Donald Hoffman Meets Stephen Wolfram For The First Time On Toe

Steven Wolfram welcome hello there Donald Hoffman welcome thank you it’s my understanding this is the first time you both are meeting that’s great indeed yes people people say to me you know about things I worked on in physics and and so on oh that’s uh related to things that Emanuel Kant did and then they say might be related to things that Donald Hoffman has done well Emanuel K I’m too late for but uh Donald Hoffman we get a chance to actually talk about things that would be fun absolutely Don do you see yourself as K 2.0 uh well I’m not nearly as smart as him so it’ be a lesser version but but uh similar it’s it’s idealism um but with some mathematics behind it yes and how about are you a livets 2.0 as well or are you I I I don’t not yeah much much less smart than livets that’s for sure but but yeah it’s very very similar I like laet say monadology there’s lot lot of good ideas in there and the work I’m doing on conscious agents in some sense I can view it as simply a mathematization of Liv Net’s ideas interesting I I still have to you know people have told me for four decades that things I’m doing are sort of livets related and at various times I have tried to understand liet’s monad idea and I’ve usually failed although one thing that helped me a lot recently was realizing and maybe you can comment on this that uh you know liet didn’t imagine that you could have mind made from non-m mind so for him you know a monad if there was ever going to be anything mind-like about it it had to start by being a mind so to speak right he has his um analogy of the mill lnet Mill analogy right where he says you so he’s looking at the Hard what we’d call the hard problem of Consciousness from a physicalist point of view and he gives it just one paragraph in the in the Mony that’s that’s all he thinks thinks it deserves and and he he basically says look uh you know if you’re trying to get Consciousness out of some kind of physical system it’s like going inside of a Mill and and going down and you seeing all the gears and so forth you know whatever it is the gears are not going to give you an explanation for what is going on in Consciousness and so he you know he he felt that whatever mechanical physical explanation we we give will will fail and then and he he figured one paragraph was enough and he moved right on Don What would be your position on that well uh so physicalists have been trying to give theories of Consciousness quite strongly now for the last three decades right so we have integrated information Theory uh Global workspace Theory orchestrated collapse of quantum states of microtubules and so forth but and I I know that the players and they’re brilliant people and their friends and I they know what I’m going to ask them every time I talk with them or get on stage with them is what specific conscious experience can your theory explain Taste of chocolate the smell of garlic the the taste of mint what what I I you know we’re in we’re interested in scientific theories that explain specific conscious experiences what experience can you give me humans can experience around a trillion different experiences so it’s should be like shooting fish in a barrel there’s a trillion experiences which ones have you done and the answer is zero and and so right now we have no example of a physicalist theory that can explain even one specific conscious experience so for example what I would ask for example of integrated information Theory they say there’s going to be some causal structure that’s the substrate and if you have the right causal structure then they say you can represent that in a particular with with a matrix The Matrix represents that causal structure so okay great that’s your theory what’s the Matrix ferment just how big is the Matrix what what you know if it’s an N byn Matrix what is n and what are the N byn the N squared entries so so you know it seems like we have an easier problem in the last year or two than we’ve had in the time before that because now we have llms that can talk to us a little bit like we talk to each other yes and you know for humans it’s both practically and ethically not possible to kind of take our brains apart and see what’s going on inside but for an llm so far it seems ethically just fine to do that and uh you know so what would you imagine I mean you know know you’ve got your llm and it’s you know it’s talking to you and it’s discussing the kind of tea it likes and all kinds of other things what would be the kind of thing that you would think you should want to identify that is its internal experience uh nothing I my guess is that they don’t have any internal experiences uh and they’re what what you know what our llms right now are doing are just sophisticated um correlations and and computations uh they’re looking for you know statistics um and and how convinced are you that you are more than that well I would say that I have the the taste of mint and the the the smell of garlic and I can hear the Middle Sea on a piano and right now can you convince me that you can hear those things or or feel those things oh AB absolutely not and and you can’t Vin me either that you have it it’s so it’s a matter of of me just believing that you’re you’re relevantly similar to me in certain ways so so I I absolutely agree that there’s there’s no proof uh of anybody else solipsism is certainly logical possibility right but so but you believe that I might have those internal experiences but you don’t believe that the llm could have those internal experiences well so it’s it’s a little more complicated so I’ll say a little bit more more about so I think that our experience of space and time and physical objects is um just a headset so it’s it’s my Consciousness is is created a headset to interact with other consciousnesses and so when I look at you on the screen for example all I see is pixels and the the pixels on the screen are I wouldn’t want to say are conscious but through the pixels I’m getting a portal into I think your Consciousness I I can guess what you’re thinking about and guess what you’re what your beliefs might be right now and so forth you know probabilistically and not not all the completely accurately but I wouldn’t want to say that pixels are conscious they’re just part of my headset that’s giving me access to the Consciousness so so I want to say that Consciousness is fundamental it’s the fundamental existence and what we call SpaceTime is a fairly trivial headset uh that that some Consciousness has used but probably most don’t probably there’s a variety of much more interesting headsets out there than just a four-dimensional one uh that that we’re using and so so no no in the headset is conscious just like the pixels on the screen AR conscious and some pixels give me access to your Consciousness and others don’t but I I wouldn’t want to call some pixels conscious or not so so ultimately I think I’m always interacting with Consciousness I’m always interacting with Consciousness wait so you if you see a frog are you interacting with Consciousness inside the frog or not not inside the Frog but I’m in sort of like the frog is like the pixels on my screen that’s giving me access to certain aspects of Consciousness so but the but the Frog internally has a feeling of I don’t know what it might have a feeling of a mosquito or something like that a feeling of of uh it it has an inner experience all right yes yes we understand Stephen so let’s say there’s a frog feeling sub one and then a frog feeling sub two well well yeah I I would say that there is a conscious experience that I’m interacting with a conscious experiencer or series of experiences behind the Frog and in the case of the llm there there is going to be beyond the the headset conscious experiences but it’s not going to be what we typically think of as somehow a physical machine gave rise to consciousness it’s rather that I even the very components of the computer that are running the llm are like pixels on my headset and behind that is consciousness absolutely you mean so so it’s like the llm is the is the digest of eight billion souls and it’s it’s um that’s the way you see it that that’s right so so it’s it’s really a bunch of conscious agents outside there outside of SpaceTime and we are opening different portals into Consciousness beyond our headset just like so so we humans are sort of the ultimate seat of those elements of Consciousness in your view is that right no not not at all we’re probably among the the the the less sophisticated ones uh so what’s an example of a more sophisticated one well our headset has only got four dimensions uh why not have consciousnesses that are using headsets with a billion Dimensions uhhuh but I mean uh but but then I’m a little surprised you know in we I mean so so do you view our sort of if if you imagine so first of all do you believe there are laws of physics for example or do you believe that there are in other words are there things that are laws on top of which our brains and the electrochemistry of them and so on operate or do you think that it’s sort of that is is is there some substrate underneath or are you somehow imagining that your scientific theory is built I mean okay for example we could imagine that you never had a Theory of physics all you had in physics was a collection of experimental results and you would have a bunch of you know you could even imagine sort of axioms about how oh I’ve seen that this thing correlates with that thing and we would have this kind of uh uh sort of um observational version of physics that never had anything sort of underneath I I’m just curious how how do you imagine kind of the the the nature of kind of what’s happening in brains relating to sort of the substrate or the potentially laws of physics right so so my view is very very similar to what some high energy theoretical physicists are doing right now which they’re looking for for new um principles and structures Beyond SpaceTime so this is Nar Hamed and and a bunch of other people there there’s the European research Council just announced the universe plus project and put they putting 10 million euros into what are called positive geometries beyond SpaceTime and Beyond quantum theory so so so what they’re and they just had their first um Workshop in in February where they brought together about a 100 phds in mathematics and and uh theoretical physics to what they’ve discovered are these new structures Beyond SpaceTime called positive geometries amplitud hedron assoc cosmological polytopes that um their volumes encode scattering amplitudes yeah yeah I used to do particle physics when I was a kid I know these things are these things are a bit more recent than that but uh I mean I think the thing to understand about sort of particle physics and where it’s gone is I think what you’re describing is kind of the limit of what one can view as the S Matrix approach to particle physics I mean you know the the one view of what happens when sort of particles interact is you see all the details of what’s happening and the mechanism of the interaction another approach that Heisenberg introduced was just this we don’t know what’s happening inside we’re just going to say what are the things that are coming in what are the in in initial States what are the final States and we’re just going to Define this thing we call it the S Matrix that sort of describes the transformation from initial states to final states without having to address this question about sort of the mechanism of what’s inside you know it’s a thing that I learned recently is a piece of uh history of science trivia but it’s interesting to me at least is uh about how Heisenberg ended up coming up with the SM Matrix okay so the the um you know one of the things that’s relevant to you know my efforts to understand fundamental physics is the question of you know what’s discret what’s continuous you know back in Antiquity you know people are arguing about everything you know is matter discreete or continuous and so on that fin got resolved at the end of the 19th century basically and yes you know matter is discreet as made of molecules we can see brownan motion all those kinds of things and then very soon after you know light is consistent with being thought of as being discreet at the time 10 and something years ago most of the oos physicists were convinced that space was also discreet but they kept on trying to make that work from a mathematical point of view and particularly make it compatible with relativity and they kept on failing and Heisenberg as I recently leared was kind of in the middle of that whole effort when he said I just can’t make this work and he said forget it all I’m not going to try and describe the mechanism I’m not going to describe what’s happening in space I’m just going to set up the S Matrix and say you know this is given this initial configuration what you know how will that translate to final configurations so I think you know it is certainly possible to you know in terms of what we experience in the world there’s no question that you can describe our experience of the world just in terms of kind of the initial States the final States you can describe just you know as I was mentioning sort of an axiomatic physics where all you describe is what relates to what and you don’t really talk about what the underlying substrate the mechanism of physics is I think that’s a a and it’s it’s interesting you know in our models of physics at some level that’s what’s happening at some level what really matters are things like causal graphs let’s say how you know one event relates to another event the question of what is the you know how are those events kind of uh what’s you know when we start setting up things like space and time space and time are very different in our kinds of models but when we when we sort of say this is a lump of space it’s that’s something which is something we can do as a convenience for understanding what’s going on but ultimately in terms of our experience what matters is is this causal graph of relationships between events so I think I mean in that uh you know so I’m I’m I’m certainly on board with the idea that what matters to us is just this causal graph of events now whether that means and and for example the very construction of space for instance is something that I view as being kind of a coincidental feature of our scale in the universe that is you know the fact that we say there’s a state of space at a particular moment in time yes you know I look around this room it’s you know I can see maybe 10 m away I you know light gets to me in a microsc from 10 MERS away but it takes me milliseconds to process what I saw and so I’ve kind of integrated this whole you know I’ve aggregated all those photons that are coming in and I can reasonably say there’s a state of space that I can talk about and then that might change over time whereas if I was for example oh I don’t know if I thought a million times faster than I do then you know I wouldn’t probably integrate space and I wouldn’t talk about space and if somebody told me oh by the way there’s this way of thinking about the physical world that involves the idea of space I’d say well that’s kind of interesting but it’s not necessarily something that is relevant to my particular way of observing the world so I I mean I I I think that’s a I I don’t disagree that the the the construction of space is a feature of certain details of us being the way that we are so to speak I I I agree and and that seems to be what the um this universe plus the positive geometry approach to physics is after as well one of their banners is they they say SpaceTime is doomed it cannot be fundamental because it ceases to have operational meaning beyond the plank scale so they’re actually looking for New Foundations for physics entirely outside of SpaceTime and and remarkably entirely Beyond quantum theory so these new structures for example have no Hilbert spaces and and and they’re they’re saying there are no hbert spaces here there is no unitarity and so forth this is beyond quantum theory but they want to get SpaceTime and quantum theory emerging together from things like the amplitud hedrin and so forth yeah I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it I think one of the things you know I have to say I I did physics when I was much younger and then I haven’t didn’t do physics for a long time and then kind of got back into doing it when I realized that a bunch of things that I’d figured out for other reasons were sort of converging on giving us a view of how physics might work and it’s been super exciting to me to actually you know I think I think we got it I mean I think we know how it works and I think Nemo and folks like that I know know something about what we’ve done but I think that the Paradigm is is it’s interesting because the Paradigm is a bit different from traditional mathematical physics but there are very beautiful connections to lots of work that’s been done in in traditional mathematical physics sorry just a moment the Paradigm of space time is doomed or the Paradigm of the amplitud hedron No No the Paradigm of of what people call wol and physics project the I mean it it’s it’s something where sort of the foundational machine code is very computational the what that turns into at the level of things that we can do experiments on and so on is sort of looks much more like traditional mathematical physics and what’s really cool is that a bunch of limits of our model clearly are kind of map into things that have been studied in traditional mathematical physics and that’s that’s kind of what you would hope would be the case because you know what we’re trying to do is is deal with something that is sort of a lower level machine code of the structure of the universe the structure of reality basically um than than the things you know I IID always thought of what I was doing as kind of going underneath space and time to something which is sort of more fundamental than than space and time I mean I think it it has not helped the progress of of a lot of kind of physics that people have sort of had this idea that space and time are the same kind of thing which is kind of I think you know in terms of doomed ideas that is a doomed idea that was that was a thing that you know Einstein didn’t have that idea that idea came in when makovski said it’s really cool that there’s this quadratic form that we can write with space pieces in A Time piece and they all sort of fit together and that’s how kind of this concept of space time was was born and I think it’s it’s sort of a mistake because I think that you know time as I see it is this kind of progressive application of computational rules and space is this thing that uh you can you can reasonably construct as a way to describe what’s in the universe it’s kind of the the the the structure there sort of a a structure of the universe that you can slice into pieces of space you could slice it into quite different things as well um and you know I think it’s it’s a feature of observers like us I think that we believe in space I mean same same thing that you know the fact that we believe in fluids as opposed to just saying there’re all a bunch of molecules bouncing around that’s a feature of observers like us um and not necessarily a feature of all observers Ian I do think by the way in terms of Dimension you you you mentioned uh you know is 3+1 Dimensions kind of the fundamental thing uh I’m sure the answer is no right and you know my guess is that there is some totally obvious feature of the nature of the observations that we make that leads us to believe that the universe is 3+1 dimensional I mean and you know in terms of sort of the the computational uh kind of representation of the universe it really doesn’t make much difference that it’s 3 plus 1dimensional we could as well be you know exploring it on some one-dimensional space filling curve or some such other thing it’s um um you know I think that’s a I’d love to know what feature of us makes us believe that it’s three plus one dimensional right right right so you have the your ruad right which is all all the possible different computational rules and and our projection of that ruad into three plus one dimensional SpaceTime is is just one of an infinite number of different projections you could take right yes yes indeed I I think yeah the thing that has been very exciting to me and was not something I saw coming at all was the way in