Making Sense - Sam Harris - #404 — What If Consciousness Is Fundamental？

00:00:00.000 I'm nervous.

00:00:27.060 Actually, I have a cute story to tell about.

00:00:28.600 I've only been married for 20-plus years, so it takes a while to get comfortable.

00:00:36.140 You have a story?

00:00:37.500 I have a cute Violet story that you might want to hear.

00:00:39.080 Let's hear it.

00:00:40.240 Okay.

00:00:40.600 Well, I was driving the kids to school this morning.

00:00:43.760 I was feeling nervous about doing this, and I said to Violet, I'm nervous about my interview

00:00:48.780 with Daddy today.

00:00:50.020 I said, do you have any advice?

00:00:51.640 And she said, well, I don't know what you do in interviews.

00:00:55.660 How could I give you advice for an interview?

00:00:57.180 And I said, yeah, but you know me.

00:00:59.060 Could you give me advice?

00:01:00.260 Because I feel nervous.

00:01:02.100 And she said, well, don't cry.

00:01:08.720 I'll try not to cry.

00:01:10.720 Well, feel free to cry.

00:01:16.800 Okay.

00:01:17.300 Well, you have an amazing audiobook series.

00:01:21.160 It's really, it's an audio documentary, but it's being framed as an audiobook.

00:01:25.320 It's available on Audible and elsewhere, which just dropped this week.

00:01:30.300 Normally, we would have recorded this earlier, but I've been sick for 10 days.

00:01:33.520 But now we're free to talk about the contents of what you've done here, and we're also going

00:01:41.760 to release one of the chapters on the podcast and on Waking Up.

00:01:46.520 It's about 11 hours of content for the whole series.

00:01:49.920 And you did how many interviews of scientists for this?

00:01:53.160 How many hours of interviews?

00:01:53.900 I did about 35, but I believe 15 made it into the documentary.

00:01:59.220 Right.

00:01:59.500 I could be wrong about those numbers, but about 35 and 15.

00:02:03.280 So you had something like 60 or 70 hours of content?

00:02:06.640 Yeah, at least more.

00:02:07.640 Yeah.

00:02:08.080 Yeah.

00:02:08.540 And you spoke to some fascinating people.

00:02:10.300 Who did you speak with?

00:02:12.860 I talked to physicists like Brian Green and Jan 11 and Adam Frank, Sean Carroll.

00:02:19.160 And then I spoke to many neuroscientists on LSETH and David Eagleman and others.

00:02:26.480 I think the list is actually 18.

00:02:28.380 I spoke to people who specialize in consciousness, like Sue Blackmore, Christophe Koch.

00:02:34.280 Yeah, the list was long.

00:02:36.180 And the whole thing is organized around a single question, really, which is, what if consciousness

00:02:42.740 is fundamental?

00:02:44.120 Yeah, it is.

00:02:44.920 I mean, it started with a less extreme question.

00:02:47.940 I think the first question I went into it with was really, is it possible that consciousness

00:02:52.580 goes deeper in nature than the sciences have assumed and kind of how deep does it go?

00:02:58.060 But I became convinced over the course of years of having these conversations that if

00:03:04.220 it does go deeper than we have assumed and much deeper than we have assumed, then I have

00:03:10.100 an argument that it has to really go all the way down.

00:03:12.640 And so then, yes, the question became, is consciousness fundamental?

00:03:17.200 So we might want to review the starting point here, which is inevitably the hard problem,

00:03:24.000 as David Chalmers described it.

00:03:26.180 We've talked about this before.

00:03:27.220 I've talked about it many times.

00:03:28.520 And you cover it in depth in your book, Conscious.

00:03:32.140 And you also start the series reviewing it.

00:03:34.940 But I just think any conversation here needs at least touch on why it's a difficult intellectual

00:03:41.120 problem to situate consciousness in the order of things.

00:03:45.100 Yeah.

00:03:45.600 It's a problem I didn't get for a long time, actually.

00:03:48.520 But really, what it comes down to is the way in which consciousness, and by consciousness,

00:03:53.500 I mean in the most fundamental sense, the fact that there is something that it's like,

00:03:58.640 the fact that there's any felt experience, internal felt experience at all to any system,

00:04:03.740 really.

00:04:03.940 And the question is, you know, because consciousness is different from everything else we study

00:04:11.980 in science, and that it can never be directly observed from the outside, you can communicate

00:04:17.780 a lot about conscious experiences, we can talk about them, we can talk about how we think

00:04:22.060 they're generated.

00:04:22.960 But to actually, you know, know my experience right now of looking at a brown wood table,

00:04:29.100 there is nowhere else from the universe that that direct experience can be talked about

00:04:35.160 or felt except from the experience itself.

00:04:38.140 And so the question that I finally understood to be mysterious is, if the universe is made

00:04:45.040 of non-conscious matter, how and why is it, how really is it, that some non-conscious matter

00:04:52.200 gets configured in a way that suddenly there's this other property of there being something

00:04:59.100 that it's like to be that matter?

00:05:00.960 Which is what we mean by consciousness.

00:05:03.300 Yes.

00:05:03.660 We have that formulation, that something that it's like to be a system or a creature is the

00:05:10.840 explicit framing of the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

00:05:16.040 Right.

00:05:16.740 And it's interesting because a couple of the, more than a couple of the scientists I spoke

00:05:21.540 with feel about consciousness the way I did for most of my life and most of my career,

00:05:27.540 which is that it seems mysterious now, as life did at some point in our history.

00:05:33.080 And eventually the sciences and neuroscience in particular will understand enough about the

00:05:38.120 workings of the brain that we will, you know, it will no longer seem mysterious once we understand

00:05:42.240 it.

00:05:42.520 And it's funny, actually, I don't even know if you remember this, but so you were one of the

00:05:47.960 first people to help me actually understand that the hard problem is a hard problem.

00:05:53.300 And we, when we first met, were arguing about it and I was arguing for the physicalist side.

00:05:59.480 And I said, you know, it seems mysterious that when you flip a switch, a room fills with light,

00:06:05.740 a previously dark room fills with light.

00:06:07.660 But once you understand the physics, it's not, it doesn't seem magical in the same way.

00:06:12.520 And so I use that analogy of the lights coming on, which is where this title came from,

00:06:17.220 which I don't know if you know or remember.

00:06:19.620 I don't think we even said it, that the title of the series is lights on.

00:06:24.100 So, yes.

00:06:24.920 So I think I'm a good proponent of this argument because I really came from the other side of it.

00:06:31.080 And so I speak to a lot of physicists in particular who either don't think there really is a hard

00:06:38.100 problem or thinks we'll resolve it soon.

00:06:40.580 But I was surprised at how many of them, in particular Brian Green, seem to really understand

00:06:47.420 how it could be different from other problems we faced.

00:06:51.200 Well, let me pull out a few points here because I think it could still be unclear why the hard

00:06:57.700 problem is hard.

00:06:58.920 Because the analogies to things like life or to the mind in general make it seem like it's

00:07:05.320 consciousness must be reducible to what some properties of the physical world are accomplishing.

00:07:11.980 Right.

00:07:12.140 Because obviously intelligence is just a matter of information processing and we're doing

00:07:16.560 that in machines and if our machines become conscious, then there must be some way of

00:07:21.820 explaining that in terms of information processing and there should be no mystery there.

00:07:26.440 Life is no longer mysterious.

00:07:28.440 But the crucial difference is that intelligence and life and virtually any other thing you can

00:07:34.220 name that science explains can be defined by virtue of its extrinsic properties.

00:07:42.260 What it does to other things in the universe, its behavior, its covert internal behavior.

00:07:48.640 And it's completely explained by the behavior, by the external observations.

00:07:52.440 Yeah, there's nothing.

00:07:53.580 Once you explain all the input-output characteristics of life, nothing has been left out except obviously

00:08:00.520 consciousness, if you're talking about conscious life.

00:08:03.060 Right.

00:08:03.600 And so it is with the mind.

00:08:04.720 A visual system can function perfectly in a robot and the only residual mystery, once you've

00:08:12.560 explained everything about its input-output characteristics, is if there's something that it's like to be

00:08:18.660 that system intrinsically, if there's a visual experience, then you have to confront the mystery

00:08:24.620 of consciousness.

00:08:25.960 So consciousness is intrinsically defined.

00:08:28.920 If there's nothing on the inside, then there's nothing to explain.

00:08:32.240 If there is something on the inside, it is just a fact that there is the only evidence

00:08:37.120 for its existence is on the inside.

00:08:39.340 It's not on the outside.

00:08:40.340 You can't see a brain do anything which announces that there's something that it's like to be

00:08:45.480 that brain or part of it.

00:08:47.360 And so it will be with a perfectly functioning robot that, unless we know how consciousness

00:08:52.560 arises or that it does arise based on information processing, we'll have robots that seem conscious

00:08:58.320 to us, but we won't know whether they're conscious.

00:09:00.680 Yeah, this actually points to an example I've been using a lot lately that I think also helps

00:09:05.320 highlight why the hard problem is hard.

00:09:07.660 And also why I think our intuitions have been misleading us about what consciousness is.

