Cognitive Scientist: Our “Reality” Is An Illusion (Here’s The Proof) | Donald Hoffman

Based on the research and the science that you've done, what we are experiencing right now as human beings is not the full truth. You could call it a simulation. You could call it a game. There is something that is running our body and our thoughts in this world. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

That's right. If you look at the mathematics of evolutionary theory very, very carefully, it basically says the probability that any organism has ever been shaped to see any aspect of reality as it is is zero.

Cognitive scientist, professor, and author of The Case Against Reality. By the end of this conversation, you'll be forced to question everything you thought you knew about the world around you. Please welcome Donald Hoffman.

As you get more and more energy into a smaller and smaller region of space, Einstein tells us that that energy is also the same thing as mass. And when you get that mass to a high enough point, spacetime collapses into a black hole. And you actually destroy the very thing you're trying to observe.

So would you say that there is no reality, there's just perspective of what we're experiencing?

I would say that.

From your research and your studies, is what we see real when our eyes are open, or what we see when our eyes are closed and our mind more of reality than what is real.

Most of us just assume that you look around and you see a table and books and chairs and people and so forth, and you're seeing reality as it is. Most of the time, not all the time, someone can show you a visual illusion and trick you, but most of the time our feeling is, yeah, you know, for all practical purposes, I'm seeing the truth. And, you know, when I see the moon, the moon is there. That's because there really is a moon and it's there and you can look and if I'm not looking, And you see the moon, we can see the moon is there even though I'm not looking. So it's always there. And that's the way we normally think about things. And there are evolutionary arguments that are given to support that point of view. In some sense, evolution says we've evolved to be fit, to survive long enough to reproduce. And surely seeing the truth, will make us more fit. So a lot of my colleagues, for example, and the man in the street would say, yeah, we've evolved to see reality as it is. So I see tables and chairs. That's because there are tables and chairs and it's just that simple. So the physical world is the reality that really exists. And that's the standard view. It can get a little bit more sophisticated, you know, where you go, well, okay, in this special kind of way, with this kind of light, you can be tricked. We can put these visual effects on you and you can have illusions, but most of the time people would say you see the truth. And so I question that.

Is this the truth? Is what we see really the truth?

Well, now I have some good reasons to question that. Really, why? So on several grounds, but one of them is evolutionary grounds. So evolution has shaped us to be fit. Darwin's theory is about, you know, organisms competing for resources and mates and so forth, and the fitter have the greater chance of surviving long enough to reproduce. And so the genes that gave them the ability to, you know, outcompete will then be passed on. So we get the better genes and we're more fit. So that argument has led people to say we do see the truth because seeing the truth would make you more fit. And I argue with my colleagues, Chetan Prakash and Manish Singh and others that I'm working with, that no, if you look at the mathematics of evolutionary you read the theory very, very carefully, it says quite the opposite. It basically says the probability that any organism has ever been shaped to see any aspect of reality as it is, is zero. In other words, the probability that we see the truth is zero. Really? Absolutely zero. Wow. And so that's a stunning mathematical result. And of course I've had lots of pushback from not just not average people, but from my colleagues in, you know, in, in the sciences. So there's lots of interesting discussion about it. And then from philosophers, some of the pushback is of the following kind. I'd say the biggest pushback is you're shooting yourself in the foot when you make this, right? So Darwin is assuming that there are physical organisms in space and time that are competing for physical resources and having physical offspring.

In space and time.

In space and time. And so I'm using Darwin's theory, which assumes that. I'm using actually evolutionary game theory, which is Darwin's theory made mathematical by John Maynard Smith and others. So it's Darwin's theory, but with a mathematical rigor. And that's widely accepted in evolutionary field now, using evolutionary game theory to study its properties. So the argument against me is, well, you know, Darwin's theory assumes space and time and physical objects are real. That's what it's all about. And you're, then you're using Darwin's theory to claim that the probability that we see reality as it is is zero. That means the probability that physical objects in space and time are real is zero. So you've used Darwin's theory, which assumes objects are real, to prove that they're not. So surely you've got yourself shot in the foot with a logical contradiction. So that's That's the kind of argument I get, not just casually, but publications in philosophical journals and from my more scientific peers as well. And this really misses a key point about science and how science works. So, and this is sort of a central thing about science. Every scientific theory starts with assumptions. That seems trivial and obvious, but it's full of complications and implications. Yes. So since every theory must start with assumptions, it doesn't explain everything because it doesn't explain its assumptions. So no scientific theory is a theory of everything. And you can say, well, of course you can give me a different theory that's deeper that explains those assumptions of some theory. That you already have. And that's true. You can always get a deeper theory that explains the assumptions of the prior theories, but your new theory will have its own assumptions. And so science will always be in search of a new theory, and we will never have a theory of everything. Wow. So I would say what science, my own take is that science at this point and forever will know roughly 0% of reality. Wow. Because we only can make assumptions that we assume without knowing that they're true or not. Sure. And what we really don't do in science is assume that our assumptions are true. We don't need to assume that they're true because in some sense we know this is just provisional, right? I'm making these assumptions because this is the best we can do right now. That doesn't mean my assumptions are true. It just means that they're the best we can do right now with what we know and what we've learned. So what we can do though is make sure that our assumptions are consistent. I don't wanna have contradictory assumptions because then you could prove anything and there's no rigor. So what I'm really doing now with Darwin is I'm saying his assumptions are consistent, but I don't need to assume that they're true. So I don't have to assume any of my, in any theory I propose, I'm not assuming that my assumptions are true. I just want to make sure that they're consistent. I'm hoping in my lifetime someone will overthrow my theory with a deeper theory, and then I'll know that my assumptions were at least a provisional, you know, at best provisional way to go. So it's not a logical contradiction to take the assumptions of a scientific theory and use them to prove that that theory is not the theory of everything, because we already knew that that theory was not the theory of everything. And the best example of this that we have to date is Einstein's theory together with quantum theory. So Einstein's theory of spacetime, flat and curved spacetime, is general relativity theory. And that together with quantum theory both assume space and time are fundamental. Okay, so, and yet Einstein's theory with quantum field theory also tell us precisely when that assumption is false. When you go small enough to what they call the Planck scale, so 10⁻³³ centimeters, 10⁻⁴³ seconds, spacetime ceases to have any operational meaning. And so spacetime is a great framework for a lot of physics, and most physicists don't need to worry about the Planck scale, but the high-energy theoretical physicists, do. They're the ones that are pressing the limits of spacetime, and they're the ones that are talking about energies that are high enough that spacetime falls apart.

What are these energies that are high enough that spacetime fall apart?