which one can given the idea of the ruad the way in which one can derive the know laws of physics and that’s something that you know if you’d asked me five years ago even would there be a way to derive general of derive quantum mechanics I would have said well there might be an underlying Theory from which those emerge but I don’t think that there would be any way to for that would make those theories necessary those are theories which just happen to be the way they are because the universe happens to be the way it is if you’d ask me about ther second world of thermodynamics for example I would have said as people have said for hund and something years that yeah it’s probably derivable in some way but we don’t quite know how to do it but the thing that’s been super surprising to me is that General activity quantum mechanics and it turns out the second law all seem to be derivable what’s the assumption that you need to derive them well the ruad doesn’t really have assumptions the ruad is just this abstract thing that you set up the assumptions have to do with what kind of observers we are and you know it seems like there are two critical assumptions I’m guessing that there are actually more assumptions that I haven’t correctly identified yet but the two that have identified is you know we’re computationally bounded we don’t get to trace every detail we only get to notice certain aggregate things and we believe we’re persistent and time we believe that that which is something I’d be really interested to talk about is is kind of the you know to me it seems like a a crucial feature of observers like us is that we have this persistent thread of experience we don’t and we have we have a single persistent threat of experience we you know we it it’s not the case that we kind of are you know have our multiple thoughts kind of branching out in all possible ways nor is it the case that we are sort of here just for a moment and then it’s a different us at the next moment we kind of have this perception at Le at least that we have a sort of consistent thread of experience and anyway the the I mean from the point of view of physics the big surprise to me is those two assumptions seem to be sufficient to allow us to derive the laws of physics that we have now clearly if those assumptions were changed if we were observers different from the way we are we would we would get different physics we might not be able to communicate with those other observers who have such very different qualities but those other observers were we to be able to get inside them their view of the physical world would be different so there’s an infinite number of different views of the world that that could could be and general relativity is is just one of the infinite varieties of them right for observers like us well for observers like us general relativity is inevitable but not for observers just for observers like us yeah for observers like us but there are conceivably other observers that don’t observe General relativity well the problem with that and the reason this is tricky is you know I view for example you know the weather as having a mind of its own but the the weather one might think and this is a question of what its internal quotes conscious experience is might have an experience of the world that might not have general relativity as one of the things that it experiences the problem is is that as we were talking about before you imagine that I’m enough like you that you can kind of get some idea of sort of what’s going on inside but in the case of the weather I don’t think it’s enough like us that we can have a good projection of what its internal view of things is so while it may be while we could abstractly think of it as an observer it isn’t an observer with which we can kind of have which where we translate its its kind of internal perception of things into our internal perception of things now what is your view on conscious experiences in the relationship to the ruad is is is the ruad more fundamental than conscious experiences or is consciousness more fundamental than the ruad in your view well I don’t know I mean I think the ruad is just an abstract object and you know the fact and it is my uh sort of assumption perhaps but it’s working really well that sort of everything that exists is somehow part of the ruad which means we are too which means that the ruad is sort of a substrate for everything that we are now the question of whether you can go into the ruad and say and point at something and say that’s the Don Hoffman set of em and the ruad so to speak and then what special features that might have that’s that’s that’s something I mean we know a certain amount about that there’s a lot more to figure out about that but if you’re asking is there something I mean for this is a complicated thing about what science is and what the point of science is and so on I mean there’s there’s there’s the universe doing its thing and there’s us having some narrative about what’s going on in the universe and I think you know science I think is about sort of taking not what the universe does but sort of trying to develop a narrative that we can kind of play in our minds that can say things about what the universe is doing in other words it’s not you know I think you’re you’re you mentioned the concept of a sort of headset for us to perceive what’s actually going on out there so to speak and yeah I I agree that what what matters to our science is what we perceive I mean the things that are not um and you know if you look at the history of science what has happened in the history of science is we’ve been progressively able to perceive more kinds of things you know telescopes microscopes electronic amplifiers all these kinds of things and we have then you know found ways to describe the world that we can then see so to speak and I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future there’ll be more kinds of sensors that we somehow manage to transduce into the things that we you know into the built-in sensors that we have um and and then we’ll we’ll we’ll want to Des describe more things about the world but I think in in your question of of um I mean for me I’ve always thought of Consciousness is an incredibly slippery concept and so I’ve I’ve uh you know I haven’t been that interested in kind of exactly how do I Define it and etc etc etc perhaps to my detriment but the one thing that um uh has you know was was interesting to me a couple of years ago was realizing that I needed sort of pragmatic definitions of Consciousness in order to understand more about how physics Works in other words it’s you know for example it’s kind of like if I say okay there’s Consciousness and observers like us have Consciousness what is the what are the operational consequences of that for example so for example one of them I think is this thing about single threads of experience I think that’s a now whether whether you say that’s a defining feature of Consciousness or not I don’t know that’s a question of what you mean by the word um it’s uh but I think there’s a there’s a significant feature of us as observers that we have this concept that we have this belief that we have a single thread of experience I mean I don’t know you know i’ I’ve sort of wondered what it’s like you know if you could be in a kind of a multi-way trance so to speak where really your brain is thinking about two different kind of you you have you know you have two different time narratives going on in your brain I mean I can’t imagine what that would be like but um uh you know if one had grown up with that maybe one would have some sort of internal uh you know you talk about what the internal feeling of something is you know I’m curious what what the internal feeling of an observer a bit different from me would be like these are all very interesting topics and I’m I’m interested in something very very simple like the taste of mint and and it’s so the taste of mint as a conscious experience so so to keep it really really simple instead of all the threads and so forth just a single specific conscious experience that that an observer might have and how that would be related to the ruad so for example would you want to say that the r there’s a computational substrate in the ruad that is for example necessary and sufficient for the experience of mint to occur or or or not you know I I don’t know what the experience of mint is I mean you know in other words I I I you know I have some experience of it if you say let’s kind of scientifici that experience okay what do we do to make it and you know this is the question in part of what science is and what science aspires to be because there are you know if we say how do I make that something that you can also sort of observe you can also be part of because the experience that I have internally as we discussed before is not something other than by extrapolation you don’t know what that experience is right so the question is can I make a transportable version that is kind of a a a community science version of my experience of mint or is it just something that happens inside me that can never be broken out of me and which is therefore not in some sense you know it isn’t Community science so to speak it isn’t what we usually think of as being what we usually aspire to have in kind of the operation of science so if I say how do I break out that experience well I could start saying you know and by the way it’s going to get complicated very quickly because you could say okay I experienced this a bunch of neurons in my brain you know are are chirping away and um you know what does that mean for you know that these neurons are choing away well we can say no doubt the neurons in my brain that chop away at the at the taste of mint would be different from the neurons in your brain that chirp away and we don’t even know how to map you know neuron number if if we were nematodes we might know how to map our neurons but we’re humans with a lot more neurons and we don’t know how to map our neurons and and there won’t be a unique mapping from one brain to another I mean in other words a nematode sort of interesting thought experiment could one nematode communicates scientifically to another nematode its internal experience of the taste of mint because after all the nematodes have a fixed set of nerve cells where we can say cell number 312 fired in this case and then the other nematode would say oh yeah I know what cell 312 firing feels like but it’s a very different thing with us we in order to communicate a concept from one human brain to another we kind of have to package it in a robust form that will allow that communication and the you know the number one robust form that we have is human language um where you know we’re taking all those random nerve firings that you think of when you imagine the taste of mint and you’re packaging those up and you’re saying to me the taste of mint and that’s unpacking in my brain and maybe I get some notion that is something some correspondence I don’t know what the correspondence is between your version of the taste of mint and my version of the taste of mint although if we were nematodes we might know because it might be the very same nerve cell that was firing but but we have a more General notion of Concepts uh than that and I think you know to this idea of being able to take a bundle of of neural activity and package it up in a robust form so that it can be trans moved to another brain and unpacked you know I think that that’s probably probably one of the key things that sort of our species discovered which is that you can have things like words that are kind of transportable from one brain to another and and I guess you know I there’s sort of a fun analogy that um which is you know when you have a particle like an electron or a photon a quark or something like this one of the things it’s doing is it is a it is a carrier of existence through space and time that is the electron is a thing that you can identify as being the same electron when it moved to another place or another time and that’s sort of similar to this idea that concepts are also sort of transportable things I mean in in our view of the way this works you know an electron is a something capable of pure Motion in physical space a concept as something capable of motion of pure Motion in Ral space I mean by by pure motion what I mean is it is not obvious in our models for example that a thing can move without change so in physical space you know you move a a book around for example and if the if it’s near a space-time Singularity the thing will be distorted like crazy but most of the time we say I move a book from here to there and it’s still the same book and I think that um uh this this possibility of pure Motion in our models is something that you have to kind of establish abstractly that that’s possible and by the way the the idea that there is pure motion again depends on observers because that book you know you moved it and some things about it changed I mean in our models it’s made of different atoms of space when it moved to a different place and yet to us it’s the same book and so similarly I would say you know when you talk about the the concept of mint of the taste of mint the experience of the taste of mint it is a non-trivial fact if it’s true that that is a transportable thing through time that there is a consistent persistent thing that is the engram or whatever it is that represents that that concept and that it is robust and I think that that if you you know the version of it that’s locked inside your brain at some moment in time I don’t think that’s transportable I don’t think that’s scienz I think that’s a thing that you would say it is I mean if if we were thinking about it in terms of an llm it would be some little you know some some activation of some neuron at some moment and you know then it’s gone and we wouldn’t say you know and we would argue was that a conscious experience of the llm well it isn’t robust it’s not something where we can pick it up and say look it’s a conscious experience because it was a fleeting thing that just was there at that moment and then disappeared and and I would claim that that um uh that absent some way to robustify what you’re talking about you you there isn’t really a way to extract I mean if you say show me that conscious experience what is it you know physicalize that conscious experience you can’t physicalize it so what does that mean so to speak I would claim that it is it is not an obvious fact that things can be made robust enough to be sort of picked out as a separate thing I mean I’m sort of reminded of of um uh I have to say in in your kind of what is that essence of a conscious experience um I’m reminded of something that I kind of feel silly about myself because you know when I was a kid 1960s and so on it was uh you know you would run into people who would talk about sort of uh the the Eternal Soul and you know if you were kind of a a physics oriented kid as I was you would always say things like but how much does a soul weigh you know how can this be a real thing you know what how much does it weigh you know when if a soul departs a body does that mean you know you lose a a you know a microgram or something you know how much does it weigh there must be some sort of if it’s feel it must have those physical attributes of course I realized in later on that that’s a very silly thing to have thought because you know computation the kind of the the the the idea of a a sort of an eternal soul is very is kind of a a sort of primitive way I think to talk about you know abstract computation and it will be a very foolish thing to ask sort of how much does the abstract computation weigh right and I kind of suspect and I’m not untangling it in real time as well as I might but I’m kind of suspecting that your kind of notion of the the intrinsic conscious experience of something and you saying look you can’t pull it out and physicalize it is the same kind of mistake so let me see if I can paraphrase so in your ontology um the ruad is is fundamental or close to fundamental and the rules there the comp ations but things but any color shape motion taste experiences those conscious experiences are not part of the fundamental ontology that you’re considering is is that correct or if I misund I mean okay so you know in matters this fundamental there are inevitably many different ways to look at the same elephant okay okay so the ruad and for example its representation in terms of computation and rules and so on is the way way that I understand best and that I think people in general understand best it is probably not the only way to think about it so for example just as mentioned before you can think about physics either as a kind of an underlying mechanistic structure that makes things happen or you can invent kind of an axiomatic physics where you just say this is a thing that’s true that’s the thing that’s true and then you have to fit all the pieces together so similarly when it comes to the ruad there is certainly I I like to think of it in from sort of the bottom up of I can represent it in terms of computations and things like this but in the end sort of observers like us are making various observations about it and one could imagine reconstructing it it’s I don’t know how to do it exactly but one could imagine saying all I know is what I observe and that is that’s my reality so to speak and now from that reality I can you know I could imagine a theory in which there is this really OD thing with computations and so on in other words my way of thinking about it the way I I prefer to think about it just because I guess that’s the way my particular mind is built is from this kind of hard structure of computation building up to something where I might hope to be able to find somewhere in the rouard a thing that corresponds to you know a brain with a a feeling of mint and things like this right that’s that’s that’s the way that for me is the most sort of it gives me the most sort of Hope of being able to make scientific progress but I don’t think that’s the only way to think about it I think you could as well say all I’m going to do like like the S Matrix for example you know forget the mechanism all we want to know is the transformation from initial states to final States and we’re going to just say there’s this thing called s that represents that transformation and we’re then going to talk about the properties of s I mean this was the you know the in the late 1950s early 1960s this was kind of what people thought was going to be the way the particle physics worked in in the strange cyclicity of science those ideas have come back again but um you know at the time there was sort of a competition would we describe the World by saying there’s just this SM Matrix and we’re going to figure out properties of the S matrix by having I wouldn’t call them conscious experiences but partical accelerator experiences of the S Matrix that’s you know door number one door number two are we going to figure out the mechanism you know how all these particles are structured and how they you know what the little interaction vertices are and all this kind of thing that was door number two in in the 1970s door number two one in particle physics right um in uh uh but I think it’s it’s not the case that you know we’re seeing in fact a return to more of the kind of SM Matrix approach approach to saying we don’t really know what’s going on inside but we can describe certain constraints based on what we observe and I absolutely think that there’s a way of constructing kind of uh sort of the ruad you know you could you could invent the ruad as the afterthought having started from something which is just axioms about observers and my particular way of thinking about it I like to start from something that I can you know run computer experiments on and that happens to you know that I at least imagine that I have a reasonably good handle on from a sort of from the way my mind works but I don’t think it’s the only way to think about it right you know for me if you say uh you know only start from things that an observer can observe you know which is kind of the SM Matrix idea only start from things that are uh sort of externally observable sure one could do that I don’t know how to set up that formalism um I mean you know I’ve got some ideas about that but that’s I think for me it’s much more difficult than the bottomup approach but I don’t think it’s I I I think both approaches