00:09:12.600 But, you know, we're so used to it.

00:09:17.000 I mean, in some sense, it's everything that we are.

00:09:19.620 We don't know how to know anything or talk about anything that happens out of our conscious

00:09:25.100 awareness.

00:09:25.520 It's all playing out for us in consciousness.

00:09:28.040 And so we kind of, in a sense, we take it for granted and it kind of, we don't think

00:09:32.200 about it too much.

00:09:33.140 It seems, yes, you know, so if you think of something like sight, if I see the color yellow,

00:09:38.600 it seems like, oh yeah, there's this advantageous evolutionary system that gets put in place

00:09:45.160 where we understand that there are light waves and there are wavelengths that appear red to

00:09:50.600 us, appear yellow.

00:09:51.400 There's a spectrum of light.

00:09:52.320 We don't perceive the whole spectrum, but there's, you know, one that we refer to as

00:09:56.300 yellow because when it hits our retina and gets processed by the brain, an experience,

00:10:01.520 a felt experience of seeing yellow materializes in the universe.

00:10:05.960 This is something that comes into existence is this experience of seeing yellow.

00:10:11.420 And we know that yellow isn't something that exists out there in the world.

00:10:15.120 It's, you know, it exists as a light wavelength, but in terms of the felt experience of it and,

00:10:20.820 you know, scientists and everyone else used to think that yes, yellow does exist out there.

00:10:25.160 We used to think we kind of had this perfect window onto reality.

00:10:28.140 And it turns out that the brain is actually generating this experience of seeing yellow.

00:10:33.900 And so that kind of all seems natural to us until you realize that cameras and computers

00:10:38.780 also process light waves and can distinguish between different wavelengths of light.

00:10:42.940 There's a whole category of fascinating plant research that I get into in my documentary

00:10:48.780 also, which talks about how plants process light waves and how their subsequent behavior

00:10:53.940 is based on how they process those light waves.

00:10:57.180 But we can easily imagine that computers and cameras and plants do all of this without,

00:11:01.940 we don't think they're seeing yellow.

00:11:03.320 We don't think they're having an experience from the inside.

00:11:05.700 But for some reason, it seems natural to us that we do.

00:11:08.740 But the more you kind of interrogate these intuitions we have,

00:11:12.940 about what consciousness is doing, what it's there for, what function it serves,

00:11:17.560 and why we think it comes out of complexity,

00:11:20.560 our reasons for it really do start to fall apart.

00:11:23.540 And I think that's incredibly interesting.

00:11:25.640 And so you realize that you actually, it is completely mysterious

00:11:29.480 why a brain produces an experience of seeing yellow

00:11:33.240 and other systems in the universe that process yellow light waves do not.

00:11:38.540 And whether we're right about that or not.

00:11:41.700 Right, right.

00:11:42.360 So that's the hard problem.

00:11:44.100 It's no matter how much you explain about the behavior of a system or its input-output

00:11:48.600 characteristics, there seems to be this remaining mystery as to why it should be like something

00:11:54.780 to be associated with any part of that behavior.

00:11:57.200 And the hard problem is really based on what you, I think you call in the series, a primary assumption.

00:12:04.280 The strong assumption is what I've termed it, the strong assumption.

00:12:07.960 So what is the strong assumption?

00:12:10.260 So the strong assumption is the assumption that the sciences have made,

00:12:13.980 and that I include myself in until somewhat recently,

00:12:17.580 that consciousness arises out of some sort of complex processing,

00:12:22.500 namely in brains, probably doesn't exist outside of brains and central nervous systems

00:12:27.600 that those are required, but that we've kind of come to this assumption

00:12:31.560 because we are conscious creatures,

00:12:34.760 and the only evidence we can really get is in the form of communication,

00:12:39.660 and we can only communicate with systems that are similar to us.

00:12:43.560 So, you know, I look at all your behavior, even, you know, the behavior of my cat,

00:12:47.500 and there's enough communicated to me that they are a similar system to myself.

00:12:53.360 You think that I'm at least as conscious as our cat?

00:12:59.220 And so we've made this assumption that because we are the most complex things we know of in the universe,

00:13:05.300 the human brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe,

00:13:07.860 we do all of these complicated things, and we have this high level of intelligence,

00:13:11.960 that because we only seem to get evidence from other systems like ourselves that they're conscious,

00:13:19.220 we have no way of communicating with other types of systems,

00:13:22.760 we've assumed that consciousness arises out of complexity,

00:13:26.860 and we have a lot of assumptions about where we're likely to find it in the universe.

00:13:31.460 And so that is what I call the strong assumption,

00:13:34.200 and that what I discovered was we actually have no good reason to begin with that assumption,

00:13:39.140 and that the sciences, when we don't know something,

00:13:42.140 and in this case, when we don't know how consciousness arises in the universe,

00:13:46.260 we're actually, when it comes down to it, we're faced with starting with two assumptions.

00:13:50.160 So we have to start with a starting point.

00:13:52.560 We look out at the universe and all these collections of atoms and say,

00:13:56.580 okay, which of these systems are conscious or might be conscious?

00:14:00.120 And the simple answer is either all or some.

00:14:04.300 We know the answer isn't none because we at least have direct experience of our own.

00:14:10.000 We know the conscious, I know the conscious experiences I'm having,

00:14:13.060 whatever the cause of them is, whatever kind of crazy situation I'm in,

00:14:16.420 I could be a brain in a vat, who knows what reality is.

00:14:19.460 But these experiences are arising in the universe.

00:14:22.420 I'm, you know, I'm experiencing them directly.

00:14:24.760 Something is happening and it's being experienced.

00:14:26.920 And so the sciences have assumed that only some things in the universe are conscious,

00:14:31.260 which is a totally natural starting place.

00:14:33.700 They're all the good reasons we have for starting there.

00:14:36.340 I think we've made a ton of progress in neuroscience with that starting assumption.

00:14:40.060 But what I realized is we don't actually have strong evidence for assuming that.

00:14:45.120 And where might the science lead if we started with the other assumption?

00:14:49.160 And it doesn't even make sense, you know, how it sounds completely crazy even to me.

00:14:52.560 But, you know, sometimes interesting science comes out of ideas that at first sound crazy.

00:14:57.340 And I found more and more evidence in my conversations to support the fact that this is actually a legitimate starting position,

00:15:05.120 at least, you know, to leave as a question mark, but to say, what if we assume consciousness is fundamental?

00:15:10.860 And then how do we analyze the data that we find?

00:15:13.240 And how do we interpret the phenomena we find in, you know, in all of the sciences?

00:15:17.220 And where might that lead us?

00:15:19.360 Or do we hit all kinds of roadblocks and it actually doesn't make sense?

00:15:24.200 Yeah.

00:15:24.360 So then you take it in a slightly different direction where the focus is still on consciousness,

00:15:30.680 but rather than simply hurl yourself at the hard problem,

00:15:34.440 you come at it somewhat more obliquely by asking the question,

00:15:39.000 what are the implications for physics of all this?

00:15:42.340 So could treating consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe help us make progress

00:15:47.280 on any current theories in physics?

00:15:50.340 And sort of the flip side of that or another facet of that is,

00:15:54.640 do any of the established understandings in physics rule out the possibility that consciousness is fundamental?

00:16:00.880 Right. And I actually expected that I might find answers there in my searching.

00:16:06.320 But yeah, I mean, what became obvious to me pretty quickly when I thought,

00:16:10.540 okay, let's do this, let's do this thought experiment and just start thinking, you know,

00:16:14.960 I was just doing this on my own and then I was doing it in conversation with the scientists and philosophers.

00:16:19.840 But if consciousness is fundamental, what does that mean?

00:16:24.140 And what implications does that have for everything we understand, everything we don't understand?

00:16:29.120 And I realized almost immediately that this is a question for physics.

00:16:32.640 The science of the fundamental is physics.

00:16:35.940 And that was where I needed to go.

00:16:38.860 And it was pretty early on.

00:16:40.820 It was, I think, the second conversation I had was with Adam Frank.

00:16:44.820 And that led to many more conversations with physicists.

00:16:48.420 And actually, I should say that I think this line of thinking really needs to be heavily informed by neuroscience.

00:16:54.620 But the question itself, is consciousness fundamental or fundamental property of the universe?

00:17:00.760 It truly is a question for physics.

00:17:02.620 And you spoke to some neuroscientists who have a fairly deep connection to physics, people like Christophe Koch.

00:17:10.760 I think Anil Seth actually studied physics as well before he became a neuroscientist.

00:17:15.220 That rings a bell.

00:17:16.780 And those conversations are great.

00:17:18.920 Christophe has some mystical experience he likes to talk about, which is fascinating.

00:17:24.560 One of my favorite parts of the series.

00:17:26.240 Okay, so let's just linger on this claim that consciousness might be fundamental.

00:17:34.600 What are the implications of that?

00:17:36.820 Or what are you visualizing or imagining could be true if consciousness goes all the way down in some sense?

00:17:46.720 Are there different versions of that claim?

00:17:49.400 What's the picture of reality that you're broken?

00:17:51.720 Yeah, no, I think there are.