Well, so they're the kinds of things, um, past even our collider, you know, our current collider technology. But, but the idea is this, that if you want to look at smaller and smaller regions of space, you need to have a better and better microscope. That can give you smaller and smaller wavelengths of light or whatever radiation, but most say light. So as you get smaller wavelengths of light, then you can resolve smaller and smaller details. Now, but what we tell, what we know from physics is that as you make the light wavelengths smaller, the energy is going up. So the energy, it takes more energy. That's why you have to put all this energy into the Large Hadron Collider to get the, the high, you know, it's like a big microscope. So you need lots of energy. But as you get more and more energy into a smaller and smaller region of space, Einstein tells us that that energy is also the same thing as mass. And that mass is curving spacetime heavier, more and more strongly as you get the mass greater. And when you get that mass to a high enough point, spacetime collapses into a black hole and you actually destroy the very thing you're trying to observe. Really? So at 10⁻³³ centimeters, 10⁻⁴³ seconds, there's, you're actually destroying what you're trying to observe. And if you get frustrated and say, I'm going to make the, you know, I'll use more energy because I want, the black hole just gets bigger and bigger. Really? So, so at that point, there's no operational meaning to spacetime. And so here's a case. And then the reason I went into this is because here's a case where we have a scientific theory, one of our best, that assumes that spacetime is fundamental and quantum theory. Assume that space and time are fundamental. They're consistent theories. And at the very end, they say, oh, by the way, spacetime cannot be the fundamental nature of reality. It falls apart at the Planck scale. And that's the sign of a great scientific theory. A great— a good scientific theory gives you the mathematical tools to explore its scope because it will have some scope of explanation if it's a good theory. But a great theory gives you the mathematical tools to find its limits that you knew a priori it had to have because every assumption, every theory starts with assumptions. And we know that those assumptions can't be universally true. So where do your assumptions and where does your theory stop? So every time I sit with Lewis Howes, that's right.

Interesting. Okay. So with this new research, these new discoveries, then what are you learning about the perception of the mind? What is real, what is not real, and what this world is.

Well, so, so this then brings up the question, if spacetime isn't fundamental, then that's what we're seeing. I'm seeing objects in space and time, so this isn't the final reality. So what is this? What is this thing that I'm seeing, and how do we go to the next level of scientific description? And I should say, I'll tell you what I'm doing, but I'll just mention briefly, the high-energy theoretical physicists are already there. They're, many of them are now stepping outside of spacetime and saying, let's do physics entirely outside of spacetime and entirely outside of quantum theory. So you, you let go of spacetime, you let go of quantum theory, unitarity of quantum theory, and they're finding stuff. So the European Research Council, the ERC, has a €10 million initiative right now. And there are many, many high-energy theoretical physicists and mathematicians that are finding what are called positive geometries outside of spacetime. So there are new mathematical structures that code for properties of particle interactions inside spacetime beautifully. Really? And precisely. And so it's quite exciting. This has only been since about 2013 that we've actually had these positive geometries. So this is, you know, 13, 14 years that we've had this kind of new horizon for us. And so it's taking off. So the physicists, the high-energy theoretical physicists are already there. And I'm looking at it from the point of view of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary theory and asking what, from our point of view, should we be thinking if we haven't evolved to see the truth, what have we, what would Darwin's theory say we have evolved? And the way I think about it, just intuitively, we can go to the math, but intuitively the idea is what we evolved was more like a headset, a VR headset to play the game of life. And the idea there would be, suppose that you're trying to play, you know, some kind of video game. Like, I like Grand Theft Auto. A lot of people are still playing that game. So Grand Theft Auto, when you play the game, you see cars and virtual roads and buildings and so forth, and you see a steering wheel and you use that headset, that VR headset to negotiate the game and try to beat the other players. Now you're not seeing the reality, which in this example would be there's some supercomputer somewhere with all sorts of bits running, you know, millions of bits per second in a precise, pattern being sent through channels in the computer and being processed.

And you're watching it.

That's the, yeah, that would be the reality. All I can see is this headset. I'm not seeing the computer. And you could, in principle, play the game by toggling bits. Toggling those bits in the computer the right way, because that's what's really going on. But good luck. The person who doesn't see that reality of the computer and just sees a little fake steering wheel and the fake cars is going to beat you. And so here's the case where knowing the truth isn't going to actually help you win in the game. It's going to actually slow you down. So the idea is, yeah, Darwin was right. It's survival of the fitness. Evolution is shaping you to have the most fit sensory systems, and those sensory systems are designed to hide the truth and to just give you a user interface that lets you play the game of life. So you're playing the game of life with a headset. So again, this is, now I don't wanna say that Darwin is the final word, right? I'm not saying that at all. It's the best we've got right now. And so that's why I'm talking about it. And it's a wonderful theory. I use it and it's powerful. I hope that we'll transcend it very, very soon. But right now Darwin's theory says this is just a game and it's a headset designed to help you play the game well.

So With that theory, we are just essentially watching through a headset?

That's right.

So we're not actually in the reality of this world, but we're watching the reality of this world through a device.

Yes, you are effectively, whatever you are, you are not a physical body in space and time. That is not who you are. Really? So here you are, 200-pound, 300-pound person, whatever it might be, 6-foot-whatever or 5-foot-whatever, and most of us think that's who I am. And I'm saying, no, that's just your avatar in a particular headset. And, um, you're not confined to that avatar. You're not identified with that. You might think you're your avatar, and I understand. I mean, I'm easily identified with my avatar, but it's just an avatar, and it's a headset that you can take off, and we all do.

So with this information, How does someone take off the virtual reality headset of the game they're playing in this world to optimize their experience, to optimize their life, to have a better, more meaningful, more rich and fulfilling experience?

Well, of course, we all eventually take it off even if we don't want to, right? So that we will all eventually face that, but we can take it off now. There are various meditative practices, for example, where you can see that you're not the headset and that you are, you're just looking through the headset and see yourself identifying with the headset, but you can step back. So I spend time in meditation and basically just letting go of thought. Literally just, if you ask yourself the question, I wonder what my next thought is going to be. And you wait in silence, that space where you don't have any thoughts is, I think, the deepest pointer that I can give to who you really are. And that, that, that silent awareness is you beyond the headset. And as soon as then you start going into thoughts, then you re-identify with this body and your problems and so forth. But I think Ultimately, my own view about things is that reality infinitely transcends space and time. You are that reality. And in some sense, you, your consciousness, is just choosing to look through an infinite number of headsets. So there's a Lewis Howes headset and a Don Harrell headset, and this one consciousness is having a conversation with itself between two headsets and enjoying and learning. So it's almost like the one consciousness views itself from an infinite number of perspectives, chooses to put on an infinite number of headsets and enjoy that perspective, maybe get lost in it, completely identify with it, feel pain, feel joy, you know, the whole range of emotions, discoveries, and so forth, get completely lost in it, and then slowly wake up. And realize, oh, that was just a headset. And boy, did I learn a lot from that perspective. And, and, um, and now it's time to— there's an infinite number of other headsets to go and try out.

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Yeah, I would say that you are reality. You in silence, not any story you tell. Any story you tell about yourself is not you. You are much, much deeper. So whatever you are is that which can entertain any story, every story, enjoy it, and then not identify with it and let it go. So whatever you are is infinitely beyond any headset, but you are looking at yourself through an infinite number of different perspectives.

So what happens if we experience something and then we tell ourselves a story about what happens and we attach meaning to that story. What are we doing when we attach meaning to an identity or a story about what we perceive as happening?