are perfectly viable it’s just a question of if one’s goal is to have kind of a narrative description of how the world works one can make a choice between those approaches you know which is the way that is most likely to lead to a narrative that for example I understand I mean now again this is and for me the narrative that has to do with ruad and comput and so on is easier to understand it it is more grounded for me than a description in terms of kind of starting with Consciousness so to speak right so I think I’m understanding better so to me is of course I love the computational approach and the mathematically precise approach and that’s what we need to do in in science and I I guess what I’m doing is saying that the the computations and the mathematics are describing the activity of Consciousness as opposed to the activity of something that’s not conscious in other words what I’m doing is biting the bullet up front and saying fundamental in my ontology are things like observers that have conscious experiences so because every Observer if you imagine an observer that has no conscious experiences it’s not really clear what we’re talking about an observer with no conscious experiences um is nothing I don’t know what that means exactly so I mean you and lienet seem to have a lot in common so except that he was much smarter the you know one of the things that I only very recently understood about liit as I mentioned earlier is that libet could not imagine a way that mind could arise from non-m mind and I think you think the same thing that is you can’t imagine a way that mind can arise from non-m mind I can imagine how cognition intelligence and things like that could arise but conscious experiences what we call qualia um I would be delighted to see the first scientific theory that ever tries to do that right now there’s nothing on the table well I mean so so what would I mean this question of what can arise from what is a first of all you have to know what the thing you’re trying to get to is you know like like people say you know uh you know can life arise from non-life and again it’s a messy business because what do we mean by life if we mean the specifics of life on Earth with RNA and cell membranes and all this kind of thing that’s one question if we say you know the thing we scoop up from the Martian soil and it does something amazing that we’ve never seen before you know is that life is that not life you know it’s it’s I think we have to know and I think one of the difficulties about what you’re talking about is if we if you say can conscious experience arise from something other than conscious experience if if we don’t know if we don’t have a en description of the target it’s very hard to answer that question just like if we say can life arise from non-life and we have only one example of life here on Earth and if you say can conscious experience arise from something that isn’t conscious experience and you ultimately have only one instance of that which is what’s happening inside you you don’t even know that I have that same conscious experience so you have you know you’re trying to explain kind of an N of one thing of how does the thing that you feel internally arise from something that sort of isn’t you and so on how how does that arise and I think that’s a I mean I i’ I’d be very interested to understand how one would you know how one would get a positive answer to that in other words forget you know oh there isn’t a good enough Theory and we don’t know the electrochemistry and we you know we can’t see how Aggregates of neurons behave and so on I you know there are obviously issues there but there’s a there’s a different question which is you know how do I what’s the signal of success right so one issue here is that as an observer all I have are my conscious experiences I actually the notion of something physical beyond my conscious experiences is actually the leap right AB absolutely absolutely right the only thing we have is what we you know it’s the the uh you know cogo osum type type story absolutely and so we’re on the same page on on that and and and I agree I I don’t know that your world of experiences is anywhere similar to to mine I can never know that but what I do know is that Consciousness is what I know firsthand what I call inanimate matter is an extrapolation what’s directly available to me are experiences conscious experiences and what I call an unconscious physical world is an is an extrapolation that I’m making what I only have are my conscious experiences I have nothing else let’s go back to I hadn’t thought about this before this conversation but let’s go back to the nematodes okay which have precise to defined you know neural Nets where there really is a way to say nematode number one feels this and do you believe that if I could accurately measure kind of the electrochemistry of the nematode that I would capture kind of that’s the whole story or do you believe that there’s something that is kind of beyond the physical that is kind of not capturable by any physical measurement that is what you know is is something about what the nematode feels what we call physical is going to be something inside A four-dimensional Spacetime which is going to be just what I as particular Observer can observe because I am the kind of Observer I am the reality beyond that four-dimensional space time that I happen to observe is infinitely complicated and I may need to go to that other deeper reality to give you a full so so in that sense what I can do in terms of a physical thing inside SpaceTime is probably trivial and probably inadequate I understand so so I mean this is at some level you know I could unkindly say it’s kind of a Victorian Theory okay because it posit it that there is what we have physically in our minds but that and and what we can sort of what we can sort of tell is there but then there’s a spirit world which is beyond that that might be you know for example in the ruad for sure in my view we see just tiny little slices of the ruad and there’s much more there for the things that I mean the okay so one of the questions is is it enough for doing physics that we sample only that tinest slice of the ruad it might not be it might be the case that we would sample that slice the rad and miracles would keep on happening weird things weird random things would keep on happening that kind of poke in from other parts of the ruad that we weren’t able to sense so to speak and that in other words that we are that it isn’t a closed system that the part of the ruad that we are slicing that the slice that we’re taking isn’t closed enough and so you know we we constantly are being exposed to other things so so an analogy in fluid dynamics for example most of the time it’s okay to just think of a fluid as with a velocity field and things like that occasionally you actually you know if you’re if you’re making a Hypersonic airplane you have to care about the fact that the fluid is made of molecules but that’s a rare case but it could be that there are things about the World perhaps even your conscious ious things about the world where aspects of the ruad poke through and it isn’t it isn’t self-consistent to just look at the slice we are we we know we can can kind of know we know that we can observe so that’s an interesting question of to what extent is the pocket of reducibility as I would call it the kind of slice where we can say things about what’s going to happen to what extent is that closed and to what extent does it have things feeding into it by the way there’s an analogy of this in mathematics which is uh kind of to what extent can you do mathematics at the level of kind of talking about things like the Pythagorean theorem and or do you have to can you talk about the Pythagorean theorem or every time you mention it do you have to go back and say oh and the definition real numbers that I’m using is this and that the following axioms etc etc etc which is kind of like going down to the level of molecules and talking about the fluid so I think it is a it is a non-trivial claim but a thing that that I I think we are deriving in for example our models of physics that there is a sort of self-consistent layer that can be talked about merely in terms of general and quantum mechanics and so on without looking down below at the details of the whole hypog graph and all these atoms of space doing all their complicated things it is a it is a a scientific claim that it is enough to merely look at this kind of Continuum level of General activity in on by the way a thing that we would really love to do is to see things other things poking through I mean that’s what you know when people observed molecules you know they they have water fluid but yet they saw that these little grains of pollen were kicked around in Brown in motion and that showed there was something below just this fluid description water and we’d love to find the same kind of thing for physical space and that’s one of my big activities right now is trying to see you know is there an effect are we going to be lucky because molecules people were pretty lucky molecules were big enough that you could actually see them in 1900 so to speak you know whether we will be able to see the atoms of space so to speak in in my lifetime I don’t know um you know it’s a question of you know what the what the scale is and and how clever we are and so on but think that that um this this um you know this this whole idea of whether whether we are in a consistent bubble so to speak or whether we have to appeal to things sort of beyond our physics is a reasonable question I mean that is there are things where uh you know I’m hoping that there are observations that we can make with telescopes uh or maybe with other kinds of systems but that there are observations that we can make in which the the nasty spiny parts of the ruad will kind of poke through our usual Continuum view of space and so what you’re what you’re asking I think is in the case of conscious experience is it enough to merely talk about kind of the laws of physics that we know or is it is that a place where there’s a poke through from something Beyond kind of the laws of physical that we know I I think that’s a very important and useful question and and and there’s also another way of looking at this issue and that is if we we’re trying to build a scientific theory and we’re trying to find as few assumptions as possible for our scientific theory we believe in aoms Razer and so and we’ve both agreed that that as an observer all I know are my conscious experiences so whatever conscious experiences are they’re all I know as an observer so so in the ontology that I’m going to assume in my scientific theory I have a big choice I can either put conscious experiences in that ontology as found as foundational or not and if I choose not to then I’ve given myself the scientific duty to explain where those experiences come from so I either postulate that they are I say upfront these are part of the ontology these are the assumptions I make or I say no they’re not part of the assumptions I therefore have the duty to explain consciously so it’s my choice now I would like to just to stop you for a second there I mean it depends on what kind of science you’re doing okay if if you’re doing psychology or something if you’re doing a science that is about that then for sure but one of the things that happens in science it’s not obvious that it would be possible but it has proved possible is that you can separately look at physics biology chemistry you know they have they have interfaces but you can choose to concentrate on one aspect of the world and you know an obvious question is is there a you know you might make the claim there is no meaningful science that can be done without entraining Consciousness in it that would be a potential claim that is not what has been the observation of the last few hundred years of science the few last few hundred years of science has achieved a lot without solving the problem that you say nobody has solved and agree nobody has solved um the but you know so it’s a question of what it is that you think you’re going to do in your science now when you talk about oam’s Razer and you know I don’t know why aam’s Razer is true I mean it’s it’s an interesting Criterion it’s um in a sense the ruad denies oam’s Razer because the ruad has everything all these kinds of things going on in it at some level from the point of view of of abstract Aesthetics the ruad is lovely because it assumes nothing but you know from the point of view of of you know is it saying oh the the description of what’s happening for example let’s take an aram’s razor argument about what happens in a fluid okay the arham’s razor argument would probably be if the fluid is Flowing from here to there all the molecules inside it must be flowing in exactly that direction that would be wrong correct in other words so you know and in fact what’s true is there’s very complicated stuff going on it just happens the level of looking at the whole fluid it can be described by saying the fluid goes from here to there so I don’t think I mean I think it would be a mistake to say that there is something kind of uh there’s any necessity if there’s an aams razor that means anything it means something because of the way our minds work I mean one key feature of our minds is that they’re very finite and you know we we take all the stuff going on in the world and we’re trying to make a narrative about what’s happening that is simple enough that we can stuff it in our minds and and make inferences about it and for that aam Razer is very useful occasionally things will poke through and be like you know aam was wrong type thing um but uh you know I think it’s I think it’s a feature you know I think perhaps one could even argue you know I’ve been on sort of the hunt for things that observers like us just take for granted and I think in some sense the Simplicity of explanation is something that we implicitly take for granted let me see if I understand you correctly in the same way that we observe general relativity because of the kinds of observers we are in the wer model and in the same way that we see quantum mechanics because of the kinds of observers we are in the wer model we also many people many philosophers many cognitive scientists for instance Don are willing to say look we can move Beyond SpaceTime and we can find something that can give rise to the physics that we have and then in part by doing so they appeal to aam’s Razer but you’re saying that also aam’s Razer itself may be something that we find appealing because of the kinds of observers we are yes that’s interesting yes I don’t think op’s Razer the ruad does not know aam’s Razer now what’s interesting about what you said is that by assuming nothing you assume everything so in some sense when you take aam’s Razer to its Pinnacle you then undo aam’s Razer to the utmost well yes in some sense that’s right I mean in in some sense you know the by by assuming nothing and getting the ruad you have something where sort of to recover aam’s raaza in your observations of the ruad is something is is is then a different sort of a different Adventure it’s um but but I I mean I want to come back to this idea I mean this you take the point of view I think that there is a a desire to construct conscious experience from something else and and you know I agree as I said that it is like you know mechanism versus it’s like the particle mechanism versus the SM Matrix and so on there is there are no doubt complimentary descriptions of what’s going on which one is the easiest to build a formalism around is a matter of taste probably and you know for me so far I found it easiest to talk about the ruad and so on and build up from from that side of things now I will say that I’m pretty sure that there’s a way of formulating a lot of the things that I’ve said about the ruad the princip of computational equivalence computational irreducibility all those kinds of things as essentially axiomatic statements about observers that in other words that one can an alternative to going sort of bottom up is to Simply say for example you know Einstein did this in formulating special artivity he simply said you know there’s The Observers can’t determine sort of simultaneity in an abstract fashion observers have these limit ations and he took that as axiomatic and from that he constructed a physical Theory and you know and that was a sort of Observer first construction of a physical Theory um in in our way of deriving spectral altivity it is not Observer first it doesn’t it doesn’t work that way um I mean it it uh I suppose it makes one kind of Observer related assumption which is it says the only thing that we can in a sense pay attention to is the causal graph of relation of causal relationships between events we are not in a position to independently discuss the relationship of atoms of space the only way that we can uh sort of say anything about atoms of space is by their effect on other things and ultimately implicitly by their effect on us as observers but now observers like us as we’ve discussed have conscious experiences or we have nothing right if we have no conscious experiences we we have nothing that we’ve observed I I don’t quite understand that so let’s walk through that for a second okay so so I mean one of the problems that I’m having is you mention sort of conscious experience and you know I certainly have this internal feeling that I’m having conscious experiences I I try to imagine what it would be like if you know at some time in the future you know well here’s a few a few few different cases okay so let’s say uh let’s say somebody does molecular scale manufacturing of a brain just like mine and somebody can you know scan my brain and uh you know reconstruct every molecule then first question is does that sort of copy of my brain also have conscious experiences or not so you’re asking me no I’m asking you does that does that in in your view of things would I okay so I’m going to you know we’re going to go through several different levels because one thing would be a a one question would be is a molecular scale copy of my brain able to have conscious experiences now you could say no you could say there’s more there there’s other pieces of the ruad that are poking into your brain that aren’t part of the Canon of physics that we know right now that will mean that the thing you copied of just molecules you didn’t copy enough you could say that I don’t know if you are saying that well my analogy would be more like again the zoom screen so right now I see pixels on the zoom screen some of them are of your face and some of them are of inanimate objects in the back and I could try to get a mathematical model of how the pixels of your face dynamically behave versus the pixel of the books behind you that behave in different ways and I wouldn’t want to say that therefore because I understood I’ve got a model of how the pixels on your face are doing some other complicated computation different from the pixels of of the wall behind you that doesn’t give me any real insight into the nature of the Consciousness itself because in every case all I’m dealing with is just an interface I’m not dealing with the Consciousness itself I’m seeing Consciousness through an interface so SpaceTime I’m saying is nothing but another Zoom screen I understand can I make a comment here so there are two ways of copying we can copy Steven by duplicating the window right now but then there’s another way where if you clone Steven or if Steven happened to be cloned so if there was an embryo and it’s split now would you say that look this embryo is operating in SpaceTime so in some sense this embryo is operating at the level of the pixels on our Zoom screen we could say that but then we would also see the two Stevens and say that both Stevens are conscious I don’t think what’s I don’t think that’s what Don is saying I know that this may not be what you’re saying Stephen but I’m I’m curious so what would be the difference in the embryo case splitting versus copying Steven that makes one not conscious I I think I think we need to Define this more you know I think one thing is if I had an identical twin you would obviously believe I think that my identical twin if the identical twin was alive would be just as conscious as me that is that true right I would I would I think it would be the best inference to make is that you know it’s fine okay so the identical twin is is conscious