Why Time Space And Matter Are An Illusion Rupert Spira Don Hoffman

TITLE: TbDCHuXwJX8 CHANNEL: Unknown DATE: ---TRANSCRIPT--- Gentlemen, lovely to be with you, Robert. How are you?

Very well, Simon. Lovely to be with you and lovely to see you again, Don, as well. Uh, Donald, how are you? Great. Good to be here and thanks for inviting me. Well, and it’s a privilege to be here with you both. And, um, I’ve just been finding out you do know each other to some degree already. You’ve spent a bit of time together at the SAND conference, for example. So very first question then is um even though we’re going to explore this to what degree do your uh views of reality converge Robert from what I know of your your work done the talks that I’ve heard you give at the sand conference and more recently um some podcast interviews that I’ve that I’ve listened to that they convert GE very closely. I would be hardressed to find any differences between us. Of course, there’s quite a big difference between the way we formulate our understanding because of our two different the two different um pathways through which we both come to our understanding. But I think if you if you strip away the formulations and you really get down to the the content, I well, we’ll see in the conversation, but I can’t see that there’s much difference between us. Dut I I agree Rupert. I think that we’re substantially in agreement and I’m frankly just looking forward to filling in some gaps in my understanding from from your perspective and uh hopefully get some new ideas to push the uh the research forward. So I so I I think it’s wonderful that we’re so close that uh this is almost going to be like a research meeting for me to get some new ideas to push forward on my mathematics and that is something particularly exciting bringing science and mathematics together with the perennial philosophy the wisdom of the spiritual traditions which to me feels hugely important. Um, so let’s dive in and I’m going to start with a review of your book, The Case Against Reality. Uh, Don, and just to be clear, it was very wellreceived and this is a five-star review that I am reading and it goes as follows. A provocative idea, well reasoned. That said, I cannot see any impact this will have on anyone’s life or what difference it could make for the average person to know. And I’ve got to say sometimes when I relay some of Rbert’s work I get that same um question or uh retort or answer. And I think the conclusion the gentleman or the woman who read your book um is innocently very wide of the mark. So I think what we want to do today really is um explain what your provocative idea is, how it dovetales with Rbert’s work and the perennial non-dual philosophy. look at areas it may differ to and then explain why this can have a profound impact on people’s life and how humanity moves forward. So I just wanted to set out the agenda as it were. Does that sound okay to you both? Wonderful. Very good. So let’s start then with the hard problem of consciousness and we’re really going to not assume anything. Um, so let’s start with what consciousness is. Because there are lots of ways of defining it. And most people, the average person in the street might say, well, consciousness refers to whether I’m, for example, awake or asleep. If I lose consciousness, I fall asleep. But that isn’t the type of consciousness we are talking about or the definition, is it, Robert? That that’s very true, Simon. Yes. It’s not possible to define consciousness satisfactorily because being as I would suggest and I think Don also the the ultimate reality it is that in terms of which everything else can be defined but it cannot be defined in terms of everything else. So I’m not going to try to define consciousness. more important is um to to to try to evoke in our experience what consciousness is. And to that end, I would simply say that consciousness is that uh with which all experience is known. It is that um within which everything arises and ultimately it is that out of which everything is made. In other words, it’s everything. I if we can see that there are things then consciousness is everything. Later on, I’m sure in the conversation, we’ll we’ll um I’ll suggest that in the ultimate analysis, there aren’t even things for consciousness to be the all of. But yes, in in as a concession to our belief in the reality of things, then consciousness would be the the ultimate reality of those things. Yes. And Don, uh I think very well said. I as a scientist of course I try to build mathematical models. Um and I but I agree right upfront with RER that ultimately uh consciousness will transcend any mathematics that we can possibly put to it. But what what we do in in scientific approaches is to do what mathematics we can. Uh it turns out it’s always very valuable to do that. We always get rewarded. I mean, the the technology we have right now, we’re we’re across the the world from each other and we’re we’re having this conversation is due to attempts with mathematics to describe reality as as as imperfect and as incomplete as they are. And what’s interesting is the mathematical model that we’re developing of consciousness says that there is one consciousness and that our mathematics can never fully describe it. So what I love about our mathematics is that it agrees with Rupert. It says that this mathematical theory says that there is one consciousness, the one ultimate consciousness and that this mathematics will always in a very precise way be uh inadequate to fully describe that but it can always do um something that’s interesting something that may be practical and may be helpful uh and and so we can go into that. So, so, so I agree with with with Rupert, but but as a scientist, I don’t want to just say yes. I mean, at first I agree it transcends any mathematical description that just follows in fact from Girdle’s incompleteness theorem. So, there is no scientific theory of of anything of of everything about that. There’s no scientific theory of everything. On the other hand, what we find is we’re rewarded for doing the scientific theories of what we can do. And as long as we’re humble and we recognize that this is just the next baby step, it’s not the final theory of everything, then then we’re good. So, so I’m I’m looking forward to the next baby step. But I absolutely agree with with Rupert that the ultimate goal transcends what science can do. And we’re going to talk about your theory and indeed about Girdle’s incompleteness theory, which I want you to explain in simple terms. But again, just to bring it back to uh the hard problem of consciousness, and I’ve seen your TED talk um Don, where you basically say it’s analogous to the the genie in the bottle, and in its simplest form, it means how experience rises from matter, but basically we’re no closer or to um explaining the hard problem of consciousness than we were hundreds of years ago even. Is that right, Don? Yes. So most of my colleagues and these are good friends and brilliant colleagues who are working on on the hard problem of consciousness um are physicists. So they they assume that space and time and physical objects are fundamental and that certain physical objects for example brains and neurons and or complex systems maybe an artificial intelligence uh that have the right kind of complexity will somehow give rise to conscious experiences. So it’s a physicalist framework in which spacetime is fundamental. It’s been around for 13.8 billion years and early on there was only energy and then matter and then eventually after billions of years maybe life and then who knows how long much longer later consciousness emerged from those uh you know the more advanced life forms. But so the question is how from their point of view does consciousness emerge from the complex interactions of certain uh physical systems like like brains. And what’s remarkable is that they this is called the hard problem. How do you get the taste of chocolate arising from neural activity without a handwave right? We we really want to know exactly what pattern of of neural activity for example must be the taste of chocolate and could not be the smell of an orange or something like that. And what’s remarkable is is again the my my colleagues and friends who are doing this are are are brilliant, but I think that the assumption is false that that physical systems even exist when they’re not perceived and that physical systems create conscious experiences. And the the result of that is that in this attempt to build a model of consciousness coming out of physical systems and physical dynamics, they have what I I call the stipulation problem of of consciousness which is like the hard problem. They have to stipulate space and time being fundamental. They have to stipulate physical systems like brains and then they have to stipulate particular patterns of activity in those systems like integrated information or some kind of global workspace or orchestrated collapse of neuronomic tubial quantum systems. Um and then they have to stipulate the specific conscious experience. So because they can’t actually derive any particular conscious experience from their theories. So, so there’s not a single scientific theory today that can say this pattern of say of integrated information or orchestrated collapse of quantum states must be the taste of vanilla. It could not be the smell of an orange. There there is not one example on the table to date. So they have to stipulate the connection to the conscious experience the so everything is stipulated. You stipulate spaceime, you stipulate the patterns of the the functional pattern that you’re interested in like integrated information and then you stipulate the conscious experience. And so my attitude is um why not just stipulate the conscious experience? Yeah. Forget all the rest. So just stipulate the conscious experience and use a mathematical model of conscious experience and nothing else to boot up a model of spaceime. And and and that’s what I’m up to. So, so the idea is that this idealist approach that starts only with consciousness can be made mathematically precise and it will stipulate less than the physicists because it doesn’t stipulate space and time. It will derive space and time as a consequence of the um stipulation of conscious experience. Why do neuroscientists like Anil Seth for example say hey this isn’t such a hard problem. One day materialism will solve this problem. Why are they so adamant about that in your view don? Well, Anne Neil’s a good friend and he and I have have a good time talking with each other about this and disagreeing and and and exchanging ideas and and so Anneil’s a brilliant thinker and I I would say that his attitude about it is is very similar to many of my my good friends and colleagues. For example, even Francis Crick when when he was alive thought, you know, look, we you thought that life was going to be very very hard and a schmistical kind of thing. there were vitalist notions of life and you know Francis and and uh figured out with the structure of DNA when they had the structure of DNA then they all of a sudden certain of the mysteries of life unraveled and so what Francis Crick thought was that well we’ll do the same thing for consciousness once we really understand the neural circuitry uh you know consciousness will unravel like life unraveled and so so the attitude is that you know physics and science has has had remarkable successes. There have been naysayers all along that said you can’t do it and then science comes along and does it anyway. And so consciousness will be another such thing. And I think that that’s their attitude. Um so it’s an assumption. My attitude very different. Yeah. It’s well it’s an assumption. Absolutely. It’s an assumption but but they would point to what they would call is a pretty strong track record, right? But in other areas but in in completely other areas. That’s like me saying, “Oh, well I’m good at I’m good at cooking. Therefore, I might be good at tennis. That That’s right. But I think with this one, we’ve come up with something where um our own best theories in science, for example, um quantum field theory with gravity uh is telling us that space and time is not fundamental and also evolution by natural selection tells us that space and time are not fundamental. So that that that whole framework which has been a a wonderful framework for science for centuries, space and time or spaceime being the fundamental reality that has worked spectacularly well. But but the Nobel Prize this year that was just given a few days ago, in fact, I think last weekend um was to three physicists who um have experimental confirmation of the prediction of of physics that uh what’s called local realism is false. That uh physical objects um don’t have real values of their properties like position, momentum um when they’re not observed. Uh and so we can go into that. But when local realism is false and space and time are not fundamental, then the assumption that brains and other physical systems that are local real quote unquote local realistic systems would create consciousness that has to go too. We have to rethink from the ground up. So So this is not a small thing. Science needs a new foundation. Spacetime can’t be it. Spacetime is doomed. And so we’re we’re going to have to have a new mathematically precise foundation. And that’s why the my current my again these are my friends and brilliant colleagues. But but we’re doomed to fail at solving the hard problem of consciousness if we assume that space and time are fundamental and and objects in space and time like neurons. We cannot solve the problem that way because those assumptions our best science tells us are false. Okay? And so if we start with assumptions that our science tells us are false, good luck trying to boot up a theory. Sure. And we’ll come back to spaceime in a second. Uh Robert, why do you think or in fact no I remember you saying in one interview um what makes you think a scientist is qualified to make observations about the nature of reality whereas someone interested in the nature of consciousness is not? And I remember the answer to your question was was not a particularly satisfactory one. So can we just flip that back round and what makes someone interested in the nature of reality like yourself qualified to make observations about the nature of reality in the same way that scientists with their interest instruments and technologies etc are. Because all the research that a scientist does they do with their the faculties of their mind namely the faculties of thought and perception and reality cannot be known through the mind through thought and perception. So that there’s a lot that scientists can and obviously do do with their minds. But the one thing that no scientist um will ever do and indeed no person will ever do is know the nature of reality through the faculties of their mind. Why? Because our minds impose their own limitations on everything that they know or perceive. In other words, the mind looks at reality, but reality appears to that mind in accordance with its own limitations. Just as one who looks at snow through orange tinted glasses, they are looking at the snow, but the snow will appear orange. Why? Because of the lens through which they perceive it. All science and this may be true of most scientists un unlike the introspective ones like Don who who also meditate but the vast majority of science scientists investigate reality with their minds. It’s the wrong tool. By by the mind I mean our conceiving and perceiving faculties. That’s not to say that the the the work a scientist done does with thought and and perception is not valid. Of course, it’s immensely valid, but it’s not the right tool for researching reality. So that that is why um somebody who is not a scientist or doesn’t use their mind in a scientific way by scientific I mean conventional definition of the word scientific is equally qualified to explore the nature of reality as is someone with a scientifically trained mind. So when people talk about the hard problem of consciousness as they have done for decades um what’s your take? Yes the hard I think the days of the debate about the hard problem of consciousness are are numbered. There is no hard problem of consciousness. What’s really interesting is the hard problem of matter and that’s a really interesting question. The hard problem of consciousness is is is is like like the problem of how screens are generated by movies, how the sky is generated by clouds, how the ocean is generated by waves. That that’s the hard problem of consciousness. The answer is it’s not. It it it’s based on a massive assumption namely that that uh matter is the fundamental reality of the universe and as as