00:17:53.040 And I think if more people get on board with believing that this is a legitimate path forward, I think we're, you know, we're just at the very beginning of what the implications are.

00:18:03.340 And I think this will go in directions that no one can yet imagine, really, which is kind of how science works.

00:18:08.620 It will be the next paradigm shift, I think, if we become as convinced that consciousness could be fundamental as we are convinced at this point that it emerges, because then that will lead all of the new questions.

00:18:22.720 Before I answer that, though, I'm aware, I've been talking about this so much that I'm aware that I've made my case in many other contexts, but I'm certainly aware of how insane, no, to you I have, but to your audience, this may be the first time they're hearing about this, and I don't want to sound too crazy.

00:18:44.260 And so I just wonder if we should backtrack a little bit or if I should just say that I spend my crazy wife that I spend much of the documentary and have spent much of my work explaining and making an argument for how I have come to the belief that this is a legitimate and important scientific question to ask.

00:19:05.120 And my argument is based in neuroscience.

00:19:07.620 It was working with neuroscientists for 20 years and learning more and more about how the brain works that convinced me that our assumptions about what we think consciousness is, how it's causal, all the rest.

00:19:18.940 Actually, many of them have already been proven to be illusions of sorts.

00:19:23.260 And so we don't need to get into the details there, but if anyone has read my book Conscious, there are two questions that I raise in that book that I think are interesting, intuition-shattering questions once you start to look closely at the details of how we try to answer them, because they feel like questions we know we have the answer to and we feel confident that our answers are right.

00:19:46.920 And the first question is, can you find evidence of consciousness from outside a system?

00:19:52.180 And we feel the answer is obviously yes.

00:19:55.080 You know, when you see it, if I see my friend coming toward me with her arms outstretched, I have a very strong belief that she is conscious and feeling love and excitement.

00:20:05.740 And, you know, I think we're very likely right about that.

00:20:08.640 But the idea that we can always be sure that the behavior of a system, or that we could list behavior in a system, that is conclusive evidence that consciousness is present.

00:20:20.440 I think, one, we're starting to already get confused with the advancements in AI, because as you mentioned, there could soon be a system that looks like my friend running toward me with its arms outstretched, and we won't know whether there's a conscious experience on the other side of that.

00:20:35.280 And so it turns out, the answer to that question, is there conclusive evidence we can find from outside a system?

00:20:42.120 The answer there is, you know, at the very least, maybe, but very likely no.

00:20:46.340 I would say that if your friend has a credit card reader on her face... 0.96

00:20:48.940 I could see the joke brewing.

00:20:51.520 Anywhere on her face, if the credit card can be scanned, she's probably not conscious.

00:20:58.720 And the second question is, is consciousness causal?

00:21:02.780 Is it behind many of our behaviors?

00:21:05.120 And this is where a lot of the neuroscience disproves our strong intuitions that consciousness, that our felt experience of certain brain processing, is the thing that causes us to then act.

00:21:18.340 And there's now a ton of research, I'm sure you've talked to many neuroscientists on the podcast about binding processes, you know, almost every process in the brain actually kind of is a clue that our feeling, our conscious feeling of making a decision of trying to think of another example.

00:21:39.680 Being the actual authors of our thoughts and actions.

00:21:43.080 Right.

00:21:43.340 As if there's kind of this conscious lever.

00:21:45.560 The consciousness initiates the thing that happens.

00:21:48.220 And the truth is that most processes in the brain that we know about, the conscious experience, at least the one that we can report on, is at the tail end of all of that and that all of the processing kind of happens.

00:21:57.800 But doesn't the second point cut the other way?

00:22:00.680 Because if you knew that about the mind, which in fact we do, or it certainly seems to be the case, that much of what's going on is going on in the dark.

00:22:11.520 Then what is the motivation to imagine that consciousness might go all the way down?

00:22:16.140 If it seems like even mental processing is going on in the dark.

00:22:20.400 Well, if consciousness is fundamental, then whatever seems to be in the dark to us is just other conscious experiences arising that don't enter our stream of memory.

00:22:31.840 And so, yes, there's another way to talk about all of that if we're assuming that consciousness is fundamental.

00:22:36.340 But speaking straight from the neuroscience, so there's a lot of self-contradiction here in the neuroscience in terms of assuming that consciousness is causal and assuming it evolved.

00:22:47.740 But then all of the research showing that it isn't consciousness, actually, that is behind all of these things.

00:22:54.700 So, yeah, there are two ways to talk about it here.

00:22:57.460 Another point I was going to make about that, because I think it's interesting that if, again, if we shift our perspective and we start looking at these things and we ask the question, if consciousness is fundamental, what does it mean that a person seems to be unconscious when they're under anesthesia or when we're in deep sleep?

00:23:14.840 Or that there are all these unconscious brain processes that go on that we are completely unaware of or seem to be unaware of?

00:23:21.780 You know, what does that mean if consciousness is fundamental?

00:23:23.860 And so I've been thinking a lot about this.

00:23:25.720 And one of the last chapters where I talked to Sarah Walker, the astrophysicist, really focuses on this.

00:23:32.540 She really is willing to go there with me on this idea of, you know, what does it mean to be a human mind and have a self and how much memory comes into play?

00:23:44.840 And so the truth is, there could be countless conscious experiences happening in my brain and maybe elsewhere in my body that don't enter the stream of memory that I call me, right?

00:23:58.880 And so the split brain research is really interesting to look at here.

00:24:02.720 I think just kind of to break open your creativity to think about other things that might be happening besides if I report on it, if I can feel it and talk about it, that means it's conscious.

00:24:12.880 And if I don't remember it or don't feel it, it means it's not conscious.

00:24:16.980 Even a simple example of a pregnant woman, which I thought a lot about when I was pregnant, you know, even conjoined twins is another example.

00:24:24.360 Split brain research gives the best, the cleanest examples, but just go back to pregnant woman, you know, we don't know when human babies become conscious, but it's not that hard to imagine that it happens at some point in utero in some late stage. 0.99

00:24:38.840 And so, you know, babies could be experiencing sound and light and very minimal experiences of consciousness that you would never expect the mother to be feeling, right?

00:24:49.000 It's a separate system. And so there are many ways we might imagine that there are countless systems within the human brain and the human body that just don't get shared with what I'm calling me.

00:24:59.980 You know, and in the case of a split brain patient, it really seems that you've basically just split these streams of memory that you would call I, that we're always referring to as I.

00:25:10.740 And there's a whole half of the brain that the left hemisphere, which is the speaking hemisphere in a split brain patient who can report about things, will not be aware of or doesn't seem to be aware of and can't answer questions that have been posed to the other hemisphere.

00:25:25.480 And so that, you know, there's already evidence that there can be many different streams of consciousness.

00:25:35.100 And I actually think that's probably the wrong way to think about it.

00:25:37.580 I think it's more useful to think about memory and how different experiences get tied through time in the form of memory.

00:25:44.800 Lately, I've been thinking about the fact that, you know, even my own memories of a week ago, 10 years ago, each moment is a new moment.

00:25:53.340 And so I have this memory and I have this kind of false sense that I'm this concrete entity that moves through time and kind of touches on all these conscious experiences.

00:26:03.140 But the truth is this new conscious experience is being generated a new now.

00:26:08.720 And it's been affected by previous experiences through memory.

00:26:14.660 So I have some relationship to, you know, even though I was a completely different person with a very different brain when I was four years old, there's some continuity there.

00:26:25.460 There's some way that this conscious experience in this moment is being affected by a conscious experience that happened in that my four-year-old self.

00:26:35.040 And there's a way in which I've been thinking more about how conscious experiences affect one another in time and in space.

00:26:44.840 And so there's a way in which also everything in this room with me, especially you, is affecting my conscious experience right now.

00:26:53.960 So you're having conscious experiences and the look on your face or the sounds that you make or in those ways, they shape the conscious experiences that are arising over here.

00:27:03.180 And so conscious experiences kind of affect each other through space in the moment and through time, through memory.

00:27:10.700 Yeah.

00:27:10.880 So in all of this deconstructs a standard notion of a self, which I guess we can leave aside.

00:27:17.680 That's something that I've spent a lot of time talking about.

00:27:19.980 Yeah.

00:27:20.280 And there's a whole chapter devoted to it.

00:27:22.300 Yeah.

00:27:22.520 And you also talk about the split brain research, which is interesting.

00:27:26.760 Yeah.

00:27:27.100 I should also say, just for listeners who want to go deep, I also have chapter notes for every chapter.

00:27:32.880 So on my website, yeah, it's clear when you're listening.

00:27:36.440 But all of this research, people can go deep if they want to.

00:27:40.340 Although, so your reference to a few of these phenomena, split brain, conjoined twins, pregnant mother, invites a discussion.

00:27:51.620 Of what is called in this literature, the combination problem.

00:27:56.180 If consciousness goes deeper than most people think, if it goes down to the level of cells or even further still, if there's an interior experiential dimension to everything, including electrons, it still leaves it mysterious how any of these parts combine to produce specific, seemingly independent islands of consciousness.

00:28:23.960 So that, you know, there's something that it's like to be some considerable portion of your cerebral cortex functioning properly.