now let’s imagine that in some future state of molecular manufacturing I can make a molecule by molecule copy of myself would the resulting molecule by molecule copy of myself be as conscious as I am or not well so the answer is going to be partly what we think about this SpaceTime interface and and its relationship to Consciousness right so if we’re if if we’re taking a a point of view in which um space-time particles somehow give rise to conscious experiences by their complex interactions then from that point of view of course I would then say well if those physical you know interactions in your body gave you Consciousness than presumably identical ones in in another SpaceTime body that’s identical to yours but Al but what I’m denying is that physical objects inside SpaceTime actually give rise to Consciousness that that that space time itself is nothing but an experience of Consciousness so what we I don’t think that’s the same issue I mean in other words I think that that first point is if you you know you it is not obvious that if I copy a proton for example that it could be the case that there’s a special proton that is a proton in a conscious mind that is different from proton from other protons and it could be that when I copy the proton it it is no longer a conscious proton it’s a it’s kind of a you know it’s a it’s a lame dead proton you know I copied the thing but it wasn’t it wasn’t conscious anymore just like it could easily be the case that if I copied every molecule that the that I get wouldn’t be alive it wouldn’t have you know wouldn’t be it wouldn’t be operating so to speak I mean it’s it’s you know you can have it a simple analogy in if I copy a lump of computer memory but that lump of computer memory is not being that there’s no you know program counter that’s starting to execute instructions in it that lump of computer memory while it is a copy of another lump of computer memory it’s it’s not alive in the same sense that the that the original computer memory was was but so I think I think the first distinction is whether there is whether the the sort of electrons and protons and so on in me if I were able to copy them would they be if I were able to make kind of a physical copy of them and yes that physical copy will be something that I would perceive as being in a different place in SpaceTime I don’t think that’s the most important aspect of it I don’t think that’s that important for your Theory actually um but I think the first question is you know did that copy that got made was it uh you know did it preserve its Consciousness or not well maybe an even prior question is do we believe in local realism in SpaceTime so I would want to argue that local realism is false and that and and even stronger that that in fact particles only exist in the act of observation and otherwise don’t so to be really out there I’ll say neurons only exist when they’re perceived and neurons do not exist when they’re not perceived so local realism is false and and and therefore this whole whole line of questioning goes away right it’s it’s it’s rather all I have as an observer are my conscious experiences period when I talk about inanimate objects and particles and so forth I’m now extrapolating from my firsthand evidence of conscious experience to something that I don’t see I’ve never they don’t exist unless I actually perceive them so so so I mean just to to clarify what you’re saying I mean and and what I’ve you know it is the case that you could imagine constructing a science by talking only about conscious experiences and how those conscious experiences relate to each other one could imagine building a science that way and you know even there are little Shadows of that in things I’ve done there are shadows of that in the way special of is set up and so on but by the way explicit in Chris puk’s Quantum basian ISM okay in so they call it cubism basically yes I I know that that’s right so there in some sense what he’s basically saying is the Observer is everything and all quantum mechanics is is just the handbook that the Observer uses to interpret their experiences but but the thing to to to understand is this is you know it’s a classic issue in in lots of areas of science you can describe things by mechanism or you can describe things by kind of what’s achieved in the end so for example if we’re doing mechanics we can describe the equations of motion for something you know a ball going through the air we can describe we can say there’s an equation that says what the B will do at the next moment in time or we can say we’re using an action principle and there is an overall constraint that the motion of the ball should minimize the you know the the action quantity by by the trajectory it chooses so this is a you know this is something I mean you know it’s been there since Aristotle and probably before these different forms of explanation of things and my my contention is that and so I’ll be very clear about it that there is no mechanical explanation for any conscious experience not possible okay was right I’m arguing liess was right with his argument from the mill and and that right now the the work that’s been done in in cognitive Neuroscience on the models of Consciousness these are all my friends and colleagues that are working on this I always ask them okay you’re proposing a neurobiological mechanism so what mechanism gives rise to the taste of mint I I understand but you’ve got to have an end point you’ve got to have an end point to make that a meaningful thing to talk about you’ve got to be able to Define what success means in other words what kind of an answer would satisfy you well so these theories themselves tell you what they would say would be the answer so for example integrated information Theory says you have to have the right causal architecture and you can specify it with a matrix I think these theories I I’m not a big fan of these theories okay I think nor am I nor am I I I think I I think what they’re doing you know it’s kind of like they’re describing something which is sort of the whole elephant and they’re describing how it flips its tail in a particular way that may be a little bit unkind but you know it’s it’s I don’t think I think that it’s I mean a case that perhaps is easier to pin down is things about the definition of life where it’s like you know it’s a little bit less controversial because there isn’t this kind of inner experience type thing it’s like what does it mean to be alive is it self- reproduction is it beating certain thermodynamic things is it something about you know what is the you know what is the kind of the definition and it’s a mess there isn’t because in that case as I said it’s a you know we have an N of one but at least we’ve had 10 to the 40th organisms that have lived on this Earth um in the case in what you’re describing you have really an N of one because it’s only you yourself internally who can definitively you know have something to say about what conscious experience is so I’m I’m still I’m I’m fighting with the on on this issue and I don’t think I’m I’m not saying there isn’t an answer but I don’t think you’ve given it which is how do you define success in other words what you know let’s say I’m and and I’m going to you know that question of how do you define success you have rather dismissively said that that my friends the llms are all you know merely uh you know they’re merely sort of uh regurgitating the things that went into them so to speak um but you claim that you know we are not so to speak but but so so my question will be you know if you can define a notion of success for you know for Consciousness as experienced by you and as extrapolated by you as experienced by me and other humans and so on then the question is what you know that that definition of success of of did you manage to derive that can I then is that definition of success transportable enough that I can really apply it to an llm and perhaps the answer will be you know the llm is not conscious but right now you haven’t given me anything that is concrete enough that I can take it and and you know fit it feed it fit it onto the llm and say do you win or do you lose right so I I owe you a mathematically precise Theory Of Consciousness a scientific theory of consciousness that could try to do that kind of thing that’s what we’re trying to do we have a theory we call the theory of conscious agents and we have some papers that we’ve published where we have a mathematical model it uses marvian Dynamics um in the model and what we’re what we’re doing right now right is to try to answer your question right so I agree with you what you’re asking for is exactly what we have to do and the the way we’re going at it is is is as follows the the high energy theoretical physicists in in the last 10 years have discovered these positive geometries beyond SpaceTime and quantum theory and behind those positive geometries they found these combinatorial objects that classify them they’re called decorated permutations and so so this is just in the last 10 years but so we’ve taken off the headset the SpaceTime headset and we we’ve gone outside for the first time and we’re finding these obelisks these positive geometries outside of SpaceTime and these combinatorial objects so what we’re doing to answer to actually respond to your question is we’re saying let’s start with with a mathematical model of Consciousness qua Consciousness so it’s a it’s like a network of interacting conscious agents so it’s it’s it’s a it’s a social network and is governed by Marian Dynamics and what we’re doing then is saying can we take this markovian Dynamics and first show that we can project onto the decorated permutations that the physicists have found and then from there project on to the positive geometries if so then we can project all the way into SpaceTime and then we would actually be able to make testable predictions inside SpaceTime from a theory that says Consciousness is fundamental and we start there so we’ve already we published a paper last year where we actually showed some new mathematics apparently about markovian Dynamics and we showed how they can be classified with decorated permutations so that so we published that and and now what we’re doing is showing we’re trying to show that we can get the positive geometries like the amplitud hedrin as projections of of marov polytopes which are the spaces of all possible Mar coing Dynamics so so so what you’re asking for is exactly what should be asked for and what we’re trying to do is to show that we could get all of physics plus more from a theory of conscious agents being assumed to be fundamental outside of SpaceTime and projecting through decorated permutations positive geometries into SpaceTime where we can make our our empirical test so so so so that’s what we have to do but but if we if if we don’t assume that Consciousness is fundamental in are in the foundations of our theories then we either have to dismiss Consciousness and say it’s not there or we have to give a theory in terms of unconscious entities about how Consciousness emerges and if we try to do that last I claim that it’s not logically possible to start with unconscious ingredients and to have Consciousness emerge not possible that is not my intuition okay I mean you and livets have the intuition I think the reason I disagree with liet’s intuition if if you’d asked me in 1980 do I disagree with liet’s intuition I would have said um I don’t know I don’t know how you would get a mind-like thing to arise from a a non-m mind-like sort of uh origin but then by 1981 I was starting to do all kinds of computer experiments and so on about what you know what simple rules can actually do right and it really surprised me in other words what could emerge from something that seemed like it was too sterile to generate anything interesting I was completely wrong and I you know it’s amazing that even after all these years you know I I do these experiments on different kinds of systems and I keep on being wrong and I keep on thinking you know this thing is somehow too simple to do anything interesting and my my intuition keeps on you know even though I think I’ve now developed much better intuition about this it is remarkable the extent to which sort of things much richer things than you might imagine can emerge from simple causes so to speak and so I think that’s a foundational kind of piece of intuition that you know I’ve developed I I you know it’s kind of fun for me because this idea of computational irreducibility that I actually introduced about 4 years and a week ago um it is uh um it is interesting to me that when I talk to some younger scientists and so on for them computational irreducibility is obvious could the world could not be any other way and which is how I feel about it too but but it’s it’s you know it’s a thing where if you grow up with this idea it’s kind of an obvious idea in the end it’s it’s it becomes obvious after you’ve kind of ground on it enough but I think that that idea was something certainly not know and you know that’s that’s a new piece of information a new piece of sort of intuitionally relevant information so that’s that affects my my thinking about this correct me if I’m incorrect Don I don’t think you’re disagreeing with what Stephen just said Stephen what you had said is that look we can start with something that’s simple mechanically simple and then get to something that is extremely mechanically complex such that we would never think looking at the complex case that it could be made of these Elementary elements and Don is saying that’s correct but notice the word mechanical there you can get something that’s simple mechanically and give rise to something that’s complex mechanically but that’s a different question than jumping onto logical categories right so so the claim is that there’s a a spark of Consciousness that can simply not be reached mechanically that’s the claim that’s the claim right so okay so it’s an interesting claim it’s a claim that I think the structure of the science that we have is not going to be able to talk about it in other words you can say let’s turn science On’s head and let’s say that’s our basis and then let’s see what we can construct about the rest of science that’s a perfectly intellectually valid thing to do but if you’re going to ask given given the fact that you’re not able to give a kind of a science-based definition you’re not going to be able to get to you what you want from kind of you know you you might very well be able to as I as I keep on saying you know from a theory in which all that’s real is what observers observe I have no doubt that you can go from such a theory to to deduce how things have to work in the world and even to be able to say given this way of how things work in the world we could come up with kind of a uh sort of a meta theory that is that corresponds to space and time and all these kinds of things that is a good description of what we have derived from this underlying theory that has to do that starts with observers actually I want to ask something about that in in what you described MH do you think that there could just be one observer in other words do you think it’s important to the nature of observers that there are many of them and that they have some correspondence to each other or do you think that if if in fact it was the case that you know you were the last human alive and there’s no other sort of I don’t know what you know I I don’t think intelligences relies on life forms but but imagine that it did and you were you were the only thing in the universe that had that was like you and quotes conscious is that an okay situation or is that something that would not work in your theory would your theory require that there’s a whole flock of observers there yeah so it’s it’s quite striking that the paper we’re we’re writing right now that we’ll be publishing hopefully later this year um we’ve discovered a new Logic on the space of markovian kernels so so we we’re able to associate a markovian kernel to each conscious Observer and the the Marian kernel is basically is describing given that my current experience is red was the probably the next one will be green and so forth you can write down a matrix of it it’s what we call the qualia kernel and and I think there’s a horrible problem with that but we’ll come to that in a minute okay sure sure but but so then there’s the question can can these conscious agents and the marvian kernels combine to create new conscious agents with with more experiences and we discovered we’ll be in this new paper announcing a new Logic on on on markovian kernels that we just that we just discovered you probably know about the taking a markovian kernel and taking a trace chain on a subset of states where so I can immediately imagine what that means but yes I a 10 by1 yeah I get it and I and only look at three of the states it’s going to induce the Dynamics on the 3X3 and you’ll get a new kernel on the three 3x3 kernel that’s induced by the 10 by10 it’s called a trace chain so so it turns out what we’re going to publish is that the the one kernel being the trace of another gives you a partial order on all kernels so it turns out that’s a partial order sure and so so it actually you know for example you know the trace of a trace is a trace so it’s trans POS and and irreflexive and so forth so so it’s actually so it gives you a logic and it gives you a logic about with an you know least oper bound a greatest lower bound and and so forth it turns out it’s a non- Boolean logic of of of these marvian kernels okay there’s no top there’s no top Consciousness there’s an infinite number of directions that you can go infinitely far in in terms of combining it’s locally Boolean so if I take a particular marvian kernel all the kernels that are less than it in this logic form a Boolean logic so it’s locally bulling so just just a technical question here I mean so these you know we can think of one of these movian kernels as defined by some Matrix some some uh okay so are these finite matrices or are these infinite matrices well right now um what we’ve been doing are finite but we we you in this paper we’re only going to deal with finite we’ll then look you know at the continuous case and so forth Beyond end okay so so I mean what you’re saying is given that I have a probability Matrix that says I mean you know your movian matrices are kind of like random versions of s matrices in a sense that they’re saying you know given this Vector of what comes in this you you know you multiply by this Matrix and you get this Vector of what comes out um and you’re doing that purely in terms of probabilities but now what you’re saying is given given I’m just trying to understand the technical aspect of what you’re what you’re describing given given such a matrix you are saying there are uh you can can extract submatrices by tracing out um by by I mean for anybody who’s watching this who wants to know what that actually means it’s it’s your you’re you’re just adding you’re you’re getting rid of those components by just adding up a bunch of things and fixing fixing what happens so so we’ve got you know some part of our Matrix is still flapping around you know free as a bird so to speak and another part has been locked down and what you’re saying is if you uh if in the all the different forms of locking down um they form a there there is there kind of a like subsets of a set or something they form some kind of partial order of you lock down this and you you know there will be pieces that are in you know you can lock down this part and if you lock down a part of that part it’s sort of it’s it’s a it’s you know it’s a proper subset there and you can have another part that is sort of uh um that that’s I mean in yeah I’m going to start spouting technical things about chains and anti- chains and so on but which is probably not very useful but but at least helps me understand what’s going on that’s right but but by the way most marov and Colonels are not comparable right so if I give if you give you Marian kernel almost every Marian kernel is not greater than it or less than it right there it’s really it’s it’s quite an accomplishment to have any kind of relationship at all with other Marian kernels which gets at the diversity of the of of consciousnesses and the relationship but it turns out you can’t combine consciousnesses unless where where they the states overlap they have the same Trace you have to have the same trace on your overlapping