? So there's a fundamental reality

(01:16:41):
out there that's quite complicated.
And what this is saying is you're seeing only a trace of it
on us, on the subset of experiences that you can have.
Whatever reality is, is, is quite complicated and you're
just getting the trace. Now the mathematics of the trace
is nice. One thing that it tells us is

(01:17:02):
the trace is the minimal surprise representation.
That's an interesting aspect of it if I ask.
So it's minimal surprise in the in the following sense.
If I ask, I got the my three by three matrix and that's that's

(01:17:22):
governing the red, green and blue transitions.
And I can only see red and green.
The trace is gives me exactly the frequency of red and green
transitions that I will in fact see.
Is this so it it it's telling mewhat I will see if I can't see
the blue, It's minimal surprise in that specific sense.

(01:17:47):
There's no no other matrix will minimize surprise.
So that's but it's another it's a minimal surprise in another
sense. Every Markov chain, every Markov
matrix of a certain class that, that, that have some regular,

(01:18:08):
they're called ergotic, but theybut they have some nice stable
behavior long term, put it that way.
They have nice long term stable behavior has what's called a
stationary measure. It tells you what's the
probability long term that I'm going to see red, what's
probably I'll see green, probably I'll see blue.
So maybe I'm at that, you know, situation where I see red 60% of

(01:18:31):
the time, green 20% and blue 20%or something like that.
That would be the long term behavior.
That's called the stationary measure.
It turns out that the when I take the trace from red, green
and blue onto red and green, thestationary measure also gets

(01:18:53):
transferred. The stationary measure I get on
the on just red and green turns out to be the normalized
restriction of the trace of the measure on red, green and blue.
So if I take the red, green and blue thing and just look at the
red green part of it and renormalize it, that's the
actual stationary measure I get for the trace.
So that's that's incredible, right?

(01:19:16):
So it's minimum, it's minimum long term surprise.
And it's so because the stationary measure is the right
stationary measure to minimize long term surprise, but it's
also minimum surprise in my individual transition
probabilities. So it minimizes.
So, so this is interesting because there's, it's well, in a

(01:19:38):
big thing in psychology right now is the free energy
principle. Karl Fristan and, and
collaborators working on the free energy principle where
they're, they're minimizing freeenergy as a way of trying to
find a way to, to minimize surprise, right?
So they, they, they don't minimize surprise directly.
They they buy by doing a gradient descent on free energy,

(01:20:03):
they can try to get to minimum surprise.
And he's actually, Carl's got his own AI company they're
building to use the free energy principle and minimizing
surprise to build a new kind of artificial intelligence.
And already they have apparentlysuccess.
They're they're bidding large language models in some some
measures. And the idea about this, by the

(01:20:25):
way, and intelligence is actually a simple idea about
surprise. If every time I make an action,
I'm surprised for, you know, forexample, I pick up a glass and
it falls to the floor and breaks, or I try to button my
shirt and I RIP a hole in it, orI try to comb my hair and I cut
my head. I mean, if everything I do, I'm

(01:20:46):
surprised, well, then I'm not very bright, right?
That's that's, that's so you cansee that there minimizing
surprise is not everything thereis to intelligence, but it's
part of intelligence. It's an important part of
intelligence. And so another way to think
about this trace logic is it, itis a logic of intelligence.

(01:21:09):
It's the logic of minimizing surprise.
And it minimizes surprise in twoways.
The trend, the literal transition probabilities
minimizes surprise in the transitions and it minimizes
surprise in the long term, expected number of time in each
state, the long term probably being red, green, blue and so

(01:21:30):
forth. So both it minimizes surprise.
So this is a logic of intelligence.
We won't have to minimize free energy.
We compute the trace and minimize surprise.
So I could see an AI down the road based on on this trace
logic, because it's it's not only a theory of observation,

(01:21:52):
it's a theory of intelligence, the logic of intelligence.
Don what? What do you think Carl would say
to that if Friston heard? This idea, well, I would, I
would love to talk with Carl, but I've actually, I think I've
talked to him a little bit, but but we would love to have a
conversation. With him, what I could do is
just set up a meeting for you guys so the two of you can be on

(01:22:12):
the show together. I think it would be a great
colloquium episode. Yeah, it it would be a lot of
fun, absolutely. I'll, I'll set that up.
So we'll, we'll talk about that afterwards.
But yeah, if if in your newer thinking Don, does conscious
agent remain the fundamental ontological primitive or is the
primitive being reconceived as something more abstract now,

(01:22:32):
would it be like patterns of interaction, processes of
participation or something else?Still in the way that I'm in our
current model, the way I would start still is with the notion
of conscious agents interacting and, and then I go from there to

(01:22:54):
the trace logic. And from there then I would
start branching off and showing headsets appearing.
So Minkowski space, general relativity.
But then there's an infinite number of much more interesting
headsets that that could could come out of there.
So that's, that's the way I would look at the ontology of it

(01:23:16):
right now. See, and that's an important
question because I think a lot of people are thinking, OK,
we're trying to do quantum gravity.
And so, so we need to have, you know, so we have to have some
kind of notion of, of some primitive things that are
related to something spatial or temporal or something like that.
And I'm, I'm saying, no, we start entirely outside of that

(01:23:38):
kind of framework all together. So, so this is, it is sort of an
approach to quantum gravity, butit's utterly unlike the the
approaches. I'm not, I'm letting go of
space-time completely, completely.
I'm, I'm, I'm jumping into consciousness with both feet.

(01:23:58):
I'm, I'm saying conscious consciousness, conscious
experiences are fundamental. Nothing about matter is not
fundamental. Space and time are not
fundamental. Quantum theory is not
fundamental. And that's a, that's a big one.
I should, I should say space-time.
We talked about space-time is doomed because it's, it falls

(01:24:21):
apart at 10 to the -33cm and 10 to the -43 seconds.
That means quantum theory is doomed.
Some people say, well, I'll start with quantum theory.
If you use Schrodinger's evolution, there's time right
there. Time falls apart at 10 to the
-43 seconds. The Schrodinger evolution does
not make sense at 10 to the -43 seconds period.
And if you go with quantum fields, they're defined over

(01:24:43):
space-time. space-time doesn't make sense at 10 to the -33%
period. So you're going to have to have
a new theory of quantum mechanics that's not defined
over space and time, and that's what's defined over is space and
time. So good luck with that.
So space-time is doomed. By the way, I'm on this.

(01:25:05):
I'm, I'm not making that up. But David Gross has said that
Nemo Hakani Ahmed has said that the physicists at high energy
theoretical physicists are saying this.
And though, and, and you know, Nemo will also say that means
that quantum mechanics is doomed.
Just deal with it. It's it's over.
So, so it's not like I'm trying to go after the quantum theories

(01:25:25):
of consciousness. Absolutely not.
And you know, there are theoriesof consciousness that that start
with quantum. There's, there's one that you
know, that starts, you know, a good friend of mine, Federico
Fujian, good friends and he supported my work.
I have only good things to say about him.

(01:25:46):
So, so this is now technical difference that we have.
He wants to start with quantum fields and he's very interested
in privacy of qualia. My qualia.
You can't, you know, Tevin can'texperience Don's green and Don
can't experience Tevin's green. And for all I know, what you

(01:26:06):
call green could be what I wouldcall the, the taste of
chocolate. Who knows?
I mean, I, I just don't have access to your.
So there's privacy of qualia in that sense.
And, and Federico and, and his collaborators rightly point out
that the states in quantum theory can't be cloned.
There's a no cloning theorem. If I have a quantum state, it

(01:26:27):
can't be cloned. And that suggests to them that
quantum states might be the right thing to use to represent
qualia, because I can't, I can'tclone your qualia.
I can't experience your qualia. So privacy of qualia.
And that's a nice idea, but it turns out you don't need quantum
states for that. It turns out that the no cloning

(01:26:51):
theorem does not require. This is a little technical,
Doesn't require the unitary evolution operators of quantum
theory. All you need are linear
operators, and Markov matrices are linear operators.
We have a no cloning theorem forMarkov states, so it's a equally
A theorem that if you think about a probability measure as a

(01:27:12):
Markov state, there's no Markov kernel that can universally
clone any Markov state. End of story.
Same thing as the, the no cloning theorem.
So if, if that was your choice, you know, for going out after
quantum theory, the, the, there's no reason for the, for
the privacy. Another one is to say, well, you
know, quantum theory is, is, is is in some sense deeper than

(01:27:36):
Markov theory. Markov theory is just these
linear matrices. It's not unitary.
It's, it's, it's not got these unitary operators and so forth.
And, and my answer is that's gotit just backwards.
The unitary operators emerge as the asymptotic description of
the Markov chains. The Markov chains give you
unitary operators if you want them as the asymptotic

(01:27:57):
description. But we have more, we have the
step by step description. So we can actually give you, if
you want, a hidden variables theory of quantum theory.
Quantum theory just gives you the asymptotic, we give you the
step by step. So in fact, what I'm doing can
be thought of as a hidden variables theory of, of quantum

(01:28:17):
theory and and then of course the, so the immediate objection
is well, well, then we have somesome very strict theorems about
that right there. You you can't have a local

(01:28:39):
hidden variables theory that's. Deterministic that's
measurement, I'll say measurement independent.
So this is Bell's theorem and then the Nobel Prize was
awarded, you know, just a few years ago for empirical

(01:29:00):
verifications of Bell's theorem and and SO11 can say Will
Hoffman, you know you just admitted you're doing a hidden
variable story. We those have been ruled out and
So what what are we up to here? The Nobel Prize has already been
handled out for showing you can't do what you're what you're
claiming to do. And and the answer is Bell's

(01:29:20):
theorem was fine, but it says that you can't have a local
hidden variables theory that is measurement independent and, and
and is also deterministic. Our theory is probabilistic.
It's not deterministic. It's not local in space and
time, and it is it's a theory ofobservers.
It's not measurement independent.
The whole thing is about measurement.