Well, I think what we're doing is we're playing a role and we're learning a perspective on who we are. And it's interesting that consciousness seems to be willing to just go in with both feet. I'm just gonna go in there and lose myself. I really transcend all this. But to really understand this perspective on this, I'm gonna be a 5-year-old kid in a sandbox, and I'm gonna let myself completely fall apart when someone else steals my shovel in the sandbox. I'm just gonna let myself fall apart and feel like my world has collapsed. And then when I'm a teenager, I'll let myself fall apart when a date goes wrong or I flunk a class or something like that. And so we let ourselves completely identify with it. You know, jobs, careers, everything, failures, successes. We go in with both feet. And at the end of life, you look back and, and you go, wow, that was quite a ride. And I'm glad I did it. And that's not me. I transcend that. And now it's time to take off the headset.

As a cognitive researcher and scientist, what is the greatest tool that you've learned that has brought you more peace, abundance, and joy in your life that anyone else should be learning as well?

I would say that there are two almost contradictory aspects that I've found important in their own ways. One is, as I've mentioned, going into silence and letting go of all thoughts and all anything I might be clinging to, I think really critical. It's stepping back from everything that I identify with and just watching it and realizing that, oh, whatever I am is the watcher, not the story, not the thing that I'm seeing, not the thing that I thought was so important. I'm the watcher that can just watch all that. And that's not, of course, new with me. Many Spiritual traditions have been saying that for thousands of years. But so that's one side of the story.

Why is that such a powerful tool for people to create more peace, joy, and abundance?

Well, so I'll be very practical about it. So the way I apply it in everyday life is, um, I might be, you know, for example, driving up here to, uh, on the freeway through Los Angeles and it's, you know, it's rush hour and there's lots of traffic. And I can just watch myself get irritated. So I'm, now I'm in a story. So here I am, I'm driving, it's important for me to get somewhere. There's these frustrations in front of me. I can let myself, I can see I'm being irritated and just comes up. So I look at that and I step back. All of a sudden I sort of wake up. Oh, there's Hoffman in his avatar playing the game of the freeway and getting, you know, getting upset about it. I all have to do is just look at it. Okay. Oh, feel that feeling. Oh yeah. There's some frustration. There's some irritation. Ah, very, very interesting. And I just watch it. That's not me. And then watch it dissolve and just watch that irritation. So what happens on a practical level is when you realize it's just a headset, it's just a game. And it's all the other players are you with different avatars in the game. All of a sudden you realize there's no reason for me to be in competition with you, except as, you know, a friendly competition or whatever. Just, you know, you wanna play handball with me? Sure, we'll play handball. I'll try to beat you, but then I'll shake your hand and we'll have a, you know, a drink or something. So it's really to recognize that in the moment, I can just step back from the story, step back and look at my emotions. And that's the key point. I can look at my emotions and realize I'm watching the emotions. I'm not the emotions. I'm the watcher of the emotions. You have the ability to step back. And for most of us, that's sort of a surprise. I mean, I understand firsthand how surprising this is. What do you mean? I am mad and that's what I am. I am mad or I'm frustrated. Well, actually, you can just watch the frustration. You can say, you can realize, oh wait, that's just an energy in my body. I can feel that. I don't have to identify with it. And if I just watch it, actually, sometimes it dissolves quickly. Sometimes it takes 10, 15 minutes, but it will dissolve and I can just watch it. And that energy which was frustrated gets transformed into something which is much more dynamic and positive. So it is actually transformation of frustration into a positive energy.

And when you are saying that you're the watcher of your thoughts or feelings or what you're identifying as, does it mean now instead of the avatar of you in this virtual reality, I guess, that you're in this game, you're able to almost step out of that avatar in your mind and see, oh, I'm actually controlling in some ways this avatar playing this game, but I am not the character in this game. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

That's exactly right.

So I'm actually, I don't know, the puppet master of my avatar. That's right. If I allow myself to create distance emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, mentally, and remember who I am, which is not the avatar. Exactly. Remember that I'm in control of this avatar, and then I'm not in the game of life. I'm actually stepping out, playing the game of life.

Exactly right. That's right. You get that perspective so that you don't identify with the avatar, and then all of a sudden you can just watch the emotions going through your body instead of identifying and really then gripping and holding onto things and getting upset about things. You can just peacefully watch them. And of course, enjoy the good things and enjoy life. But eventually you realize that I am just the watcher and this is just the avatar.

Where is the watcher?

Entirely outside of space and time. And that's the interesting thing that science, the high-energy theoretical physicists are now saying space and time are not the fundamental nature of reality. They're finding these new structures, positive geometries outside of space and time. That's just a baby step, right? We're just taking, science is just waking up to the fact that this is a headset and that we can step out. So this is brand new, like really? Now scientists, of course, the physicists have known for a long time that spacetime falls apart at the Planck scale. So that's, that's, that's not brand new. That's been around for a while. But the idea that we can actually now use the tools of science and rigorously, not hand wave, rigorously with mathematical precision, discover mathematical structures that we can then test back in the headset of spacetime to see if we're getting the right structures to predict things that will— because in our headset, we can only get our data inside the headset. Science is restricted to what can you find in the headset. Right, right.

And that's how we have tools and technology that are available, what resources are available to study what's in this digital world, I guess.

Right? That's right.

So for those who are watching or listening and are not understanding this right now, let me try to break this down. What I'm hearing you say and try to simplify this. What I'm hearing you say based on the research and the science that you've done as a cognitive scientist, professor for 40-plus years and the other research of other scientists you worked with is that what we are experiencing right now as human beings is not the full truth, is not fully real, is what I'm hearing you say. That this world we are in, you could call it a simulation, you could call it a game, you could call it an experience, whatever you want to call it, but there is something outside of us, beyond us, that is running our body and our thoughts and our avatar in this world. Is that, is that what I'm hearing you say? That's right. And would that mean that there are billions of, uh, individual consciousnesses in another space-time or another area of consciousness or thought, or I don't know where, that are then all running their virtual avatars in this world that are all wearing a headset and playing the game of this game of Earth world we call.

So I would, I would say that yes, there are an infinite number of conscious avatars and, um, they have a wide variety of different kinds of headsets. Ours is probably one of the more trivial. We have 3 dimensions of space, 1 dimension of time. We're forced to be attached to a physical avatar in this. And I think that most of the headsets that are available for consciousness to play with probably have much higher dimensions. Why not 50,000 dimensions? Why should we be stuck in 3?

I mean, there's different worlds that they're playing in is what you're saying.

Exactly, different worlds. Maybe with And the very notions of space and time themselves are no longer even relevant in these other headsets.

But our, let's just, in this, I guess, moment, our puppet master, our consciousness that's running our avatar, is he, are they only playing one game right now? Do they only have one headset on in this world for this period of time while we're alive?