states to allow consciousnesses to combine you know I’m hoping that there’s more to Consciousness than marvian matrices well because that’s a shockingly minimal kind of um view of what I mean and and also to say I’m never a believer in theories that have probability as a fundamental comp component well so there’s two things there so the first though I would bring up um something called the theory of computational equivalence that that that I agree with you on and it’s a simple thing to point out that Marian kernels are computationally Universal it’s trivial so so the problem is as soon as you’ve got probability in the picture you’re no longer dealing with pure computational rules probability is a statement I mean you can if if you’re looking at the manifold of all possibilities and you’re just viewing probability as a way as as a parameter effectively to to sort of sample your space so for example let’s say I say I’ve got a circle okay there’s a well- defined meaning to a you know a disk let’s say a region that’s that’s circular and then I say well actually I don’t have a circle I just have this probability distribution that uh allows points to be dropped anywhere in this region now I could describe the circle by saying that I have this probability distribution that in mathematical terms only has support within the circle only has a non-zero probability within the circle that will be a way of describing the circle but if I am to talk about the sequence of points that are dropped in the circle then I’ve got a whole bunch more it’s it’s no longer sort of accessible to Pure computation as soon as I can drop the points according to probability I don’t have a rule for where the points will land I’m well but there’s a theorem in autometer theory that the the non-deterministic automa Turing machines for example have exactly the same computational class as the deterministic there there’s not that’s a much more detailed issue let’s unroll that that’s not correct in the the I mean okay deterministic and non-deterministic touring machines absolutely have the same computational power but but that is not the same statement as that a probabilistic touring machine will is has the same kind of computational character as a touring machine let’s let’s unpack that oh it may may have a different character sure sure right but let’s unpack that we’ve got a touring machine a touring machine has definite rules you start it from some initial state it goes crunch crunch crunch and generates you know its succession of States but now let’s say it’s a probabilistic touring machine and that means that it’s what it does at every step is not definite it’s determined by some probability but it does it does something it’s just we don’t know what it will do and it has a probability of you know 30% of doing this and 70% of doing that but at every step it does something right so that’s that’s the probabilistic touring machine we don’t know what it does it’s going to do at every step but at every step it does something a non-deterministic touring machine is a different story a non-deterministic touring machine is asking what are all the possible things that could happen we’ve got many paths of History the touring machine could go left it could go right we actually take all of those paths we build up this whole you know we call the multi-way graphs of all possible paths okay and and the and the statement is that if what you’re interested in is does there exist a path that leads to this or that thing that’s that’s you know the the full put it the way the the multi-way graph can is computationally equivalent to the single way turning machine that’s everything you can every computation that you can do with the the multi-way touring machine you could in principle do with a single way touring machine but it’ll be a lot of effort that is not true with a probalistic touring machine so a probalistic touring machine that choice at step three that you picked to go left that choice is unknowable right by an ordinary touring machine that came from outside the system that was you know the probability the heat bath you know the the random the the the you know God was playing dice and it came out this way that came from outside the system and you can’t know that so any you know as soon as you have a probabilistic theory it’s not the case it’s not the same story as not as non-deterministic theories a non-deterministic theory there’s still you know there’s still a definite thing which is the set of all possible non-deterministic paths which is different from you know if you said well as I was saying with with the in the case of the disk for example if the way you’re describing the disk is to just say let me look at all possible ways that the points could be could be selected there then yes it’s a it’s a it’s a nice kind of computationally describable version of the dis it’s a somewhat round way to describe it but it’s it’s the same kind of purely computational kind of concept but if you say I’m going to you know notice where every raindrop fell in the disc so to speak that is a different story you can’t know whether you know if it’s a probalistic thing it is not from within the system to know where the raindrops fall so I think I mean are you unhappy then with the notion of a probabilistic um fundamental framework you don’t like that idea yes I don’t think well I I think that if you say that you are wheeling in you know who makes who makes the choice in the probabilistic system in other words does God make the choice in the probabilistic system how does that choice get made because in something like in a multi-way system in a in a non-deterministic system there isn’t a choice to be made all possible choices are made there’s no there’s no kind of you know there’s no deity playing dice whereas in a probalistic system you have to have something from outside the system deciding what’s going to happen unless what you’re saying is you’re merely using the probalistic system as a proxy for this multi-way thing but I don’t think you’re doing that because our because it’s a fundamental feature of kind of I think what you would call conscious experience that there is a single thread of conscious experience now maybe I should ask you this question I mean in so far as you think you know what conscious experience is is there a definite single thread through time of conscious experience well actually from your discussion I would actually say that the way I’m thinking about is the multi-way thinking of it that all possible consciousnesses in fact exist all the threads are there wait wait a second there’s there’s two issues one is do they exist and the other is are you experiencing them because I don’t think you experienced them I don’t think you think you experienced them no I’m not experiencing your Consciousness right now for example right but I think that a critical feature of of our typical conscious experience is that we believe we are persistent and we have a single thread of Consciousness we think definite things are happening in the world we think definite things we think that we are thinking definite things you know forget about what’s happening in the outside world but we imagine that we have a definite train of thought so to speak we do not imagine that we have kind of oh there are a superposition of of a hundred thoughts that I’m having right now rather we think at least we have the impression might be wrong but we have the impression that you know somehow we are just having a single threat of experience I mean do do you agree with that that that’s my subjective impression is that there’s a single continuing me that that is taken has taken one path that I couldn’t have predicted and and so forth right but right so that that’s the way I I feel about and I agree that if you bring probabilities into a scientific theory that’s where explanation stops right right explanation stops where probabilities begin and then you can either be an objectivist or subjectivist about those probabilities um and how to interpret those so so I Absolut so absolutely I agree that probabilities are the end of explanation and so when probabilities appear in my markovian dynamics of Consciousness I’m saying this is where my explanation stops we’ll need a deeper if you want to get rid of these probabilities you’re going to need a deeper Theory than the one I’m offering you right now but the point is can I offer you one right now with probabilities in it where you say oh okay that’s where your theory stops and I say oh yes that’s where my theory stops but but if I can use that theory of Consciousness and show that we can build up get these positive geometries get SpaceTime emerging then then maybe you’ll grant me you know the dispensation to hold off on the probabilties until I show that I can actually do this and then we can go back and say now can we get rid of these probabilities in the matrices or not right but so so I suspect in in your concept of kind of I think it from what I’m understanding when I asked the question could the world be uh could there be just a single observer in the in the world I think what you’re saying is no because you’re building a calculus of the combination of observers and yet this and and there’s no it’s not a Boolean logic so there’s no single top Observer but there is in some sense you could talk about the whole of all the observers and and that if you want to say is that an observer I I might say yeah maybe maybe instead of one Observer there’s the whole Observer which is you can go infinitely far in infinitely many directions so there’s not an infinite one top there’s an infinite number of directions that you can go infinitely far and so this notion of conscience is really complicated but I don’t think I can say that there’s one but I can say there’s a whole okay but but so are you this in in your Marian partial order okay are are are you and I part of the same postet or do we each have our own separate post sets um well we’re part of the this big whole post set the markovian postet um but we may be and we’re we’re partly in branches that are partly compatible because we’re talking and and and presumably something’s happening we’re not completely incompatible all I know that Don is you’re greater than liveness the partial order well he has yeah right he has the advantage that time has gone by since since old gotfried was around IQ was at least double mind so but anyway um but but okay so I’m fairly confused here because on the one hand we agree I think that the only conscious experience that you can have any definiteness about is the n of one conscious experience that you are having that’s right okay that’s right so now in your theory you’re talking about multiple conscious experiences multiple conscious agents or whatever that have certain relationships that’s right and so I’m not even I mean so you’re positing that you you’re taking your sort of empirical inference that there are other conscious agents in the world and you you’re saying I’m really going to believe in that because I’m going to make a theory that has many conscious agents in it that is that fail yes and I’m also going to believe that the experiences that I have had in my life do not cover all possible conscious experiences I’m going to admit that there are experiences that I don’t have yet okay and for example as as life has gone on I’ve had brand new experiences I’d never had before all of a sudden you go oh I’d never had that experience before at all right so okay but why is that I mean but you’re saying that somewhere in okay so in your theory there are sort of is it the case first of all is that time in your theory or is that is it is it merely the kind of the the the partial order sort of is it merely the pecking order of consciousnesses or is there some kind of progression there what’s interesting is that as you well know um you can have stationary Marian processes in which case there is no increase in entropy from step to step so there’s no entropic Arrow of time and so what what I’m imagining is that the the full dynamics of the whole Consciousness um is stationary but I am a projection of that so you I’m a trace so I’m a projection so I’ve lost information and it’s it’s a theorem pretty easy to prove that when you take you a projection Say by conditional probability where you lose information the projected chain will have increasing entropy so I’m proposing that there is no time for the whole Consciousness and time emerges as well as space as an artifact of the loss of information and projection so what we’re going to actually try to show is that time and space themselves um are all artifacts of projection and not an insight into the true nature of the deeper whole conscious okay so let’s unpack that a bit so one thing we can imagine if we take a fairly traditional space-time view of the universe right is we can imagine that there’s this giant crystal that is the whole space-time history of the universe right it’s just there and then we can imagine that our experience of the universe is merely Motion in the time direction through this Crystal that is the space time the representation of all space time in the universe mhm so I think what you’re what you’re saying is you are imagining and I I I want to unpack this a bit because I I I think there’s there are you know you’re imagining that you have this thing it’s a partial order of mock of matrices basically MH and by the way I I think it’s not really fair to talk about it as a a logic I mean it is a logic in some sense of universal algebra or whatever else but I don’t think you know by saying the word logic you’re kind of making that sound like it has something to do with human you know logic as constructed by Aristotle is kind of this way of representing sort of the way humans construct arguments and I don’t think that kind of the mathematical structure that you’re describing as a logic is you know it is you could as a as some kind of mathematical definition you could say it’s a logic but it certainly isn’t logic with the same kind of input report that Aristotle’s version of logic has you know just to make that point I mean I think it’s it’s a well well if we think about probab so think about probability measures as propositions right so they’re propositions and we can talk about the when we talk about we can put a it turns out we can put a partial order on probability measures um this is something we did 30 years ago and it’s called the leeg logic and so it turns out if you say one probability measure is less than another if it’s a normalized restriction of the other okay that that gives you a partial order on the of all can believe it yep and and so now the reason I would call that a logic is because I can think about probability measures as propositions and here I am taking the and and the or and the and the conjunction disjunction and negation and so forth so so in in in that in that sense I I’m calling it a logic because it’s it’s it’s um logical relationships among propositions but wait a second I mean you know the notion of and and or which which I claim is a is a deeply derived notion I mean in other words it’s not that is not a foundational notion that’s a notion you know processed through layers of kind of symbolic representations of the World by humans and all kinds of things like this but but be that as it may I I don’t view logic as being in any way fundamental but the the but be that as it may you can say interesting you know there’s the there’s the hand of uh you know you you’ve got I’m still trying to understand in your kind of Markov matrices you can say uh well do you are you associating propositions in some way with these Marco matrices or not yeah the probability that if I see R now I’ll see green next is the is 0.01 and the probability that I’ll see blue next is 03 that’s a proposition well wait a minute the proposition is so you’re saying the mark of Matrix itself represents a proposition represents the statement I mean the Markov Matrix is a collection of probabilities and the assertion these are the probabilities is the proposition right that’s right if you view it that way then when you have these um when you put a partial order and you look at the meet and the join then you could be thinking that these are in some sense logical relationships among propositions and so why not just call it a logic but if you don’t like that term okay fair enough that’s that’s a better answer than I than I thought of Okay so so I mean in in so let me let me just understand what what you said there so uh and um maybe these explanations are helpful for anybody who’s watching this I don’t know but try the uh it it’s um I think I mean what what you’re saying is if I say the probability that I see red is 50% and whatever and then another proposition is the probability they’ll see red is 30% sent right what you’re asking is and which I’m a little confused by if I take the and of those propositions I don’t see how I construct that out of your kind of I mean those seem to be inconsistent to me those those seem to be you know they’re on sort of an anti-chain of your of your partial order so how do I take the right so only way that you can take the and of two probability measures is if they have the same normalized restriction on the okay propositions that they overlap on right the same normalized restriction there otherwise you can’t take the okay so so in other words I’ve got to have if one Mark Matrix says 50% probability of red and 8% probability of purple and the other one says 50% probability of red and 6% probability of yellow they’re incompatible then I can combine them um you know they if they didn’t have things to say about purple and yellow going you know between each other so in so far as they’re disjoint you can combine them or if they speak about the same if they both agree that red is twice as probab probable as blue then they’re fine as long as you both so as long as you agree about the relative probabilities on things then then you can take the disjunction and conjunction and so okay fine fine so so then then uh all right so I’m I’m buying more that you can I mean I think it’s a very weak logic but but you can you can set something up that um uh that has some of those attributes but so now I mean the the question is you’re you’re imagining that so one one question is what can you derive from what so one of the surprising things about our physics project is that what I had not imagined is that you could derive so much from so little and so you know you would think that the statement consider all possible computations you know the entangle limit of all possible computations you would think that you could derive absolutely nothing from such a thing um but the surprise is that you know as soon as you put these conditions about how observers can sample that you suddenly start to be able to derive things I think the simplest case to see that is the molecular Dynamics case where you can say uh you know you got all these molecules bouncing around and we know that they can serve number maybe they conserve momentum and things that those don’t matter that much but we’ve we’ve um you know we’ve we’ve got all this microscopic sort of Randomness computational irreducibility going on and just from the fact that observers like us are computationally bounded we can now derive the second La of thermodynamics we can start to derive fluid mechanics things like this so in other words it’s very surprising that from so little you can get so much and that’s you know that’s the thing that really I didn’t expect at all so what I want to understand for your what you’re doing is you know I think you’re also attempting to get much from Little absolutely so so I want to understand what um you know and what you would like to get is uh you know things like I mean honestly I think you’re more likely to get the rouy ad than you are to get space time in its usual formulation I think it will be easier to get from the kind of thing you’re describing to the rou ad than to get to all of the technical detail of SpaceTime and so on because that that’s um but but let’s let’s just understand what it would mean so you know again I I I want to sort of posit this kind of axiomatic physics where all you’re doing is you’re saying I make these observations and all I know is that I have certain aims about how these observations fit together which I think is what you’re you know you you are positing certain axioms about how what you’re describ as conscious agents fit together that is right in fact