Don very well described the hard problem of consciousness that matter eventually uh gives rise to consciousness. It’s in time I I think in the not too distant future we will we will view um this perspective in the same way that we now look back on the flat earth theory or the the um geocentric universe theory the the theory that the sun travels around the earth the idea that matter is the fundamental reality of the universe and gives rise to consciousness will find its place alongside these kinds of ideas. So, but what’s really interesting, if consciousness is the fundamental reality, how then does the the apparently physical world contained in time and space? How does that arise from consciousness? That’s the hard problem of of matter. That’s a really interesting question. Yes, it is. I’m wondering to what degree you share Robert’s optimism. Um, Don, because I’ve heard you talk about 99% of your colleagues still having a physicalist outlook. I remember speaking to Carlo Relli, he said the same thing. Um, and so from those kind of statistics, 99% that doesn’t suggest that uh sea change is coming imminently. I agree. I think it’s going to take a while but but I’m pretty confident that that’s going to happen because uh human beings scientists in particular are just as dogmatic as anybody else on the planet but science as a institution a social institution is not dogmatic. It may be slow to change its views but it’s not dogmatic because eventually uh data will overwhelm our our biases and the the new theories will will overwhelm our biases. So for example uh in 1905 uh it was over for Newton as being the fundamental theory of physics it was over but 17 years later when when Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics um the Nobel committee was very very clear that it was not for his theory of spacetime it wasn’t for his theory that overthrew Newton it was for something else it was is um something in quantum theory the photoelectric So the so what happened was it took a long time for even the Nobel Prize committee to respect and and believe Einstein’s theory even though it had already predicted uh you know the change of the position of stars in a in a solar eclipse and so forth they they were not convinced well everybody is convinced now but but you can see that even if it’s it’s a genius like Einstein who has made what we now know to be one of the biggest contributions of all And it takes the science a little while to, you know, a few decades to catch up, but but eventually it does. So I’m I’m quite confident that, you know, like like this year’s Nobel Prize for the experimental verification that local realism is false. That’s just another clean nail in the coffin of space-time and physicalism. And and so so I’m I’m convinced by the way that as idealist framework starts to solve the hard problem of matter that that Rert was just talking about where we start with a a mathematical model for example of consciousness and then show how um precisely quantum field theory arises as a projection of the dynamics of of consciousness. um then I think um things will turn around because when you can start building new technology based on the on the on the new science that that doesn’t assume that space and time and physical objects are fundamental then all of a sudden you’re you’re a lite if you if you still believe in space and time you you you’ve you’ve been left behind and so I think that’s what’s going to happen is that there will be a new theory of and it’s already happening um there are physicists you know Neimar Connie Hamemed and others who are finding new structure structures beyond spaceime. So the race is already on. Spacetime is it’s not just that we’re saying the spaceime is doomed. There are new structures beyond spaceime that that are being found and eventually we’re going to get new technology that goes around spacetime. And when we have technology that goes around spacetime and doesn’t require the existence of matter, then all of a sudden um you’re not going to be the smart one in the room if you if you think that spaceime is is fundamental. You you’ll be the you know the one that was left behind the dinosaur. Um, before we dive into spaceime being doomed, one last question actually, Robert, for you on this, which is something I hear you say a lot, which is that no one has ever found matter. Now again, I think to someone who perhaps is not particularly who is a bit uninitiated, that might sound like an outrageous claim. So, can you just clarify what you mean by that? Well, all we ever find are or or know are conscious experiences. And we extrapolate that the existence of a physical stuff called matter that exists independently of consciousness. But but nobody has ever found that stuff let alone found how consciousness is generated from it. We found what appears as matter. So if when we look at reality through our perceiving and conceiving faculties, reality appears to us as matter. And so ma matter is is a is is a the name we give to the way reality appears to a finite mind that is constructed in the way a human mind is constructed. And there may be other kinds of minds in reality that that there may be other minds that that that look at the same reality because there’s only one reality and it may appear to them in a very different way not as matter. Why? Because their minds are constructed configured in a different way from a human mind. So matter the physical universe is just the way that the one reality which I would suggest is made of consciousness appears to from the localized finite perspective of of a human mind. So it it matter is is part of the way reality appears. It’s not what reality is. And it’s fine. I’m not suggesting that we should get rid of um that we should no longer speak in terms of matter or or it it’s fine as long as we know that we we’re not describing what reality ultimately is. And actually if we then try to find that stuff that appears to us as matter, if we go deeply into it, we we we never actually find it. Nobody has ever actually find it. We we find appearances in consciousness. Yes. Okay. So, for example, if I hold this pen up, it seems like there’s a pen here, but actually, you can’t separate the pen from the awareness that knows it. You can’t separate the pen from the awareness that knows it. Nor can you separate its appearance from the perceiving faculties through which it is known. Do it’s not a coincidence that as human beings our perceiving faculties consist of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. And surprise, surprise, the world appears to us as sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells. Do you think that’s a coincidence? Of course not. I If we had a a a a sixth perceiving sense, let’s call it exing, then we would find X’s in the world. If we had a seventh sense called ying, we would find a corresponding Y’s or zeds or in the world. In other words, the pen is it’s its reality. I think this is very important, Simon, because someone might think, and this is this is true of some idealist thinkers, that that they conclude that the pen only exists in in your mind. Yeah, I’m not suggesting that, and I and I know Don is not suggesting that at all. The pen borrows um it its ultimate reality is I would suggest the infinite consciousness that lies way beyond each of our finite minds and and precedes our finite minds. So the pen the reality of the pen is is infinite consciousness but it borrows its appearance from the finite mind through which it is perceived. So, as William Werdsworth said, we half create, half perceive the world. We perceive it in the sense that what we’re perceiving is reality and that reality preedes and is independent of its being perceived. But our perceiving faculties, the faculty of seeing in this case, impose their limitations on reality and create its appearance. So we half perceive and half create the world. So so yes the pen it it it it owes its reality to infinite consciousness. It borrows its appearance from the finite mind through which it is perceived. Okay. So something that you that you think could make important people question their materialistic assumptions is to do with spacetime as you’ve already said Don and you come out with this phrase spacetime is doomed. So um can you explain why it’s doomed? And just very quickly as well just in terms of spaceime it it’s obviously I’m in a room now. I could throw something to that side of the room. you’re obviously in a different part of space and this interview will take a certain amount of time which heads in one direction. So that’s what spacetime is. Um unless feel free to correct me but assuming that’s correct. Can you explain why it’s doomed? Don. Yes. And I would like to just say that what Rert was describing in terms of the pen and is is beautiful. That’s I agree with him completely on that and and the goal of our work is to take what he’s saying there and make it mathematically precise. But but what Rupert is saying is is precisely the point of view that I’m trying to mathematize. Right? So so the idea that spacetime is doomed of of course is not my idea. So let me give credit to the the physicists who are saying this. Um one was David Gross in a 2005 paper that was published on the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. So it came out in 1905, Einstein’s theory. And so in 2005, David Gross wrote a paper, you know, celebrating Einstein’s achievement and then announcing that it’s over, that spaceime is doomed. And and that’s that’s the way physics goes. I mean, that’s the way good science goes is we celebrate the the the wonderful achievements of the past and then we look forward to the next step. So here’s the argument. I’ll give you two quick arguments for why spaceime is doom. This is again not me. It’s from the physicists. So one argument is this. Suppose we’re trying to measure something in space like the position of an electron at a finer and finer and finer scale. To do that, we need to have some kind of radiation, say light, at a finer and finer wavelength. So smaller and smaller wavelengths of light. Okay, that’s fine because you need the smaller wavelengths to resolve finer features. So quantum theory tells us as you use wavelengths of light with smaller and smaller wavelengths then the energy is going up. So you’re getting more and more energy into a smaller and smaller region of space. Einstein tells us that mass and energy are the same thing. His famous E=mc^2 equation. So that means that as we’re resolving finer and finer details, we’re essentially having a higher and higher density of mass that we’re using. Well, at a certain point then gravity spoils the party because you get so much mass in a small region of space that you create a black hole and you collapse the very you destroy the very system you’re trying to measure. And so that means so that happens at about 10 theus 33 cm 10 theus 43 seconds the plank scale. What this means and this is what David Gross said in his 2005 paper is that the notion of space and time or or spacetime has no operational meaning below the plank scale. There’s no operational meaning that can be given to it and so it’s doomed. It’s not a fundament from my point of view it’s a very shallow structure. Spacetime falls apart at 10 theus 33 cm. If it was 10 theus 33 trillion centimeters, I might be impressed. But 10 theus 33, we got a cheap headset. This is a a really cheap data structure that we got. And it so it’s not the final reality. It’s it’s it’s a very very shallow data structure. I’ll give you just one other reason that they that physicists give for this and it’s a little bit deeper. Quantum theory says that any measuring system is itself a subject to the uncertainty principle. has degrees of freedom and if you want more and more accurate measurements, you have to have more and more degrees of freedom in the actual measuring apparatus itself. Okay, so that’s fine. So you have your measuring system in your lab and you want more degrees of freedom to get more measurement accuracy. So you add more degrees of freedom. Well, more degrees of freedom mean more mass. So as you as you’re getting more accuracy, your measuring device is getting more and more massive. And eventually at some point the mass inside your lab is going to be so great that the whole lab will be collapsed into a black hole and you’ll destroy what you’re trying to measure. So that’s that’s a different but there thought experiments like this make it very very clear that spacetime has no operational meaning below a very shallow scale 10 theus 33 cm and so so spacetime is doomed. And by the way it’s not just spacetime it’s quantum theory. Quantum theory is not fundamental either. So, and this is what this is what physicists like Nema Arani Hamemed and others are saying is that we need a a theory beyond spacetime and beyond quantum theory that gives rise to spacetime and shows how quantum theory arises with spacetime together. And so the deep structures that they’re finding don’t assume spacetime and they don’t have any so-called Hilbert spaces there there there’s no no mathematical structure of quantum theory either. So, so this is this is big. This is like spacetime and quantum theory which are you know beautiful and wonderful tools and and and have been an incredible gift to humanity in terms the technology that we have right now that lets us talk like this is entirely due to you know the the technology we got from assuming that spaceime is fundamental and quantum mechanics is telling us how matter it’s it’s it’s been fantastic. So even though it’s fundamentally wrong, space and time are not fundamental. Nevertheless, there’s some nature rewards us. And this is the interesting thing that I’m very interested in about consciousness and appearances and you know the the thing in itself versus our description of it. We can we can talk about that later. Somehow we are rewarded when we try to give very very precise descriptions albeit fallible albeit partial nevertheless precise descriptions we’re rewarded for doing that and I’m very interested in understanding why we’re rewarded but the next step beyond spaceime is now there are things like the amplitude we can talk about where the physicists are not just saying yeah there’s there’s stuff beyond spaceime they’re saying no here is a specific structure beyond spaceime here’s how it precisely maps into spaceime and here’s how it precisely um for example predicts scattering amplitudes for uh experiments at the large hadron collider. So this is not a hand wave this is getting precise new ways of of predicting experimental out outcomes at the large collider new ways that do not require spaceime or quantum theory. So that’s that. So that’s what’s going on right now. And by the way this is brand new. The the the paper that announced the amplitude came out in I think 2014. That’s eight years old. So this is so it’s no surprise that my my colleagues in the hard problem of consciousness don’t understand yet that it’s over for spacetime and that there’s a whole new race for the new structures beyond spaceime that that’s going to completely transform our study of the hard problem of consciousness. Can I can I ask you a question there, Don? Um sorry to interrupt, Simon. It’s just something Don said triggered a memory. You know the children’s game where you’re you’re you’re searching for a treasure and the grown-up says you’re getting warm or you’re getting cold and the rewards you talk of the this this reward you say you say that that you get. Do you do you think that this is um reality’s way of of of sending us the message that we are on the right track that that it’s a confirmation in our limited world that that that that we’re we’re approaching reality the right way. We’re taking steps at least in the right direction. We’re getting warm, not cold. it. I think that that’s a a very interesting idea and I can’t dismiss it. I I think you know I don’t know I I can’t say yes or no but but I think that that’s a really interesting idea. We we do know that for example if you get the laws your your laws of physics a little bit wrong like in Newton the the gravitational force is is proportional to the two masses it’s g m1 m2 divided by r^ 2 the the distance squared. Suppose you said well I you know I want to make it over r cubed. I don’t want to do R squ. I’ll do it over R cubed. Well, then everything that you do will will fail and your spacecraft will crash. Every nothing will work. So if if you even make it like R squ make it R to the 2.1, you’re doomed. So and the same thing if you pick up a new thing like ice skating when I I remember when I first was get on ice skates, I tried to do what I normally do. You try to walk the normal way and and when you do that you fall flat on your face and you find