Well, the way I would think of it is there is, the one consciousness of which Lewis and Don are just two avatars. Yes. But it's the same consciousness ultimately through Lewis and Don and all the billions of people on Earth. But then I've, the mathematical, there's a mathematical model I'm working on with some colleagues including Chetan Prakash and others that would say that there, that this one consciousness has literally an infinite number of incredibly varied headsets that it can use. And most of them, in fact, do not fit into a spacetime kind of format at all. They transcend that. But, but what we can do as scientists is show how we can have a mathematical model of all possible consciousness structures and, and then show how some of them, a small fraction of them, could give rise to this kind of headset and show precisely how you could build this kind of spacetime headset.

Okay. I don't know if I'm fully understanding it, but I'm going to get there because it's getting closer to me. I'm curious about how people can, and we may never fully understand what this is, but for myself and for my audience, I think what's going to be helpful is figuring out how can they maximize their experience here with this world that we're in. And I think most people think that their brain creates their thoughts and feelings, but I think in your research, you say that it, that it works the other way around. So does our brain create our thoughts and our feelings, or is it something else?

That's a good question. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I study the brain and, and I think it should be studied. There's 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses. There's a lot going on there that we should absolutely understand. And I'm all for that research. That being said, I don't think that neurons exist when they're not perceived. So right now I have no neurons. If you were to open my skull and look, you would see neurons, but you are creating them on the fly, just like in a virtual reality game, right? I look over there and I see a red Ferrari in Grand Theft Auto. I render the red Ferrari when I look. When I look over there, there's no red Ferrari because I'm not rendering it. And there's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer. You can look in the supercomputer. There's no red Ferrari there. There's bits in the—

it's only when you start to perceive an area, then it enters your frame of, of sight.

That's right. And that's the only existence that it has. The red Ferrari in the VR game is only there As a perception, and only as long as you choose to perceive it. As soon as you look away, that's gone. So neurons are what we perceive, what we render in the headset when we look inside brains. But they're not the reality. But I should be very, very careful. I want to say neuroscience is very, very important. We actually need more money for neuroscience because what we have to do is look at the neuroscience and reverse engineer it. There's something outside, there's software outside the headset, just like in the VR game, right? There's software rendering that Ferrari. And if you want to understand how that Ferrari is rendered, you've got to go to the supercomputer and look at the code. Well, so that's what we have to do. We have to study the brain, study the 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses. That's just the data for the next step out of the headset. What is the code that's rendering the space-time headset and rendering the 86 billion neurons and trillions of synapses. So neuroscience is very, very important and we should study it, but brains don't exist when they're not perceived and they cause none of our behavior.

So what is creating our thoughts, feelings, and our behavior if it's not the brain?

So it's our consciousness. Plunging itself into a particular avatar and choosing to have that perspective on things. So that's, that's, so that's what's really going on is that consciousness is choosing to limit itself in certain ways, give itself certain obstacle courses with a certain kind of headset and play the game.

And the smartest scientists on the planet and philosophers and researchers have been studying the brain for hundreds or maybe thousands of years, trying to figure out where consciousness comes from. Right. Do we know where consciousness comes from now?

Well, I'm good friends with, and certainly colleagues with most of the people who are doing this research. And I should say first that they're brilliant and they're hardworking. And I know many of them personally and they're good friends. Most of them are physicalists, so they assume that space and time is fundamental, that neural activity or some kind of computational processes and, or functional architectures are the foundation, and consciousness emerges either from neural activity or certain functional properties of physical systems. That, I would say, is 95 to 99% of the ideas that are out there right now. And again, these are my friends and they're brilliant. And their work is very, very good. That being said, what is consciousness? Well, consciousness at a minimum is trillions of experiences. The taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic, feeling pain, heat. There's trillions of human-specific conscious experiences. And so now as a scientist, right, I have to be hard-nosed. I have to say, okay, so you want to start with physical systems, functional properties of physical systems. So among them are, you know, for example, the quantum microtubules, quantum states of microtubules in the brain, the orchestrated collapse of those and certain theories by Penrose and Hameroff. There are theories of integrated information theory, Tononi and co. and others. And you can ask for all these, and there's dozens of these theories. You can ask for each one of them, okay, so you're proposing a theory of conscious experiences. So give me one. What is your mathematically precise theory for the taste of mint? Right. I mean, good luck. And the answer is zero. Yeah. There are, and again, that's why I was saying upfront, these are my friends and they're brilliant. They are brilliant and they're working hard and they have zero experiences that they can explain, precisely zero. And we've been at this for decades. And the reason you can't do it It's not because they're not smart. They're, many of them are geniuses. They're brilliant. And you just can't do that. You can't start with non-conscious ingredients and boot up consciousness. And we're learning that the hard way. We're finding out by trying and trying and trying. But the position we're in is very much like, suppose I came out and said, you know what? You know, I'm not a, I'm not a physicist, but I got my brand new theory of particle physics. And someone goes, oh yeah? Well, I've got a great new theory of particle physics. Okay, great. Tell me, what is your theory? How does it explain photon-electron interactions? And if I said to you, oh, I can't explain any specific particle. I just have a general theory of particles. You'd go, well, come back when you've got something real to say. And that's where we are with consciousness. There are all these theories of consciousness and not a one of them can explain a single conscious experience. Wow. That's where we are. And so, and so that we're in a dangerous place too, because we cannot, if we have a theory that can't be tested on a single conscious experience, we better not use it for other things. Like for example, making life and death decisions, right? A theory that can't be tested on specific conscious experiences should not be used to make life and death decisions.

So what do we know about consciousness?

The way I like to think about it is now as a scientist, so there's two ways I can try to address that. One is from a personal point of view versus a more technical side, which would you rather go with?

One of each, personal point of view and then as a scientist.

Okay, from the personal point of view, what I would say really helps me as a person in this is to realize I am not my body. I am in this body and I of course have to take care of it and if I get kicked it hurts and so forth. I'm careful when I drive. So there are rules of the road for this game, but it's just a game. And for me, the practical thing is that I take away from this that helps me in my everyday life is first dealing with my emotions. I'm not my emotions. I have the ability to watch them and be with them and just let them be. Just feel the emotions. Without condemning myself, without putting any pressure on myself, just the ability to feel the raw pain, perhaps, of an emotion, or the joy of an emotion, whatever it might be, and just be the watcher is very liberating. It's extremely liberating. And all of a sudden you're not identified with frustrations. You just watch the frustrations and eventually you can smile at the frustrations. And you can smile at them in the same way that if you look back at your 5-year-old child in the sandbox and how their world fell apart when someone stole their toy and you realize, oh, I completely fell apart and that was so important to me and it was trivial. It was absolutely trivial. And then as a teenager, I didn't get that date or whatever it might be. I didn't pass a test in high school and I was crushed. And I look back and really not a big deal. That's right. And now as an adult, I've got my business. I'm in there with both feet. I'm identified with it. Any setback, I take it very personally. I get upset. But on my deathbed, I'll look back and go, that wasn't me. That was part of the game. And I, just like the sandbox and the 5-year-old with the toy, it's just that important. It's that important. But what was important for me was to go through it for a couple reasons. To first know who I am. I transcend that. But then to know who all these other people are, right? Many religions say love your neighbor as yourself, and it's because your neighbor is yourself. And that's what we're really here to learn, is that the other person is you in a different headset. And that's really the— so learning to be in touch with your own emotions and watching them, and learning then to have compassion on other people who are having the same kind of emotions, the same kind of fears and pain and problems that that you have and realizing we're just kids in the sandbox identifying with our toys and having compassion and helping others to sort of wake up and get some space between them and the game so they can watch the game instead of just being identified with the game. So for me, on the personal level, that's the best integration I've come to. And I hope next year I'd have an even better integrator of it, but that's where I am right now.