(01:29:42):
So, so none of the the assumptions that in Bell's serum
are being, you know, that that have to be violated to violate,
we violate all those assumptions.
So, you know, Bell's serum doesn't apply to us.
We're we're outside of Bell's scope.
So. So yeah.
Yeah. So look, I think that's a great

(01:30:02):
way to sort of give people a nice.
You've done a great job of giving people an overview of
this new version of it. One of the main things.
Let's move on to time, causalityand emergence for now, right?
One of the most one of the bolder claims in the updated
work is the reframing of causality as a user interface
construct. If cause and effect is not
fundamental. I'm hoping this can help fine

(01:30:24):
tune all the things you actuallyjust said already though.
If cause and effect is not fundamental, what actually
explains the orderly regularities of experience?
Right, right. So the issue that we have inside
space-time is if I, you know, take two things and, you know,

(01:30:51):
take this and hit that, I might make that thing move and and it
looks like one physical object is causing another physical
object to to change. And it's useful in tight inside
space and time to talk about oneobject causing another.

(01:31:12):
But for something to have causalpowers, it first must exist.
If you don't exist, how do you have causal powers?
And I, I want to say very, very clearly, one implication of this
theory is that space-time is just a headset.

(01:31:32):
Think of it like AVR headset. And the objects that you see in
space and time are merely icons that you perceive in the
headset. So think about like playing a
game like Grand Theft Auto and you have on then it's but it's
imagine it's an immersive version of multiplayer.

(01:31:54):
So I'm got a headset on. I see myself immersed in this
world. I see my steering wheel in front
of me. I see a red Ferrari over there.
And I mean, someone from Japan is driving the red Ferrari and
someone from, from, you know, Vienna is driving a, you know,
some other car over there. If I look what's literally going

(01:32:17):
on, there's some supercomputer somewhere there's, and if I look
in the supercomputer, there's nored Ferrari.
And, and there's no steering wheel.
There's just bits in a computer.There's circuits and software.
And that's, that's there's nothing red.
These red Ferrari that I see does not exist unless I look and

(01:32:40):
perceive it. Then all I it exists in my
conscious experience. I have an experience of a red
Ferrari, but there is no real red Ferrari.
Now when that red Ferrari crashes into a telephone pole
and knocks a telephone pole overin Grand Theft Auto, it might
look like the red Ferrari causedthe telephone pole to fall over.

(01:33:01):
Looks like A cause and effect thing.
And that's a useful fiction inside the Grand Theft Auto
game, a very useful fiction. But in fact, it's just a
fiction. There is no causality.
There is no red Ferrari to beginwith, and it did not cause a
telephone pole to fall over. What in this metaphor, what
happened was some bits, there's a sequence of millions of bits

(01:33:22):
being, you know, or voltages being toggled into some very
specific order in a computer andhas to be exactly that red word.
And I perceive that as a red Ferrari hitting a telephone pole
and causing it to fall over. But that's a fiction.
And what I'm saying is all casesinside space and time where I

(01:33:42):
think one physical object is causing something to happen is a
useful fiction. Well, it's a fiction.
Hopefully it's useful. But it those are all fictions,
those objects don't exist when they're not perceived in this.
So I'll be very, very clear. The moon does not exist when
it's not perceived another to be, you know, just to make this

(01:34:07):
very, very clear right now, I have no neurons period.
There are there are there aren'tno neurons or in Hoffman's head.
And people might say now I believe you, but neurons are not
are causing none of my experiences.
I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I I've I've been involved in

(01:34:29):
fMRI and EEG study. I love neuroscience.
I love studying brains. I think neurons do not exist
when they're not perceived. But I think when I look inside
brains, I see them. That's the symbol my user
interface gives me. So that's what I have to study.
I have to study those symbols. But I take them seriously.

(01:34:49):
I do neuroscience. I do not take them literally.
The fact that I do neuroscience and take the neurons seriously
does not mean that I'm taken in and believe that they're
literally real and have real causal powers.
No, this is a headset representation of something
going on entirely outside of space-time entirely.
So causation inside space-time is in every case without

(01:35:14):
exception of fiction. Yeah, in some cases it's a
useful fiction. In other cases it's a mistake.
And, and we've covered and we'vecovered this quite intensely.
I think in the first, our first conversation together, you went
quite in depth on this. The reason why I'm, I'm sort of
bringing this up a little bit soyou can build towards the next
few things is one of the things I wanted to ask is then from

(01:35:34):
cause, causation to emergence. When we think of conscious
realism, when we think about emergency in the physical sense,
we look at it from OK, from subatomic particles all the way
up to consciousness. Take us on the reverse.
What is emergence like from a conscious realism perspective?
All right, so, so right, The standard view is in some sense

(01:35:57):
you go from the micro physical to the macroscopic, right.
And the, the way the philosopherwas talked about is super Venus
that the the, the larger scale thing supervene on the smaller,
they're dependent on the smaller.
So ultimately, you know, it's, it's the elementary particles of
the standard model of physics, The, the the bosons, leptons and

(01:36:21):
quarks. They're the fundamental thing.
They build up atoms and atoms build up molecules and molecules
build up biology and they build up us and, and and so forth.
So there's this whole emergence of, of, of things from the, the
fundamental thing, the, the point of view that comes out of
this is to say that whole emergent theory is wrong.

(01:36:47):
Because by the way, in that emergent approach, what what
ultimately happens is if for physicalist theories, eventually
we get to the place where we have brains.
And then brains, if they have the right, say, causal or
functional properties give rise to consciousness, right?
Maybe they have the right integrated information,
maximally integrated cause effect structures, or they might

(01:37:12):
have the right quantum collapsesof microtubule states or
whatever. It might be the right attention
schema. Of course, they're they don't
believe in consciousness, but but anyway, so somehow in the
physical theories that take consciousness is real
consciousness emerges or is an illusion, but, but the but it's

(01:37:35):
an emergent illusion from from aphysical reality.
And and I'm saying that that whole approach is, is wrong.
There, there is no emergence. And in fact, it's not, this is
actually coming now very interesting from philosophers in
the foundations of physics saying this very, very similar

(01:37:59):
thing. It turns out there's an issue in
physics that they call the problem of fine tuning.
There's certain parameters at a small scale that have to be
adjusted just right for things to be happening properly at at a
higher scale. So there's and, and, and this is
a big puzzle. And, and so some philosophers

(01:38:22):
and the foundations of physics, for example, Professor Emily
Adlam at Chapman University in, in, in Southern California, is
this talking about these all at once theories where maybe
there's some top level constraint.
And, and I guess it would be very much like, you know,

(01:38:45):
Leibniz's idea of a pre established harmony, but it's at
a higher scale. And then as you look at this,
the higher scale then dictates everything at smaller and
smaller scale. So this is just the opposite
direction. Instead of saying we start with
the bosons, leptons and quarks at the micro physical level and

(01:39:05):
we build up atoms and molecules and biology and brains and
consciousness, this is saying, no, we're going to start at the
top. And so everything like Leibniz
said is going to be a pre established harmony from from
the top. And that's what the that's the
interesting thing is that the trace logic does that.