00:28:30.440 But it doesn't seem like there's something that it's like to be your liver.

00:28:34.860 But maybe every cell in your liver has some conscious or proto-conscious quality to it.

00:28:42.260 So why doesn't the liver have an independent point of view on the universe, et cetera?

00:28:46.880 So how physical structures that are, wherein the lights are on in some sense, combine to create a more hierarchical, more complex point of view that is the result of those structures combining?

00:29:05.280 Yeah.

00:29:05.980 First, I think it's more useful to think of conscious experiences arising and passing away in the universe.

00:29:13.220 And some of those conscious experiences contain much more content than others.

00:29:18.760 I will also say that, you know, I still consider myself to be a physicalist.

00:29:22.820 And I actually haven't even landed on, you know, believing that consciousness is fundamental.

00:29:27.600 All I believe is that it's a legitimate question.

00:29:29.880 And I'm interested in exploring the possibility that that's the case.

00:29:34.220 But if consciousness is fundamental, I think the physics and math that we have discovered and developed so far explains the structure of consciousness.

00:29:44.120 And I'm very curious to know more about what that means.

00:29:49.040 But clearly there are more complicated structures than others.

00:29:53.680 You've mentioned the liver.

00:29:54.820 I think, you know, the human brain and the types of processing that goes on between neurons, the firing between neurons.

00:30:00.140 I think my liver is probably about as conscious as our cats at this point.

00:30:03.260 I think, yeah, less.

00:30:04.900 So I think just because we see a liver as a single system, you know, and I actually, the truth is, as we were talking about, I don't think the brain is even a single system.

00:30:13.620 I think if consciousness is fundamental, there are, you know, maybe hundreds, if not thousands of conscious experiences coming in and out of existence right now that I, you know, my stream of memory doesn't have access to.

00:30:24.200 And so, you know, I'm not calling that me, but they're coming into being in the universe.

00:30:29.380 So if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect a liver to, you know, in that point in space and time where the liver exists, I would expect there to be an incredibly minimal form of experience and nothing that implies memory.

00:30:46.100 You know, as much as, as far as we understand memory, there's almost no system that has any sort of hint at memory.

00:30:53.640 I mean, you know, a Venus flytrap shows us a system of memory.

00:30:58.000 And so I would expect a Venus flytrap, even though I don't think that a Venus flytrap feels like a self, if it feels like anything.

00:31:04.820 But wherever there's more memory, there is more chance of an experience of being a self.

00:31:10.660 There's this continuity through time.

00:31:12.220 And so a liver doesn't show any signs of having that.

00:31:16.020 And so whatever the types of experiences are that get generated by that type of matter, I would expect them to be very, very minimal and very fleeting.

00:31:24.540 And so there's no sense of being a liver because there's actually...

00:31:28.320 It's not thinking, God, this guy really likes margaritas.

00:31:30.940 No more margaritas.

00:31:32.240 There's a great, fascinating and sad documentary that is in the notes, I forget which chapter, but of a man, I believe it was a PBS documentary.

00:31:46.640 It was a man who had the shortest memory based on brain damage, Clive something.

00:31:51.920 I forget which episode that was, but it's crazy.

00:31:53.920 And it's so fascinating to hear him talk about his experience.

00:31:57.980 So I think his short-term memory is like three seconds long or something.

00:32:01.800 So his experience is of just constantly kind of waking up over and over.

00:32:06.760 Just being annihilated, yeah.

00:32:07.880 But he seems to have some, I mean, he seems to have some awareness of this, but he will talk about how much he has been, how long he's been unconscious for.

00:32:17.940 And he sees the way he experiences it is as going in and out of consciousness because he experiences himself waking up, even though in the last second he was talking.

00:32:28.480 For him, that goes black. 0.71

00:32:30.100 So I think, I think it takes a lot of intuition shattering for us to get creative enough to think about what conscious experience means without memory, possibly even without time, but certainly to be very unlike a human being, which I actually think is why psychedelics can be so helpful for these types of insights because it makes you, I see another joke brewing.

00:32:53.480 I was just going to ask, are you on psychedelics now?

00:32:57.300 No, I would not be speaking this well.

00:33:00.100 Sorry, you had a point you wanted to come back to.

00:33:04.040 It was just a question about the combination problem, but then when you talked about the brain potentially having many islands of conscious experience, which you, the reporting witness who I'm talking to, don't have access to.

00:33:20.400 Right.

00:33:20.700 That sounds really far-fetched on some level until you realize what if there simply is a bottleneck where there's only one system of processing in the brain that is what we mean is in fact what constitutes memory and reportability.

00:33:40.800 Mm-hmm.

00:33:41.240 Right.

00:33:41.420 So it's like, in order for there to be many different verbose islands of consciousness, there would need to be memory and reportability in all these other islands.

00:33:50.660 That's right.

00:33:51.060 So you'd be talking to multiple, you know, not selves, but points of view.

00:33:56.160 Yes.

00:33:56.540 But if there were only one in an intact brain, which seems to be the case, I mean, this is what's so unique about the split-brain case, is that when you divide the corpus callosum and all the other commissures, you have partitioned the brain in such a way that if there is language ability on both sides, which in some cases there is, you can talk to two, effectively two different people.

00:34:19.080 Yeah.

00:34:20.100 And, you know, or at least communicate with them.

00:34:23.000 Different opinions and different answers to the same question.

00:34:25.480 I mean, so there are these famous cases that where, you know, the left hemisphere is talking with the mouth and the right hemisphere is spelling something out, an alternate answer out with letter cards.

00:34:37.700 Now, but it just so happens that in most people, language is heavily segregated in one hemisphere, usually the left.

00:34:43.360 And so when each of us introspects and tries to take the measure of what could possibly be the totality of consciousness in our own case, all we have is some version of this memory buffer that's allowing us to integrate our perception and sensation and thought and emotion over a, you know, a narrow time window.

00:35:08.440 Right.

00:35:08.700 And without that, I mean, just imagine, take the case you just referred to, and just imagine not remembering anything that proceeded two seconds ago, right?

00:35:20.420 Like that just had, what a punctate, you know, slice of conscious reality that would be.

00:35:25.660 All that other stuff that happened would be in the dark, right?

00:35:28.140 Like it is memory that makes this sense of psychological continuity available to us.

00:35:33.260 Yeah.

00:35:33.540 And then reportability and communication.

00:35:35.920 Right.

00:35:36.340 Yeah.

00:35:36.500 Right.

00:35:36.760 So if we had multiple versions of that, well, then we would have a sense that, okay, there's a Congress of selves in here that, you know, you can pass the mic around and they can talk.

00:35:47.920 The fact that there's a single common pathway of reportability and short-term memory puts us in a situation where, by definition, it's going to seem like there's only one of it, right?

00:35:59.340 Whatever else is going on.

00:36:00.480 Exactly.

00:36:01.760 Yeah.

00:36:02.660 All right.

00:36:02.920 We figured it out.

00:36:03.580 So where's the Nobel Prize?

00:36:04.920 And you see this, I mean, it's really intuition shaking to see the interviews with split brain patients.

00:36:12.520 I have one that I play in one of the chapters.

00:36:15.580 But to see a question asked of a split brain patient's right hemisphere, which is the non-speaking hemisphere, which apart from these ways that the neuroscientists found to interrogate, you would have no idea these opinions and feelings were there at all.

00:36:33.220 You know, they ask the participant who answers with his left hemisphere, what did you just see on the screen?

00:36:39.320 And they flashed it to the right hemisphere.

00:36:41.140 So he thinks he didn't see, he'll say, I didn't see anything.

00:36:44.080 So his conscious experience is nothing was seen.

00:36:47.200 They realized that they can have the right hemisphere answer either by writing with their right hand or by pointing to cards, as you said.

00:36:55.840 And they point to the right object.

00:36:57.480 They saw it.

00:36:58.080 And the fact, that's already something we know happens.

00:37:04.840 And so, yeah, the question is, how often is that happening in our own minds?

00:37:09.920 And then throughout the universe, I got very interested in plant behavior at some point.

00:37:14.880 I still do not have an intuition that plants are conscious, but some of the behaviors that they exhibit are quite complex and actually new things that have just been discovered as early as 2014 about plants' ability to, vision is not the right word because they don't have eyes, but their ability to perform all kinds of tasks based on detecting light in a way that seems very much like vision.

00:37:40.900 And why we would assume that our experience of vision includes a felt experience, again, of seeing yellow and other processing in nature that in many ways is more complex.

00:37:53.180 They have many more photoreceptors than we do.

00:37:56.840 Why do we assume that that doesn't require consciousness?

00:38:01.040 And, you know, I don't have the answer, but I think it's very interesting that we don't have an answer for why we need it and plants don't.

00:38:08.120 And we don't have an answer as to whether conscious experience even arises out of complexity at all.

00:38:16.080 Okay, so how does the possible fundamental nature of consciousness affect physics?

00:38:23.300 Yeah, I mean, I think if enough scientists are willing to move forward with the assumption, not knowing either way, but rather than the assumption that consciousness emerges at any level or at a complex level, that it's actually part of the fundamental story or is in fact the most fundamental thing.