critically critically I think you’re positing something which seems completely unobvious to me which is all we know is the n of one we have an internal experience of being a conscious agent right but you are positing a a network of relationships between conscious agents in your partial order and things like this and that to me that’s a big leap now you might argue the ruad is a big leap too but what you’re doing there is you’re saying you know all I know is what I have internally and I’m talking about that as a conscious agent but now I’m going to posit about conscious agents that they have these inter relationships and by the way I’m pretty sure if there was only one conscious agent in the world you know the game would be over you wouldn’t be able to construct there’ be no Grist to construct uh sort of a an external model of the world because what I think you’re doing as I understand it is you are going from the calculus of observers to construct an an external model of the world which is the opposite way around from what you know from what I’ve been trying to do and but the you know so so now I claim if there’s only one Observer that no Grist there’s no there’s nothing you can do to kind of build up that external model of the world just as I don’t think you can tell in the solipsistic view of things you can’t really tell whether there’s any external whether there’s anything out there you you are you are taking your personal extrapolation that there are conscious agents like you that have certain relationships you’re taking that and building what amounts to uh we might call it a scientific theory we might call it a you know a theory of the world somehow based on that so so if I think that there is the what I call the whole right I could so it’s this really infinite conscious agent I can imagine it then choosing to look at itself through different traces so I’m going to choose to look at myself through the the trace and this Trace I’ll call Don Hoffman and that Trace I’ll call Steven wol and these are just different so it’s the hole looking at itself through a straw through a straw hole right uh BEC because the hole is infinite and and you know I’ve got a finite IQ so for so I’m so in that sense you wouldn’t have the problem of not having the ability to have interesting worlds and so forth if the if there’s this infinite Consciousness that’s looking at itself through an infinite number of different perspectives then and and suppose so that’s what I what I am and you are so from this point of view Don and Steph are just avatars of this deeper whole Consciousness okay so the whole is talking to itself through a Don and Steven Avatar right now right right right you know that’s bizarrely close to what I would say about the ruad so in other words I thought coming into this I I I actually thought that we were going to end up pretty much agreeing that we’re doing the same thing I’m just calling it Consciousness and you’re not right well but but but you know the thing that I don’t get in so you know in what I’m doing I’m you know imagining that there are these atoms of space and I’m imagining that there’s this hypergraph and so on and do I know that these are real things no they’re my way of describing the world I mean it’s like you know occasionally people will come and and say things like oh you have a computational model of the world what kind of computer is it running on right right right right right you know that’s a that’s a hopelessly philosophically muddled point of view right and so you know this is merely a description and and I think what you are so so let me let me see if I can unpack your description so you’re saying your whole is the set of all these possible connections between consciousnesses and and maybe maybe you’re even going uh you know and I think you have to go this way in order to avoid sort of the trap of probabilities and the dead end of oh there’s probabilities where we don’t know where they what you know what the particular role of the dice is right so the you know we you you’re going to end up with essentially a multi-way collection of all the possible histories and so on yes so so you’ve got this whole structure that is kind of the I mean I I think okay so I think what you’re constructing I mean the object that you’re constructing um it’s uh you know that is a mathematical object um I think your sort of Markov chain thing is is weaker than it should be in other words I think replace that with an arbitrary computation and you basically have the ruad you have the same object so in other words he’s inviting you to co-publish Don I don’t publish things well I think this is you you rais a really interesting very technical question that I think we should really try to address is the relationship between the ruad and what’s possible with this infinite you this lce Mark I’m pretty sure that what you’ve got is you know with this partial order of Markov chains and so on that’s a definite mathematical structure it is it is it is a much weaker mathematical structure than something where those sort of those you know your relationship of taking traces is much weaker than an arbitrary computation but I don’t think it’s a huge leap to say you know that’s a particular submodel that might capture some aspect of uh you know of of how it might be a useful phenomenological model of certain aspects of conscious experience that you have or whatever else I think the the more general you know my feeling is you’re going to you’re going to you’re slipping down a slope here first you have to you know and you’re going to wind up with some thing I mean this is one of the things that again has been a surprise to me you know the ruad is the end point of an awful lot of generalizations so in other words there are you know in mathematics if you’re you know looking at you know growth and deak’s work on higher category Theory and and you know infinity groupoids and things that object is basically the ruad that object and in fact the the you know growth and de’s hypothesis about the inevitability of what amounts to topology or space or whatever from a thing of that kind is precisely the assumption that we are also making or the thing that we think we can give some level of derivation of that space inevitably emerges from the from observers in this Ru ad and so on so I think you know it would not be a surprise to me that the the end point of an effort of generalization is the same object because I think it’s it’s um you know it’s a it’s a it’s a typical end point of generalization but now the question is you know is that uh you know if if you’re thinking about kind of what I might call I don’t know what the right word for it is but I’ve been calling it axima physics I’m not sure if that’s the right right characterization but it’s it’s a a you could think about it as a calculus of observers as opposed to or a um you know a a um where everything is just in terms of the relationship between observers but it’s really really critical I think to what you’re talking about that there isn’t just one Observer I don’t think you can I don’t think as I said talking of Mills I think there is no Grist for your Mill without a multitude of observers that is I think you can’t you know cuz if you’re going to be able to construct extent and so on you need that and now the question is if you and so then I I want to come back to your you know experience of mint well let me first just agree with you on two on the two points you’ve made first I agree that it would I would be delighted if it turns out that the the the Marian dynamics that we’re doing and and the partial order turns out to be equivalent to the ruad that I would I would be delighted and it won’t be equivalent it will be a subset it’s it’s a it’s a small piece of it I mean well again you can get um computational universality out of two or three Markov kernels right all you need are two or three Markov kernels you get computational so that’s why I think if if there’s a relationship they’re equivalent okay fair enough if if you know I I don’t I don’t think that quite makes sense because you know Markoff chains are probabilistic and involve real numbers and you’re kind of out of the game of computation Theory by the time you’re dealing with those kind of things two or three kernels that are not probabilistic they have only zeros and ones in the Matrix get comp so remember the mark of kernels include 01 matrices they include the deterministic ones as a special case so we get the even just from those we’ll get the ruad hold on hold on it’s not so simple because let’s talk about how you actually apply I mean this is you’ve got these matrices right and you know if you say what you are constructing is a product to many matrices which is not what I’ve heard you say what I’ve heard you say is that you’re taking these matrices and you’re tracing out components and you’re looking at the partial order of matrices that’s a different statement from the statement that you are taking products and matrices and I agree with you that it’s not quite as simple as that I mean you can’t uh you know to get let me think about this for a second uh certainly with finite matrices you will not get computation universality you’re going to need infinite matrices and and in fact okay so here’s a construction that um that you could easily make so you could imagine building a cellular automaton by just taking a vector that represents a one-dimensional cellular automaton a vector that represents current State and you have an infinite Matrix uh no that’s not going to work that doesn’t work that that’s that only gives you a subset of cellular autometer you can’t get so if you have a single Matrix and you’re simply doing matrix multiplication there’s linearity to matrix multiplication and you’re you’re only going to get a a very small subset which by the way aren’t Universal of of cellular autometer now if if you say oh I’m going to make these matrices be like elements of a group generators in a group and I’m going to say I’m going to multiply these together in all sorts of different ways then that construction yes you can get computation inity out of it but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about and that’s what we do so so I hadn’t talked about that part of the theory yet so I only talked about this one what I call the qualia kernel it turns out the qualia kernel is actually a product of three kernels so we actually so we actually in the basic formalism of the conscious I send you the paper on conscious Theory we have a decision kernel an action kernel and a perception kernel when I take the product of all those I get what we call the qualia the single qualia kernel but what we’re imagining is that there’s this infinite social network and that there’s there’s actions you know message passing and so forth that’s happening and and and it’s all going to be done by products of marov and kernels throughout this whole thing so it’s it’s going to be it’s going to be a computational universal Network and and and we’re going to get um you know some of the kernels can have no probabilities in them at all they’re just zeros ones and and so so yeah get rid of those probabilities you’re going to have a much easier theory if you get rid of the probabilities cuz you because as soon as you have the probabilities as as you as you say it’s kind of you’re you’re admitting you know incompleteness of your theory so to speak you’re saying there’s you know I just don’t know where these where the the dice roles are coming from but let’s not let’s not well on the incompleteness of theories I I would say that every scientific theory starts with assumptions and those are the Miracles that the theory doesn’t explain well that’s an interesting point okay so that’s the bizarre thing that I didn’t see coming about the story with the ruad okay it you know it doesn’t you know the representation of the ruad in a particular form that is a sort of arbitrary choice that you can think of as an assumption but the thing the actual you know object that you construct I don’t think that has it’s not the kind of a thing that starts from assumptions it has been the experience of all of of scientific theories to date that all scientific theories have been you know they’ve been models and as a model they are not the system itself they’re some you know some projection from the system itself some simplified you know narrative about the system itself the thing that’s bizarre with with the ruad and I I I’m still I’m still trying to wrap my arms around this this thing because it really surprises me a lot it is inevitable and it is it is something that is just it’s a unique inevitable thing that doesn’t it isn’t like a you know you say scientific theories have assumptions because I think one’s imagining as as one usually has done that the theory is a model where it’s assuming oh it doesn’t matter that such and such is such and such away um so I think the I mean in in our Theory with the ruive and so on the assumptions come in in assumptions about what we are like as observers which is a different kind of a you know and that’s the underlying Theory the underlying reality as you might call it is just the ruad and in some sense it’s everything but it tells you nothing to to have it tell you something you have to take these slices and these slices are particularized by you know features of us as observers so to speak let me just ask a question about it there two questions one is does the ruad admit something like girdle’s incompleteness term that’s that would hold for the ruad is it I mean it’s it’s in some sense even though you’re talking about this infinite thing I mean with with mathematics in general girl says that any system that has the you know formal power of arithmetic um there will always be the that that are true that can’t be derived within that system I’m just wondering if the ruad has some kind of incompleteness as well yes I mean okay this is this is complicated to untangle let’s do it for a second okay I mean you know girdle’s theorem is built on top of a bunch of assumptions about truth and so on I I think it is more useful to think about let’s see where do we start here I first point is that sort of the thing that I think is the underlying phenomenon that good the is built on is computational irreducibility because what you know what you might say is I’m going to I’m going to start from these axioms of arithmetic and then any theorem I must be able to just finitely prove from those aums but in fact there’s no upper bound on how how many steps you might have to take to get to the theorem that you care about now it unfortunately okay it it takes so so the basic point is computational irreducibility which is kind of the core of girdle’s theorem is absolutely alive and well in the ruad in fact without it there wouldn’t be time there wouldn’t be there wouldn’t be space there wouldn’t be lots of things I mean the the fact that the passage of time is Meaningful is a consequence of computational irreducibility if it wasn’t for computational irreducibility the you know the leading of our lives would be there would be nothing that was actually happening it would just be oh we could jump to the end and say the answer is 42 or whatever um it would be so that that’s a you know and and similarly in the fact that there is an extent to space that is also a consequence of computational irreducibility so in those things I mean computational irreducibility is is absolutely fundamental to the non-collapse of the ruab the ruab would collapse without computational that’s beautiful the fact that there that there’s you know the fact that it has extent is a consequence of that so now you can ask questions about well let’s talk about mathematics for a second because one of the things about the ruad that’s again something I didn’t see coming is the ruad is not only the foundation of physics it’s also the foundation of mathematics and so and and in fact it has the bizarre consequence that you know in the sort of platonic view of mathematics that there’s a there there so to speak that what you end up concluding is if you believe that physical reality exists you must believe that there is a mathematical reality that exists does it also work the other way around if you believe in in the sort of platonic view of of uh of mathematics then I think so I haven’t thought about it that way around because people are usually people usually maybe Dawn is an exception but people usually believe in physical reality people usually don’t have a problem with with the notion of physical reality well Plato would have said that the true reality is the platonic reality and then this one is the ucer one yes right yes fair enough right so I mean in in um uh but but you know just to understand how that works in mathematics and how that sort of how girdles theorem works there and such like so in mathematics and and this is yeah in in mathematics as as it was formulated in the 20th century perhaps not in the best possible way but but the formulation of the 20th century and from Hilbert and people like that was we put down these axioms and then we see what theorems we can derive from those axioms so for example the particular case KD looked at was we put down the piano axioms for arithmetic you know X Plus yal y + x and a whole bunch of other axioms and then from those axioms we try and fit them together to derive other theorems right and the question is if we fit together those axioms do we you know is there a finite path to every where do we get you know we get certain things that we can construct from those axioms one of the things that’s tricky about girle theorem as it’s usually stated is it’s not a question of what one can construct it has this notion of Truth which is an overlay on top of what one can construct right so you know I can construct the statement X+ yal y + x from that an associativity of addition I could also construct the statement that x + y + x equals y plus X Plus X for example that’s a that’s a thing I can construct and you know first question is is is every well this this this notion of um what uh let’s see I mean of of what um uh the question of what’s true is more complicated than the question of what you can construct that was of the point of girl right is that the notion of Truth transcends the notion of proof yeah I think that’s a technical detail actually I think that’s a it’s a confusing feature and it’s confuse people a lot the real Essence okay what did girdle actually show what girdle did was he wanted to take the statement this statement is unprovable which is a statement doesn’t seem to be a statement about arithmetic and the remarkable thing that he did was to show that that statement can be compiled into a statement about equations about integers you know that you can have an interpretation of that statement that is just a statement about equations about integers and then the and that that fact that you can compile that into a statement about integers was an early version of the idea of computation universality that is that you can take this thing and you know compile it into this sort of set of Primitives and then having done that it it you know then then you can kind of feed that you know that statement this notion of provability is then something that sort of Tangles itself up through that statement but the remarkable thing is not that that statement doesn’t you know that statement is a is a kind of a a paradoxical mess the remarkable thing is that that statement is actually a statement of arithmetic and that’s right and but what’s interesting though is that you know someone like Roger Penrose for example looks at this and says what what he takes from girdle’s incompleteness theem is is that I something there’s something about me that allows me to understand what this formal system cannot do this formal I can understand the truth of this thing but I understand it and the formal system cannot and so so that’s really the key for for Roger Penrose that was sort of the big take-home point from this and and I I would agree but it sounds like you disagree um Don and and Stephen would you say that it’s correct to characterize you Steven as a computationalist and Dawn that you think there’s something more to reality or to Consciousness than mere computation yeah yeah I’m I’m suggesting that girdle’s incompleteness the suggests that the notion of Truth transcends the notion of proof so I’m all for the ruad and I’m all for mathematical models but I’m suggesting that there’s something deeper