(01:39:26):
It says there is this top matrix.
And as you look at the traces, you get the pre established
harmony. I view, by the way, I view each
matrix as corresponding to a different conscious agent, a
different conscious. So all the conscious observers,
though, are coherent, at least in, in this Boolean logic part

(01:39:51):
of the truth when we go from oneBoolean logic to another.
I haven't done my math yet, so Ican't.
So that's the that's open territory.
I'm looking forward to exploringit.
But right now my hands are full with the Boolean logic and
getting space-time. But then I want to step out of
that and look at what these other things might be if my

(01:40:11):
brain is up to it. We'll see if my brain is up to
it. That's that's.
But but it is, it's a good pointto him because instead of having
the bottom up approach where we're just trying to build stuff
higher and higher and then we have the fine tuning problem in
physics and so forth. We take the Leibniz approach and
say there's a pre established harmony, there's a big matrix at
the top and then the monads havethe pre established harmony.

(01:40:33):
So all the traces come out of that.
And so in the foundations of physics, you know, I found it
striking. It was just in the last couple
weeks that I've read Professor Adlam's paper on on or, or
actually, I saw her on Kurt J Mungo's podcast actually as
well, talking about this, this very thing of, of getting the,

(01:40:54):
the constraints the other way, the fine tuning constraints top
down. Brilliant idea.
And I realized, oh, that fits right in with the trace logic.
Exactly. The reason why I asked these two
questions are done is because itallows you to set up this
headset one more time just for anyone who was was too lazy to
go watch the the other three episodes.
But you've often when when we look back at the past, you've

(01:41:15):
described space-time as a headset and but this new version
of thinking changes things a little bit.
So it's sort of suggests that time itself may arise from the
structure of traces, not the structure of the interface.
Does this mean that the true arrow of time is internal to
consciousness? Oh, right, yeah, the arrow of

(01:41:39):
time is an interesting issue in this.
For example, if I start with if my top matrix that I'm taking
the traces, if I started in a stationary measure, then in some
sense there's a a notion which it doesn't really evolve it it
it's it's it's sort of timeless.It's this the and so there's no

(01:42:06):
arrow of time for it and there'sno increasing it.
It doesn't have to have an entropy increase, but as soon as
you, I'll put it this way, as soon as you do conditional
probabilities on it, you will get an entropy increase.

(01:42:27):
Now I have to look at the the there's a question when I take a
if I start the initial. So this is a technical question.
If I start the initial top one in a stationary measure, will
the, I guess the all the traces will also be in their stationary
measures as well? Because they're, they the

(01:42:49):
theorem I mentioned earlier. So I guess all the the traces
themselves will already be stationary.
Very, very interesting. So, so there is a, a sense in
which there is you don't have tohave very, very, you don't have
to have an increasing entropy. Now, when we do the, The Big
Bang stuff that we were talking about earlier, right?

(01:43:11):
So the, with The Big Bang, we'redoing a sample trace now.
I think we'll get an evolution of matrices and we'll, and
we'll, we'll, we'll get something that looks like an
evolution of an increasing of entropy, right.
So so that so that may actually be the entropy may actually be a
function of the the actual sample tracing process.

(01:43:35):
Look, Don, when you look at the within the new formalism around
conscious agents networks, this manuscript tightens that
formalism a bit. What technical obstacles have
been most difficult in building a mathematically sound universal
model of interacting agents? Well.

(01:44:02):
One is to ask what, what is thisnetwork, right.
So the way we were thinking about before was we'd have this
definition of an agent, but there would be some network of
agents and it was it was a real question about how do we and
then Chaiton really was worried about this quite a bit as a
mathematician trying to get a clean formalism of what that
network would look like, right. We, we, we could of course

(01:44:24):
easily write down simple little networks.
That's not a not a problem. But if we're trying to get like
a comprehensive network, what would that look like?
And I would say that if I start with one of these big matrices
and the trace logic and look at all the agents that come out of
the that trace logic, then then we get a nice coherent set of

(01:44:47):
agents. When I look at the incompatible
matrices and all their Boolean logics, then it's there is there
is a mathematical structure and we haven't yet understood it
yet. So so we we we we understand the
partial order. So it's one thing to know the

(01:45:07):
definition of the partial order.We have that in this a partial
order and we know that has localbullying lot.
But to know more about the global structure, the non
boolean global structure, I don't think Shaitan and I really
understand. I think that's a big, big, fun
open problem, well above my pay grade, maybe not above Chaitons,

(01:45:31):
but it's a, it's a, a real, I think a serious challenge for
him and I'm sure he would welcome some help.
So, so actually on that, I, I don't know the answer.
What it does say to me is, is itis infinitely complex.
It's infinitely complex because there's an infinite number of
infinite dimensional matrices. Literally, there's an infinite

(01:45:53):
number of quote, UN quote, top infinite dimensional matrices,
and under each of them is this infinite boolean sub logic.
So I have not wrapped my. I'm not even close to wrapping
my head around that kind of complexity.
But but for each, for, there'll be headsets for all of that
complexity, all of it. I'm having a hard time just

(01:46:17):
wrapping my head around the other headsets inside this, our
little one Boolean sub logic. I'm sure there are
mathematicians out there who canrun circles around us right now
with, with this, they, they could see the, the partial order
and go you, you, you adults. This is, you know, here's here's
what the, the, the bigger structure is and, and here's how
you I'm sure there are mathematicians who could do

(01:46:39):
that. I'm not one of them but but.
From a mathematical perspective,how close do you guys, how close
are you guys to defining a mathematical measure of
conscious richness or agent capacity?
Something like Phi, but groundedin conscious agents rather than
physical information and structures.

(01:47:01):
Well, we could of course have a measure of the complexity of the
consciousness in terms of at a minimum the number of
experiences that they have, but then also a measure of
complexity of the of the of the Markov kernel, the transition
probability. For that, we would have, for

(01:47:22):
example, the same tools available to us that Snowy and
Coke are using for, you know, talking about integrated
information in, in, in their theory.
But they're the, their idea is very, very different from from
ours. And so I need to really spell
out where we both use Markov matrices.

(01:47:46):
We use them in very, very different ways and for very
different purposes. For for us, the markup matrix is
a mathematical representation ofconscious experiences.
Period. Conscious experiences are
fundamental. There is no substrate.
Conscious experiences have no substrate that they're emerging

(01:48:11):
from that that were mathematics.So it's not like we're we have
some other substrate, Unconscious experiences are
emerging from that substrate andwe have to write down the
mathematics by which they emergefrom that substrate.
If you have this kind of kind ofcomplexity, then you get this
conscious screen. No, I'm using Markov matrix.
And so we're saying, grant me that there are a red, green and

(01:48:33):
blue experiences and grant me that there is a probability if I
see rednecks that I'll see greennext and so forth.
Then I will write down a transition probability matrix to
describe that reality. So that's, that's my assumption.
That's why I'm asking you to grant me where do conscious
experiences come from? That's where my theory stops.

(01:48:54):
That's my magic, right? Every, every scientific theory
has magic. I start with conscious
experiences, but I promise to give you space-time, all of
space-time. I promise to give you quantum
mechanics, general relativity, the whole bit, or I'm wrong.
Also, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection
has to come out as a projection of this in so, so it's, you

(01:49:17):
know, now what's going on with Tononi and Cohen in integrated
information theory is very, verydifferent.
They're they're saying there is some substrate, typically
physical. I think they would say that Mike
doesn't have necessarily be physical, but I don't know what
else they'd suggest. So a physical substrate and if

(01:49:40):
that substrate has certain kind of cause effect structure, a
maximally integrated cause effect structure, then and only
then does conscious experience appear.
OK. And so you can see the
philosophies are very, very different.

(01:50:02):
I'm not trying to give you a structure that will then talk
about the when a 'cause, you know, a conscious experience
appears. I'm saying consciousness is
fundamental In my own take on again, integrated information
theory. If they, if we take them
seriously what they're proposing, then they're saying

(01:50:24):
for every experience there is a matrix, there's a Markov matrix
and or a class of matrices. So maybe it's not a single
matrix. Maybe there's a class of
matrices, which is the experience of the green at, you
know, wavelength. So, you know, 555 or whatever it
might be. OK, So for or for you, for the

(01:50:47):
molecule that's at the heart of mint, that molecule, the
experience of the taste of that molecule is this matrix or this
class of matrices. So what, what they've set
themselves up, what they've chosen to do is to say we owe
you for each experience, a matrix, the matrix which is the

(01:51:10):
maximal cause effect. That's what we owe you, or a
class of matrices. And when you ask, OK, well,
well, great, that's what you said you want to do.
So what are the matrices so meant or whatever, you know,
give me a matrix and they can't do it.
They'll talk about space-time, but they haven't actually given
a matrix. They when they say, well, we got

(01:51:30):
a theory of space-time, really. So if you're going to give me a
matrix, it has a certain number of states.
So is it 1000 by 1000 or 1,000,000 by 1,000,000 or 543 by
540? How many states are in it?
And if it's, you know, 543 by 543, there's 543 ^2 entries in
the matrix. What are each of those 543 ^2

(01:51:55):
entries? What are the numbers?
And why are those the numbers that the to meant?
That's what they're saying they want to do.
So I'm just pointing out I didn't ask them to do this.
No one said they had to do this.They're saying this is our
theory. And so, so then I say, OK, for
me to evaluate it, you need to give me the 500, Say it's a 500

(01:52:18):
thing. Why is it 500 by 500?
What are the 500 ^2 numbers? Why do they have to be exactly
the values they are? Why are they and why and, and
then how does that connect with the taste of mint?
Good luck. Good luck.
Yeah, this isn't difficult. It's not going to happen.
It's just not going to happen or.