out that there are new ways that you have to behave on ice or you will end up on your face all the time and you get rewarded for doing it right and you get punished by by falling on your face if you get it wrong and science seems to have so even though in some sense Newton is not right he was in the right direction and when I first got on ice skates you know everything I did was wrong but every once in a while something wasn’t as wrong and I wouldn’t fall down quite as fast. Right. And so that was my reward. And eventually I learned how to jump and so forth on ice skates. And and so I think so I like your idea, Rert. And the only reason I can’t endorse it all the way is because I’m not smart enough yet. I haven’t gotten far enough along to to really say yes. But I suspect that you’re right. Um I’ve got a bit of more of a basic question, which is if spaceime is doomed and has been shown to be doomed, why do we not hear more about it on the news, for example? I mean it’s a big deal as you said it it is a big deal and and I was at a conference just uh a few weeks ago um on mathematical models of consciousness where there were many physicists who are experts in quantum theory and they were using quantum theory for their models of consciousness and and so I asked I made a habit as often as I could raise my hand and get acknowledged to ask a question I would ask them so what do you think about the new research that says that quantum theory is not fundamental because spacetime and quantum theory are doomed and to a person none of them knew about this and these are PhDs in in in physics and and and the reason is that this result that spacetime is doomed is a particular branch of physics is high energy particle physics. So there’s physics is a huge huge field. There’s condensed matter physics, there’s quantum theory, there’s thermodynamic there. It’s there’s lots and lots of branches and and you know you specialize if you’re going to get a PhD you have to know one area really really well. So most of them have no idea what are the the new state of of play in condensed matter physics or the new state of play in in this case high energy physics. And so it’s only it’s only eight years out. So it’s it’s no no surprise that that it’s not well known even among physicists much less among cognitive neuroscientists and of course the general population probably hasn’t even heard about it at all but but again in you know 1922 the Nobel committee itself was not interested yet in Einstein’s theory of spacetime so these things take time uh you know but eventually they’ll they’ll come around and often it takes the old guard just dying right the old the old scientists just have to die and it’s the new generation that that uh aren’t aren’t attached to the old ideas that love the new revolution. They they take it and move forward. So that that that will happen. I I I just would like to not be one of the old guard that dies before it sees what what what the fun stuff is ahead. So and I’ve heard you say, Don, that they there are young physicists working beyond spaceime and they’re having a ball. I think was what you said. They’re they’re having a ball. I I’ll tell you some of the successes. If you for example try to compute a single interaction event at like the large hydron collider like two gluons smashing into each other and four gluons go spraying out and gluons are these fundamental particles that are inside protons um and they they bind quarks together. So if you do that using quantum field theory and standard space-time techniques, it turns out it’s hundreds of pages of algebra to compute just one interaction. And and you’re you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of these per second. So it’s it’s it’s supercomputers can’t keep up. What they what they found is if you let go of spacetime and you do this computation with this new structure like the amplitude outside of spacetime, hundreds of pages turn into just two or three terms that you can compute by hand. All of a sudden the math gets easy. Spacetime was making it unnecessarily complicated. It’s not that hard. It turns out when you let go of spaceime it’s much easier. And second, so so the math gets easier. And second, if you do it in spaceime, you can’t see certain symmetries that are true of the scattering event. But when you go let go of spacetime, all of a sudden you see these new symmetries. There’s something called the infinite yang symmetry, which turns out to be true of the scattering events and you can’t see it in spacetime. So, so let go of spacetime. The math becomes much simpler and you see new symmetries that you couldn’t see before. Well, goodbye spacetime. I mean, it’s all over. and and it’s it’s actually some weird features of spacetime that are causing all the problem in spacetime. you’re trying to force everything to happen um according to Einstein’s notion of locality in spaceime you’re enforcing locality and unitarity and so you’re forced to make these virtual particles and every virtual particle adds a new term to your computation and so you get all these unnecessary terms when you just let go of spacetime you get rid of the virtual particles so that’s one thing that no more virtual particles and then the mathematics becomes simple or well simpler I mean simpler much much simpler and you see new symmet ometry. So, so they’re finding structures called the amplitude. Um, and behind that something called decorated permutations, which is like shuffling. If you take a deck of cards and you shuffle them, right, you could you could have the queen first or or then the king first and then the queen. You could shuffle the cards in many many ways. Those are permutations. Something called decorated permutations to to the surprise of everybody is the the deepest structure they found behind like the amplitude. So, so somehow the universe, by the way, the amplitude is just this big geometric object. It’s like this big, it’s described as a jewel beyond spacetime. It’s like this monolith. It could have trillions of dimensions, even more. So, it’s this. So, it there’s no dynamics. It’s just this geometric structure sitting outside of spaceime. It’s just sitting there. And then behind it is this other structure of decorative permutations. And these things are doing magic, right? they they the structure of the amplitude actually codes for unitarity and locality. So the the edges the the vertices the edges the faces that whole structure of this geometry actually encodes the properties of spacetime in in the structure abstractly and the volumes of the structure encode the scattering probabilities. This what they call the scattering amplitudes and then behind that is this deeper thing called decorative permutations that that captures the essence of this geometric structure but there’s no dynamics and no one knows who ordered that. So, so why is it that when we take off our space-time headset and we start looking beyond beyond space time, right? If you think about it, science has been studying our headset, our space-time headset. That’s what science. So, we’ve and we’ve sharpened our tools. We really have learned how to study our headset. Now, we’re taking our first step in the last 10 years. We’re taking the headset off and saying, let’s use our tools to discover structures beyond spaceime. And there we see this monolith, the amplitude and and then the decorated permutations. And my my feeling is it’s like, you remember the movie Spa uh 2001, a space odyssey? There’s there’s a scene in which the monolith appears and there’s all these apes that at first are scared to death and they’re staying away from it. Then they slowly they start banging on it, hooting, hollering. They they know it’s like it’s pregnant with meaning, but but they’re clueless as to what it what it what it’s about. And that’s where we are. We found this monolith beyond spaceime and we’re beating on it and we’re you know what what is this? We know it’s really important. It’s it’s got some deep meaning but we have no idea what it is and no dynamics yet. So physics has moved beyond spaceime. It’s found static structures but it has not yet found a dynamics. So this is a really really fun time. Okay Robert, I’ve got a couple of questions for you. Um and actually firstly um that you know findings slim from pages and pages that are the most powerful computers on earth couldn’t deal with to something manageable when spacetime is dismissed. That seems to fit very well with your children’s game of you’re getting warmer you’re getting warmer. That’s the first that was immediately what leapt out to me. But my question for you Robert is this is you also assert that spaceime is an illusion but not coming at it from the scientific angle. How do you do that? Yes. I I like Don think that spacetime is an illusion and just um to be clear about this because this is something that is often misunderstood. By saying that something is an illusion doesn’t imply that it is not real. An illusion is something that is real but that is not what it appears to be. So the the the Caribbean beach that we dream of at night is not a real Caribbean beach made out of sand and and and sea and air, but it is real as the activity of our own mind. So I agree that spacetime is an illusion which doesn’t mean that it’s not real. It’s an illusory appearance of something that lies behind it that cannot be captured by our perceiving faculties. So in fact one of my questions that I’d like to come back to in a minute for you Don that this jewel behind spacetime with what region of the mind can we investigate it given that that the normal tools of the mind thought and perception impose their own limitations on reality and make it appear as spacetime. So, so I’ I’d like to ask you about that, Dom, but let me just finish my responding to your question, Sam. Yes, I’ve come at it from a completely different angle from from Don, more um more experiential and introspective. And really I reasoned if I were to reason the process although for me the the process came before the the reasoning and the explanation. In the it in the in the waking state we have thoughts and images and uh sensations and perceptions and that constitutes our waking state experience. thoughts and images on the inside, sensations of the body and perceptions of the world on the outside. Then as we fall asleep, uh sensations and perceptions leave us. We no longer experience the world or the body. We enter what we consider to be a dream state just consists of thoughts and images. And then thoughts and images leave us and all that remains is consciousness. So the consciousness was present in both the two previous states but it was colored by thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions in the waking state and just thoughts and images in the in the dream state. But as the activity as thinking and perceiving thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions as they leave, as we fall asleep, uh the the in other words, as the activity of the finite mind ceases, the more deeply we fall asleep and at some point there’s no activity of the mind. There’s just consciousness. And as the activity of the mind ceases, as thinking and perceiving cease, surprise surprise, our experience of time and space disappear. Could Could it be therefore that our experience of time and space is profoundly and directly linked to the faculties of thinking and perceiving? Well, yes, of course, thinking takes place in a single dimension. What do we call that? Time. perceiving, seeing, hearing, touching, but particularly seeing takes place in three dimensions. What do we call that? Space. Could could it be that what we call time and space are how the reality that lies behind the appearance of time and space appear to our thinking and perceiving faculties. In other words, it is thought and perception that um project time and space or render reality as time and space. Time and time and space is the is the it’s the orange tinted snow. There’s something real there. I’m not saying it’s it’s non-existent or unreal. It is real, but its reality is nothing like time and space. When you um to use an analogy, when we look at a a movie, we we see a threedimensional landscape. When we go up to it and touch it, we find its reality, relatively speaking, is a two-dimensional screen. So something that is in reality, relatively speaking, two dimens has two dimensions appears as three dimensions. Well, time and space appear to us in four dimensions. One dimension of time, three of space. But behind that, could that be a a a four-dimensional appearance of something which behind it has less dimensions? And I would say if you go all the way back through the beautiful jewel that um Don talked about through through whatever the structure is behind that, I can’t remember what you if you go back through all the data structures to the ultimate reality, I I would suggest consciousness has no dimensions at all. And and we we cannot think of that. We cannot even imagine something with no dimensions because everything we conceive or imagine is limited by the the mind through which we do so. So I I so Simon to come back to your question it was really through through through exp through my experience investigating the the waking state the dreaming state and and deep sleep and then going back in the other direction in deep sleep there is just consciousness there is no experience of time and space there is just the awareness of being when dreaming starts again the awareness of being doesn’t disappear the dimensionless awareness of being it doesn’t disappear thinking and Imagine as thinking and imagining are simply added to it. Thinking and imagining are as it were a coloring of the of the dimensionless awareness of being and then the waking state sensing and perceiving are added to it and we have the full fourdimensional appearance of of the world. But it’s all made of this dimensionless consciousness which is is the the ultimate reality that lies behind and appears as time and space in the waking state. Ripet, do you want to ask your question to Don about that structure beyond spaceime? Yes, it was. I I if if what I’ve just said is is true, if if if Don you feel that what I’ve just said is true, that our faculties of thinking and perceiving impose or render reality as time and space, then with what faculty are we able to explore this um the the dimensions that lie between time and space. And if you go all the way back, dimensionless consciousness. But what you’re suggesting is that there are structures in between time and space before you get all the way back to dimensionless consciousness. We we have d I I would suggest we have access to time and space through our thinking and perceiving faculties. Access to the ultimate reality through the pure awareness of being. But with what faculty are we able to access the regions behind time and space and in front of infinite consciousness, so to speak, right? I I love the description you just gave, by the way. It’s beautiful. So I I’m on the same page with you about um our perceptions of space and time being essentially the result of a filter. That’s that’s or a projection. Absolutely. And in in terms of and and by the way that’s precisely what I’m working on right now in a paper that we just submitted for publication. We have some steps on that where we actually show precisely the kind of filtering that leads to spaceime from a model of consciousness. And a paper I’m working on getting ready to to to write right now is going into to more detail about exactly how that filter works that will create space and time and and that paper is going to be tapping into the amplitude and the decorative permutations idea. But your your question is a very very good and and deep one about what what faculty are we using to do this work beyond beyond spaceime. So it’s a complicated issue. So I’ll I’ll take little pieces of it first. The first thing is that the physicists who are doing this work beyond spacetime always know that whatever structures they propose beyond spaceime they have to show how they project into spaceime where we can test them. So so you you you’re not free to just postulate anything you want out there and have fun have fun but eventually you have to show exactly how space and time and particles and their dynamics arise from this structure beyond spaceime. If you can’t do that you’re not doing science. So we absolutely can only test things inside space and time like at the collider and so forth. And so any theory of what’s beyond spacetime has to have a precise mathematical projection into spaceime into you know Einstein’s relativistic uh spaceime for example uh quantum field theory and so forth or and and ultimately Einstein’s curved spaceime you know gravity now the structures that