00:38:42.980 I'm aware that human beings are generally very bad at predicting where new science will take us and what the future will look like.

00:38:53.800 But I did, for this series, spend a lot of time doing my best to imagine what scientists might be exploring and the types of things we might be able to discover.

00:39:03.120 And there are kind of three general areas.

00:39:05.440 And so the first is actually connected to work that's already being done, which is called sensory substitution and sensory addition.

00:39:12.940 I talked to David Eagleman about this work.

00:39:14.660 And so this started as something called sensory substitution, which were devices to help blind and deaf people.

00:39:21.600 They're devices that they wear that helps them process light waves, you know, in the case of a blind person.

00:39:26.240 And very interesting and very successful work, actually, these tools.

00:39:30.780 The brain learns to use these other signals, electro-tactile signals usually, that come in through a camera.

00:39:36.780 And the people who are blind are then able to do things like shoot hoops and walk through mazes and incredible things once their brains adapt to this new way of getting visual information.

00:39:50.480 And so the science then naturally led to something called sensory addition, where we realized there are all these things that we don't perceive in the world, one of them being the Earth's magnetic field.

00:39:59.560 And I talked to a participant in a study where they were tried to give participants an experience of feeling magnetic north.

00:40:08.600 And so I explained the whole study in the series, but essentially these participants were given a new sense.

00:40:16.000 And David Eagleman talks about all of the possible potential for this type of thing.

00:40:20.680 And so one way, I imagine, is that we already, a lot of our science is done because we perceive.

00:40:29.080 We perceive gravity, we perceive color, we perceive all these things, and we actually have good intuitions for a lot of them.

00:40:36.120 And so we have to do science to enhance our understanding of these things that we perceive and feel.

00:40:42.020 But it really always begins with a perception of them.

00:40:44.820 We can now understand the microscopic world, but it helps to be able to use a microscope to see the microscopic world.

00:40:52.700 And we gain intuitions when we can actually experience the things.

00:40:56.620 So I think there's incredible potential.

00:40:58.900 And so I call this whole realm experiential science.

00:41:02.000 I think there's potential for learning a lot more about the way the world works by directly experiencing other systems and forces.

00:41:10.740 This actually got me thinking after I spoke with Sarah Walker.

00:41:15.240 She writes in her book about Einstein's intuition that space-time is space-time.

00:41:21.680 That they're not two separate things and that actually the fabric of reality is space-time and gravity is not what we thought it was.

00:41:28.000 It's not a force, but it's this warping of the fabric of reality.

00:41:31.800 It's a warping of space-time and that explains the things that we see gravity affecting.

00:41:36.320 And it took him a good decade and longer to really express this initial intuition he had through mathematics, through language.

00:41:47.180 And so there's something very interesting I learned along the way that communication is so central to this conversation about consciousness.

00:41:55.920 Because we can't really talk about anything that we don't share an experience of.

00:42:01.700 So in the same way that you can't explain to a blind person what it's like to see, you can give analogies. 0.97

00:42:07.760 There's a lot of information you can give, especially if you share other senses.

00:42:11.280 But there's no way you're ever going to give them the experience of seeing red.

00:42:15.340 There's nothing you can say about it.

00:42:16.700 And so communication relies on a shared felt experience.

00:42:20.220 And actually, the man I spoke with, Sasha Fink, who did the study for Magnetic North, he talked about this kinship he felt with the other participants because they were the only people in the world who had experience, who had this feeling of Magnetic North and could talk about what it felt like and share their experiences with each other.

00:42:38.140 So in terms of scientific advancements, I think about, you know, what if Einstein had been able to share the intuition directly?

00:42:46.800 Because language and mathematics, while extremely useful, can take a very long time, especially if it's something new that no one else has thought of before.

00:42:55.080 Well, the point you're making now actually subsumes this whole conversation on some level because the fact that we're constrained to talk about, think about, try to resolve the contradiction between reality being this two-faced object, the mental and the physical, that on some level could be a constraint that's artificially imposed based on our perceptual systems, the way our neurology just sections reality or seems to.

00:43:23.180 Yes.

00:43:23.760 And the linguistic concepts we have available to talk about it.

00:43:27.920 Yes.

00:43:28.140 We're constrained to talk about the mental and physical.

00:43:31.060 Yes.

00:43:31.480 And then to try to reconcile them.

00:43:32.900 Unless we find a way to share experience through memory.

00:43:36.760 So I think, you know, as I was talking before about, you know, my memories of when I was younger, I have this sense that I have access to another point in time and space, which is true, but it's more that those points in time and space are informing this moment in time and space.

00:43:53.180 And so the idea is that the same way that I have that information available and that that information is available in this moment.

00:44:01.200 If Einstein's intuition, that felt experience, whatever created that, if that or at least enough of that could be in my stream of memory so that it's an intuition I can refer back to.

00:44:12.280 Right.

00:44:13.280 Suddenly, I mean, yes, this has all kinds of implications for me.

00:44:17.260 I think about the scientific implications, but it naturally dissolves the sense of self.

00:44:22.880 I think it gives us a better felt experience of how the universe is actually structured.

00:44:27.780 The separateness we feel in the experience of being a self, I think, would start to dissolve if not only would the experiences I had when I was 10 affect the experiences I have now, but the experiences you had yesterday could affect the experiences I have now.

00:44:43.840 And so I don't know what the future technology looks like.

00:44:46.540 And it gets scary if you try to imagine it.

00:44:48.520 They do, because I always complain about them.

00:44:50.260 But there's no reason, there's no real reason why I could have an experience now of a memory of being myself yesterday making breakfast and not have a memory of being you yesterday making breakfast.

00:45:07.100 And so that's kind of the second area that I think is interesting and likely to be explored.

00:45:12.880 And then the other thing is a little harder to explain, or maybe a little harder to explain the usefulness of, but I was thinking about this idea of being able to experience other systems.

00:45:25.640 Is there some way in which we might be able to feel, I'm trying to think of a good example of a plant or a tree, feel an oak tree?

00:45:34.180 And what does that even mean?

00:45:35.660 And of course, even if we found some way to connect my neurology to an oak tree, and I had some very interesting experience, there'd be no reason to believe that that's what the oak tree feels, right?

00:45:47.480 But what I realized in these crazy thought experiments is that we use our conscious experiences as intuition already for so much science and for our guesses about what other systems are conscious.

00:46:04.600 And so I have all of the evidence from you that you are conscious, but that's so much of that is based on the shared experiences we're able to communicate to each other.

00:46:15.820 You know, my cat to a lesser degree, but it's the way in which I notice the cat behaving in ways that I expect it feels something similar to the things I feel when I behave in similar ways.

00:46:28.500 You know, there's pain, there's pleasure, there's hunger, there are all these things that I can relate to.

00:46:33.620 So I imagine there's some version of that happening.

00:46:36.040 If we were able to start to experience other systems in the way that David Eagleman talks about, he gives this crazy but fascinating example of astronauts being connected to the workings of the International Space Station so that they wouldn't have to be reading numbers all the time, but they could actually intuitively feel, you know, the health of the space station or the things that need to be attended to.

00:46:56.840 So if there were some version of that and we were able to connect to other systems, would we gain intuitions that would maybe not be full evidence, but maybe as much evidence as I have that my cat is conscious based on the things that are able to get communicated through that?

00:47:13.260 Is there some sense in which we might be able to experience other systems that would give us new intuitions for, one, how they work, which is just interesting scientifically, but then, two, whether they're conscious?

00:47:24.360 Well, it's fascinating terrain.

00:47:28.400 I think we should just introduce the episode here because there's no, there's nothing we're going to say here that's a surrogate for just actually listening to what you've produced here.

00:47:39.920 Yeah, so this is chapter eight called Space and Time, and I spoke to two physicists, Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli, and a science writer, George Musser, to try to get as clear of a sense as I could about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics and the new theories of quantum gravity and how they might relate to this possibility that consciousness is fundamental and how these physicists would react.

00:48:09.920 So that suggestion, I also, at that point in my journey and in the series, became very interested in whether time is a fundamental property of the universe or not, physicists are generally in agreement that space is emergent and not fundamental, and I talk a lot about that and how actually I think that makes sense at the level of the brain as well and what we're perceiving as space not being out there in the way that green is not out there, but more of a mapping of structure of the universe that we're

00:48:39.920 have some access to. And so Lee Smolin believes that time is fundamental and his new theory of quantum gravity places time at a fundamental level, and Carlo Rovelli does not believe time is fundamental, and his theory talks a lot about how time, he wouldn't say time is an illusion, it's something that emerges, but that essentially it's not something that is part of the fabric of the universe.

00:49:05.180 Lights on chapter 8. Space and time.

00:49:15.840 When I first began to wonder if my and others' experiences in meditation were providing any hints of deeper truths about the nature of reality, the fact that I was even contemplating this question came as a complete surprise to me.

00:49:33.700 I had always considered any type of personal, subjective experience to be more or less useless as a tool for probing scientific truths. Maybe not for psychology and neuroscience, but certainly for fundamental physics.