(01:52:39):
Disaster. Almost.
That that's right. And it's the same thing with the
the quantum collapse of microtubules, orchestrated
collapse, right? So again, no one put a gun to
their head and said you have to do this.
But they're saying what we owe you is we'll show you for each
experience and a set of microtubules in a particular

(01:53:03):
quantum state and we'll give youa particular orchestrated
collapse and that is the experience.
Wow. OK, if that's what you want to
do. So which ones can you do?
Show me the microtubule configuration, the quantum state
and and the collapse. And that has to be meant.
Holy smoke. And why is that meant?

(01:53:23):
You can see where we are here. It's now what's interesting to
me is the state of play in this field.
And by the way, let me be fair. These are my friends and
colleagues. I love them.
They're brilliant. These are brilliant, really
brilliant people. There's nothing personal in

(01:53:45):
this. This is just about theory.
They if it could be done, they would do it.
They're brilliant. And and the reason they're stuck
in the physicals framework is that we've inherited that mean
that's we were raised in it. We have to be the generation
that steps beyond physicalism and we're learning the hard way
that as smart as you are, you can't be smart enough to solve

(01:54:07):
the problem in a physical framework.
It just won't work. We actually have to let go of
physicalism that that horse has had its ride.
It's time for a new horse. So, so we have to to just step,
step aside. What's, what's going on here is
the theories are starting with something in space and time and

(01:54:33):
trying to boot up consciousness and, and they haven't been able
to do it. And if I, if I said to you,
look, I've got a theory of particle physics, a brand new
theory of particle physics. Oh, really?
Oh, wow. So what, what specific particle
interactions? Can you, can you model like
quark gluon interactions or, youknow, electron photon?

(01:54:57):
What? Oh, no, no, I can't give you any
specific interaction. I've just got a new general
theory of particle interactions.Well, you'd say, well, come back
when you've got something specific to say.
And that's where we are in conscious.
I've got a theory of consciousness.
Oh, really? OK, I've got a theory of you've

(01:55:19):
got a theory of conscious experience.
OK, well, give me what? What's your theory of men?
Well, I can't give you any specific conscious experience.
Well, well, well, maybe come back when you've got something.
But what they'll say, well, we can give you the neural
correlates or some kind of physical correlates and we can
predict correlates of conscious experience.
And here's why I'm not impressedwith that.

(01:55:45):
And by the way, that's where allthe research is right now.
So the, the adversarial collaborations are not about,
we're going to see if your theory of mint is right or my
theory of mint is right. Is, is, can I predict an area of
the brain that's going to have more activity than you can, and
you're going to predict generator of the brain that

(01:56:05):
might be correlated with certainkinds of.
So this is that that's, that's where we, we are right now in,
in this kind of thing. And I'm not impressed with that
in the least. If I, for example, we're on a
zoom screen right now and I, I see a bunch of pixels on the
screen and pixels are just pixeled.
Some are pixels of Tevin's face and some are pixels of a wall.

(01:56:29):
And I say, you know, I can give you the pixel correlates of
consciousness. And there are, these are the
pixels. And I can, I could probably
write down some dynamical things.
There's motions in the Tavern pixels that aren't happening in
the wall pixels or the guitar pixels or the book pixels,
right. And, and so I, I could write
down and, and and above average predict which pixels are

(01:56:53):
corresponding to, to consciousness in that way.
Should I be impressed? Not at all.
There's the, the, the fact that there are correlations between
pixels and and and Tevin's consciousness.
And I think that kept Tevin is conscious, but the, the, the
pixel correlates of Tevin's consciousness are irrelevant to
Tevin's kind. And they certainly Tevin's

(01:57:15):
consciousness doesn't emerge andis not caused by those.
Those correlate. There's, there's, there's,
there's no beef there. The neural correlates of
consciousness are very interesting in one sense because
that's the only data we have. I'm under cognitive
neuroscientist. I am all for studying the neural

(01:57:37):
correlates of consciousness. We have to get our data.
If we think that neural activityis causing conscious
experiences. We've made a fundamental error.
Neurons do not exist when they're not perceived.
Neurons have no causal powers whatsoever.
They have no functional properties whatsoever.

(01:57:59):
Neurons cannot cause conscious experiences because they do not
exist independent of consciousness.
That is as clear a statement as I can make of the difference
between my approach and almost all of my colleagues.
Neurons don't exist when they'renot perceived.
They cause no conscious experiences, Period.

(01:58:20):
That's. And I mean, already we've seen
an expensive bottle of wine being given away because pretty
much the neurocholids have not been found.
They, they, they've not worked out and, and again, these are my
friends, in many cases good friends and, and colleagues,
many of I've known for decades and they're, they're brilliant.

(01:58:47):
And I guess the field just has to go through where we have our
brilliant people really proving that this way won't work.
Yeah, I think it's, it's one of those cases done where the
epistemology is important. We need to know all these
things. So studying the neural
correlates as you said is fundamental.
It's very important. It's going to help us in many
ways, absolutely. But it shouldn't be mistaken for

(01:59:09):
the ontology and and trying to figure out this deepest
structural layer of reality is something that is for different
people to explore, but is also important.
And I think one should, one shouldn't see it as, oh, we
think one's more important than the other, but.
This is the data that we have, right?
I, I agree. Yeah.

(01:59:29):
So neural activity is very important data as some of the
most important data that we have.
We have to use the data that we've got and we have to be
creative and and make the creative leaps that go beyond
that data. Yeah, in the recent work, Don.
So again going back to this paper and there's a shift so

(01:59:49):
from discrete to more continuousmodels of agency, is
consciousness better model then via discrete entities or
continuous fields of agency? That's the interesting question,
right. I'll say that I don't know.
Right now we're working on discrete models and that's

(02:00:09):
partly just because of Hoffman'slack of mathematical skills.
And it's a little bit easier in some ways to, to work in the
discrete case. And I think that, you know,
it's, it's easier to start there.
I'm open to the idea of a continuum.
There are Markov chains in the continuous case.
So we mark. So the Markov formalism is

(02:00:31):
easily able to go there. Well, they're Hoffman's ready to
go. There is a different story.
And I think Chaiton has got the tools to go there.
I would have to think out-of-the-box.
So I would say my guess is I don't see an obstruction to
going to the continuous case. My only obstruction is I've got

(02:00:51):
to learn more math. You know, I've got to really
boot up on, on learning the continuum case, Markov chain
chains stuff. So that's just a Hoffman
problems. I don't think it's a, it's a
deep technical problem. So, so and who knows, it might
even go deeper. I mean, Cantor's hierarchy

(02:01:12):
doesn't stop with Alf 1, so I mean I don't know what tools we
might develop to go even to higher levels of Infinity beyond
Alf 1's. And this sets us up for the next
for this next section on that focuses more on objective hood,
on objective, sorry, identity and the self in conscious

(02:01:33):
realism. So a striking thread in your
newer work is that the self may be just another interface
construction, not a fundamental agent.
Yeah. Has your understanding of the
self changed since then? And what does it imply for
personal identity? That's a.
That's a really interesting question because the trace logic

(02:01:54):
does really give a new wrinkle on this this whole thing.
Yeah, that's, that's what I, that's what I felt while reading
it. It was that there's, there's a
whole new shift here. Philosophically, theoretically,
it's it's interesting. It, it, it is and it, and it
really what the, the spiritual traditions have been saying for
thousands of years is really it's coming.

(02:02:17):
The trace logic, it agrees. It says that there is one
source, right? They, they may say and, and
we're all just in some sense perspectives on the source.
And that's what the trace logic is.
It's saying, give me a master matrix.
All the traces are perspectives on that master.