they’re you what the faculty that the physicists are using right now the first one I’ll you I’ll talk about is mathematics Right. So what they’ve done is they say okay we have all these hints that they what they what they found were the when they did the mathematics in spacetime there were these complicated things but every once in a while they would find a formula someone would just discover a formula some some ma mathematician by the way you could do it so you now you can do this real easy you don’t need hundreds of pages here’s a simple formula I remember to look at holy smoke where did that come from right it was like a hint it was a a mathematical hint that there’s some other way of thinking about this whole thing. There’s these guys, Park and Taylor. There’s a Park Taylor formula that came out 30, 40 years ago. And everybody, whoa, is that a one-off or, you know, were they just lucky? And it turned out we got lucky over and over again. And and finally the So what the mathematicians and the physicists did was, well, can we posit some structure beyond spaceime that would project to spaceime and give us these formulas? And so you can see what they’re doing. there we’re getting all these hints and okay so now I have to make this creative leap okay there’s this structure I’m letting go of spaceime I’m letting go of quantum theory I’m doing this geometric object it’s it’s not a polytope but it’s like a polytope so they postulate it and could it ever be more than that Don could it ever be more than a well-informed inference tested in our interface of of time and space but not actually experienced or Could it be more than an inference? I think I think it eventually will. I think it eventually will be the source of new technology. So So for example, right right now, uh if you and I want to go to the Andromeda galaxy, which is the closest galaxy, it’s it’s 2.4 million lighty years away. Well, we’re not going to make it in our lifetime, and our great great grandkids won’t make it either in their lifetime. So So we can’t even get to the nearest galaxy going through spaceime. But what if um we realize that spaceime is just our headset? It’s just a data structure. It’s not the reality. And we discover this the the first layer of quote unquote software outside of the that headset, namely the amplitude heed, for example, and decorated permutations. Why shouldn’t we be able to get new technologies where we don’t go through spaceime, we go around spacetime? Then all of a sudden what’s going to happen is we’ll our addiction to spacetime the limits that we have right now in our thinking most of us when when I say there’s something beyond spacetime I I’ve had scientists go what what could you possibly even mean I think the next generation that is spending all their time in VR and the metaverse and so forth and is taking off a headset all the time for them it’s going to be oh yeah spacetime is just a headset of course there’s a reality beyond the headset and of course we can grock realities beyond spacetime in our imagination. We just have to expand our minds and and and so we’ll be able to do that. we have the tools of mathematics to help us when our current senses sort of falter but then I think we’ll get an expanded sense and then I think that we will get new absolutely new technologies and uh I should say that I’m right now working on a mathematical model of a dynamics of consciousness and by the way again I agree with Rupert that ultimately my model is just a model it’s not the final reality right it’s just the next baby Ultimately, the one consciousness cannot be described. And yet, we’re rewarded for humble baby steps of description where we recognize that our description is not the thing. And yet, it’s not pointless either. And so, that’s that’s the interesting thing to say. It’s not the final word and yet it’s not pointless. And that’s what’s really interesting. And but but so this next baby step that I’m taking with my with my team um is a dynamics marovian dynamics of conscious agents that turns out it does it so and we can talk about if you’re interested that why why marovian and so forth but it is a dynamics and it is true what rupert was saying with this dynamics that we can have a dynamics of marodian dynamics that’s timeless in the sense that there’s no increasing entropy there’s no entropic arrow of time in this dynamics of consciousness But it’s a theorem that if you take a projection and that’s exactly the word that that Rupert used when you when you take a a mathematical projection of this dynamics that’s timeless you will get and so you project the dynamics into a a new dynamics which is a projection of the deeper dynamics then you do get an arrow of time. It’s a theorem that you get an arrow of time not as an insight into the nature of the reality but merely as an artifact of the very projection process itself. And what I’m working on right now is to show not only that the arrow of time arises as an artifact precisely and mathematically but also that space itself that’s that’s my current project is to show how space itself arises as an artifact. So I couldn’t agree with with Rupert Moore and his term projection is in fact the right technical projection uh the right technical term to use. I’m looking at mathematical projections and showing how time and hopefully eventually space arrives as an artifact not as an insight. And from my point of view I mean I I do a lot of work on evolution for natural selection. I’ve got got some work showing that evolution also agrees that spacetime is not fundamental. I use evolutionary game theory. But this deeper structure, this deeper dynamics has no arrow of time. The arrow of time, the time is the fundamental limited resource in evolution. If you think about it, that’s the fundamental thing that’s the limiting factor. All the other resource limitations are a result of that. So what I’m saying is that even evolution of a natural selection, which is a I love that theory. It’s a beautiful theory. We have no right now we have no better theory for understanding um the human mind. I’ll put it that way. Not not the not the ultimate consciousness but the human mind in its projected form. There’s no better the human ego. If you want to understand the human ego scientifically evolution of natural selection is the is the tool to use. It’s incredibly powerful. But it’s not the final word. It’s not the final theory. There’s a deeper theory in which there is no limited resource. There is no no arrow of time. Perhaps there is no competition, no nature red and tooth and claw. But when you project that down into a space-time interface, then you get the illusion of ego, me versus you, of nature red and tooth and claw, of limited resources and competition and and so it’s all an illusion. So, so what Rupert was saying um from a spiritual insight is I think going to be borne out with mathematical precision in the next baby step. Not the again I don’t have a theory of everything. We’ll never have a theory of everything and yet we’re rewarded for taking the next baby step. Uh Rup I want to ask you a question but you mentioned Don uh conscious agents. Can you just in the simplest terms explain what a conscious agent is? A conscious agent is trying to be precise about what we mean by um consciousness and experiences. What so those are those are words but to do science we need to make them mathematical. And so I try to capture in the notion of a conscious what it means to be to have to have awareness without content and to have contents arise. So that’s what the mathematics does. It gives a math something called a probability space which describes awareness without content and then a marovian dynamics on that probability space which describes how um specific experiences arise and disappear on the surface of this awareness without content. And so that’s the marovian dynamics. It’s a I we’re doing the simplest most elementary mathematics possible namely is marodian dynamics which captures the idea that experiences can arise probabilistically and disappear probabilistically and and so that’s that’s where that mathematics is coming from. Again it’s absolutely not the final word. It’s just a next step. And what we’ve shown in in a paper that we just submitted for publication is that this dynamics of conscious conscious agents um has a canonical projection into one of the structures that the physicists have found beyond spaceime. So I said you know there’s spaceime there’s the amplitude and then behind it are these permutations these decorated permutations. So a few months ago I said well look if I want to start with consciousness and go all the way into spaceime the physicists have told me what I need to do. I need to give them decorated permutations. Okay well I got a marovian dynamics. Has anybody shown how to take a marovian dynamics and give you decorated permutations? So I did a literature search and no one had ever done it. So I got together with my mathematician uh friend and colleague Chayon Pashosh. I worked we’ve worked more than 30 years together and we did it. So we we showed a way to take a it’s so it’s a new contribution to mathematics. Here’s a way to take any marov dynamics and give you as decorated permutation. We also did it for arbitrary graphs. So now we have this dynamics of consciousness um beyond spaceime. We’ve shown how it projects and I’m using project as as you’re using it rupert is it’s it’s an information losing map. So it projects down to decorated permutations which then project through the amplitude into spaceime. So we have for the first time now a theory that starts with consciousness and shows at top level how spacetime arises as as a projection. So so it’s exactly what Rupert is saying but it’s just the first baby step of taking what he’s saying and making it absolutely mathematically precise. Now, this might sound like a dumb question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Um, because my head was hurting a little bit when you were just talking through that. Um, am I are you and is Robert a conscious agent? Oh, so great question. Yes. And you’re also a infinite collection of conscious agents. And let me give you a concrete idea just so you get the feel of what I’m talking about here. So, a friend of mine uh who’s now dead, a guy named Joe Boen was a neurosurgeon who uh did a surgery where he cut the corpus colossum of of people’s brains. So So you your brain has two hemispheres, the right and left hemisphere and there’s a band of fibers called the corpus colossum which has 220 million axons, neural fibers. And to help people with intractable epilepsy, uh, Joe would in really bad cases go in, open the skull, take a scalpel, and cut all or part of the corpus colossum to separate the hemispheres. That way, a seizure that say had an origin with a focus in the right hemisphere couldn’t get the left hemisphere to go down. That you could keep the epileptic seizure only in the right hemisphere. And it was a clinical success. So it was it really worked. But what some other friends of mine Ramondrin and and uh and others who have studied these patients Mike Gazan Gazano is one of the most famous. What they found is you um find that the two hemispheres are losi of two different forms of consciousness and two even different personalities. So so Rama my friend Rama who’s a professor at UC San Diego. One guy had his right hemisphere was an atheist and his left hemisphere believed in God. The right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver in one person. The left hemisphere wanted to have a desk job. And sometimes it turns out the right hemisphere controls your left hand and your left hemisphere controls your right hand. And sometimes with these split brain patient, they’re called split brain patients or commisertomy patients more more technically correct commottomy patients. But the split brain patients would have what’s um called intermanual conflict. We call it the alien hand where the left hand and the right hand fight each other. So in one case someone was trying to make an omelette with their right hand and the and the left hand would then throw a salt shaker into the omelette. They apparently the the right hemisphere did not like eggs and the left hemisphere wanted eggs and so so they were fighting. So so here you have oh and by the way the two hemispheres um can be so isolated from each other in terms of their conscious experiences that they can play 20 questions with each other. So you can give the right hemisphere a word and and the right hemisphere knows what it is and it can use the left hand to to put thumbs up for yes, thumbs down for no. So the left hemisphere which can talk can ask questions, you know, is it is it an animal? Yes or no, right? And and sometimes the left hemisphere loses. It doesn’t figure out the word. So So here are two separate consciousnesses inside one skull. So yes, you are a conscious agent, but you’re not just one conscious agent. You’re two. And you’re not just two, you’re a whole lattice. And this actually comes out of the mathematics that we’re working on of this Marco dynamics of conscious agents. Conscious agents combine. And so you are this, you know, incredibly huge lattice of conscious agents. And each has its own interface. Each agent has its own projection. So we happen to have a particular space-time projection and so forth. But that’s just I call this a headset. It’s one of countless headsets that consciousness uses to parit itself because it’s there are countless ways that consciousness can take a projection and look at itself through a projection. Okay? And so so you are a bunch of agents. Each agent is looking at itself through different projections. They’re coming together ultimately to two agents which are your two we see as two hemispheres and then the one agent that that is you when your corpus colosum is intact. So that’s a long answer to your question but yes. Can I follow it up with a with a question Don? Would would you say that the the consciousness with which each conscious agent is aware of its experience is the same consciousness. Yes, it turns out to be a theorem of our mathematics that that’s the case that there is one ultimate conscious agent. But it’s also a theorem of our mathematics that our mathematics itself will never be able to describe that ultimate one agent. We can describe these little agents, but we can’t describe the one. And and we and we actually know precisely how far we are from describing it. Well, it’s always infinitely far, but we we’re always infinitely far from describing it. There’s something called So, it turns out infinity is not one thing. There’s different sizes of infinity. There are bigger and bigger infinities. There’s an infinite number of infinities. This was discovered um by a mathematician named Gregor Caner in the 19th century. So the numbers the counting numbers like 1 2 3 up to infinity that’s the smallest infinity we call it a lift zero. Any collect any subset if you look at all the subsets of the integers like 1 and two 1 2 and 3 1 and 50,000 look at all the subsets that’s called the power set. It turns out the that the power set of a set like the power set of the integers is a bigger infinity. So we call it alf1. Now we take the p the power set of alf1 and that’s a bigger infinity. We call it aft 2. And it and so there’s an infinite number of infinities. And so the theorem about consciousness from our theory says we can take whenever we have any collection of conscious agents, they satisfy the definition of a conscious agent. So their combination is a conscious agent. So if I have start off with a countable collection of conscious agents, then their power set was a new infinity of conscious agents ALF1. And so but but it’s a theorem that they’re also one agent. So there’s this one super agent that’s equivalent to ALF1. But now take it the power set now ALF 2. So we have to go all the way up counter hierarchy and there is a top agent at ALF infinity. But we can never describe it because we can never climb up Caner’s hierarchy. So, so, so this is where I love the mathematics and the reasoning because reason properly done gives you precise insights. It’s very very powerful, but it also tells you precisely where it stops. Right? Like quantum field theory and Einstein’s gravity says how powerful spacetime is. It’s a wonderful concept and how precisely where it stops at 10 theus 33 centimeters this wonderful concept stops. It’s the plank scale and it’s over. And so that’s what we get in our scientific investigations. In spiritual traditions they’re very very careful to say um the word is not it. The finger pointing to the moon is is not the moon. It’s just a finger. Anything that I say about it is not it. In science we have the same thing. Our theories