00:49:47.800 Through my work with neuroscientists over the years, I had learned just how indirectly we're in contact with the outside world. In fact, many of the things that seem like the most direct channels to reality, as we've seen, turn out to be what Anil Seth rightly refers to as controlled hallucinations.

00:50:07.660 But there's a hitch. Strangely, when you place careful attention on your moment-to-moment experience in a very disciplined way, some of our perceptions, including those of space, time, and self, actually begin to shift or drop out altogether.

00:50:25.100 And surprisingly, our window onto reality can be transformed into a more accurate one, at least in some cases.

00:50:32.300 So as I followed the advancements in quantum physics, reading about newer theories that suggest space and time are emergent rather than fundamental, I was reminded of some of my and others' meditative experiences of a timeless, spaceless experience of consciousness.

00:50:50.820 And much like the experience of self, the suggestion that space-time is not fundamental, though mind-blowing on one level, actually made some intuitive sense to me.

00:51:02.300 And this was the beginning of a sort of merging of two areas of interest of mine that I had never dreamed would intersect.

00:51:10.800 I had already witnessed the convergence of my interest in meditation with neuroscience earlier in my career,

00:51:17.020 even developing into some fascinating scientific studies in which they scanned experienced meditators' brains in fMRI machines.

00:51:24.900 But experiences in meditation more naturally lend themselves to neuroscientific interest as a phenomenon for obvious reasons.

00:51:33.160 And I was still fairly skeptical that there was any useful connection to be made between meditative insights and fundamental physics.

00:51:41.140 Hmm.

00:51:42.460 Okay, so where to start?

00:51:45.200 I just want to say that I've been immersed in this conversation with you for quite a while now,

00:51:50.420 and I'm never really sure how jarring some of these arguments are for newcomers.

00:51:56.200 But this is Chapter 8, so hopefully by now the listener hearing a casual suggestion that space and time might not be fundamental is not that crazy anymore.

00:52:05.860 Yeah, I know.

00:52:06.280 Sometimes I have to remind myself of what it's like to come across these topics for the first time.

00:52:11.560 Yeah.

00:52:11.800 And it's also surely clear by now that language really does fail us here.

00:52:18.400 Language, it's naturally bound up in the assumptions of time and space.

00:52:23.540 In fact, the most commonly used noun in the English language is time.

00:52:27.460 Year and day also rank in the top five, I'm pretty sure.

00:52:31.040 But I think it would be helpful before we jump into the conversation to just have you quickly lay out a distinction in your own words.

00:52:38.400 What's the difference between something being fundamental versus something being real?

00:52:44.000 Or do you not see a difference there?

00:52:46.180 Yeah, this is an important distinction.

00:52:48.260 And these are terms that people use in different ways, so there's a linguistic element as well.

00:52:53.860 But when I say fundamental, I'm trying to get at the deepest understanding of reality,

00:52:59.140 the place where explanation essentially stops.

00:53:02.280 So there are plenty of things that are real that aren't fundamental.

00:53:05.760 We can have the experience of seeing the sunrise, for example.

00:53:10.200 And that's not only a real experience, but it's connected to something real that's happening outside my brain as well.

00:53:16.340 And just with that sight of the sun rising, with that limited window onto reality,

00:53:21.920 we're definitely getting some information about the underlying reality.

00:53:26.220 But there's a deeper explanation there, a more complete picture of our solar system and the Earth's rotation, etc.

00:53:33.800 So it's possible to grasp something more fundamental beyond our immediate perception.

00:53:39.880 And then we can go a step beyond that through an understanding of the force of gravity and so on.

00:53:45.620 And when we're including the human brain, it gets even more layered than that.

00:53:50.420 For example, I can dream about the sun rising or hallucinate that I'm seeing it.

00:53:54.960 Then, in order to explain the experience, we need to get into not just the mechanics of the solar system,

00:54:01.260 but the understanding of what's going on at the level of the brain to produce an experience in the absence of the usual circumstance.

00:54:09.020 So when we're talking about the brain and the experiences it generates,

00:54:13.540 there are the external inputs and the activity of the brain itself.

00:54:17.580 And the sciences have really helped us shed light on where the inputs end and the brain processing begins.

00:54:25.260 And, of course, science has also shed a ton of light on our understanding of what those inputs are,

00:54:30.280 of what the outside world consists of.

00:54:32.740 We still have a long way to go in terms of a complete understanding of any of these things,

00:54:37.500 but generally, the more we understand, the more fundamental a layer or explanation we've exposed.

00:54:45.540 In the case of space and time, we're talking about needing to understand

00:54:49.980 both the inputs and the universe outside the brain, as well as the brain processing itself.

00:54:58.460 So let's start with space, because physicists are basically in agreement about space being emergent and not fundamental.

00:55:05.000 Time is in a different category because we don't yet have scientific consensus one way or the other.

00:55:12.140 So when talking about space, is it possible that,

00:55:16.260 just like the color green doesn't exist out there in the universe,

00:55:20.460 but it's how our brains represent a light wavelength in our experience,

00:55:26.080 is it possible there isn't space,

00:55:28.860 at least in the form that we perceive it to be, out there either?

00:55:32.320 That the three-dimensional space we experience is yet another way our brains create a map of something

00:55:39.360 out there we're perceiving.

00:55:41.700 And that's on the side of the experience of space, how it's generated by the brain.

00:55:47.320 And the question for physics is,

00:55:49.460 if space isn't a fundamental aspect of the universe,

00:55:53.320 what is it that's giving rise to this domain we call space in the first place?

00:55:58.100 And there, the holographic principle is one promising way to explain it.

00:56:03.520 We won't get into those details now,

00:56:05.420 but if space can be explained through physics as emerging out of some other process,

00:56:11.200 space is not fundamental.

00:56:12.860 It's not part of the fabric of reality as we had always assumed.

00:56:17.580 So to go back to your question about my use of the word fundamental,

00:56:21.020 at the very least, we know we've been able to probe deeper and deeper into the nature of reality

00:56:27.000 through scientific investigation.

00:56:29.400 And we arrive at a fuller, more complete picture every time we reach a more fundamental level.

00:56:35.820 And wherever that explanation stops is where we'll find the true fabric of reality,

00:56:40.860 the true fundamentals.

00:56:42.660 Now, whether or not that's possible even in theory, we don't know,

00:56:45.940 but that's the idea,

00:56:47.380 that at least we can keep moving in that direction.

00:56:50.100 And so that's a very long answer to how I and physicists in this domain are using the word

00:56:56.700 fundamental, something that's not dependent on the presence or activity of anything else,

00:57:02.520 where explanation stops.

00:57:05.000 Okay, got it.

00:57:06.480 And that was just about space.

00:57:08.500 Just wait until we start asking those questions about time.

00:57:12.500 Right.

00:57:13.420 And that's where I get completely stuck and start spinning in circles,

00:57:17.100 trying to understand what it could possibly mean for time to be emergent out of something

00:57:23.580 more fundamental.

00:57:25.300 The statement itself sounds paradoxical because for something even to emerge,

00:57:30.560 you need time, or at least it seems that way.

00:57:33.680 I don't know.

00:57:35.560 But luckily, I knew the perfect person to help me think through these questions about space and time.

00:57:41.680 George Musser.

00:57:42.580 Hi.

00:57:45.580 Hi.

00:57:47.440 Tell me about your project, though.

00:57:48.920 It's so exciting.

00:57:49.760 I mean, it's...

00:57:50.400 It's been really wonderful, and I've learned a lot, and I still have so many questions.

00:57:54.740 And I'm also just excited to find out how many physicists are interested in consciousness

00:58:00.240 and interested in having this conversation.

00:58:02.000 Each of them, however, is kind of wedded to their own theory and very invested in the work

00:58:09.480 they're doing.

00:58:10.480 And there's still kind of a limit on how much we can brainstorm together or just play around

00:58:16.960 with ideas.

00:58:18.440 And so while I was reading your book, I just thought, oh, George has come along at the

00:58:21.560 perfect time because he understands so much more than I do.

00:58:24.540 You can help me understand all of this.

00:58:26.980 But also, there's an openness because you're not attached to any theory that you're working

00:58:32.400 on.

00:58:33.700 That sounds great.

00:58:34.300 I mean, I also, when I read your book, I felt a certain kinship with the craft there

00:58:39.160 as well.

00:58:39.940 I think both of us are very synthetic writers that we take vast quantities of information

00:58:45.420 into knowledge and try to distill what is the most essential from it.

00:58:49.340 George Musser is a science journalist and the author of two of my favorite books for

00:58:58.240 a general audience.

00:58:59.960 One is titled Spooky Action at a Distance about quantum mechanics.

00:59:04.780 And the second is called Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, which addresses the very

00:59:09.900 question I'm most interested in.

00:59:11.980 How does consciousness relate to fundamental physics?

00:59:14.720 When I spoke to him, I started our conversation by reading a passage from his book, Spooky

00:59:21.100 Action at a Distance.

00:59:22.980 So I wanted to start with space and non-locality.

00:59:27.340 I am going to read an excerpt from your book on page 135.

00:59:32.780 You write,

00:59:33.720 The velocity and position of a particle are not independent quantities.