(02:02:40):
Now this is not quite going all the way to what the wisdom
traditions are saying word because they're they're going
beyond my one master to to even beyond that to all these the the
Infinity of masters. And then the source even
transcends that so so I'll againsay I agree that mathematics has
a limit and my math. So science has fundamental

(02:03:02):
limits. Nevertheless, within this
framework, it's pointing in the direction that the the wisdom
traditions have for thousands ofyears been saying that there is
this in some sense the one source looking at itself from a
lot of perspectives. And we get that with the trace,
the traces are different perspectives.
So what that means then is, you know, and I've actually been

(02:03:25):
dealing with this on a personal level, you know, just, OK, this
is not just abstract science. Now this is about consciousness.
I'm conscious, it is about me. This is this is and it's saying,
OK, I've been sort of identifiedwith this guy named Hoffman and,
and you know, and, and you know,he's got a certain height and
weight and he was born, he's gota certain family and all the

(02:03:47):
stuff and the career. But is that who I really AM?
And, and the answer has to be no, that's just a trace of who I
am. So that's, that's, I mean, this
is all fun stuff and I'm glad I'm doing it.
But in some sense to be identified with it is to miss
something far, far deeper. And that is there is an aspect

(02:04:10):
of me which is my, my conscious essence, which transcends my
name, my name. You changed my name.
Nothing really has changed. You could change my hair color,
you could change my height, you could change all sorts of
things. And, and it doesn't really
matter. What does matter is something

(02:04:34):
that transcends all that and andit can't be described if I ask
what it is all like the best thing I can do.
Well, so this is there's this isan interesting thing to to the
point of pointing to things. So, so one way to think about
this is we learn a lot of the meaning of words by what's

(02:04:57):
called a stents of definition, right?
So you take a child at the rightage, they're ready to learn
words and my mom might point andsay rabbit.
And at the right age, 18 months or so that the child can get
rabbit and they'll understand itwith just one or two points
they, they get. And that's learning by a sense
of definition. And it's amazing, if you think
about it, it's, it's miraculous.The child, you don't, you don't

(02:05:22):
give them a dissertation on the rabbit.
You all you do is point and say rabbit and and there's an
infinite number of hypotheses. It could be the color of the
fur, the texture of the fur, theleft ear and the right paw, the
the front tooth and and the rug that the there's an infinite
number of things that you could be referring to.
There's some pre established game between mom and dad and the

(02:05:46):
kid where at the right age at the right time, the kid knows
you're pointing. You're not, you're not going to
say mammal, you're not going to say quadruped, you're going to
say rabbit. There's the game is set up so
and, and, and the kid learns and, and and and they get it
right. Of course, I don't know what the
kid is experiencing because yourexperiences are different from

(02:06:08):
mine, but whatever, something worked and in the right context,
the kid will say rabbit and I will agree.
So that's by a sense of definition.
But now what am I? I mean, you can point and say
Hoffman, but but that's that's in some sense, yeah, that yeah,
yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, that's Hoffman.
But there. But there's something deeper
there. There is something deeper.

(02:06:30):
And and the only way I know how to point to that is, you know,
another kind of a sense of definition.
If I say, if I ask you to, to say, I wonder what my next
thought will be. And so just for I want to say

(02:06:52):
wait and see what your next thought is going to be anyway.
No. And then and then so there's a
but and then finally you have a thought, right?
There's some, some thought that empty space before you had the
thought. That's the best I can point to
who you are. That's my best sense to so the

(02:07:13):
best I can do. Just like when I have to point
and say rabbit, and I'll leave it up to you to get it because I
mean, if you can't see rabbit, there's nothing I can do.
But if, if you aren't, if the child is three months old and
you say rabbit, they can't get it, they're not equipped to get
rabbit. And if I do it with an Ant, if I
have an Ant there and I point tosay rabbit, they're not equipped

(02:07:35):
to do it either. So I can do all the pointing.
And I want to. You have to be equipped yourself
to get the ostensive definition.And the same thing is true here
about what I'm saying about you.All I can do is say what?
Wait and see what your next thought is going to be.
And in that gap, I can say I point to that and say whatever

(02:07:58):
you experienced there, that's the closest I can point to to
who you are. And I can't tell you what it is,
just like I can't tell the childwhat the rabbit is.
That's all I can do. So there's nothing more
mysterious about pointing to youas the source than there is to
me pointing to someone and saying rabbit, They're equally
mysterious because I don't know what's going on in you.

(02:08:21):
All I can do is point and leave the rest up to you and, and
assume that you've got it. So, so in that sense, I can say
that's who I am. And but that's, there's infinite
exploration there because I can go back into silence and spend
more and more time in silence. And even without concepts, it's

(02:08:41):
very, very deep. And in some sense, I you're face
to face with an intelligence that transcends anything that
you can talk about. And in fact, that's where I go
to get the creative ideas for myscience.
I I choose to go into silence. I do my homework, I do my study,
I do all this, my reading. But then when I want something

(02:09:05):
truly creative, I let it all go and go into silence.
And that's where the real creative.
Insights come from I think another good point to you then
would be pre birth, post death anesthesia.
Those are the elements of reality where the self tends to

(02:09:25):
disappear quite literally. Because if you think about it
anesthetic when you wake up there's literally a chunk of
time that's gone but for some reason you feel like nothing has
happened. You just wake up as if nothing
really had changed. And same thing in deep sleep
too. Every night, deep sleep, I I
disappear and then I reboot and then still seems like the same

(02:09:49):
Don that what happened. It was Don disappeared for a
while and then rebooted. And yeah, it's so it's and and
of course, in the framework thatI'm discussing, my body is just
an icon space and time is just aheadset.
So effectively what's what's happening is a conscious the one

(02:10:10):
is choosing to look at itself through this headset and then it
sets it aside for a little whileand then it puts the headset
back on and looks at itself fromthis perspective.
And so that's the best I can sayis that they're the ones, the
one, the source of all things for some reason wants look at

(02:10:34):
itself from an infinite number of perspectives.
There's and there that's a a deep, deep question I don't have
the answer to. It's it's it's it's John Wheeler
has a book. I've actually got it here, a
journey into gravity and space-time.

(02:10:56):
And the first one of the the first page with on it says
something like here it is. Truth is less than truth until
it is made known. And that's that's from John

(02:11:20):
Wheeler's book. And that I don't say, I'm not
saying it's the final answer to the question I just raised, but
it's an interesting perspective on why does the source need to
look at itself from an infinite number of perspectives.
It maybe Wheeler's idea that that is the very act of observer

(02:11:43):
participancy that creates the reality that's that's being
observed and, and the the sourceI'm I'm way over my pay grade
here. This is way over.
This is way over my pay grade. But but so now I don't have any
mathematics or anything to to gowith on this.

(02:12:04):
So I'll, I'll just, this is justintuition and not very good.
This is more in perspective speculations, but that's right.
But it looks like it has to be alot of perspective.
Yeah. When you look at do conscious
though, so I think it's important to touch on this
because it it leads to this nextquestion, which is do conscious
agents in this new ontology havepersistent identity or are

(02:12:28):
identities constructs emerging from temporary informational
partitions? Yeah, it looks to me like it's,
it's just a temporary construct that the the the personal
identity is ultimately there's just the one source and these

(02:12:54):
perspectives are compared to theone are are absolutely trivial.
But on the other hand, I am the one.
So, so it's, it's the Hoffman avatar in some sense that's
trivial. By the way, as complicated as
that avatar is, right? We have 86 billion neurons,
trillions of synapses. When we look, they're not there

(02:13:14):
when we don't look, but when we look, we see 86 billion neurons
and trillions. So it's, it's, it's incredibly
complicated. And yet this avatar is trivial
compared to the source. And when I look around, right
when I look around the, the world and I, I see the sun and I
see a tree and I see the complexity.

(02:13:35):
I'm making this all up on the fly, right?
This I'm not see in the physicalist framework.
I'm seeing a pre-existing world.I'm saying there is no
pre-existing physical world. This is a headset.
I'm rendering this stuff on the fly.
I see that beautiful rose, all the complexity of that beautiful
rose in the scent. That's how good you are.

(02:13:57):
You're making that up on the flyinstantly.
So, so you are stunning all the stuff you're making and it's
complete, it seems to you effortless completely.
I mean, I look over there, I seethis transcendent beauty.
I look at the ocean waves, I look at Mount Everest, I look up

(02:14:18):
at the moon, I look at galaxies.I'm making this stuff all up and
it's and it's and it's a piece of cake.
So so whatever I am completely transcends this this Hoffman
avatar and yet this avatar, whenI look at it is unbelievably so
in some sense, we're showing offthe the the source is just like

(02:14:41):
it is effortless. It's just plain showing off all
the time is universe is no problem on the fly.
It's just this so I so the Hoffman avatar, the, the, the,
the Tevin avatar. And these, these are these are
for 8090 years. Yeah, Yeah.