are not the reality. But what’s new is that our theories can tell you precisely their limits. And that is what science brings to the table. We’ve always the spiritual traditions have told us yes, anything that we talk about has limits. Science says yes. And here is the precise limit of this concept. That’s what I love about scientific theories is they tell you precisely when they stop. So So I’ll I’ll stop with that. Ruper, question for you. Uh, Don said an infinite number of infinities and um, as from what I’ve taken from you, I can’t quite compute how that would work. Um, what’s your take on that? That there could be an infinite an infinite number. Let’s say let’s take um Don’s idea of conscious agents which I think correlates fairly closely with what I would um express as um innumerable localized points of view of infinite consciousness within in infinite consciousness from whose perspective if so if if if Each each of our minds is a temporary and ultimately illusory localization of of of the one infinite consciousness from the point of view of that localized consciousness or finite mind. It it is a it is a an an individual separate consciousness that that’s the point of view of the from the inside of that point of view. um we think that we are individual separate consciousnesses. So from that point forward, there are innumerable consciousnesses, one for every sentient being. And I think this correlates with your description of um conscious agents, Don, although I understand that inside each finite mind there are again numerous conscious a but but so so however many localized points of view there may be in consciousness and that that that there’s no reason to suspect that there’s a that that there are anything other than an infinite number of possible localizations of consciousness in consciousness. Nevertheless, the consciousness out of which all those localizations are made or within which each localization appears is all one. Not just one, but it’s it’s indivisible. It doesn’t really localize itself. Just as our own limited minds when we have a dream at night, our own limited mind if if if for this analogy we can concede the existence of a limited mind. Our limited mind is a single homogeneous field of consciousness or beit a limited one. But when we dream we dream of numerous people and each of those people has a separate point of view. But our mind doesn’t really divide itself into numerous minds. It doesn’t really even localize itself as the apparently separate subject of experience that we, the dreamer, seem to become. It always remains exactly as it is, the dreamer’s mind. It never really enters the time and space that seem to be real from the dreamed character’s point of view. So the the the the infinite I would suggest the infinite consciousness is as it were dreaming or imagining seeming to localize itself as each of our f finite minds but not really doing so. Seeming to localize itself as a discrete finite mind from whose perspective it views its own activity as time and space and the events and objects that they contain. never actually entering time and space because from its point of view there is no time and space to enter that from its point of view there is just itself like the dream that the the the if I fall asleep in Oxford and dream that I’m walking on the streets of Paris I never really leave my bed in Oxford and enter the streets of Paris I seem to localize myself on the streets of Paris in order to perceive the dreamed world but I never actually do so so I I I would suggest it’s the same that that there are innumerable localizations of infinite consciousness, finite minds, and there may be, you know, we’re just aware of human beings and and animals. That’s because they’re all that show up through our limited perceiving faculties, but but outside our limited perceiving faculties. may be all kinds of other minds that simply our perceiving faculties are too crude to pick up. You know what what did they mean in in the um in the early u days of Christianity when they spoke of angels? Well, was this just fanciful? Or did they have some deep intuition of localization of infinite consciousness, God’s infinite being, to use that language, that that was a different kind of mind that didn’t fit into the limited field of thinking and perceiving that we’re able to be aware of, but we’re a a different kind of mind. So, I’m open to the possibility that there may be all kinds of finite minds, not just human beings and dogs and cats and and fishes and and so on. Uh, but nevertheless, even if there are, that they could only ever be apparent localizations of the one infinite consciousness because that’s all there is for them to be a localization of. I I would just say I I agree. And if I could just ask Rupert a question. I mean this is this is now where this becomes a research meeting for me because this is a question that I I plan to I’m thinking about for my own research. The question is why why does the one localize? Don, I I don’t think we can answer that question satisfactorily because I think that the question um arises within our data structure of time and space and it presume because and everything that that that we experience in time and space it does have a reason. All our actions for instance we have a reason for them. That’s how reality appears inside our little bubble, our tiny little bubble of time and space. And the the we then imagine that the the the um the laws that govern that pertain in our little bubble of time and space must pertain to the greater field of infinite consciousness. I think um just as time and space that doesn’t exist for the one infinite consciousness. I think that causation why purpose none of these questions are relevant that they all presume for instance why purpose it it it presumes time I do A because I hope B will happen. So I I I think I don’t think the why I think it’s it’s important to ask the why question within our bubble of time and space. But I we need to think in I was going to say we need to think in a completely different way. No manner of thinking, however expanded it may be, no manner of thinking could um capture infinite consciousness. There there is no way. In other words, there is no way that we can think accurately about consciousness. In fact, one and and this is a very powerful meditation. um one who for a mind that really wants to think about consciousness. In the early days of my spiritual practice, I was always um persuaded against thinking because thinking tends to have a a kind a bad rap in the spiritual traditions. Later on when I started reading Admanandanda Krishna Men and I I I was it was as if he gave me permission to think and I then started thinking and I it was I was like a child who had been let loose in a candy shop for 20 years. I had suppressed thinking about consciousness but I had I really wanted to anyway I then started thinking about consciousness and and very quickly I realized that if we think about consciousness that attempt brings thinking to an end but it’s not a disciplined end. It thinking brings itself to a natural end because consciousness simply it no manner of thinking however refined could ever encapsulate consciousness. So actually the the the mind that is left free to think about consciousness comes to a natural effortless undisiplined uh end. So that was a long answer to your question why Don I I don’t think there is a reason. And I think the best we can say is that why does the one localize itself as as a finite mind and as a result appear to itself in in form in time and space in our case simply that it is its nature to do so not for any reason. It is just its nature to do so. Uh, Robert, can I just um chip in here just a sec because I’ve heard you be asked this question so many times and I’ve heard you answer it in a few different ways. So, I’ve heard you say, you know, you can’t ask the why question for the reasons you just elaborated. Um, it’s its nature. I’ve heard you say that as well as you just did. And then as well you gave another time an example of where it’s it’s like a bit like um our desire to procreate you know it’s like why do we do that like children is it’s hard work for example now to to take that you can’t ask the why question could there be an answer to that why question on the relative level because you also talk as well about the meaning of life or yes the meaning of life in terms of waking up to our true nature and then expressing our true nature through through the many ways. So on the relative level in terms of and and don this actually leads into something I’ve heard you say about love about um you know expressing that here on earth as it were or wherever the other finite minds happen to be. Could there be a why on the relative level? Robert, let let me respond. Yeah, on the relative level, absolutely that there is a purpose to our lives on on on on the relative level. Talking talking about um waking up to our true nature, recognizing our essential reality, recognizing who we really are, not just a bundle of thoughts and feelings, sensations, and so on. um a and our purpose in the world to somehow bring that understanding out into the world and and share it with humanity. I think it is um valid and and not just valid but necessary to to speak of a purpose internally and externally from our limited points of view. But I don’t think that those purposes pertain to consciousness. It’s like um you’ve I’m sure you’re don familiar with my analogy. The actor John Smith who plays the part of King Leah. John Smith that represents infinite consciousness. King Leah the localization temporary localization of of John Smith. From King Leah’s point of view, yes, that that the very best thing he can do if he wants to get over not only his sorrow on the inside, but his conflict with his daughters and the war with French on the outside, the the only way he’s ever really going to be able to do that is recognize who he really is, John Smith. So for King Leah’s point of view, yes, there is a purpose to his life, recognize his true nature, John Smith, and express the implications of that understanding in his everyday life. But we cannot say that those purposes are relevant for John Smith. He already knows that he’s John Smith. He’s already perfectly he doesn’t exist anywhere in King Leah’s world. So the purposes that are valid for King Leah don’t pertain to John Smith. So but yes, absolutely there are real purposes for us as individuals. So Don, what’s your take then on the absolute on Rbert’s take on the absolute why and the relative why? I I I think that uh Rupert is right uh and that the notion of purpose as as you described it uh in some sense involves time which is an artifact of a particular perspective of a projection and I I still wonder if there’s an answer to the question of why that um is not purpose related answer. So is there a way to say so for for example what we’re one thing that we’re referring to here is that no particular p perspective could ever encompass the whole of the one consciousness that that now now that’s not an answer in terms of a local purposeful why that’s more a a structural kind of answer right and I’m so I’m thinking about so so girdle’s incompleteness theorem basically says if you have any mathematical system that has a certain degree of sophistication that can do arithmetic and more then it there’s a an infinity of things that it can prove. So it has infinite potential but there’s an even bigger infinity of things it can’t do. And if you so there’s there are an infinite set of truths that are true but can’t be proven within that system. and and Girdle shows if you take one of those truths and add it to your your your conceptual system, your your mathematical system, um then of course now you have that truth in your system, but then Gle will say here’s here’s a new truth that that’s true, but you can’t prove it within your augmented system. And so what this means is in principle there is no limit to possible mathematical structures. Now, so this is not a purpose fact this or or purpose kind of thing. this is a more deep conceptual thing. And and so I’m wondering if it’s a a deep con a deep truth about the one sort of a deep truth that spiritual traditions always refer to that the one could never be encompassed by anything that we say. So see notice that statement. That’s a very interesting statement. It’s it’s a conceptual statement that’s pointing beyond itself to a non-conceptual realm and saying that that non-conceptual realm cannot be captured by any particular conceptual statement. That’s a really if you look at that statement what’s going I I have to wrap my I don’t understand it myself but there’s something to wrap our heads around there. And it’s that kind of almost paradoxical statement that I think is really so it goes beyond a local purposeful answer. It goes to this deeper level that many spiritual traditions refer to that no the finger pointing to the moon isn’t the moon, right? That kind of thing that seems to be a kind of statement that of course it’s a conceptual statement and yet it seems to somehow point beyond itself. And it’s that kind of thing that I’m that I’m really after here. If if I can wrap my head to the extent that I can around that, I might be able to take another baby step, right, in terms of of the mathematical understanding. But again, I think it’ll only be a baby step. And ultimately, what you’re saying is going to be the final truth is that there is no answer. But there could be baby answers along the way that that could be useful. Yes, I I would agree with that completely or all the way along the way. And and there may be purposes that are not encompassed in our little bubble of spacetime that that are not that are not yet the the ultimate purposeless but but but as you say baby steps along the way that that that are very valid purposes. And in fact there’s there’s everything suggested that that at each of at each stage the these various jewels behind the jewels at at each stage it would have a a purpose associated with its particular data structure just as in our world of time and space there are there are purposes that that pertain to this realm. It makes complete sense that every every realm, every baby step you take from one jewel to the next jewel behind it to the next jewel that there would be corresponding purposes that we can’t quite imagine or perhaps you are imagining them in this realm. Yes, that that that makes that makes good sense. that that I like that idea because in some sense every time we take a new baby step, right? It’s it’s like discovering a new candy in a candy store. It’s like so so it’s it’s and and you know, so one way to talk about it would be that what in principle no particular perspective can capture the one. But every new perspective is fun. It’s a new candy. And this is like you call it call it girdles candy store right there that don’t get stuck on the chocolate because there’s there’s the um you know there’s there’s other things beyond there’s lour and so forth beyond so so don’t get stuck on the chocolates and and and again that’s sort of purposeful and yet it seems that kind of thing seems to try to escape the local purpose and and look at the big big picture of that no perspective can capture the whole thing. there’s this infinite candy store and what consciousness is up to is exploring all the candies. But again, that’s it. It’s it has this funny feeling because again I know that’s only it can’t be the whole story and yet it it does seem to escape a little bit just my local perspective. Yes. Yes. Okay. I’m just going to take a deep breath. Okay. So um it first of all we we can look at the relative why which comes back to what I mentioned at the start. We’ll do that in a moment. But um I realized something actually we haven’t touched on and it feels to me at least that it relates a little bit to what you’ve just said there in terms of almost okay we’ve got a purpose on this level but then there’s a purpose on another level add infinite item right which is a bit like a computer game which leads us rather nicely to your uh interface uh theory Don because we’ve spoken about how spacetime is an illusion. Can you just run us quickly through your um you know why uh we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world to be able to survive it and how you came to that theory because I think it was 1986, wasn’t it? When you got your initial punch in the guts about this one. Yes. Um there I got the punch in the gut from a theory of perception. Absolutely right. So, so the way to think about this is I I think of it as as an implication of the theory of evolution by natural selection. So, so the way to think about what I’m about to say is evolution but natural selection is the best theory we have