00:59:38.140 If you know the spread of possible velocities, you can calculate the spread of possible positions

00:59:43.200 using the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and vice versa.

00:59:47.520 Relativity theory spoils this conversion by requiring that the uncertainty principle be

00:59:52.280 observer independent.

00:59:53.940 Now when you translate velocity to position, you find that the different positions are no

00:59:58.100 longer mutually exclusive.

01:00:00.140 You might find the same particle in two different places at once, or the particle in one place

01:00:05.080 and its energy somewhere else.

01:00:06.540 The combination of quantum mechanics with relativity violates locality in what was for Einstein its

01:00:13.880 most basic sense, the stipulation that all things have a location.

01:00:19.200 Okay.

01:00:20.380 It seems that there's now a consensus among physicists that space is not part of the fundamental

01:00:26.980 story, that space emerges, and perhaps space and time.

01:00:31.820 But it seems like there's really a consensus at this point that space must emerge out of

01:00:37.500 something more fundamental.

01:00:39.660 So I should first just say that my intuition has, this is in line with my intuition.

01:00:46.180 It has always seemed to me that space is not fundamental, and that kind of the fundamental

01:00:51.560 nature of things.

01:00:53.020 So one thing I just want to make clear at the outset is that, because I have a lot of questions

01:00:58.400 about string theory and higher dimensions of space, more dimensions beyond the three that

01:01:04.660 we experience, and to just be clear that when we're speaking about those other dimensions

01:01:09.880 of space, possible dimensions of space, that I am always assuming those are reflecting or

01:01:16.300 representing something at a deeper level that is not space.

01:01:21.040 Does that make sense?

01:01:21.840 Right, right.

01:01:22.360 Yes, absolutely.

01:01:23.340 Okay.

01:01:23.480 Yeah, I mean, it seems that whatever space is representing at a more fundamental level,

01:01:29.020 it can still be a good map for us of the underlying reality, especially because we can't seem to think

01:01:35.000 in any other terms.

01:01:36.040 It's almost everything we experience, we kind of put into these three spatial categories.

01:01:42.260 Yes, yes.

01:01:43.340 Science always progresses.

01:01:44.940 Physics is no different in a stair-step kind of way.

01:01:47.500 So we go from, yes, we see three dimensions of space.

01:01:52.660 In string theory, there seem to be additional spatial dimensions that are associated, we can't

01:01:58.360 see them directly, but they're associated with the properties of different particles.

01:02:02.380 And then, you know, the next climbing up the stairs or descending the stairs, whichever you

01:02:07.080 want to think of it, would be, oh, let's dissolve the space altogether.

01:02:10.740 And think about space as coming from these more fundamental ingredients physicists call degrees

01:02:16.440 of freedom to kind of avoid prejudicing whether they're particles or something else.

01:02:21.280 Degrees of freedom is the kind of abstract word for that.

01:02:24.000 Actually, that's one question I do have is whether most physicists working on string theory

01:02:29.900 at this point believe that these other dimensions of space are still pointing to something more

01:02:36.420 fundamental, that space is not the ultimate story.

01:02:39.180 Or do they really have some picture of a universe that has nine or ten or more dimensions of

01:02:46.800 space and that that space is kind of the fundamental reality rather than it being a sign or signal

01:02:55.440 of a deeper structure?

01:02:57.900 Yeah, well, I think physicists and string theorists in this case in general think on different kind

01:03:05.280 of layers of description, levels of description.

01:03:09.580 So on some for some problems, they'll think in terms of 3D space plus time.

01:03:15.060 I'm going to put time on the side for now.

01:03:17.780 In some cases, they may think of nine dimensions of space, six on top of the ones that we know.

01:03:24.480 In some cases, even they go to 10.

01:03:27.080 And in some cases, they go back down to zero again.

01:03:29.380 It just depends on kind of what they're trying to do at that particular moment, what they're

01:03:33.440 trying to accomplish at that level of description.

01:03:36.560 And that's what's fun about physics is that you can kind of plumb these different depths.

01:03:40.820 Yeah.

01:03:41.380 But do you think most of them are kind of on board with assuming that however many dimensions

01:03:48.120 space has, ultimately space is not really the story, is not really the underlying reality?

01:03:57.440 Yeah.

01:03:58.000 I mean, I've never done a proper opinion poll, but that is certainly my reading.

01:04:02.460 And the individuals will come to that from different arguments and directions.

01:04:08.340 But one thing that's interesting about string theory is to the extent to which it's actually

01:04:12.280 not about strings anymore.

01:04:13.860 String theory is kind of a historical term that describes a general direction in fundamental

01:04:19.920 physics.

01:04:21.060 But that doesn't mean that day in, day out, they're actually thinking of literally, oh,

01:04:25.320 there's little strings.

01:04:26.180 So right now, the predominant direction is indeed to think of spatial dimensions as being

01:04:33.340 emergent, that you can have, again, these degrees of freedom, these fundamental ingredients

01:04:38.320 that organize and behave in certain ways, out of which space pops like a figure in a pop-up

01:04:47.120 book.

01:04:47.340 And that goes under the rubric of what's known as dualities or the holographic principle.

01:04:55.500 And these dualities relate space times or universes of different spatial temporal dimensionality.

01:05:04.060 So you might have a four dimensional universe that is equivalent to a five dimensional one

01:05:09.480 or a three dimensional one.

01:05:10.580 And as soon as you start kind of doing this cross over, you're saying that four dimensions

01:05:16.220 is really no different from five.

01:05:17.980 That's tantamount to saying that at least that fifth dimension isn't fundamental.

01:05:25.960 So they at least get one just straight off the math.

01:05:30.480 One dimension is this pop-up dimension.

01:05:34.420 Interesting.

01:05:35.320 That isn't real, isn't, I mean, it's there in a sense, but it reflects the steeper physics.

01:05:39.900 And then they'll usually then go to say, well, one can pop up.

01:05:44.020 I guess they all do.

01:05:45.420 So that's kind of usually how thinking might go.

01:05:48.420 Interesting.

01:05:49.180 Okay.

01:05:49.980 So one thing that just always resonated with me and has been part of my thinking since I

01:05:57.200 was probably nine or 10 years old is this, the story of Flatland and this analogy.

01:06:02.360 And my father had explained this to me and I've always, I mean, I've just never stopped

01:06:08.220 thinking about it.

01:06:08.960 This idea, imagining what it would be like to be in a two dimensional plane, you know,

01:06:16.880 in this three dimensional world and how much information you don't have access to and how

01:06:21.620 mysterious certain things would seem.

01:06:24.240 Whereas if you could jump out into three dimensions, they're not mysterious at all.

01:06:27.840 You can see the whole picture.

01:06:29.340 And so when I started learning about string theory, however many, 20 or so years ago, I

01:06:36.120 really gravitated towards it because the first time I heard an explanation of quantum mechanics

01:06:43.220 that fit with the way I had been thinking about it all those years, that having more dimensions

01:06:50.840 of space could potentially really help explain these things that seem so mysterious to us.

01:06:56.920 So the idea that the types of things we witness like non-locality and entanglement could, if

01:07:05.780 we were perceiving four dimensions or five dimensions, the structure of that would make perfect sense.

01:07:13.460 But we're missing so much of the information that, you know, we're in our, we're in our little

01:07:19.300 3D plane or 3D sphere without access to, to the fuller picture, to the larger reality.

01:07:28.620 And I just wonder, does that, does that analogy hold at all?

01:07:32.720 I mean, does, does anyone actually think in those terms?

01:07:36.580 You mean in the terms of by elevating to a higher dimensionality, you see the world as it

01:07:42.000 truly is?

01:07:42.820 Yes.

01:07:43.240 Well, and that it could potentially explain the types of things we see in three dimensions,

01:07:50.620 where if, if they're explained in four or five dimensions, there is much more logic to

01:07:56.820 them.

01:07:57.400 Yeah.

01:07:57.640 So yes.

01:07:58.780 Well, the answer is basically yes.

01:08:00.560 And it's a great question.

01:08:01.740 In fact, and this is why dimensions even come up in these foundational discussions of physics,

01:08:08.520 why they play such a role in string theory and certain other theories as well.

01:08:12.780 People see, and remember what physicists are trying to do here is they're trying to unify.

01:08:17.740 So they see there are nuclear forces, there are electromagnetic forces, and already electromagnetic

01:08:24.660 is a unification of electrical and magnetic.

01:08:27.860 They see gravitational forces, all these forces that seem quite different.

01:08:32.960 And they ask, are they unified or are they really the same, but seen from different sides

01:08:40.160 in a way?

01:08:41.580 And the dimensionality of space helps with that.

01:08:44.740 And there's a whole program going back to Kluza Kline and to mathematicians in the early

01:08:51.240 20th century that basically takes gravity and imagines just the ordinary force of gravity

01:08:57.380 operating, not just in three dimensions, but in four and five and so forth.

01:09:02.320 And they find that when you start piling on these dimensions, what is gravitational in, say,

01:09:09.020 the fifth dimension looks to us, unable to see that fifth dimension directly as electromagnetic

01:09:15.300 force.

01:09:17.280 So they take two forces in that case and unify them into one by saying that there's this hidden,

01:09:26.560 it hidden to us.