(02:15:01):
And then they're gone and that'sit.
Nothing's lost. I look through all that project
data. Last question on self, done on
selfhood. Are there degrees then of
selfhood that emerging agent networks similar to our
coherence emergence in quantum systems?
Well, there there is complexity of right?
So the fewer states I have the the less complexity that that's

(02:15:24):
possible. So there is a notion of
complexity, but but the the selfis very interesting.
Your question about selfhood anda lot of times see even a single
agent with only one state is fully conscious in in my theory
of that. So, so it's only so
consciousness is fundamental. It it transcends selfhood in

(02:15:45):
some sense. It's so there's a full, full
consciousness there. Selfhood is, is maybe, you know,
a consciousness of the process of experiencing consciousness
itself. There's some kind of reflexive
loop on it there, But but but even that reflexive loop is
trivial compared to the fundamental source.

(02:16:08):
Do you see that? Do you see that these selves as
something similar to what Benarda says is like these
dissociative altars of the fundamental conscious?
Very, very good point. Because you know, you know, I'm
good friends with Bernardo and, and you know, he's, he's an
idealist philosopher and, and, and I think the trace logic is

(02:16:30):
the logic of dissociation. It, it's so he, his, his
emphasis on dissociation, I think is the, the right
emphasis. And the way, at least in, in the
trace logic, the dissociation happens is by taking the trace.
And so we can also talk about now not only the dissociation,
but the recombining of, of consciousnesses.

(02:16:52):
Because the trace logic gives the, the not, not only it gives
the meat and the join of. So it's it's it's saying how all
these different consciousnesses can be interrelated and how
they're all ultimately just perspectives on the one.
Have have you chatted to Ronaldoabout this as he familiar with
this concept yet? I don't think I've talked with

(02:17:14):
him about the trace logic yet. I'd love to.
He's been, he's been quite busy with, with other stuff.
So I, yeah, he's, he's very busy, but, but I would love to,
to talk with him. And also I know he's now
interested in integrated information theory.
So I'd love to to have a little discussion about that because as
you can see, I'm I'm still not enamoured of it.
Yeah, I mean, I completely understand.

(02:17:36):
So it's, but I think, yeah, I think that's something that he
would really love because it it does fit perfectly with his
dissociated altars. I mean, it sounds very much the
same. Absolutely, absolutely.
We're on the very, very same page.
And, and in fact, I, I knew about his, the associated
altar's idea before I had the trace logic.
And almost as soon as I had the trace logic, I realized, oh,

(02:17:58):
this is, yeah, this is like the altar stuff that he's interested
in. Tell me, Don, when you when you
look at the future moving forward, does the updated theory
predict that advanced AIAGI, let's say, could instantiate
conscious agency? Or would artificial agents
always be subsets of a deeper agent network rather than

(02:18:21):
independent conscious entities? Great question that that sort of
helps get that the difference between what I'm doing and what
most people are are doing. So, so most most people think of
consciousness as somehow emerging.
So perhaps if we get a is that get complicated enough?

(02:18:42):
There'll be some kind of critical threshold that maybe
they'll get the right integratedinformation or whatever it might
be, some kind of correct properties that then they make
the transition to, to consciousness.
And there's been all sorts of ideas, different ideas about
what that would be integrated information theory and, and
others about what would, what would be the, the, the trick,

(02:19:05):
the global workspace structure, whatever it might be that will
do the trick. And my reply to that whole
approach is that nothing inside space-time exists when it's not
perceived. The computer that you're running

(02:19:27):
your AI software on does not exist when it's not perceived.
That computer itself resides in consciousness, period.
And so does the software. And so there's no notion of
consciousness emerging from software at all.
It is that that's that's just the wrong way of thinking about

(02:19:50):
it. Now, will we get more and more
useful kinds of AIS? Absolutely.
More and more quote and quote intelligent AIS more valuable
and helping us to do more tasks?AB Absolutely.
Will we get consciousness out ofit?
Absolutely not, because the AI itself is a model in a
consciousness already. That's that.

(02:20:11):
It's just the other way around. So the key point on this is to
understand that space-time is not fundamental.
No object in space-time exists unless it's perceived
consciously. Period.
So there's no way that consciousness emerges from
something. Now, should we try to build more
and more interesting AIS? Very much so.

(02:20:31):
And I'm very interested in usingthe trace logic to see how far
it can go to, to build more, more advanced.
I use AIS. They're very, very helpful while
I'm stuck in this headset. And AI is a useful tool And so,
so why not build them and have fun, fun with it.
But the the hope of getting an AI to the point where it's

(02:20:54):
conscious and actually emerges, free will emerges from it and so
forth, not, not going to happen.Now, does that mean that they
couldn't be dangerous? That's a different story.
Could they be dangerous is a different story.
I mean, when I deny that they'regoing to be conscious, it
doesn't mean that I'm denying that we need to be careful.
That's the different stories and.

(02:21:15):
Then tell me, Don, if let's say all conscious entities cease to
exist, what does that mean for this ontology?
So if every species that has anyelement of consciousness no
longer existed, mass extinction,does this actually even matter?
Or is this just the overall consciousness's way of just

(02:21:39):
retracting back into its original state?
Right. Well, yeah.
So this, that's a, that's a goodquestion because it reveals
another aspect of this whole theory.
The distinction that we make between living and non living
and between conscious and unconscious is an artefact of
the limits of our headset. So we tried, it's been a hard

(02:22:02):
task in science to try to definethe boundary between living and
non living, animate and inanimate.
Very, very lots of lots of theories put out there, lots of
arguments also between consciousand unconscious systems.
And that has as much chance of success as the distinction
between conscious and unconscious pixels on the zoom
screen that I talked about. Not going to happen for this.

(02:22:25):
Very embarrassing. Pixels are just pixels.
They're not conscious or unconscious.
So the distinction we make between living and non living,
conscious and unconscious is entirely illusory.
It's entirely an artifact of our, our, our interface, our
space-time interface is always interacting with consciousness.

(02:22:46):
Whatever I pick up a rock, I'm interacting with consciousness,
but my interface has to give up at some point because it is a
dumbing down. An interface is a dumbing down.
And at some point it says, you know, you're, you're dealing
right now with an infinite consciousness, but all I'm going
to show you is this dumb rock. That's all you get to see that
because I mean this, this is just a headset.

(02:23:06):
So where you know, there's the, the old question about, you
know, the aliens, where are they?
Where are they? And the, my answer is they're
all around us. You pick up a rock, you're,
you're interacting with consciousness, the utterly alien

(02:23:27):
forms of consciousness. You can't see them because your
headset doesn't allow you to experience them.
They're all all around us. So, so I should say something
very, be very, very clear. This is it's not a kind of thing
that says, you know, there's a kind of mystical consciousness

(02:23:48):
inside the rock. I'm not saying that the the rock
has nothing inside. The rock is something I make up
when I look. The rock doesn't even exist when
I'm not there. So I'm not saying there's a rock
and it's got this kind. The rock is a symbol that I
create, and that symbol itself is so profoundly simple that it

(02:24:09):
doesn't really reveal to me anything about the consciousness
that I'm interacting with. So it's.
Yeah, if. OK, so if space sum is an icon
system tuned for survival, what governs the diversity of
possible icon systems? Are they laws of interface
design at the level of consciousagents?

(02:24:31):
Yeah, that's, that's a really wonderful question because you
inside the interface inside space-time.
Darwin's theory of evolution does a pretty good job of of, of
answering that question in inside the headset.
But ultimately I, I want to stepoutside the headset and look at
the evolution of dynamics in this Markovian sense and look at

(02:24:57):
its trace and show. So this is so effectively what
you're posing is a challenge that I agree has to be met by my
framework. The challenge is I have to show
ultimately that I can find a master matrix and a trace or a

(02:25:19):
sequence of traces that looks like Darwin's theory of
evolution and see the evolution of.
So I talked about The Big Bang, right?
I talked earlier, we talked about how I could get The Big
Bang and, and get it growing by the commute times and so forth.
But that would just be the firstpart of that simulation.
The simulation would then have to ultimately show how I could

(02:25:39):
get all the galaxies forming andthen something like planet Earth
and then show how the headset could finally, finally lead to
things like organisms and, and, and have it look like nature
read in truth and cloth fighting, competing and and so
forth. So absolutely, that all has to,

(02:26:02):
to come out of this. And so there's absolute job
security and pursuing this work.There's a lot of work ahead.
Lots of work to be done. Yeah, lots of work, but that's a
good one that that's and it's one I'm really interested in
because I love Darwin's theory and I'd love to see how it comes

(02:26:24):
out. So notice this is very, very
different than than someone who who just trashes Darwin's theory
and says it's it's wrong. And, and I don't like it for,
for often for spirit like Christian, certain Christian
groups will, will do this. They will, they'll, they'll,

(02:26:46):
they'll run roughshod over the theory and, and they'll ignore
the every scientific theory has its limitation.
But so there are things it's notgoing to get right.
But what Darwin does, it gets a lot right and evolutionary game
theory gets a lot right. And of course there's going to
be it doesn't get everything, but we should really enjoy and
appreciate how much it's gotten right.