right now about sensory evolution. How how do our senses evolve? Okay. And I’m not saying it’s the final theory, but it’s the best theory that science has right now. So that’s so as a scientist it’s my job to look at the implications of that theory. So that theory has of course it it’s Darwin’s theory and it assumes in the language space and time and physical objects with bodies and DNA the modern you know synthesis DNA and so forth. But you can ask a technical question in evolution. What is the probability that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to see any truths about an objective reality? Okay. So, what is the probability that we’ve been shaped to see the truth or at least the truth that we need? No one thinks that we see all of the truth, but many of my colleagues think that we’ve been shaped to see some truths. Like, I see an apple. That’s because there really is an apple and it really is red and really has that shape. And of course, I don’t see the atomic structure because I don’t need to. But I do see the truths about objectity that I need. So that’s what most of my colleagues um who study evolution think that that we you evolution shaped our senses of course to guide adaptive behavior. That is to keep us alive long enough to reproduce. But the best way to do that they assume is to show you the truths that you need in your niche. So all the truths so there are genuine truths that you’re seeing but there a limited set of truths that you need to survive in your niche. So I asked the question with with my um graduate students and colleagues. Technical question. Evolution is not a handwave. It’s a mathematical model. It’s there’s evolutionary game theory. We don’t have to speculate. We can actually prove theorems. And so but I’m not a mathematician. So I first did simulations to see what what would happen. And so my graduate students Justin Mark and Brian Marion did some wonderful simulations and we started to conclude that yeah organisms that see the truth were going extinct um in our simulations when they competed against organisms that were just tuned to the fitness payoffs and didn’t see any of the truth. So then I went to the real gun which is my my friend Chayan Pash who’s a mathematician. I said look I’ve done enough back homework that I think this is worth your time now. I think that there’s a theorem here because our simulations are pointing to a theorem. And so Jayton and I worked on this, but of course Jayton’s the mathematician, not not me. And we’ve published a couple theorems. Basically, the probability is zero according to evolution by natural selection. The probability is zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any truth, any structure of objective reality at any time. That’s just a theorem of the theory. So now, by the way, I’m not saying that evolution by natural selection is true. It could be false. In which case, this theorem is false. And maybe we do see the truth, right? I’m just speaking So, but if you buy evolution by natural selection, which all of my scientific colleagues do, then then you’re forced to conclude that the probability is zero that that anything that we see, including space and time and physical objects, is um reflection of the truth. It’s it’s it’s a adaptive fiction, but it’s not the truth. And and by adaptive fiction, I mean the like the following. If you’re have a virtual reality headset on and you’re playing Grand Theft Auto in VR, right? You know, I I see a steering wheel and a dashboard and my gas pedal and I see a red Ferrari to my right and you know, a green Lamborghini to my left. Well, so I’m playing the game Grand Theft Auto. What am I really doing in this metaphor? I’m I’m toggling in a precise sequence millions and millions of voltages per second in some supercomput. and I have to get them the exact sequence exactly right if I’m going to win the race. Well, of course, if you had to get in there and toggle them by hand, good luck. You you would win against someone who could just turn the steering wheel, pre press on the gas, and so forth. So, if you want to play Grand Theft Auto and win, you don’t want to see the truth. You don’t want to see the supercomputer and all the voltages. You want to have a simple dumb down user interface of, you know, Lamborghinis and Porsches or whatever and steering wheels that lets you play the game successfully. And that’s what evolution did. It hid the truth. It gave us a space-time user interface that lets us play the game of life um without knowing what it is that we’re really doing. And so that’s the picture that that comes out of evolution by natural selection. And for me, what’s what’s striking about it is, you know, evolution by natural selection, I’d say, is one of the two big pillars of modern science. The other being, you know, quantum field theory with Einstein’s gravity. And both agree. The physicists are telling us that spaceime is doomed. And evolution by natural selection tells us that spacetime is doomed. It’s just a headset. It’s just a an adaptive fiction that let you play the game of life. And it’s there to hide the truth, not to show you the truth. So, so that’s but now you mentioned simulation and so I I need to make a a real clear difference between what I’m saying and standard simulation theory. Like for example, Nick Bostonramm um is very famous for his work on on simulation theory and and everybody knows it, but I’ll just briefly the idea is that this isn’t the reality. You know, we’re just fictional characters. We’re avatars in some virtual reality that some programmer there’s a programmer with her laptop somewhere and she’s programmed up this whole thing and and and we are just fictions and our world is just a fiction. But then it turns out that she herself isn’t real because she’s just she and her laptop are just the someone else’s program at a deeper level. And so there’s this, you know, this nested hierarchy that goes all the way down, but at the bottom it’s a space-time physical world. So there’s some program programmer in a space-time physical world at the bottom of the standard simulation theory and that programmer um with their their computer is creating the consciousness of all the players at various levels. So they they they’re assuming physicalism that space and time is fundamental and they’re assuming that that that somehow the properly um programmed computer can create consciousness and both are false. Spacetime is not fundamental. Spacetime is doomed and there’s no way that you can start with silicon and circuits and boot up consciousness. So so I disagree with that version of simulation theory. That that’s just false. It’s physicist and it has the hard problem of consciousness and it’s and it’s it’s just not it’s not um it’s not going to work. But there’s another sense in which this is a simulation. This is just consciousness as as Rupert was saying, it’s consciousness taking a perspective or consciousness putting on a headset and and looking at itself through a particular headset. And so in that sense, yes, it’s a simulation, but very very different from standard simulation theory which is physicalist and has a hard problem of consciousness. So the programmer is consciousness. That’s basically it. Yes. this the one deep consciousness which gets back to the deep question of why that we were talking about before. Why does it dawn all these headsets? And then just in terms of your desktop interface analogy, Don, you talk about um you know taking it seriously but not literally. So if I have a word document within a folder on my computer with a book manuscript, I don’t want to drag that into the dust bin because that will have consequences. But at the same time it doesn’t mean that I have got a book actually on my desktop as it were. Absolutely. The picture that I’ve just given of evolution giving us a headset not showing us the truth. For most people they think that it’s just obviously false and that they can dismiss it. Here there’s a bunch of gotchas. So, Don, if you think that that train coming down the tracks at 200 miles an hour is just uh, you know, some little symbol in your interface, why don’t you just step in front of it and after you’re gone and your silly theory with you, we’ll know that the train was real and it really can kill, right? So, so people think that this idea can be just dismissed really really quickly and and but the the idea is that the interface from an evolutionary point of view was there to um keep you alive long enough to reproduce. So you have to take it seriously. Um if if you you know and you as you said like for example if you have a an icon on your desktop for you’ve been writing a book for three years and so your work is there on that book and the icon is blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen. Does that mean that the book is blue and rectangular in the middle of your computer? No. Of course not. Anybody who thought that misses the whole point. The point of the desktop is not to show you the truth. It’s to hide the truth. You don’t want to see all the voltages and magnetic fields that you’re really toggling when you write your book. It could take ages to write. Yeah, absolutely. It would take Yeah. If you had to toggle, yeah, you couldn’t you couldn’t do it. But if you take that icon and you drag it to the trash can icon, you you go, “Well, this is just an icon. I I it’s just an icon. It doesn’t matter.” If you drag it to the trash can, you’ll lose your work. So So the icon has to be taken seriously, but not literally. That your your book is not literally blue and rectangular. It’s not literally in the middle of your screen. But you better take that icon seriously because it’s a pointer to something beyond. And so that’s what what evolution does for us. It gives us these icons that you better take seriously if you want to stay in the game. I mean, if you want if you don’t care care about staying in the game of life, that’s fine. Then then, you know, grab that snake, jump off that cliff, whatever you want to do, then then you’re out of the game. Um, but as long as you want to stay in the game, you have to take the icons seriously. Now I’ll just say one other I mean so there are more serious objections where philosophers for example say you can’t use evolution to show that we don’t that space and time are not fundamental because evolution assumes that physical objects like organisms and DNA are fundamental that those are the predicates that the theory is built on. So so you’re actually you can’t do this Don because you’re going to be refuting yourself by self-contradiction. you’re using the theory to refute the theory and so the whole thing is nonsense. And and what they’re missing is is is this that scientific theories always make certain assumptions. Absolutely. Those are the assumptions. But there is no theory of everything. Every theory has limits. There can be no scientific theory of everything. That means that whatever concepts of theory starts with those concepts have limited application. they they will at some point stop. A good scientific theory is one that tells you precisely where those concepts stop. So in physics, Einstein’s theory of of gravity together with quantum field theory um which is based on spaceime tells you it it starts with spacetime. Quantum fields are defined over spacetime. Gravity is curvatures of spacetime. But when you take those theories which start with spacetime and you look at the mathematics, the mathematics says, “Oh, spacetime is not fundamental. In fact, it ceases to have any operational meaning at 10 theus 33 cm.” That’s not self-contradiction. That’s not shooting yourself in the foot. That’s science doing what it’s supposed to do. Give taking concepts, making them so precise that you know the limits of those concepts. So that’s all I’m doing with evolutionary theory. I’m saying we we take evolution which of course Darwin was thinking about physical objects fighting over physical resources and in a modern synthesis we have DNA and and so forth. So we’re thinking about but the whole point of a scientific theory is to take take that make it precise and find the limits. Well the limits are pretty pretty stunning. Space and time themselves are not fundamental and DNA does not exist unless it’s perceived. So, so those so you get but that’s what we do science for because it’s so precise that it tells you the limits without contradicting itself. Okay, Robert, I’ve got two questions for you that I’ll ask back to back but not at the same time. The first is um so as Don said there can be no final theory of everything and I’ve heard also Don you talk about you know the theories that we have now will be scoffed at in a hundred years and this will just continue add infinitum. Why is it then Robert that the perennial philosophy doesn’t need upgrading? Because the perennial philosophy is about uh the one eternal truth, the one thing that uh that always remains the same. And the perennial philosophy is really just about that. It’s not about any of its permutations or appearances. So in other words, the consciousness with which um let’s say somebody born in um 100 BC, the consciousness with which they knew their experience is exactly the same consciousness and in the same condition as the consciousness with which each of us are currently knowing our experience. And therefore a theory of that consciousness will never change. Someone who studied that consciousness introspectively 2 and a half thousand years ago and somebody who studies that consciousness now will come up with the identical answer. Whereas if you were to study the contents of their mind two 2 and a half thousand years ago and you were to compare that with a study of the contents of each of our minds, there would be differences between them. Our minds would have evolved. And if we were to fast forward 2,000 years, again, the ideas that we have now will be vastly different from the ideas um of of those in in 2 and a half thousand years. So there can be no um certainty when we are dealing with the the content of the finite mind, the knowledge of the finite mind. But there’s one aspect of each of our minds that doesn’t change ac across time, across space, and that’s conscious. That’s why the perennial philosophy never changes. Okay. And and and why science always changes. Yeah. Okay. Um Okay. Part B of that same question then would be um the perennial philosophy would that apply that applies then to not just a human finite mind 200 BC but to any conscious agents anywhere in any realm. Yes. I if you were to have a if you were able to have a conversation with your dog I’m presuming you have a dog Simon. Let’s just say you do. If you were able a cat actually called Roger. You won’t be surprised. Okay. If you were able to have a conversation this evening with your cat called Roger and you were to ask him to describe the content of his experience, he would tell you he would tell you, “I can I can smell a mouse that there’s a mouse not not far from here and I experience this feeling of hunger.” And he would describe the the world, but but he’d be describing the same reality that you perceive, but he would surely see it in a very different way from you. In other words, the content of his experience would differ considerably from yours, although there’d be some overlap because you’re perceiving the same reality. However, if you were to ask him to turn his attention away from the content of its experience, if you were ask him to turn your attention round and look at where your attention is coming from, what it is that is seeing rather than what it is that is seeing and you would ask him to do his best in human language to describe that. To begin with, he would fall silent just as we do because our words have evolved to describe the content of experience. So there are no adequate words to describe that which knows. But if you were then to press him and say, “Well, come on, Roger. Do your best.” He would then start describing the source of attention consciousness in almost identical words to you and I. Why? Because he’d be having the same experience. Now when I say he would be having the same experience and it would be the same experience as you and I are having I’m not I don’t mean to imply that Roger experiences consciousness. Don has his own experience of consciousness. Simon Rbert we all have our own experience of consciousness. What is it that is experiencing consciousness in each of us? It is consciousness. Only conscious is consciousness. Only awareness is aware and therefore only awareness can have any knowledge of itself let alone anything else. So in fact it’s not we as a person who have the experience of consciousness. It’s not your Roger the cat who has the experience of being consciousness. Is consciousness alone that has