And so when you feel frustration or pain or anger or resentment, or you're holding onto a story or an identity that doesn't support your peace or growth or harmony. Yes. What tool do you use to step out and be the watcher and allow yourself to have that peace and space and reflection and get back into a zone of grace?

That's a great question because that's what we, that's the move we need to make. So what I do is I practice. So when I'm home alone and there's nothing that I have to do, I will spend time just in silence. And I will spend quite a bit of time actually, where I just sit there and then watch myself and just watch myself saying, I don't want to do this. I've got things that are much more important to do than this. So I just watch that. I watch that kid in the sandbox that says, this shovel is really important and no one's gonna take it from me. I just watch that and recognize it's the kid in the sandbox. And so I just watch it and that gives me the practice so that when I'm actually driving on the freeway, as I was driving up here and I'm watching the traffic and I'm trying to make it on time for our talk and so forth, to sit there in the car and go, oh, look at that. Wow, I got frustrated. Someone cut me off. Okay. Okay, well, I have the habit now of being able, because when I have space at home alone, I take the time to build that habit so that I can step back and watch. So to really do this, you can't just expect yourself to do it. You're in with both feet. If you're going to get the watcher perspective, you're going to have to choose Most of us, you have to choose to spend time practicing being the watcher and then realizing, oh wow, I really am not just those emotions. I can get distance from them. I can watch them. And if I watch them, that trapped energy in some sense becomes released as positive energy that I can use to live a more fulfilling life. Yes. So it's not like instantaneous. It's a new habit. For most of us. There are some people deeper than me who can do this much more instantly. I can say I may be a good one to talk about this because it's not been easy for me. I've spent tens of thousands of hours in silence because I knew I needed to practice.

Really?

That's how hard it is for me.

Did you used to get easily flustered or frustrated or hold on to emotions before?

I was, I think most people would've said I was normal and competent, but I knew I knew that I was anxious. Inside.

Inside.

Yeah. So on the outside, I was, you know, everything was going pretty fine. I had trouble sleeping. That was what got me to really take this seriously. When I had trouble sleeping, I realized, okay, I need to step back and look. Wow.

So what's the scientific view of consciousness then? You said the personal view and you said there was a scientific view as well.

Yes. From a scientific view, now this is less personal and more, if you want to understand, have helpful things about consciousness, I would say that from a scientific point of view, your consciousness transcends any theory. So as I mentioned, science is a process of saying, let's make these assumptions. I'm not assuming that they're true. I'm just assuming that they're consistent. And then I can use mathematics to explain all this stuff. But then there's an infinite number of scientific theories that you could go after infinitely. So whatever you are, whatever your consciousness is, it transcends every single scientific theory. Wow. And so each, so we can use scientific theories to explore consciousness, and I'm all for that. I'm working on a mathematical model myself right now, a mathematical model of consciousness. It's called the Trace Logic. Um, and there's going to be an institute coming out next month called the Trace Institute that's exploring this. So I'm all for using mathematics to give a mathematically precise account of consciousness that I think will then allow us to show how physics arises from consciousness, how quantum theory arises from consciousness, and that will then allow us to do technologies that will look like magic for the following reason. Wow. So suppose that you're, go back to the Grand Theft Auto example. Suppose that you're a wizard. You know all the rules of the game. You can drive your car faster than anybody and get from A to B really quickly. That's great. But if you're the geek who can't even drive a car very well, but you wrote the code. You can do magic. Wow. In the game, right? You can take the car of the wizard and turn it into a donkey if you want to. Sure. You can do anything, or you can turn it into a spaceship and make it fly, you know, however fast you want. So you can do whatever you want.

Because you're manipulating the game.

That's right. You know the code of the game. And so—

How does each one of us learn to know the code of this world and influence it the way we want to?

Well, so what we talked about on the personal side is what most people are going to be able to do with effort because it takes a while for you to get that space and that distance. As scientists, we can take this to a different level where we get mathematical models of consciousness. We can show how exactly spacetime emerges as a headset. How the, what is the software that's creating this headset? And once you can do that, then you can do magic inside. So I think that understanding consciousness as a scientific theory will not by any means give us the whole story of consciousness. Whatever theory I come up with, and the next thousand years of theories we come up with, will be 0% of consciousness, 0%. But I think this little step will give us technologies that will make our current technologies look like firecrackers. Wow. I think that's, that's what's ahead.

And I apologize because before when I asked you about, um, that most people think the brain creates their thoughts and their feelings. Yes. You said there was two parts to that, uh, of why that's not true. I think, I think it was around that question. Do you remember? And you, you answered one. But then I got distracted onto the next question. Do you remember that second part where like there's a contradicting element of this?

Right. So I would say that brains do not create any aspect of our thoughts or feelings at all, but that we absolutely should do neuroscience to study the correlation between neural activity and our thoughts and feelings. We should absolutely do that. And pharmacology, things that we can do to help ourselves, absolutely. But it's not because the brains are causative. They're not causing anything. So brains have no causal powers. None of my behavior is caused by neural activity. Really? Absolutely not. None of it's caused by neural activity because the neural activity doesn't even exist.

Until you're aware of it or perceiving it.

That's right. So right now Hoffman has no neural activity. If you measure things with EEGs, you will see evidence of neural activity in your measurement. But that's just a headset representation of software outside of the headset.

Of a consciousness.

The consciousness, right.

Running this avatar.

That's right. So it's the best we can do. So absolutely, since neuroscience is the best we can do, study neuroscience.

But the body then, the brain is more of like hardware is what I'm hearing you say.

Is that right?

And if the hardware is off, it's still going to affect this avatar in this body.

It's more like the virtual hardware that we're seeing.

Right, right. The virtual hardware in a screen.

In a screen.

That we're seeing. Exactly right. And if it's off in the virtual world on the screen and it affects your avatar in that world, then it's going to affect you.

That's right. Yeah, exactly right.

Man, this is fascinating. You spent over 40 years studying how we see reality as a neuroscientist, as a researcher. Yes. What's the most surprising thing that you've discovered about human perception then?

Well, I remember around 1986 when I first realized we were, I was doing mathematical models with, with my colleagues Chetan Prakash and Bruce Bennett, trying to understand the process of observation with mathematical precision. And I still remember the moment when the mathematics that we had developed forced me to realize that everything that I was seeing was just a creation, like my creation, a headset. That was such a stunning shock to me because I was, I'd been studying, I was at MIT from '79 to '83 studying visual perception, mathematical models, did my PhD on it. And then I'd been working from '83 to '86 on our own mathematical models. And when I finally realized that the math was basically saying to me, physicalism is false. You're making this world up. I had to sit down because I was so stunned.