(02:27:09):
And then of course, then do the hard no stuff about OK, here's
here's the limits. But but seeing the limit.
But there's new there's limits to Newton's theory.
Absolutely it we will not give you a lot of stuff that we we
will do any quantum stuff for. It won't give you chemistry.
Do we now look at Newton's theory and, and, you know,

(02:27:30):
thumbs down. And we, we look in awe at
Newton's theory. We're grateful for what it did.
We're now mindful of its limitations and we're moving on.
And the same thing is true of Darwin.
Of course there will be limitations to the theory.
So, and we should, but it's it. But the attitude of that is it's
all, all garbage. No, no, no, no, no, no.

(02:27:52):
It's brilliant. And it's just a stepping stone.
But it was a brilliant stepping stone.
And Don, when you look back prior to this, these this recent
work and you think of things like multiverse, many worlds,
theories in physics. And now when you look at what
you've done and how it shows that there's these multiple

(02:28:12):
universes grounded in this deeper agent dynamics.
Does it give you a new found respect for those theories?
Or how? How have you perceived it over
time? Well, it's, it, it's, it's, it's
interesting. The I'm of course glad for and,
and, and in all of the intelligence of the people who

(02:28:35):
are, are coming up with these theories.
It's, it's, they really have to know their quantum theory and
then they have to think out-of-the-box.
So they're, they're smart, creative people.
That being said, of course, it'sour job as scientists to find
the problems and, and comment them and try to move forward.
I, I think that on the upside, the multiverse is thinking
out-of-the-box and is saying that there could be things

(02:28:57):
utterly different than what we're experiencing right now and
we should open up our imagination.
And I on that point, I agree. On the other hand, the, the way
that it, it comes out, at least in like the effort
interpretation of, of quantum mechanics, right?
Where for every possible branching, every observation,
there's a branch point and you have a new universe coming,

(02:29:20):
coming out. I, I think that to solve that
problem, I think the ever interpretation is, is logically
incoherent. I, I so, so, so you can see.
So on the one hand, I'm praisingit.
It's a brilliant idea, brilliantthinking out-of-the-box.
And I think correctly saying that there's more than the kind

(02:29:42):
of universe that we're experiencing right now.
All good. This particular approach though
has technical epistemological problems with it.
I think that that you can't get the probabilities right.
Which universe am I in? You're answering question about
if every time Hoffa makes a decision, there's an infinite
number of universes that branch out for all the possible

(02:30:04):
outcomes that from the quantum state, which one am I in?
And you try to do probabilities coherently and that I don't
think you can do it. I think that that you that for
technical reasons that will not work.
So, so others I will fault again, not for their lack of
brilliant, they're brilliant. But I think that if, if you

(02:30:25):
stick in a physicalist framework, then you're missing
the big picture. If you're, if you're, if you're
cosmology is stuck in a physicalist framework, you're
you're stuck. Yeah, I think.
And that's a perfect way to get us into this meta framework
slash metaphysics and implications.

(02:30:46):
And when you look back, so you've got ITP moves on to
conscious realism, conscious agents theory, now traces of
consciousness, a trace logic altogether.
How do you see this as a metaphysical proposal?
Do you think of it as a altogether as a descriptive
theory, a generative principle, or something closer to a

(02:31:06):
mathematical cosmology at this point?
Well, the, the way I look at it is it's in there's several ways
to think about what this whole thing is, is doing in in one
sense, I can view it as a natural next step beyond our
space-time science. So science I, I, I think has a

(02:31:32):
natural evolution in which, if you look back at our history,
the spiritual traditions were, were saying that there's
something far beyond space-time physics, but they didn't have
mathematical tools to, to, to really tell us what and to, to.
And we had, of course, the, the church and, and, and the, the,

(02:31:58):
that the birth of science and, and and and so forth.
Some problems there. And so science went its own
separate way. We, we started with mathematics.
We had to sort of make a clean break with religious traditions,
which were based on, you know, authority and claims of miracles

(02:32:20):
and and so forth. And we just had to, to walk away
and for, for centuries and, and say, no, thank you.
We will start with, we'll have to, we'll go with physicalism.
We'll start with mathematics andwe'll see.
And, and we got to the point where we built all these tools,
but then we got to the point where we realized our theories

(02:32:41):
tell us that space-time can't befundamental.
And so, oh, the spiritual traditions were right.
They were right all along about that space-time isn't fun, but
we now have tools. We've been studying our headset.
We thought the headset was the whole universe.
We thought it was the ultimate nature of reality.
It we just, we discovered we were just studying our headset.

(02:33:05):
The spiritual traditions have been outside the headset saying
there's much more outside the headset.
We're now ready as a species to take off the headset, you know,
theoretically in terms of our theory and step out there.
But now we have new tools that the spiritual traditions didn't
have. So, so in that sense, I see

(02:33:25):
this, it could be, there could be a rapprochement now between
the, the two, the, the spiritualtraditions and, and the new
hard, new science that is takingoff the headset.
What the spiritual traditions will find is that they had some

(02:33:47):
deep insights that are, I think,genuine.
And then they had a lot of gobbledygook, a lot of nonsense
that we will show is nonsense. And that'll be hard to take.
It'll be, it's very, very hard when you've been dogmatic for
centuries about certain things to have it shown without doubt
to be wrong and other parts shown to be confirmed.

(02:34:12):
So it's going to be not an easy thing, but I think it's an
interesting step forward. So I see this as in that
context, this framework, the trace logic and this whole thing
is a natural next evolution of science going outside of the, of
the headset. But but now from a bigger
picture, from the, from the point of view of the of the one

(02:34:35):
and consciousness being fundamental, just starting
there. Now from that point of view, I
view the work that I'm doing with my colleagues as a tiny
baby step, right? This is now, I mean, at least
it's, it's in the ball game where consciousness is
fundamental, but there's an infinite number of steps.
So I'm 0% of the way, literally 0% of the way in understanding

(02:35:00):
the source and and its nature. And ultimately it transcends the
source. But but what's interesting, if
you want to know the source anyway, sit in silence, let go
of all thought, sit in silence and you can know the source not
as you know something outside ofyou, but by knowing yourself,

(02:35:22):
you, you are not separate from it.
So letting go of any duality whatsoever and being with
yourself with no veil of concepts whatsoever.
And so I, I do both. I, I spend my time studying my
mathematics, studying the science, being really hard
nosed, really getting it right. So precise concepts, absolutely

(02:35:43):
precise concepts, no messing around, precision and then zero
concepts, absolute no concepts. And that's where the true
intelligence comes and then go back to the, so the, the,
there's this interplay that I don't understand yet, but it's
really essential to the nature of reality.

(02:36:05):
Absolute silence, complete transcend concept and then back
into the realm. But when you get back into the
realm of concept, then precisionturns out to be critical.
And when you're not precise, we see the history of what happens.

(02:36:26):
We get dogmatism, we get one religion persecuting another, we
get people killing each other, all in the name of God.
And so this is just a baby step.Outside of all of that, it's

(02:36:49):
just a baby step. And and Donna, this point, what
have you perhaps thought of, is there a different name to all of
this or are you going to stick with conscious realism as the
overall name for this approach? Right right now, conscious
realism, partly because a lot ofpeople have, you know, unfairly

(02:37:15):
said that idealism is versus realism.
So there's an idealist theories and we, when we want to be
realist and I, and I want to saythat you can be, you can make
the claim that consciousness is real and have a science based on
the idea that consciousness is, is real.
So I, I decided that I, I, I, I couldn't just say it was an

(02:37:36):
idealist theory. I mean, I'm, I'm good friends
with Bernardo and he, he, he, he's, he's using idealism of
some kind with his, his stuff. And I, I'm perfectly fine with
that. And he's a philosopher and I'm
not. So I mean, I respect on
philosophical stuff. I, I, I defer to Bernardo
completely and on many technicalthings, he's got technical chops

(02:37:58):
as well. So, but I, I just chose
conscious realism because I really wanted the word realism
in there to, to, to say this is,this is we're going to be doing
some real mathematics on something that I take to, to be
real, but it's not a physical system.
But to, to be non physical doesn't mean you're not real.
It's perfectly real. In fact, I think the physical
stuff, if anything is illusory. It's the physical.