the experience of itself and that experience is always the same. Yeah. In in whatever mind the formulation of it may appear. Okay. Very quickly, um, Don, just very quickly before I come back to with that second question for you, Robert, just just quickly, Don, um, so scientific theories are always being upgraded and we scoff at 100 years ago, etc. But I’m assuming that the 99% of your colleagues who still rely on spacetime, if you said you should pay attention to the perennial philosophy, they would scoff and look down their noses at it without being mean. But is that fair? Um, well, yeah, I think that might not be fair because I think that they they might say, “Look, you the perennial philosophy is is interesting. it’s it’s fine and and that’s another part of human endeavor and uh but you know I’m I’m doing some hard-nosed um physicalist research and and that’s uh you know that’s that’s far more um substantial perhaps but but you know on a personal level maybe you should do that as well they so I think a lot of them are would be open to that kind of thing they’ll be hard-nosed about it like they’d be hard-nosed about anything scientific but I I many of them are not Philistines who just you know will say there’s nothing nothing here but they they might say you know it’s maybe not worth my time right you know to to spend too much time time on it but you know I would just ask though you know the the perennial philosophy maybe doesn’t change but our statements of it are just statements so any words that we say are the finger pointing to the moon so so we could imagine trying that we would like future generations to have better statements of the perennial philosophy than we have today Would you agree? Absolutely. As hopefully we we have clearer statements now than people that made statements about it 100 years ago or a thousand years ago. Yes. Um absolutely. Okay. I’m just going to Simon, I just want to say one thing in in in defense of of the scientists who you thought might might scoff at the idea of the perennial philosophy. Um, and uh, you you’re right, some of them may do and I and I sympathize with them because the perennial the perennial understanding is always expressed as as Don just said, it’s always expressed in in the in the contemporary language of the time and place at which it was spoken. And it’s it’s um spoken in the context of that culture and that that that culture flavors the expression of the perennial understanding with its own particular qualities. And so we have Tibetan Buddhism and Vdanta and Sufism and mystical Christianity. All of these are expressions of the perennial philosophy but but um packaged in the language of the day. And a lot of people and and I um in the early days um I I include myself as one of these people. A lot of people um mistake the packaging for the the the that towards which it was pointing. And because the cultures certainly the cultures that I went to this I think is not the case for obviously not the case for Dawn but because I had to I I went to to the east not not physically but but um intellectually um to find out about the perennial philosophy and particularly to find pathways where whereby I might explore it for myself. I mistook the colorful and exotic nature of these cultures for the perennial philosophy itself. And I think if if a lot of these um and that’s often what happens people a lot of people don’t discriminate between what is the core understanding and what is the local temporal packaging in which it is being expressed. And of course, the local temporal packaging of of um you know, Tibet 2 and a half thousand years ago, it’s pretty wacky. It’s pretty exotic compared to what we’re used to. There’s nothing wacky or exotic about the perennial philosophy. It’s just the an attempt to describe the nature of our essential being. But if it gets mixed up with the exotic natures of these cultures, it um and and and and limited to those cultures that that there is that there’s a lot that that that is worthy of being rejected in those statements, not because they weren’t relevant at the time in which they were spoken, but because they’re not relevant in our day and day and age. So I I I understand um people’s skepticism when they when they um are faced with the perennial philosophy when it is considered to be synonymous with the temporal packaging in which it is expressed. Okay. Um can can I jump in just go for it one thing on that? What I’m hoping is that there’ll be a convergence of science and spirituality here where for example the kinds of ideas that I’m developing with this theory of conscious agents will eventually be a way a new language for talking about the perennial philosophy but with more precision and and these kinds of dialogues would then be what’s what allows the people who are really the experts in the the standard perennial philosophy to inform a new language of science that eventually would be so precise that that then scientists would no longer have any reason to uh dismiss out of hand the ideas of the perennial philosophy. They would be forced to take the current baby step formulation of the perennial philosophy seriously as a as a scientific statement that they can then contend with on its own on its own ground. So that’s what I’m hoping is to see this kind of back and forth lead to a literal like a quantum step in the precision of the language that we use for the perennial philosophy even though I agree that the perennial philosophy itself doesn’t change its statement I think needs an upgrade and ju just quickly um you talk about an upgrade of the language I mean I would say isn’t that what the direct path is doing Robert you know instead of going through uh um various things you have to do and meditations whatever you’re talking about go no go direct there that is an upgrade in itself no yes but that’s not just an upgrade of language and it’s an upgrade of methodology in the traditional progressive paths on on in the spiritual tradition you would first first of all give your attention to something objective um normally one’s attention is dispersed amongst the 10,000 things And because for most people it’s it’s too big a step to go from the 10,000 things all the way back to the source of attention as a concession to to such a mind that the spiritual traditions okay I’m going to give you one object a mantra the breath the pause between breaths a blue light whatever and and this was a this was just to to um to gather the disperate energies of the mind on on a single object by way of preparation before that mind sinks all the way back into the source of awareness. And in the traditions that this preparation sometimes went on for 20 or 30 years before a mind was considered sufficiently mature to take this this direct step back to its to its source. that the the direct path that I speak about um is dispenses with that preliminary step and argues that that everybody at least in theory is capable of going directly to their essential nature of pure awareness just simply by virtue of the fact that they are aware. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s anyone could could ask themselves the question, what is it that is aware of my experience? And that in at least in theory should be sufficient to take their attention away from its content back to its source. In practice, of course, for some people that is still too much of a step. And so there are more intermediary means, but it’s true that what I speak about is is I try and go all the way back directly. And I think also as you certainly Simon you’ve heard me say I feel that this is the the age for the direct path. I think as a culture we are now sufficiently mature and advanced to be able to go straight back. So it’s an update of the methodology not just the the language. It’s true that I also I hope have contributed something to the to the um the simp languaging this direct path in a in a in a clear clean simple um efficient way divested of all its religious and spiritual trappings. So, so yes, I it’s true my language has I I think I’ve made some contribution to the to the upgrading of the language, but it’s not just an upgrade of language. It’s it’s an upgrade of methodology as well. Just one more thing to say. I’m not I don’t mean to imply by that that the direct path is a new no part. It’s been around forever. It’s still the perennial philosophy. Yeah. But it was always the hidden esoteric core of the traditions considered only suitable for the initiates. Now since the middle of the last century it’s been made much more available. And I want to talk about methodology and stabilizing in one’s being in a second in terms of personal experience. But um the the question that I mentioned the second question I mentioned ages ago Robert uh was this um and it goes back actually to the idea of consciousness as the programmer and the implication of that if consciousness is the programmer of the the game that we’re playing that means it’s also all the players which means that uh I’m you and you’re Dawn and round and round we go which leads then into the Okay, that that quote that I said right at the start of that chap uh who said or who said um great love your ideas, Don, but why does this matter to me, right? So this points to that because you know if I am you and you are me and etc etc and we are animals and the way we live our lives um would be upgraded uh exponentially wouldn’t it Robert? Oh um yes yes exponentially it’s yeah the implications of of the fact that at the deepest level we are all everyone and everything derives its apparently independent existence from from the one reality whose nature is consciousness. The implication of that is is twofold. one that at the deepest level we are not uh um fragments and therefore not incomplete. We are whole, needing nothing. Well, what what’s the what’s the common name for needing nothing, wanting nothing be what? Peace. It’s called peace. It’s called happiness. that that that’s every time we experience happiness, we are without realizing it touching our tasting our essential nature. So the implications and and on the inside terms of our interior experience is is there anything that somebody wants more than peace and happiness? I I I think so. So it has profound implications for the one thing we all want above all else on the inside which is peace, fulfillment, happiness. And then in terms of the outside, if it’s true that our uh at the deepest level uh we share our being, we are one reality behind the multiplicity and diversity of of people and objects. Again, that that’s the experience that I would suggest is we we we refer to as love or beauty. Love in relation to people, beauty in relation to objects. What what are the implications of that? Well, nobody does anything willingly to harm or hurt someone they love to take, you know, this is true individually, conflicts between individuals, but think of it on a on a large scale. Think of what’s, you know, think of what’s happening in Ukraine now. Would that be possible if the both parties felt that they loved each other? In other words, more more technically, felt that they shared their being with each other. These kind of scenarios would would be would be impossible. It’s not that we wouldn’t we would I don’t mean by that we’d agree about everything. We wouldn’t necessarily smile sweetly at each other all the time. There would still be disagreements because we we’re finite minds and finite minds of course there are different points of view. So there there would still be disagreements. But underlying those dis disagreements would be the the felt understanding that we are the same being, the same self, the same reality. And and therefore this understanding would always work to resolve these conflicts harmoniously. uh unkindness, cruelty, injustice, the these would be almost impossible. Yeah. Inequality, etc., etc. And and and the understanding itself, Robert, would that not do the heavy lifting? Because obviously, and what I mean by that is, you know, politically we we have people like, okay, we need to do it this way, we need to do it that way, and obviously they come into collision. This understanding if understood and taken in um by a a significant enough proportion of people this would would it not remind me of being a bit idealistic. This would sort everything out to some degree on its own. Ye well the understanding yes as long as the understanding is is as long as its implications are are lived. So, so yes, for instance, imagine if a significant number of politicians were to understand that that that they share their being, that that they’re what they essentially are is the same as everyone and everything else. Imagine if that single understanding was to inform that that not only their policies but the way they interact with one another and and and and in society. It it we would we would still have political parties that that disagreed about how to implement this understanding, but they would be it would be a a cooperative conversation, not one that would end in in hostility or war. So it would have a profound effect on on our culture, on our society. And you often use the saying, Robert, don’t you love and do as you will and love being a recognition. Well, I’m I’m quoting St. Augustine who was asked about the the moral implications of this understanding. And he just replied, “Love and do whatever you want.” by by which he meant of course understand and feel that at the deepest level everything and everyone are one single indivisible reality and as long as that’s your bottom line and that everything you do is consistent with and an expression of that understanding that’s the only moral code you need. Yeah. In fact, the only reason we need a moral code is for those of us that don’t understand that. And so we need to be kept on the straight and narrow until we do understand it. Yes. And that’s what I meant by the understanding does the heavy lifting all on its own. Um yeah, Don, how has then this um understanding that you know uh we are not in the game, we are the consciousness that programs it and um you know like you’re Robert etc etc. How’s that uh affected your approach to life? First, I say what what Rupert just said, I agree completely and well well said. Absolutely. Um it’s Yeah. So, I’ve come at this from a scientific point of view, partly from a spiritual point of view. My dad was a minister at a fundamentalist Christian church. And so I I got that point of point of view as well and had to to learn to deal with it and so and so forth and and take the good and and figure out what I didn’t want to take um from it. For for me, I’ve been meditating now for a little over 20 years. Um I I started meditating even though I was raised the church I was raised in said that that actually was a bad thing to do. They they warned us against meditation. You’re opening yourself up to the devil. Can I just ask which type of meditation, Don? Sorry. Uh well, so I I sit in silence and I it’s so it’s not any particular I have no particular tradition. I I literally just sit in silence and and um as Rub was now I I just go directly there. I just Okay, time to let go of thoughts. and you just let go of thoughts and you just sit there and it’s it’s utter silence and there’s a almost like a hyper alertness and you just like you’re just aware and but but there there’s no contents going through your head. You you just you’re aware of all you can be aware of the sensory experiences but but you’re not thinking about them and all and you get the sense like wow uh this is this is really being alive getting lost in in self-s serving thoughts you know worrying about this how do I look to that person how do I get that’s all a dream that that’s when I’m in that state of mind I’m I’m I’m asleep but when you let go of thoughts completely and just sit there in silence and just and just take a walk even you don’t have to be in a room you can just take a walk and say oh I I’m not interested in thinking and just let go of thoughts and just look at the tree and all of a sudden it comes alive and you whoa it’s you get a completely different hit from from reality as you do that and and for me that all of a sudden it makes like Girdle’s incompleteness theorem is it’s not just an abstract thing it’s the truth I mean when I let go of any of these finite formal systems any thought all of a sudden I am the deep reality I am that if the unlimited truth and it’s stunning you you just walk in it and and and then you then I go back to sleep right then I go back and go back into the dream world and there I am defending myself and trying to you know upset that someone did this to cut me off on the road and then then then you wake up again and go okay I I don’t need to think and whoa well I’m I’m So it’s it’s really it’s it’s it’s