How is it false though when this cup was here, whether you're here or not, isn't this cup really here? You know, cause I'm perceiving it or isn't it in the closet or the cupboard when with the door shut, it's still in there, correct? Nope.

It's not.

How is that possible? But it was made by someone. It was manufactured. The resources were gathered and molded in a certain way where it's now in this physical world or this reality world. How is it not here unless we're looking at it?

It's very much like the color of red that you see here, right? That color is an experience that you have. And a physicist would say to you, well, what's really going on is that there are photons coming from that cup to your eye, and those photons have certain wavelengths, and those wavelengths are what you're perceiving as color, but light itself has no color. So where is the color? Well, it's not in the light. Because light has no color, it has wavelength. It's not on the cup. And it's not, well, and I'm gonna say the cup isn't even there. You know, the cup isn't even there, but I'm using the color just as a way to bridge that gap to help you understand that. So color is something that you are making up, but then this whole 3D world that you're seeing is something that you're making up. Because if you look at your eye, the evidence we have from your eye is that the retina of your eye is a two-dimensional surface. All the, our headset is putting a description of the eye as 120 million photoreceptors on a curved two-dimensional surface. When you see in 3D, you're hallucinating the depth all the time. So the depth that you see right now is completely hallucinated.

Really?

Completely.

But if I touch it, I feel it there. Right?

And that's right. And that's also a hallucination, a tactile hallucination. Okay.

So, and, and so our senses are hallucination.

You're, and that's right. And so what, what I've been doing and my colleagues as well, we can write down mathematical equations that describe how you create 3D. So we can, and, and for self-driving cars and things like that, if you're going to have passive vision systems, you're going to do this kind of thing where you actually take in images and create a 3D world. Now, most self-driving cars are active. So they're sending out signals and bouncing light back and getting distance that way. But you don't do that. You're a passive visual system. You're letting the light come to you and you're then, but it's on a two-dimensional retina. And then you have a two-dimensional retina in your right eye and just another flat retina in your left eye. Flat, it's slightly curved, but it's two-dimensional. I'll just say flat just to make it easy.

Sure.

2 flat images, and from that I'm creating my best guess about a 3D world. And that's what you see as depth. So everything is being invented by you on the fly. Colors, depths, shapes, everything. You put it out there.

So is this a 3-dimensional world? Is this a spiritual world? Is this a, is there a 5D dimension? Is, you know, how does this, how does the research of neuroscience in quantum physics apply to perception of reality?

Well, I think that the 3D world that we perceive right now is one of the more trivial headsets that's available. And what the theoretical physicists are finding when they're starting to find these structures outside of space and time, there's one of them called the Amplituhedron that has several parameters about this geometry. And one of the parameters, there's this parameter that takes the value 4 for our spacetime headset of, you know, 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. So n equals 4, but in their model, n could go as big as you want. So what we already are seeing is that they're thinking about spacetimes that are much, much larger than ours. So ours is probably one of the smaller we probably have one of the cheaper headsets, but they can go off to thousands of dimensions and even beyond the notion of dimensions.

So can we, can our physical body in this avatar world reach different dimensions, or are we limited to this world that we're witnessing?

Well, I think that we'll be able to go to other dimensions. I think as we there's a couple ways that we can do that. As we first understand the software that's building our headset, we'll be able to play with it. Really? And change the structure of our headset. I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to move into other dimensions. And it's now, the next thing I'm going to say is more speculative. Okay. So put that out there. But I'm, I'll say this, there's, there's Andrew Gallimore and I are collaborating a bit. Andrew Gallimore is a professor who's done a lot of research on DMT and its effects on the brain and the ideas that people have that are, they're seeing in higher dimensions and seeing higher resolution and new colors they've never seen before and more dimensions than there should be there. Like there's more than 3 dimensions of what I'm seeing here. We're exploring the possibility. I mean, there's two obvious hypotheses. DMT is just screwing you up. That's the one hypothesis. And this is just a hallucination. But another possibility is, you know what? The software that's being used to build your 3D, 3 spatial dimension, 1 temporal dimension headset, you can just change a parameter and why not make, crank 3D up to 4D or 5D or 6D. And maybe DMT It does one of those. Yeah. So it could crank up the dimensions. So we're playing.

But if it hurts the physical brain inside of the digital avatar. That's right. So then you gotta work on fixing that in order to exist in this 3-dimensional world.

That's right. Cause you put on a 5D headset and you're trying to play in a 3D game. Oh, you're mismatched.

Oh, you're freaking out of alignment. Yeah. Something is off and you're like a glitch in the matrix now.

It's like, That's right. On the other hand, if you have a 5D headset that can see this 3D headset as a subset, oh, then you can start to play games with the 3D people. Then you're a wizard. Then you're a wizard. That's right. So it can go either way. So once we understand how to reverse engineer this thing, we can either, we, we, I mean, uh, so it has all sorts of implications either, you know, for other technologies. Effectively, once you know how to do this, you can make technologies that look indistinguishable from magic.

Wow. I mean, one of the things I want to understand about is our senses and how can we use our senses to manifest what we want in this world, hopefully for good rather than bad, but how can we use our senses to create a more free, abundant, fulfilling life? With what's available for us right now from your perspective?

Yeah, there's a couple things to say about that, but I think the first thing would be to say that what's really important is to realize who you are. You're not some small avatar that really has to prove itself to become important and to attain something to be worthwhile or achieve. Or, yeah, that's right. So who are we? You are the infinite already. You are, so you already are everything that you want. That's the interesting thing is to recognize that you don't have to become anything at all. All you need to do is recognize that you are already so good. That you're making this whole thing. You are rendering this world on the fly right now, and it's effortless for you. That's who you really are.

But how does someone understand, believe that, who is broke, suffering, going through breakdown after breakdown in a relationship or career or health, and they're like, that doesn't feel true to me.

I don't understand that. Absolutely. And, and it, you know, when I, I'm in emotional pain, it feels like the emotional pain is the reality, the final reality. And I'm, you know, and if I feel like I've messed up, failed at something, then I feel like I am a failure. So I understand completely. I've been there. We all go through there. What I'm saying is you can step back and look at that feeling. You can just watch it and realize that it's just a story. It's just like looking at the kid in the sandbox whose toy has been stolen. It's that same kind of thing. Once you realize that, you realize, and this is a principle actually that spiritual traditions talk about, Jesus said, whatever you ask, whatever you want, just recognize that you've already got it and it'll be yours. It's basically saying, if you want abundance, what you have to do is step back and realize who you were all the time. Don't grasp for stuff that you think you need to become somebody. Step back and realize that you already are everything. And then it's not as, it's not so important. I mean, then if it comes, great. Of course, if you're hungry right now, that's a different story, right? You need to eat right now. But, you know, if you're trying to become very, very rich, you know, because you think that that's what you need to do to be worthwhile, that you can step back from and say, I'm already infinitely beyond a trillionaire, infinitely beyond that. Now the question is, in this sandbox, do I want to play that game? Do I want to be the world's richest person?