(02:38:20):
It only exists when you perceiveit, and otherwise it's not even
there. Yeah.
And I think within, even if it is a quote, UN quote idealist
theory, it's it still can be itsown subgroup of a different
version. And it needs a name because most
of the time if it wants to stickas a philosophy, you want that
that uniqueness. That that that's right.
And there are other versions of idealism that would be sort of

(02:38:42):
incompatible with this, you know, in terms of specifics, not
not broadly, but in specifics. No, definitely.
And then so Don if idealism, I'msorry.
If conscious realism is correct,what do you think is the single
most surprising implication for human life?
For meaning, death, suffering, creativity, spirituality, or
love? Well, what's what's really

(02:39:07):
surprising is you. If this is right, you are the
infinite source. You are choosing to have been
fooled all of your life into thinking you're just Don or

(02:39:30):
Tevin or Sam or Sally or you puton a headset and you let
yourself be fooled. You let yourself be wrapped up
and you got lost in the game and, and, but, but you chose for
some reason, you are the infinite choosing to get so

(02:39:51):
identified with the avatar that it lets itself get lost in it
and then slowly wake up to who you really are.
That's so for me, the big surprise and the thing I I, I
don't understand. Yet is why it's necessary, it

(02:40:13):
seems, to get lost in the avatar, not not not only to have
an avatar, but to not only to take our perspective, but to get
lost in the perspective, to completely identify with the
perspective and then slowly and often painfully wake up from
that. And for a lot of us, you know,

(02:40:34):
it's, it's through an addiction,a crisis, a tragedy that we wake
up or we spend our entire life, you know, as a workaholic and
then look back and, and I just wasted 50 years.
And why did I do that? You know, because now I'm facing
death and I look back. And that's like the 50 years.

(02:40:57):
Why was I beating myself? Well, what, what, what?
So we get completely lost in it.And yet we, we are the infinite.
We are ultimately love and oftenwe don't wake up to it, so
that's why that's part of the one.
Knowing itself is very, very interesting to me.

(02:41:19):
Why that seems to be so. That's the big surprise for me.
It's not about something in the in space-time itself. space-time
itself is already surprising enough, but this is at a
completely different level of surprise.
It's about you and me and why we're here and why.
Why we're we have the problems that we have and why all of a
sudden we wake up and realized Ihad no problem the whole time.

(02:41:40):
It's just a game. And when you look back, let's
say 40 years ago, and to the person you are now, how much has
this actually changed who you are fundamentally with regards
to many of those topics, Death, suffering, love, spirituality.
Well, it's the the change is really, it's interesting.

(02:42:03):
The there's a lot of inertia, which is one reason why I
brought this thing up, is that just knowing this stuff
intellectually is one thing. Having it affect my perceptions
and my actions is a much slower process.
At least in my case. It's, it's really it's so that's
also for all the work that I've done in my everyday life, I see

(02:42:28):
myself becoming a physicalist on, on the on the turn, right.
Just I'm all I am my avatar. I am in space and time.
That's that is the reality. That's, and so I understand
physicalists and I understand physicalism because when I'm not
thinking about it, I'm a physicalist.
That's that's why. So that's the default.
My default mode is a physicalistmode.

(02:42:50):
And the spiritual mode is, is, is, is not my default.
But what's happening with meditation and all the work that
I'm doing is that I have brief moments in which I'm not
attached to the headset. Brief moments.
So when, when people disbelieve my theory and think I'm full of
it, I completely understand. I, I, I agree most of the time,

(02:43:14):
but my default is to agree with them most of the time.
It's only what I'm thinking very, very clearly about things
and thinking hard about it, theygo, oh, no, no, OK, no, I'm not
my body. And when I, when this body dies,
that that, that not the end of the story, even though it feels
like it's going to be the end ofthe story.
And no, it's not that important what I do here.
I mean, I got it's important in some sense, but ultimately, you

(02:43:37):
know, who was the richest guy in1823?
Who cares who was the most intelligent person in in in 17
O2 who cares and then in in 200 years they'll ask who was the
most important person in 2025 who cares, takes a.
Matter of us, it's one. That's right, it's it, it's,

(02:43:59):
it's all all 1. And so the avatars apparently
need to be honored and and yet transcended.
Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's pretty mind blowing.
I mean, I feel like you just described exactly how I am with
this podcast because when I whenI leave it, I have my own, my

(02:44:21):
own beliefs and firm fixed views.
But when I interview guests, I obviously embody their their
philosophies. I tried to actually put create
that model in my mind to try andexplore it as much as possible.
And I forget about who I am in the moment because I actually am
taking that theory very seriously.
And I do that all the time to a point where it does say to sort
of blur the lines. But there is that inertia

(02:44:42):
because the moment I leave, it'snot like I'm going to sit down
cross legged and start meditating immediately after a
podcast. So.
So I completely understand that.Right, right.
Then you have your default and you go back to your default.
Yeah, it's me too. And, and, and the default isn't
my theory, so it's my my defaultest physicalist.
You're right. It's very interesting.

(02:45:03):
It's, it's crazy, but yeah, I'vedone, it's once again, absolute
pleasure. The work's growing so much.
I feel like you haven't lost thestep at all.
I mean, and you've been quite I'll for a moment and I'm super
glad you're well, but you cannottell.
I feel like you've gotten even better, which is crazy.
But yeah, I appreciate your timeso much.
Thank you so much for joining meonce again.

(02:45:24):
Thank you for inviting me and thank you for your your
wonderful questions and follow-ups.
I really appreciate it. You know, it's been it's been
incredible done and and I'm looking forward to seeing what
comes next. Any idea when this is going to
happen? The traces of law, Is it coming
out? Is it?
When's the publication date planned for?
I would say that the the technical issue is I have a

(02:45:45):
first complete draft of the proof that we can get Minkowski
space. So I have a complete draft
Shaitaan and I will have to go over it with Chaupun, A
mathematical well, a physicist that we work with, he's a
particle physicist. And when the three of us agree,
and that may mean there's no rush, probably two or three
months, I would say two or threemonths to really believe that we

(02:46:11):
have this thing worth of reviewers time and then the rest
of the paper is done. So it's just this last section,
the paper is done except for this section that I wanted to
add on Minkowski space because that's the capstone.
We can get Minkowski space. Let's do it.
So that's what's holding up the paper.
Otherwise we could just set it in right now, but so and then,
so I'd say 3, three to four months then we'll send it in

(02:46:32):
and, and the review the review process assuming we haven't made
any mistake, we should have thisthing probably by, by summer.
I'll try and get this episode out as soon as possible so that
anyone watching, anyone listening, if they've got any
ideas, any feedback, anything they want done to possibly go
through. I'll try and sift through all
the comments for you Don, and send you as much as possible.

(02:46:53):
And if there's any mathematicianwho knows Markov chains and and
and and high energy theoretical physics and wants to work with
us, we're open. Don, anything about this paper?
So traces of consciousness, trace logic, all the stuff we
spoke about in the past three episodes as well.
Anything you feel you haven't said or need to clarify that you
would like to just drive home for people who have who have

(02:47:15):
not? Who do you think might have
misunderstood anything? Well, I think we've covered, but
maybe I'll just say one summary thing and that is that my
attitude is that a theory is just a theory that includes my
theory. I'm not claiming to have the
theory of everything. I'm just suggesting that the

(02:47:35):
next step, the next useful step in science is to let go of
space-time and to embrace consciousness as being
fundamental and to be hard nosedabout it and say, give me a
theory of consciousness outside of space-time and show me how we
get space-time mathematically precisely.

(02:47:55):
That's my agenda. And I think that's the next, a
useful next step for science. And I'm trying to take that step
right now. Rigorous outside of space-time,
rigorous theory of consciousness, and then
rigorously getting Einstein's space-time and physics and
quantum theory out of that. That's, that's the goal.

(02:48:16):
And if that works, then there's this rapprochement between
science and spirituality. That would be an interesting
next step. And I think you're doing an
excellent job with that, Don, sokeep it up.
It's incredible to watch from the outside.
So I can't imagine what it's like to be on the inside.
It's a blast. It's a blast.
I could only imagine. Thank you so much for for what

(02:48:36):
you do too. And being a doctor and doing
this, I can't imagine. Yeah, look, sometimes it does
take its toll, I must say. I've I've, I've quit the podcast
a couple of times over the years, but I always find myself
coming back so clearly it's something I love too much to
stop. Yeah, it's because I know a
little bit about the doctor's life and I just have admiration
for what you do. Thanks so much.
Don, take care and keep well, stay healthy and I hope

(02:48:59):
everything goes well, but we'll,we'll keep it up.
Let's not wait two years for thenext one.
Absolutely. I agree.
I agree. OK.

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What Are Traces of Consciousness? A New Breakthrough Unifying Mind and Reality | Donald Hoffman

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}What Are Traces of Consciousness? A New Breakthrough Unifying Mind and Reality | Donald Hoffman