yeah but I think this the problem is this notion of Truth is a complicated derived human concept and I don’t think it’s the right thing to think about as a foundational thing I think that constructive constructing things is a much more useful foundational idea so for example in um uh I mean talking about um uh kind of I mean obviously what girdle was trying to do girdle was kind of a platonist and what girdle was trying to do was to blow up kind of Hilbert’s idea that there wasn’t a there there for mathematics so to speak um but I think the um uh you know this this notion of of for example to have truth you have to have a notion of falsity what is the notion of falsity in something where you’re constructing things well here’s what it is in our so you know I’ve I’ve had the I had the nice opportunity to um you know girdle talked about the arithmetization of metam mathematics I actually even put together a book that I talked about the physicalization of metam mathematics the fact that that the the network of all possible theorems how they prove you know how you can prove one theorem for another turns out to be the same kind of construct as the way that physical space can be constructed in the universe and these are both you know both of these things sort of are the ruad and then the question of how we perceive mathematics is a question of what we are like as mathematical observers mathematical observers are rather different from physical observers you know a mathematical Observer I you know view of a mathematical Observer is mathematical Observer doesn’t care so much about time but a mathematical Observer is just trying to put a bag of theorems into their mind they say this is true this they say this is true this is true that’s the notion of Truth is this is a theorem I’m going to say is true it’s a thing I’m going to put in my mind I’m going to say it’s true okay so now what the question is what is falsehood in other words what is you know I’ve got these theorems I’m foraging in the forest of theorems and I keep on putting more things in my bag turns out that um the I think that what falsehood is in our models is what you get from kind of this medieval concept of the principle of explosion if you have something which is false from a falsehood you can derive every statement right exactly and so so then what happens in our models is that normally you’re putting these theorems in your bag and you’re saying these are the ones I think are true but suddenly you put a false theorem in your bag and then what happens is then everything is true and so what goes wrong what goes wrong is if you have a finite mind your mind is exploded at that point you can’t fit you know so in other words it’s a it’s a you know that’s a so I’m I’m kind of describing a more a kind of physicalized version of the notion of Truth and so on and I think you know this idea that I mean there’s sort of the Li statement which I I I don’t even know where it came from I’ve never never really traced this history of of you know statements which are true but unprovable I think it’s a super confusing way to think about girm okay but uh you know I think I mean this whole question about whether I mean you know this I I still want to come back to because I’m really interested in this question about what you know your statement about you know the experience of mint the the and and you’re you’re kind of you know I think the theory you’re constructing is a theory that extrapolates far away from your internal experience of M it does your theory you know talks about the interaction between observers and and you know between consciousnesses and so on I mean it’s a it’s a in some sense it’s kind of a flip around of the theory that starts from the you know the particles it’s a flip around to a theory which talks only about the effects um and only about The Observers and then I want to get the particles one of our goals is to show that we can actually model the momentum distributions of the quarks and gluons inside of a proton starting only with this dynamics of Consciousness outside of space yeah yeah you won’t get there that that won’t work but but I think you’ll go if you can you you will probably be able to get from from this kind of formalism my guess is that you will be able to get basically the ruad and then you know then it’s I’m all in favor of more people pushing to get from the ruad to the momentum distribution of of you know to the structure functions of protons and distribution and momentum distributions of protons that’s a that’s a heavy lift I don’t think we’re going to see that in a short time give you a little idea about how we’re trying to do the lift so we’re we’re proposing that particles in SpaceTime are projections of communicating classes of Markov kernels the entrop and the notion of mass of a particle is a ection of the entropy rate of the communicating class and the spin is a is a projection of the determinant and the entropy the momentum is a projection of the number of ASM totic events inside the communicating class in other words we’re building up a dictionary that says these physical properties are projections of these properties of the markovian Dynamics and so so we we we’ll see and and context that we’re going to try to get the momentum distributions inside the proton I don’t think that’s the right target I think there are other I I would if I were doing this I would try and get General Ro I think General is a much lower hanging piece of fruit for what you’re talking about I think that the problem with particle physics is you know knowing knowing what a particle is is kind of complicated and I think that the the kind of the structure of of SpaceTime the overall structure of SpaceTime is is much easier to try and get to but but I mean taking a a little bit apart what you’re saying fair fair enough but by the way point well taken thank you the I mean it it’s um you know I think that um for example in in our model uh they you know one of the things that surprised me a lot was the very easy interpretation of what energy is so it turns out that energy is basically the amount of activity in this network I mean more formally if you make the causal graph it’s the Flux Of causal edges through space likee hypersurfaces momentum is the Flux Of causal edges through time like hypersurfaces which by the way is something I could imagine you being able to get as well I mean you being able to make that interpretation I think the thing that surprises me and what you just described so you know let’s talk about entropy for a minute because entropy is another one of these often misunderstood you know constructs I mean you know entropy what’s the definition of entropy I mean in a sense entropy is basically you take a system you know certain things about that system and then you say how many states are there of the system that are consistent with the things we know about it and you take the log of that and that’s the entropy so so let me understand when you talk about uh you know when we talk about entropy increasing it’s a I mean again this is another layer of of complexity in what we’re talking about because the the you know what what we’re do is we’re saying the the number of states of the system consistent with what we observe is is is increasing let’s say but if we have a system which is a deterministic system and we know everything about what it’s doing and it’s also let’s say a reversible system so we can always take a state of the system and you know find previous states of the system as we can find Future states of the system in that case if we could observe everything about the system its entropy would always be equal to one zero rather because there’s only one possible state of the system is it state of the system future state of the system and so on so what leads to our perception of the increase of entropy is that we are not observing every detail of the system we’re instead observing only certain features of the system and with respect to those features we you know we we we say given these features there are states there are more more and more states of the system consist of those features so can can you say again what because I didn’t understand what what you meant by so you you were saying something about entropy being related to something else well the the entropy so one proposal is that the mass of a particle is a projection of the entropy rate of a communicating class so the entropy rate you know you know the definition of ENT rate for marov Colonel tell me tell me it okay yeah so for anybody else is that even if I know it the chance that everybody watching knows it is incredibly low well the toe audience is quite Technical and they not only can keep up but enjoy it so okay indulge so I have a recurrent communicating class it’s got a stationary measure so it means there’s a long-term probability of being State one through State M okay so I got the stationary measure and then each each row of the Matrix is the you know has is a probability measure and so it has an entropy hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on let’s unpack this a bit so so you know we’ve got this Matrix that says here’s a vector of what’s happening right now and a vector of probabilities for right now and we’re going to apply this Matrix to get a new Vector of probabilities for the next step so to speak right right right okay and now you say let’s apply that Matrix a zillion times and the result of that is we’re going to go to some limit and that limit is the stationary measure as you’re calling it that that that there is a limiting Matrix in which every entry in that Matrix has some particular value that corresponds to the the the ultimate limiting probability set of probabil being in that state that’s right okay I got that stationary measure so the stationary measure gives you the the ultimate probability of being in state one state two up through State n and then now if you’re in state one right there’s a transition row there’s a probability measure about where you’re going to go next yep that probability measure you can take its entropy right so you can take the probability measure take its entropy now you just multiply that entropy by the stationary weight and add them all up so that’s all you so it’s a weighted sum of all the entropies of the rows by the St I mean here’s where I’m getting into trouble because yes at a mathematical level you can compute you know sum of P log P for all these entries in the in the in the Matrix right um what the interpretation of that is and maybe you don’t need an interpretation of that but for me you know the entropy again this is you know by putting probabilities in you’re you know you’re kind of cooking things in a certain way for me when I’m talking about entropy I want to know what are those individual Stakes it’s kind of the frequentist version I’m not I’m not just saying there’s a probability I’m actually saying what what are the things underneath that probability So you you’re but I don’t know whether and I’m not I’m I’m taking these probabilities as as the foundations of this particular Theory okay but so so it’s a purely mathematical thing that you’re doing so it’s not there’s no interpretation of entropy here it’s merely the mathematics of that’s right okay right and and and of course the entropy rate for example is a big deal in communication theory if the source has an entropy rate that’s too big bigger than the channel capacity you get Distortion and so forth so it’s that kind of thing that this comes up in communication yeah it’s always it’s always fun to trace those things through for like 5G and see how you know the fact is all these things that people said it’s a theorem that you’ll never be able to communicate faster than this and then somehow you know we managed to have uh you know cell phone channels that break all those theories anyway that that’s a separate different discussion um but okay but so I’ll just say one little fun thing that comes out of this when if we Define the entropy rate the mass to be a projection of entropy rate then that that forces us to make certain predictions so a mass zero would correspond to an entropy rate of zero and that would correspond to a Marian Matrix that has only zeros and ones in it a single one in each row and all has zeros and well so we know that in SpaceTime massless objects must move at the speed of light so it better fall out of our theory that you get the maximum travel speed in our theory for the things that are have zero entropy rate and it turns out if you look at the the What’s called the commuting time between states and a Markov Colonel the the maximum commuting time the fastest commuting times you s so the smallest Community times the fastest travel times are for the ones with have zero entropy rates so we actually get that and the ma the maximum speed is one um one State per per step of the chain hold on you you’re commuting lots of different concepts here I mean the the the you know when you’re talking about things traveling from here there in this marov chain it’s like you have a vector and this thing is is kind of moving the probability measure from one part of the vector to another right that’s yeah you’re going from one state from one conscious experience to another conscious experience and the question is how fast can the conscious experiences change right but but but by conscious experience here you are taking what I would consider to be a a kind of a you know I hope that in a sense I feel my conscious experience is a lot richer than uh you know than this than your kind of um probability Vector I mean you know this is again one of the things that is difficult about this the intuition about all these kinds of things for example in you know this idea that you can have richness of things emerge from Simplicity or another thing that took me a long time to come to terms with I’m not sure I completely come to terms with it even now is that the universe is an unbelievably proplate waster of computational resources and you know I had always imagined that there would have to be a definite history in the universe that it couldn’t be the case that the universe is just sloughing off these immense numbers of different histories most of which are completely irrelevant to us so you know I I guess my my question here is you’re you’re imagining that you’re summarizing conscious experience I mean you know you you first you started off by saying look conscious experience is this very rich thing that people can’t reproduce from theories and so on and so what you’re doing is you’re flipping that around as I understand it and saying conscious experience is the axiomatic starting point and then we’re going to try and erect a theory around that starting point which is I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to do okay that I don’t have a problem with that as long as I can make physical predictions that are testable inside SpaceTime right yeah but I think you know the question is what goes into it right because as soon as you’re saying you’ve got these families of Markov chains and so on you know that’s real content that’s not you know that’s a that’s a model like I say you know the universe is made of hypergraphs and somebody else says no it’s made of cream cheese or something you know it’s um uh you know you’re making You’re positing Something definite the the the atoms of your of your ontology so to speak are these conscious experiences or or whatever I mean you know I find that so so by the way I mean to to either support or attack both of our points of view you know I can no more pick up an eem one of our sort of atoms of existence and say here it is than then I claim you can pick up that conscious experience and say here it is right right so so both of us are in the situation where we have to say look the effects of what we’re talking about are all very good even though the thing we’re ultimately talking about is not a thing we can pick up now you know to me the the you know the the problem the thing one of the things that’s nice about em and hypergraphs and RADS and things like that is they’re extremely nonhuman so we do not have sort of we don’t make the mistake of saying oh it’s truth it’s falsity it’s you know experience it’s this that and the other because they are by Construction in a sense they are deeply abstract and deeply non-human so we don’t come to it with a Prejudice about how things should work right what what worries me about starting from sort of Consciousness as an as the as the elements so to speak is that many you know we think we imagine and in fact even the way talking about you know the sensation of mint and so on is we come with a bag of prejudices about how that all works and so it is a challenging thing to erect the science without being sort of pulled in the direction of some Prejudice or another fair fair enough and and I I think that that’s a very important point and and what I would say to anybody who wanted to do research along the lines that I’m doing is to I would say um the set of experiences that you’ve had is measure zero compared to the set of experiences that are out there so so don’t make the the the the silly uh mistake of taking your own experiences as as comprehensive of all experiences really in some sense use your experiences to get going but then follow the math don’t follow your experiences that’s a very challenging thing to do living paradigms is you know I got to say in my life for example you know I started studying simple computational systems I don’t know 40 45 years ago basically and you know it took me embarrassingly long to realize things that were plainly observable in experiments I did I mean I you know just it happens to be the a few years ago it was the 40th anniversary of of my not my discovery of this rule 30 cellular automatan that does all kinds of cool complicated things I it would be nice if I could say it was the discovery it wasn’t it was the discovery of it was 3 years earlier it took me 3 years to understand what the heck was going on and to not ignore it and I I think this is the you know it is a huge challenge to kind of Rise Above one’s kind of one’s assumptions about what’s going on and I mean maybe one thing I could ask is I just said that’s a clue to what it means to be an observer that that it is hard to rise outside of one’s one’s uh one’s previous impressions of things well but I think so so a question would be you know observers like us human observers things like that we we have an internal experience of it we have a way of projecting what human observers might be like you know when we go to observers with very different human observers with very different backgrounds very different kind of belief systems kind of ways of thinking about the world you know you go we’re talking about the spirit world animism whatever else or we’re talking about you know all sorts of Eastern philosophy uh ways of viewing the world it’s even even then it can be difficult I think at least it has been for me to wrap one’s you know simple Western kind of scientific mind around these kinds of different ways of thinking about the world that that’s right that’s right I I agree i’ I’ve faced the same thing and but one thing that trying to do that has I’ve come to conclude is that I me I love science I love mathematics and I love Concepts and being precise and and everything but I’ve concluded that reality whatever it is infinitely transcends anything we can describe and that’s very humbling humbling thing yeah well right I you know I have to say I’ve had this experience now you know with the ruad and thinking of myself as this little tiny bundle of em in the ruad I would like to be able to characterize what bundle of em is a thing like me versus what bundle of em is not an observer like me I don’t yet know how to do that it would be interesting to understand for example and and this is why I’m asking a little bit about do there have to be many observers because you know for example that gets you into oh you need kind of self-replication you need some kind of you need some way of replicating the number of observers do you need The Observers to be non-identical probably you do if all the observers are in lock step doing exactly the same thing they’re not very interesting observers and one of the things again I sort of haven’t seen coming but I I’ve now realized is relevant is you know I happen to well I just recently did some some things about sort of foundations of biological evolution and uh which surprised me a lot because