#585: Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More

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Donald Hoffman ( @donalddhoffman)
received a PhD in computational psychology from MIT and is a
Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of
California, Irvine. He is an author of over 120 scientific papers
and three books, including The Case Against Reality: Why
Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He is the recipient of the
Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological
Association and the Troland Research Award of the US National
Academy of Sciences.


His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New
Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge, and his work
has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The
Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover
Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His
TED Talk, titled “Do We See Reality as It Is?,” has almost 4M
views.


Please enjoy!


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*


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*


What was the Helmholtz Club, and how did it spark a scientific
exploration into the meaning of consciousness? [06:19]


What is consciousness? [11:24]


How should we understand our perceptions and their relationship
to reality? David walks us through the desktop interface metaphor
as presented in his 2015 TED Talk, and explains why it’s unlikely
(with a probability of zero) that human beings evolved to behold
the naked entirety of reality. [14:08]


Why does Donald, as a cognitive neuroscientist, find this era of
physicists exploring consciousness and the nature of an
underlying reality we haven’t evolved to see so exciting? Also:
is spacetime doomed? [20:31]


Will science ever arrive at a theory of everything? [33:00]


What is the holographic model of the universe? [37:13]


What might things look like in the next decade or two as we begin
to fundamentally revise how we think of reality, matter, and the
interplay of consciousness? [43:09]


How does Donald scientifically explore the concept of conscious
agents? [49:48]


Is consciousness localized, or does the brain “receive” it from
elsewhere? [53:20]


How does Donald think about death? [58:55]


What are Markovian dynamics? [1:05:27]


Supplementary information that might help someone who’s
struggling to understand parts of this conversation. [1:07:14]


What is panpsychism, and who are some of the most influential
panpsychists? [1:08:38]


Which aspects of the way we interface with reality give us
effective portals into life or consciousness? [1:12:11]


Probing the deeper reality suggested by the amplituhedron,
associahedron, and cosmological polytope. [1:14:51]


At which hallowed institutions are these explorations of
consciousness and the nature of a deeper reality being
researched, and who is leading the charge? [1:20:18]


Donald’s thoughts on the use of hallucinogenic drugs to tap into
deeper reality and interact with conscious agents. [1:21:22]


Exploring a theory involving portals and morphogenesis. [1:23:18]


It’s worth considering ethnobotanical and ethnographical studies
that may give us more focused insight into consciousness through
a non-Western lens and even have us questioning if plants can be
considered a sentient part of this consciousness. [1:27:20]


On Chris Fuchs and the outer fringes of Quantum Bayesian — aka
QBism. [1:35:38]


The experiments Donald would conduct in his research with
unlimited funding over the next 10 years, and with whom he would
choose to work. [1:40:31]


What is Donald reading these days? [1:42:43]


Donald names some of his long-time collaborators who pair
mathematics with spiritual practice, and describes how he
reconciles the two in his own work. [1:47:34]


How much pushback has Donald suffered for bringing spirituality
into his scientific endeavors? Has any of it been constructive?
[2:00:51]


How does fitness payoff function work in evolutionary theory, and
how does this support the probability of zero that humans evolved
to see reality in full? [2:03:27]


Parting thoughts. [2:05:46]


*


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