Right.

Or would I rather just grow flowers? Or in other words, you have the freedom to choose whatever you want to do, and it's not so important. You can play the game, be sort of relaxed about it. And so that's the ultimate thing is you're never a failure. In fact, you're rendering this whole game right now. You're the author, not the failure.

So when someone feels like they failed and they are a failure and there is humiliation that, or shame that they feel, or maybe others are criticizing them or they feel like a sense of loss, whatever it might be, how can they let go of the identity that they are a failure? And what should they reframe about that? Loss or breakdown instead.

Yes, it's, it can be very hard sometimes. For example, you might have been raised in a family in which your talents were not recognized and you were marginalized and made to feel unimportant and made to hide. And that can be extremely difficult to break out of. You could be brilliant, extremely talented, but convinced from your parental upbringing that you're worthless. That you're worthless. And it can be a horrendous, painful process of getting out of that. Because I mean, it could have even been prenatal. And so you have this programming all through your life until you're out on your own. For someone like that, it could be a very heartbreaking, tough road to step out and look at yourself and recognize, no, I am the infinite, right? Because you were told something completely different. You're nothing. Your talents are You're weird. You're, so you can, that could happen. So for someone like that, they have been given an extremely tough path. And that I think will be a lot of time alone, a lot of tears, a lot of time facing their emotions, being with them, watching them, and getting the distance. I think ultimately someone who's gone through that tough road will actually be tougher. They will have, like if you wanna run a marathon, you don't sit around and eat hot dogs and you have to train. So those are the people who are really being trained ultimately to really understand that I am not this game. Because this game was so painful and so not me that I woke up in tears, in agony, but I woke up and realized it's just a game. For someone for whom the game is going very, very well, I was born rich, parents loving me. It's right, everybody loves me, everything's, it's gonna be, the game is going pretty well. It's sort of harder. So in some sense, it's harder for them to wake up. But for everybody, I would say, whether you had the hard road or the easy road, my own feeling is spending time alone in silence and just watching your emotions, watching your thoughts, and then returning to silence. I think is the way because that silence is you. That silence between thoughts and the silence that's able to watch an emotion without identifying with the emotion, that silence is you. And so when you realize that you transcend any description, there is no word, there is no word, no doctrine, nothing. They, that's you. You transcend anything that can be said infinitely. So ultimately the only thing that you can do to know who you are is to sit there and let go of every concept. Wow. Because you transcend, any concept is immediately putting you into a little straitjacket. That's not you. You cannot think big enough about yourself, so you just don't think at all. Because no thought is big enough, so you transcend all thoughts. And that's who you are. Once you do that, then you can go back into this world and play and enjoy. And instead of competing against others, give them a hand up. Collaborate. Collaborate.

Absolutely. Create the win-win. I've heard you say that our headaches, emotions, and loves are real, but just not in the way we assume. Yes. So what, what are they? If it's not what we assume?

They're real experiences of the avatar. So they really, you know, for the avatar, these are the experiences I'm having right now and I should pay attention to them as long as I don't think that that's the final word on who I am. The final word on who I am is the best I can put it in words. Anything I put in words is just a pointer. But what I am is at best I can say, is the watcher of all those things. But when I say a pointer, I should say something. This is an important point, and that is, 'cause it might sound like this hyper-spiritual and it's sort of off in airy fairyland and so forth. And so let me bring it down to home. Almost everything you know, you learned when someone pointed and said a word. So How did you learn that that's orange? Someone said orange, orange, and you look and you mimic it, right? That's right. You're, and you're a cat. How'd you learn? At some point your mom or your dad said to, you know, Lewis, cat, and then Lewis looks and you get it. That's called learning by ostensive definition. Ostensive definition is someone points and names and you, and you get it somehow. And it's actually, right, it's actually magic because if someone points and says cat and you look, how did you know what to think of as the cat? Is it the ear? Is it the color of the fur? Is it the right paw and the rug? Yeah.

But the whole being of it, yeah, yeah.

And also what mom doesn't do is go, Lewis, quadruped. She doesn't go, she says cat. She doesn't say quadruped or, you know, she doesn't, or feline. She knows exactly the right level of word. So there's a, there's a language game that goes on when we learn.

Yeah. And it's like, you could point at this and say orange, but you could also be saying this is a leather. This is paper. This is elastic. This is word. You know, it's like, exactly. But how do you know you're identifying the color and not book?

—That's right.

—Paper, elastic, string, whatever it may be. So it's like, how do we know this?

And that's the problem with ostensive definition. But what's interesting is almost everything you know that's important to you, you learn by ostensive definition. And what's interesting as well is for all I know, the experience that you're having that I say is orange, and if I could get into you, into your head and have your experience. I might say, oh, you know what? That is the experience of the taste of mint. I call it orange, but I have no idea whether your experience is in mine. I assume that they're similar to mine, but I have no way of knowing. Just because we behave the same way, and if we look at our neural activity, we have the same kind of neural activity. There's no way for me to know for sure that your experience is anywhere near like mine. And we actually know that, for example, there are some women in the case of color that have 4 cone photoreceptors. They're tetrachromes. And so they have richer color experiences than any man could even imagine. Really? Yeah, absolutely. There are these women, tetrachromes. So we know that there are differences. And so that's ostensive definition. And the reason I brought that up is that when I say you are the watcher, And I say, listen to what, I give you this point where I say, I wonder what my next thought is going to be. Then I say, that silence, when you were waiting for your next thought, that is you. That's the best. And that's what I'm doing on ostensive definition. All I can do is tell you that, just like mom just has to point and say cat. That's all she can do. So this This stuff is not like spiritual in some weird way. It's in the same way as how we learned the word cat or the color red. That's the all I can do to tell you about who you are is to say that silence between thoughts, that's you. And I'm telling you by ostensive definition, but you have to know it for yourself. So it's not weird to do that. That's how you know everything. And so to know yourself by ostensive definition is very natural.

When you studied at MIT, you're a neuroscientist, cognitive researcher. Do other scientists and researchers at this level think you're crazy or think that you're onto something?

Most of my colleagues respect me and they're sorry for me. I mean—

Why are they sorry for you?

Well, you know, I had a real promising career in doing neuroscience and so forth, and I'm doing this weird stuff outside of space and time. So you just, they're my good friends. We understand the rules of the game of science. It's all about rigorous theories, experiments, and so forth. They understand that I, when we have our conversations, I will say, how many conscious experiences can you explain? Oh, zero? Aha. So, okay, that's where we are. So there's a stalemate here, right? The physicalist approach is the dominant approach. I keep pointing out that they have zero points on the board. And at some point, I think there's going to be a change. The tide will change. And all we need is a real breakthrough. I mean, what I'm working on right now is if we can show how spacetime arises precisely from a theory that starts with consciousness, I think my colleagues and friends will jump like that. I think it'll be a transition that's very, we just need a little breakthrough to show how the headset is built. Once we show how the headset is built, I think the transition will be very, very quick within just a handful of years.