I’ve thought about biological evolution off and on for four decades and um I’d always thought you know I’d always had a hard time coming up with sort of a minimal model for what was happening and I finally have this very minimal model with a Sol autometer with a few simple rules and you’re asking you know the fitness is something like how long does the does the pattern live before it dies out um and what you find is that you know with that tiny genome a very sort of small number of bits in the rule it turns out you can evolve you can adapt to produce these these Long Live things that are unbelievably complicated and where there is no kind of you know there isn’t and you know when you say what’s the narrative scientific explanation of why the Thing Lives a long time there really isn’t one it’s just it that’s the you know the bits do what the bits do and the answer is it lives for 10,000 steps or something um but you know one of the things I’ve been curious about is whether uh sort of the the sort of what it takes to make an observer does what it takes to make an observer relate to things that we we are used to that are very routine to us like the idea of Life the idea of sort of replicating multiple similar but not identical copies of Minds things like this is that thing that is routine for observers specifically like us actually something that is sort of critically important in the notion of an observer like us and you know as I say the big surprise for me has been the derivation of of core laws of physics just from very coarse statements about obers like us and as we get finer statements about of observers like us what more might be be able to derive and you know I’m sort of curious about whether you know is for example the thing that I find surprising is the existence of the ruad I think is inevitable the existence of us as observers within the ruad is something that you have to derive it’s not self-evident you know in the in the abstract it is is not obvious from the existence of the ruad that there will ever be an observer like us it’s something that is presumably in a sense mathematically derivable I don’t know how to derive it um but that’s the you know to Simply say as an axiomatic matter if there is an observer like us then the Observer like us will observe physics of the kind we observe but the question is can we derive from the very nature of the ruad that there must be observers like us you know you know that’s something which I think would be interesting I I think it’s I think it will be doable but then we can ask questions like okay there observers like us uh you know how for example how common are observers like us you talked about a set of measur Z of our ways of observing the universe you know this relates to um quick here I just just be an earthquake I I was yeah yeah that was we had a big earthquake here just now but I’m good we’re getting closer to the truth that’s the sign yes um these are Earth shaking ideas but Don you’re okay like let’s just make sure you’re okay yeah we’re fine and the people in your home yeah they’re fine I think our cats are probably scared but that’s that’s a different thing all right all right and now the question is what is the cat’s perception of the physical world well our cat’s perception that’s right is very different from mine and and right now they’re probably under the bed hiding because because there’s there’s something that growled or did something really nasty to them but right but I mean you know this is this so one thing that would be nice to be able to derive is what is the density of observers Like Us in the ruad yes Ian by by the way we have the same problem in my framework right I’m saying that SpaceTime is just one of an infinite number of headsets so what we’re perceiving as observers like we are is just one out of an INF infinity and so I’m going to try to model this particular little headset and his properties and protons and so forth but then when once we do that and sort of establish that we can do that then I want to look and say what are other there’s an infinite number of other things to explore what are the other headsets that I can’t even concretely imagine but I can use mathematics to try to imagine them yeah don’t go off to protons go off to generality you’ll get to generality you have a serious chance there I I think protons are hopeless but just just okay well I’ll give that a thought no but but any case I I this this point that you’re making that uh you know in the ruad it is not difficult to kind of construct what an observer different from us would observe and to to give an example of that uh one of the things you know in the sort of computational Universe of all possible programs one of the things that little bit of a different different issue but related is there are programs that we know we care about and we’re kind of you know there’s a certain like in mathematics there are theorems we know we care about there’s an infinite space of all possible theorems most of which we don’t care about yet at least and if we look at the computational universe there are certain rules that we might have used in technology or whatever else that we know we care about and then there’s an infinite set of other ones one thing that’s interesting about the computational universe or for that matter the ruad which is closely related is that that it is very straightforward for us to do the experiment of just jumping anywhere we want in the computational universe we just pick a program at random start running it see what it does right most of what it does is deeply alien to us exactly exactly and so the question is you know in a sense the view of what we’re doing is we started from the place where we are on this Earth with life as it is and so on and we’re gradually expanding we’re gradually izing more of what I would call Ral space kind of more of the space of possible paradigms and so on we’re gradually also sending out spacecraft that colonize you know physical space um but what we can do which is which is very disorienting is we can actually jump to random places in the ruard and see what’s there but we don’t have a connection you know in other words this notion and I I think it may be relevant to what you’re doing as well is you know we we to build up something which we can have a real experience of or something I’m not sure if experience is the right word we kind of have to go in steps like first we understand this we get familiar with that then we go to this and so on we’re not we’re not able you know if we’re just thrown out there anywhere in Ral space it’s just totally disorienting and and I think I agree know it’s kind of a so yeah you can’t grock it there’s a grocket thing and you you can’t grock it if you don’t get there in the right way yes yes yes and I mean you know it’s like people say you know are the AIS going to sort of discover you know they going to jump sort of to science that we don’t uh you know and and this is the same issue that what is you know there’s a question what is science if science is the construction of narratives that humans can understand about how the world works it’s not all that useful to have something you know it’s it’s a different problem to just say we can go out there and and get to these things that are deeply non not connected to to humans so so I’m curious in your um in your view of things if you’re starting from Consciousness as atoms so to speak to what extent I mean if you were to starting from cat Consciousness would you build the same theory in other words if if you if if it was Consciousness or or let me be more extreme if if you believe maybe you don’t that the weather is in some sense conscious then if you were to build your theory based on weather Consciousness or cat Consciousness or nematode Consciousness would you build the same Theory or would you build a different Theory well I I I can tell you how we how we built this one we we said there’s lots of things that you could do to talk about Consciousness there’s lots of things we picked only two we said there are experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences and we said those are the only two things we’re going to take and and and the reason was I was you know aams Razer basically the fewer assumptions the better off you are and so I decided to I I can’t get if there are no conscious experiences I can’t do anything and I need at least probabilistic relationships and let’s just see if we can do do it with that and nothing more so I tried to get as general a theory with as few assumptions as possible so so the answer is as best as I can understand I would say I would get the same Theory Of Consciousness no matter where I start um because I tried to get the minimal things that you could possibly have but but again that may be just betraying my lack of being able to think outside of my little box well I mean you know my guess is that there is a certain category of of yeah I mean you’re erecting a theory based on you know a calculus of observers and it is you know it’s a change of basis so to speak to think about a different kind of Observer whether the theory you end up with after that change of basis looks the same is not I I don’t know and that’s a question in part it seems to me the translation from one kind of Consciousness to another which by the way we have been singularly unsuccessful at achieving I mean you I doubt that you can have a philosophical discussion with your cat right right right exactly I I completely agree I completely agree and and so I think that it’s it’s easy for me to think that I’ve got a general theory of Consciousness and and absolutely not I can only in some sense have a theory of consciousness of the kind that I can grock and what I can Gro right now may be absolutely trivial compared to what’s in the whole ruad or the whole Space of conscious agents but so let’s talk about AIS for a second because the thing that you’re doing you know in a sense you could now you know we you don’t know we don’t know we’re all saying you’re saying nobody knows what Consciousness really is and so on so you’re going to take it as an atom you’re going to take it as just the starting point for your theory but in you know in an AI we can take it apart any way we want we can’t take about human brains there are things we don’t know you know are the microtubules important you know etc etc etc there’s a bunch of stuff we don’t know for for you know your friendly LM we know every bit so now the question would be if you start having llms that can interact with each other for example and can have you know would we build you since you’ve said you expect that you know based on a cat Consciousness or whatever else you’d probably get the same kind of theory so my next question would be let’s take an llm Consciousness which maybe you know maybe there’s something wrong with it maybe there isn’t but let’s just take that as a basis we can still talk about the relationships between llms we can talk about kind of their you know you could talk about approximating what happens with LMS using your marov chains and so so on and now but now the question is now we’ve got a foundation which is a foundation that sort of relates it’s a computational foundation we’re no longer having to say there’s this mysterious thing that we’re just taking as axiomatic we’ve actually got something which whose atiz kind of goes all the way down to you know my kind of atiz so to speak or you know the computational foundation so I guess the question would be if you were to take a bunch of llms and you were to say you know you were to make a model as you have made a model of how you know consciousnesses like us interact you could say you could ask the question if you do the experiment on llms will they in okay so I mean you’ve got an assumption about how Consciousness is like us interact which is sort of and you’re saying you’re going to make that experimentally testable by deducing from those interactions between consciousnesses what the inferred SpaceTime structure is right so now we could do the same thing with llms we could say you know we take these llms they’re interacting in a certain way could you erect from the observation of interactions between llms sort of a structure of SpaceTime so for example let’s let’s take a um and you know it’s that’s an interesting thing to imagine because if you actually think about a bunch of llms they’re probably on the internet and the internet doesn’t live in I mean it is ultimately built in space time presumably but the connectivity of the internet is not the structure of a 3+1 dimensional space right right right exactly so now the question would be if if our conscious elements are AIS living on the internet interacting by the rules of the internet so to speak which are a bit different from the rules that we I mean I don’t know whether they’re in your model whether they’re different the question would be those agents erect their model of space time what is that model of space time right well and I I would imagine within our framework that there is an infinite number of different space times that could be in principle constructed but by the way the positive geometries at the high enery theoretical physicist of something like the amplitud hedrin it turns out that one of the parameters in the has parameters nkm and Z one of the parameters M for our SpaceTime is four but their their positive geometry is allowed M to be any positive integer you want so so instead of A four-dimensional Spacetime they can have positive geometries for a billion dimensional SpaceTime so in other words already in the new structures that the you know narh HED and others have found Beyond SpaceTime they’re they’re realizing that our SpaceTime is just the parameter four but there’s a whole range of parameters that they’ve discovered are possible and so other headsets are are effectively possible so so my answer would be there’s an infinite number of of them and and that’s just in our first step out of SpaceTime we’re finding this I I presume there’ll be even more dimensions of variation that we’ll find m equal four is just the first right so so my assumption is that the reason we believe space is 3 plus one dimensional right now in the history of the universe is because of some aspect of us as observers that’s my belief I I can’t you know I haven’t established that well this is dramatic we’re getting this is yeah this is Earth shaking stuff yeah um well are you in a place where they where there’s some kind of you know warning if the fault is going um you know speed of light being faster than seismic waves and so on well I’m in Southern California we’re we’re used to earthquakes here yeah okay so this is not out of the ordinary well this is unusual that we’ve been having a a few earthquakes in the last couple days so it’s unusual yeah so don how about I do a summary for your elves and I’ll tell you how I see the conversation so far and hopefully I do so in a straightforward manner sure so it started off with you Don asking Stephen look can you give me a scientific account of the taste of mint or the scent of garlic or whatever it may be and what is a theory of Consciousness that has a scientific basis like go ahead Don go ahead Steph try me do it and then Stephen’s like okay I can’t give you an answer to that because you have to know where you’re going so you have to define consciousness in order to get to it from some other place in other words there’s an adage that says something like if you don’t know where you’re going you’ll never get there and then Don you say okay well Stephen you have it backward it’s not that Consciousness is this place you have to get to it’s rather what you know most intimately it’s where you start and then this material world that you think is a fundamental notion is actually the derived one and then Steven says okay so fair enough however Dawn you claim you have a scientific account of Consciousness so how can you scientif eyesee this I believe you use that word stepen so how are you going to do that and even worse than that Don if you take your intimate Notions so seriously then where are you getting this proliferation of consciousnesses from when all you intimately know is this n equals 1 but yet your theory has has multiple consciousnesses so then I I believed on you said something like well you could have an N equals 1 if you take it to be the totality of Consciousness and we’re instantiations but by the way I think that that’s really we didn’t we didn’t pursue that particular point about the you know the the Uber Consciousness so to speak right which which feels like kind of the god the you know it feels like kind of the the uh the limit you you said there’s no upper bound so there is no you know it’s kind of like uh you know but is there a lower bound if if you believe that the N of one story is that infinite limit you are claiming you are God basically that’s basically what you have to say is is that if there’s an N of one and there’s only one because you only know that one thing but you are also then that one thing that unique thing is this upper limit this infinite limit of this whole sort of pile of of progressively Uber Uber consciousnesses yeah I’m willing to go there but I’m taking you with me I’m saying that that you and I are both God looking at at self talking to through two different avatars or three different avatars right I think I think that limit thing is basically your version of the ruad I mean I think that that that’s what um you know I think uh anyway that’s which is kind of interesting I mean it’s it’s it’s always good when you know when we con as I say it is for me it has been the the the limit of many kinds of U POS of thinking okay but cut sorry we we interrupted you good good surker this sounds like a foreign notion but many people say all there is is the universe and these glasses the cellphone yourself your eyeballs they expressions of the universe so this is just the similar sentiment in different language is that correct I think we’re going into a different direction here but we’re going to we’re going to go on for another hour this direction I think you gave a pretty good summary cut I mean I think the the only part that perhaps you left out is this is this you know these two different complimentary ways of viewing the world do you go from the em up or from the conscious observers down so to speak yeah and I was also going to say that Don you then talk about Marian Dynamics giving rise to Consciousness and and Steph believes that’s at least initially that’s too simplistic to reproduce the intricate experience that we have while caveat that Steven you know full well the power of rudimentary simple items giving rise to what convoluted and elaborate and as you helped Pioneer computational emergence so you caveat with that and then there was some some ruad pushing of stevenh like a you’re with a leather jacket at the back of a Mathematica conference saying like yeah you got to try some some ruad you got to take sniff of this sniff of this CLE way graph you won’t go back here’s a multi-way it’s on the house right and then there was an earthquake and that’s kind of the summary and then the the actual God intervened for the blasphemy that we engaged in over the past 3 hours I really enjoyed this conversation and and I would I would welcome a chance to talk some more and explore this further like yeah very interesting stuff no now and now I think I understand just a little bit about what you’ve you know I bought myself a copy of of of this book oh oh yes uh it’s I know it’s very old very very old and and I I I didn’t read it yet so so now maybe I’m I I probably have to look at the 30 years after uh version but um John Wheeler cited that book and is it from bit paper Ah that’s interesting I I unfortunately I met John Wheeler only once I mean I exchanged letters with him a bunch of times but I met him only once when he was 95 years old and it’s kind of a sad story because I’m I’m talking to him about a bunch of things and um he looks up he says you know who you should talk to about all this stuff it’s a chap over at The Institute his name is John Von nyman oh wow and I said unfortunately he died before I was born oh boy yeah that’s that’s sad yeah yeah anyway not not to end on a down note that’s right well thank you all for spending three hours with myself and with the the audience yes the audience that will eventually see this and take care yeah this good great pleasure first 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