interesting and it it I would say early on in the meditation it was all painful and it was no fun. It was just the little brief silences here and there where you get some hint that uh but but it was mostly just me facing all this jungle of emotions and thoughts and so forth. And but but after 20 years I I I I did it because I didn’t want to take um drugs to you know help me sleep and so forth. I that’s why so I wasn’t it for any deep reason. I just I don’t want to take drugs so I’ll use meditation to help me deal with with all this stuff. But but then you realize okay well wait this is this is sort of important on its own. And then you begin to realize no this is really what it’s all about. And then wow, letting go of thought even though I’m a scientist and I think now there’s this distinction between these thoughts that are just useless and so I just I don’t need to think at all versus very careful thoughts where I’m doing I’m not thinking about how to polish my image and I’m just now thinking on a nice technical problem. That’s perfectly fine. Other than that, then why not just let go of thought and then and then my feeling is when I want a really good idea, it’s time to let go of thought because when I go into that space, I really am that unlimited intelligence. And that’s where the real gems of um ideas come from is when I literally say, “Okay, no thought at all. No thought.” Of course, it’s been helped because I’ve been thinking about a technical issue. Now I let go of the thoughts and all of a sudden you get new ideas. So I actually think that this will again be science and spirituality interacting in the future in a really interesting way where scientists begin to realize no wait this perennial philosophy is how if properly understood how you get your best ideas when you go into absolute silence. So once again it’s the back and forth between the absolute silence and then the precise thinking that that’s what really intrigues me. That’s somehow that’s the heart of the game. Absolute silence, no thinking. And then not not vague thinking, not handwaving thinking. Precise thinking is what gets rewarded. That’s what I want to see and understand better going forward to the extent it can’t be understood. Maybe I just have to be it and not know it. Rbert um in fact a question I suppose for both of you actually this. So that letting go of self-referential thought i.e. my reputation, how I appear to others, etc., etc. That is seeing through the illusion of the separate self, is it not Robert? Yes, you could say that it’s if it’s really going directly to the experience. If we go directly to the experience of simply being, simply being is our fundamental experience prior to thoughts, sensations, perceptions that there is just the experience of being or the awareness of being and and that’s always there so to speak in the background of experience colored or obscured to a greater or lesser extent by thoughts, perceptions, sensations and and so on. So if if we go and and the the illusion so normally we we derive our sense of ourself everyone has a sense of being myself and we all derive that from the fact of being but most people’s sense of their self is is limited because our being is mixed with the content of experience thoughts images feelings and so on. So most people’s sense of their self is a combination of their essential being which is utterly intimate and yet impersonal and the qualities of experience. And this mixture of our essential being and the qualities of experience makes for what’s called the ego or the or the separate self, the the the illusory self. But as I said before, the illusory self is not non-existent. It is real, but it’s not what it appears to be. What what is it really? pure being utterly intimate but impersonal and and infinite. How does it appear temporary and finite? So um in the progressive paths you have to work your way back through all the illusurary layers and finally end up with the awareness of being. In the direct path we just go to the awareness of being. I mean everyone has the experience of being. It’s it’s not there’s nothing ex it’s so simple. Everybody can say of their experience, I am. Well, all that’s necessary is to take the thought I am before it is qualified by experience and just go to the experience of being to which it refers. And it it is that that um cuts through the illusion of being a temporary finite separate self composed of thoughts and images and feelings. So, so in that’s in in the in this very direct approach, we we don’t work through the illusion. We don’t even investigate the illusion. We just go straight to the core feeling of being myself or I am just the pure awareness of being. And and if we we can’t look at that because we are it. But as as Don said, if we we know that by being that and if we just go there and if if but if we were to try in our feeble way to if we were to try to describe that there would be no limitations there. There’d be no qualities there. So it’s that uh experience if we can call it experience. It’s a it’s a non-objective experience. It’s that recognition that cuts through the illusion of being an ego rather than cutting through the illusion of being an ego that leads to that experience. Okay. It’s that experience. It it’s that that that cuts through the illusion of being a separate self. Now you do make it sound very simple, Robert, and I understand it is I understand it is it is simple. But the mind does have a propensity to pop up and go, am I doing this right? Is this really it? How do I know? Etc., etc. Um, so you know, for that’s certainly been my experience. You know, sometimes I’m like, ah, you know, I’m there and then I’m not there or or So, so what to do then? Well, a as Don very nicely described, you know, 20 years ago to begin with, you you you close your eyes, you turn away from your experience of the of the world, and you just face a jungle of sensations, feelings, and and thoughts. That’s all there is. It’s torture. But um if if you if you persist uh or and I don’t mean in in a if you in a skillful way if you were for instance to ask yourself but what is it that is aware of these thoughts and feelings and that takes your attention one step further back. Initially our attention is with the world. We close our eyes. Our attention is with our thoughts and feelings. But you then ask but what is aware of these thoughts and feelings? that takes us one step back and you may be only only able to stay there four or five seconds to begin with before the thoughts and feelings take you away again and then you lose yourself for 10 minutes but then you ask yourself but what is it that is aware of these or that’s just one of of question that you could ask and with that question again you just take a brief step back oh I am aware of them these are not what I essentially am they are what appear to me and you keep going back and forth like And in time you just find that you begin naturally effortlessly you begin to find yourself remaining as that in the face of your thoughts and feelings. The tyranny of thoughts and feelings lose their power over you to begin with. They continue but they lose their power over you and in time they just die down and until it becomes quite easy as as Don said you just close your eyes and there’s no methodology. You no longer have to ask yourself a question such as who am I or what is it that is aware of your you just close your eyes and you just go straight back to being and then when you’re walking down the street if your attention is not required by the world or you pay the lightest attention to to the world to make sure you don’t step out in front of that bus but the rest of your attention is is with being and and and it is it it’s it’s simple it’s easy I I I agree that to begin with there is a little bit of a battle between our thoughts and feelings. And so we go back and forth, but in time there’s less and less back and forth until we begin to feel our being is not just something we visit from time to time, but it’s where we begin to to live and then we’re still capable of using I loved your description, Don. There’s less and less inclination to to think just randomly and and and but but your thinking becomes a really fine tool which which which you use and when you don’t need it you you go back home you go back to being uh Don just um from you in terms of you know someone who’s perhaps where you were at the start okay you’re meditating just to uh avoid having to take sleeping pills for example or whatever it may be. H how about what advice would you give in terms of refinement in terms of um you know settling into the deep ground of being? Well, I I think that um one thing that’s helped me a lot, Rupert and other spiritual teachers have made wonderful meditative tapes and I found that sitting and listening to those tapes is a wonderful way to calm your mind. Um so if you know if you if there’s too much going on in there, you sit down and it’s just a jungle. I found that listening to Rupert or Echartola I found very very helpful these these really sort of help move me into that space and then I can turn the tape off and just be uh be be silent. Uh so that’s that’s very very helpful. I I would say this um what what has really been the hardest thing for me was to stop judging myself. Learning to not judge yourself to just say, “Hey, thoughts come up. Oh, look at that. I got angry. Oh, I I that’s selfish. I shouldn’t be selfish.” Well, wait, wait, wait a minute. Okay. No, I that just came up. So, to learn to just look at the stuff and not take it personally, to to not judge myself. That’s that was that’s the most painful thing is the self- judgment and learning to just watch that self- judgment come up. See, the problem is I I identified with it. the judgment comes up and I I say, “Oh, that’s absolutely true.” And and I identify with that judgment. That was the one that got that has gotten me over and over again for 20 years. So that’s the one that I’m finally finally starting to be able to look through that one is the self-critical judgment that I always identified with. So that’s so if you look if you find you’re judging yourself then also judging other people. It’s that judgment. So Jesus, you know, he said, “Do not judge lest you be judged yourself.” Well, judging yourself is one of the most painful things you can do to yourself. And learning to to just see the judgment and then smile at it and let it go. Um, but that’s easier said than done. And that’s true of others as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. My judgments of others as well. I don’t know why they they cut me off on the road. I don’t know why they did that and I’m in no position to judge. Right. Okay. Um, now just the final bit. We’ve covered a lot and and we’ve you’ve just talked a lot about Yeah. Because then I have to go to another. Yes. Okay. Right. very final bit then just just on on fear Don because we’ve talked about thoughts and I know that you had a particularly tumultuous time last year with COVID where actually you know you nearly died um and you sometimes well you spoke about the how how scary that was and and actually even contemplating the matters that we’ve been speaking about today how scary that can sometimes be so I just wonder if you could both just share some final thoughts on we’ve touched on thoughts themselves but on on the fears that are um deeper than thoughts, Don. Right. Well, the the fears I realize come from my beliefs and they they actually have their origin in part in my thoughts also part in in just my you know biology, my amydala and so forth. Yeah, I was a year ago June um um or May I I was had a heart rate of 190 180 beats per minute for 36 hours. They couldn’t stop it. So I texted my wife goodbye because you you know that was it. So I texted her goodbye and and uh it was I didn’t feel great. You just at some point you just want to die because you feel so bad. Um, and fortunately they they found something that brought my heart rate down and they could keep me alive long enough to get a a surgery cardiac ablation and they it was such such a mess. It took them I don’t know four and a half hours to to find all the spots and get rid messed me up. So and then the the drugs that I had to take were so I’m a apparently a 2D6 poor metabizer. So the bestolic that I took which is a drug that that you know keeps your heart rate down and so forth that it affects your your levels of um autonomic nervous system and so forth. Anyway, side effects are depression, anxiety and and uh um insomnia. And because I was poor 2 to six poor metabolizer, I the dose was eight times too big for me. um the standard this so so I got an overdose of something that gives you insomnia, depression and anxiety. So it took me um a year it’s taken me almost a year but I would say nine months to recover from that. I had to use meditation and and so forth because I had gotten completely programmed into insomnia, depression and anxiety. So this is after 19 years of meditation. Now, now I had to face a a a chemical that had intervened and sent me all the way back to worse than I’d ever been before. And so, this has been a tough year. Um, but but I with love of my wife and and good friends and then meditation and so forth. So, it’s it’s been uh this has been a year in which the meditation has saved my life. Um, and it’s allowed me to get back on my feet. I I stepped out May of 2021, stopped tweeting, stopped doing everything. And I didn’t start tweeting until March of this year. I just couldn’t. I could I I was just trying to stay alive from last May until March of this year. Just trying to stay alive. And so, so now I’m back on my feet and better than ever before. But um um it was a painful journey. Very, very, very painful last year. That sounds terrific. And I’m delighted that you obviously made it through in one piece. Um Rert, do you have anything to say to that? And then also just about fear more broadly. Yes. Well, I I I know Don, you have to go, so I’ll be very brief. First of all, say I I I had no idea all all of that, Don. So, um well, to to say that I’m glad you pulled through not not just for me personally, but but actually for the world, for everything you do in the world, I’m I’m I’m deeply grateful. And and can I what can I add to that? Um perhaps just one thing that to add is is that the extent to which we we we recognize the nature of our essential being or or self and our established in it to that extent the um existential fear of of of disappearance or death diminishes. And this uh existential fear of death or disappearance is one of the deepest emotions that we feel as a human being. We’re often not even conscious of it directly. We’re conscious of the way it um it it displays itself in other areas of our life, but but very often if we trace back the more superficial feelings, you can trace it back to this existential fear of death or disappearance. And and that’s the sense of lack is another such feeling. the term two core feelings of the separate self. And to the extent that we are recognize our being and and established in that or or as that this both the sense of lack and the fear of death diminish. Okay. Right. Well, listen, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you both, and I just want to finish by saying one thing, which is that obviously I’m so um grateful for both of you in terms of the work you do, but something I really admire about you both is that you very much walk the talk. And what I mean by that is if this understanding perhaps of not being separate and therefore being a loving human being. I know Robert better than you, Dom, but I can certainly tell it with you, too, that that you both very much walk the talk and I don’t think there’s um anything or very few things more important than that. So, I want to thank you on that basis as well as for the work that you do and just what a joy it’s been chatting. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you very much, Simon. It’s been a wonderful great learning experience for me. I’ve I’ve learned a lot and hopefully it’ll feed into the research as well. I I really appreciate this. Likewise. Likewise. I’ve I’ve um learned a lot. I do learn a lot from listening to you in general, Tom, but this conversation I’ve I’ I’ve understood more clearly some some of the ideas that I’ve heard you talk about. I’m really grateful to that and and as you said earlier that this um this dialogue between our two perspectives, it’s beautiful and it certainly informs it goes both ways and um so so thank you. I hope that we’ll be able to continue it in some form. And thank you, Simon, for for for for skillfully kind te teasing out our our ideas and facilitating. You you do it beautifully. Thank you very much. So, thank you. Thank you very much indeed.