So what is your take on God, universe, creator or some type of higher power?

So many spiritual traditions have had some notion of a higher power of God and so forth for thousands of years. And at top level, it's very, very similar to what I was saying about, you know, the one consciousness that you are. What's interesting is here's where science and spirituality need to really cooperate, and I think that they will. Because on one hand, the spiritual traditions have for a long time noticed that spacetime is not fundamental, that there is some consciousness that's prior and more important than spacetime. But it was spiritual traditions that really fought the start of science. So Galileo was put in house arrest by the Catholic Church. So there's been this antipathy between science and spirituality at the very birth of modern science with, with Galileo. And so the two have diverged. Science went off and studied our headset. They thought they were studying objective reality, but it turned out spacetime is just our headset. So science has spent the last several hundred years developing incredible tools. Clean, clear observation, very precise observation, followed by clean experimental, I'm sorry, clean mathematical representations of the experimental results. And then mathematics that predicts new experiments. That virtuous cycle of observation, mathematical theories, very, very clean. That hasn't existed at all in that mathematical precision in the spiritual traditions. And as a result, the spiritual traditions have had the deep insight about consciousness. But if you look at the history of spirituality, there's been lots of gobbledygook as well. There's been a lot of nonsense. There's been absolute nuggets of truth, and it's been covered in lots of nonsense. So what we need is the best of both. We need the absolute rigor precision of observation and mathematical rigor or logic from the scientific side, plus the recognition from the spiritual side that consciousness, not spacetime, is fundamental and put those two together. Then I think humanity is off to the races. We will understand our spiritual nature. We will get rid of all the nasty gobbledygook —yeah—that has really enslaved a lot of people. I mean, the heart of spirituality is not rules and regulations. The heart of spirituality is love. That's the heart of it. If you love your neighbor as yourself, that's all you need. All the other rules are extraneous. Yeah. So bringing that all together, the precision of mathematics from the sciences and observation the insight that you are consciousness, your neighbor is the avatar of you, so your neighbor is yourself, so obviously you love your neighbor as yourself. That's it. Bringing those together, I think we're going to have a revolution.

Yeah. What would you say then is blocking most people from tapping into their full potential and of their highest level of consciousness?

I think that the one consciousness has chosen to give itself a lot of different challenges. And each of us is the one consciousness facing a unique challenge. Maybe the challenge is, how will I wake up when I was born rich? Another one is, how will I wake up when I was born dirt poor? How will I wake up when I was born a beautiful athlete? How will I wake up when I was born crippled? How do I, so with all these different challenges, how do I wake up? And so for each of us, it's going to be a unique answer, right? The one consciousness wants to see, okay, I want to be a white person with this problem. I want to be a black person or a brown person or whatever, with this problem. I wanna be a man, a woman, I wanna be a cat, I wanna be an ant. All these different things and have my own challenges. So each of us is going to have a unique challenge. But I would say what's common to all of us as human beings, I don't know about ants, but as human beings, is waking up to the fact that I am not my emotions. I can watch my emotions. I am not my success. I can watch my success or failure. I am the author of the game already. I'm not the player. The player is just me choosing to look at myself through a certain point of view. That's the, when you're there, then all of a sudden, if you think about it, does it really matter anymore? How rich I am? No. Doesn't really matter. I'm gonna take this headset off. That's just part of the game. While I'm here, is there a problem to go and try to do that? No, no, enjoy, enjoy. But bring others along with you. It's not me versus you, it's me with you. And enjoy the game. We're gonna take this headset off anyway, so let's do this thing together. Wow. Wow.

I've got a couple final questions for you. This has been powerful, Donald. I appreciate it. Before I get into them, I want people to follow you. You're Donald D. Hoffman on X, and also you have this Trace Institute you're talking about that's launching June 3rd to help advance this research. Yes. Where can people go to learn more about the Trace Institute?

Well, if you just Google my name, Donald Hoffman, and Trace Institute, I think you'll be able to get there. There's a preliminary website, but it'll be up in about, by June 3rd.

By June 3rd. Okay, perfect. It'll be up, yeah. And if people wanna connect with you directly, should they go on X, Donald D. Hoffman, and just send you a message there?

Yes, and also I've got, my email is public. It's ddhoff@uci.edu, so. Okay, cool.

We'll have people connect with you there. It's been really powerful. A couple final questions for you, Don. This is something I call the 3 truths. You've been a professor, a researcher, a scientist for over 43 years, right? Since you started at MIT and you've been here in Irvine for a long time. I can only imagine how much you've studied, researched, learned, and also unlearned about what you thought was true to now what maybe is true or you're still discovering what's true. Imagine a hypothetical scenario. You get to live as long as you want to live from this moment on, but eventually you got to take the headset off in this world. And in that last day, you get to leave behind 3 truths. And this is all we would have to remember you by are these lessons. Oh. And you get to create whatever you want up until that final day, but for whatever reason, we don't get to keep it anymore in this 3D world. So the cups that you make, we can't perceive anymore, but there's 3 lessons you get to leave behind, 3 truths, right? From all your research, all your knowledge, personal and scientific, what would be those 3 truths that you would leave behind?

Well, number 1 would be love is the center of it all. Loving your neighbor as yourself. That's the centerpiece. That one by itself is just plain enough. But if for Moore, it would be, it was you the whole time. This whole thing was you the whole time. So you were just exploring yourself. So you are the author of this whole thing. You're not the avatar. It was you the whole time. This whole thing. Those are pretty comprehensive. Love your neighbor as yourself. It was you the whole time. And I would just say, You're the author of this, you were the author of this whole game and you're on to the next headset. Really? You're on to the next.

Yeah, infinitely many of them. So you don't think that when you die in this world, everything's done?

No, I think that you are the consciousness, the one consciousness that has chosen to be in a physical human avatar for a while. The brain does not create your consciousness. Consciousness creates the brain. Wow. Yeah. That's beautiful.

Final question for you, Don, and before I ask it, I want to acknowledge you for the journey that you've been on. And I know you've gone through some of your own physical health challenges over the last few years and you're coming out of it, which has been great. And I acknowledge you for constantly seeking the truth and seeking the tools, scientific tools, to start proving more of the truth of this, this world, this existence. So I want to acknowledge you for all that you've done for science and research to hopefully bring more people to peace, harmony, and abundance.

Thank you, Lewis. Of course.

My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

I would say complete humility. As soon as you know how great you are, there's no reason to be arrogant at all. Because any arrogance is recognizing, that's a failure to recognize who you are. So greatness, recognizing your own greatness is to realize that every other person is your equal.

That's beautiful. Don, thanks so much for being here. Pleasure. Great pleasure.

Thank you. Bye, Uncle. There is a natural flow of energy in the cosmos, from the unified field of all that is, all the way down to physical matter. That full spectrum is in existence now. We are the living and seeing and perceiving.