01:09:27.760 It's not hidden to the universe, of course.

01:09:29.080 We're trapped on this three-dimensional space, so we can't even put our arm or can't look

01:09:35.400 out of it.

01:09:35.900 But if we could, in a flatland kind of way, like you could see that, aha, this electrical

01:09:41.560 force, which seems so different from gravity, is actually is gravity.

01:09:44.700 Yeah.

01:09:45.700 Yeah.

01:09:46.240 You know, this reminds me of another train of thought I often get on, which is, you know,

01:09:51.980 wondering what the difference is between actually physically being confined to a three-dimensional

01:10:00.020 space and whether it has more to do with the human mind and the human brain and what we're

01:10:09.260 perceiving so that it's only possible for us to perceive in three dimensions.

01:10:16.000 But there are, you know, right there in front of us, if only we could perceive them, we would

01:10:20.740 have access.

01:10:22.020 It seems to me that whatever the number of dimensions are that exist in the universe, that those are

01:10:29.220 always there.

01:10:30.800 And we exist within that, you know, it's all part of the same thing.

01:10:35.760 It's just, you know, we're limited in terms of what we have access to through our perceptions.

01:10:42.520 But there's obviously the other way to look at it, and I assume it's the way most physicists

01:10:47.960 look at it, is that there are actually different structures that can physically be described as

01:10:55.040 three-dimensional, and they're not in a four-dimensional or five- or six-dimensional space.

01:11:01.780 Is that right?

01:11:03.500 Yeah.

01:11:03.780 So the way the physicist who works on this would think of it is, they basically would do what

01:11:10.220 you've just done.

01:11:10.800 They would pose the question, if space were multidimensional beyond our three dimensions,

01:11:18.200 as, and if there were, it could explain aspects of physics that reflects us today.

01:11:22.960 But then, why don't we see those other dimensions?

01:11:28.140 It's something about us, it's something about the universe, about both, and there's a range

01:11:33.700 of thinking on that, and there does seem to be a connection to us in the sense that it might

01:11:43.960 in fact be impossible for us not to be, for us to be higher dimensional.

01:11:47.680 There are certain aspects of three-dimensional space, mathematically, that are special.

01:11:53.600 It isn't just an arbitrary number three.

01:11:56.720 We can do more than two.

01:11:58.640 If, for instance, in two, any line divides the plane.

01:12:05.380 And so a body couldn't have cavities in it, because that would actually create two bodies

01:12:09.420 always, or it couldn't be a unified body.

01:12:11.260 The kind of complexity of our body is not really possible in two dimensions.

01:12:16.120 The complexity of some of the gravitational effects we see are not possible in two dimensions.

01:12:21.720 Gravity still operates in two and even one dimension, but it's just not the same as the

01:12:26.660 kind of rich fabric of gravity we have in three.

01:12:30.880 And then if you start going up, if you ask four dimensions, five, six, also problems start

01:12:36.180 to occur there that seem to, in other words, we sit at a kind of sweet spot.

01:12:41.260 And the complexity, ability of complex structures to form.

01:12:45.800 So there's probably no accident that if there were more dimensions, that we would still be

01:12:51.880 three-dimensional creatures.

01:12:53.120 Interesting.

01:12:53.940 So when I started learning about string theory about 20 years ago, it always kind of bumped

01:13:00.820 me and just, I couldn't ever get my mind around the idea that these larger dimensions

01:13:07.960 would be smaller.

01:13:10.180 And I've now, you know, read so much on the topic that I realize this isn't a consensus.

01:13:16.220 But at some point early on, it seemed like that's where it was all headed, was that it

01:13:21.640 was these like, you know, tiny wrapped up dimensions and small in scale in some sense, which is the

01:13:29.440 opposite of this flatland analogy, right?

01:13:31.400 Where it's just bigger and we have this small view on it.

01:13:35.120 And then in your book, you quote Fontini Marco Polo.

01:13:39.680 She says, if quantum gravity is as fundamental as we think it is, if it's something that's

01:13:46.060 about the very structure of space-time, it's just not obvious to me that the signature of

01:13:50.900 that thing has to be something very small.

01:13:53.880 And I wasn't sure if that related to this other issue I was having or not.

01:13:57.500 But I kind of held on to that as something that was interesting.

01:14:00.280 I just wondered if you could elaborate on what she meant by that.

01:14:04.480 Yeah.

01:14:04.700 So a couple of things here.

01:14:05.900 First, regarding the extra dimensions and then about quantum gravity.

01:14:10.200 Again, string theory has gone through a lot of evolution.

01:14:13.940 So the early thinking, which is still around today, but modulated, is that those dimensions

01:14:20.380 have to be small.

01:14:21.920 And there's a few reasons for that.

01:14:23.340 One is if they were large, we could see them so we could move in them.

01:14:29.260 We could, our arm could stretch out and accidentally go into one.

01:14:33.420 So to eliminate that, that kind of eventuality, which would be bad, A and B, we don't see.

01:14:41.420 It was postulated or string theory was postulated that the dimensions must be extremely small.

01:14:46.800 And the other thing is that the kinds of forces they're trying to explain with this,

01:14:50.360 electromagnetic forces, nuclear forces seem to require, I mean, beyond microscopic, minuscule,

01:14:57.120 minuscule dimensions.

01:14:59.340 And it's not just, by the way, that they're small.

01:15:02.120 It's that they're finite.

01:15:03.520 Right.

01:15:04.060 And that they are circular.

01:15:06.280 They kind of have a closed topology to them.

01:15:09.040 If you could walk into one, you would come back to where you started.

01:15:12.440 Whereas our dimensions are not only big, but they're infinite, probably, at least to our

01:15:18.720 knowledge.

01:15:19.600 And they're not circles.

01:15:21.840 They're lines, essentially.

01:15:23.420 So if you start walking out into the universe, you will never come back.

01:15:27.460 And there's some debate about that.

01:15:28.600 But the kind of default view is that they're the topology of a line.

01:15:33.200 And you start going, and you'll never come back to where you were.

01:15:38.000 Now, things are a lot more flexible, even starting 15, 20 years ago.

01:15:43.640 Actually, the time Brian Greene came out with his book, it was already starting to turn then.

01:15:48.660 And you can see the evolution in Brian's books, actually.

01:15:51.760 It starts off with this all-dimensions idea in the Elegant universe, but its subsequent books

01:15:56.680 really flesh out that the dimensions could actually be quite big.

01:16:00.140 And that we don't see them for some other reason, that we're stuck on our dimensions,

01:16:06.100 or the dimensions are highly curved.

01:16:10.120 So there's strong gravity in them, basically.

01:16:13.920 And so we're kind of trapped in them.

01:16:16.200 And one of the hopes for the Large Hadron Collider was maybe those dimensions would manifest

01:16:22.000 or somehow we would basically lose particles.

01:16:26.320 It'd be like, where did the particle go?

01:16:27.800 And you would say, ah, the particle must have gone into the other dimension, but that didn't

01:16:31.660 happen, so probably the dimensions aren't accessible to us.

01:16:35.660 Anyway, so that's point number one, is these dimensions could, in fact, be large, infinite

01:16:40.820 even, and restricted in some other way besides size.

01:16:45.900 Then there's Fattini's point, which I think is really, really important.

01:16:48.640 And I'm glad you picked up on it, that quantum gravity is conventionally thought to be an

01:16:58.420 extremely, extremely tiny, as in physical size, effect.

01:17:06.280 So you'd have to take your mice group and dial it up and go through atoms, through protons,

01:17:10.960 all the way down to what's known as the Planck scale.

01:17:13.320 And then you'd see space-time kind of foamy or some other weird thing would happen to our

01:17:20.380 ideas of space at that level.

01:17:23.740 And the other, this is just think in terms of scales, not just of size, but of energy.

01:17:30.260 So the small, tiny, tiny distance also corresponds to very high energy.

01:17:36.020 So you'd have to dial up your particle accelerator or your x-ray gun or whatever in order to access

01:17:42.560 those very fine scale effects, those kind of deep effects.

01:17:47.600 And there's a lot of thinking to support that as well.

01:17:51.480 But as she points out, you can't really, physics is interconnected.

01:17:55.660 The nature is interconnected.

01:17:56.840 You can't just change one part of it and not expect some other part of it to remain the same.

01:18:03.420 So if you're going to this deep level and you are saying, for example, that new forces

01:18:09.180 could materialize, then you need to ask, maybe we can see them.

01:18:14.760 In addition, if you start, and this is something closer to my heart with my book, if you start

01:18:20.160 mucking around with the nature of space and time, then you might ask whether if space and

01:18:26.280 time breaks down at that fine scale, whether there could be a residue of those effects at

01:18:30.640 our scale.

01:18:31.160 And this is something Lee Smolin has argued as well.

01:18:33.660 I was really, when I talked about this in my book, I was really responding to him a bit,

01:18:38.400 that maybe these non-local effects that are seen in quantum physics, quantum field theory,

01:18:45.740 general relativity, other areas could be somehow a residue of this space-time emergence or this

01:18:52.460 deep, could break down.

01:18:53.900 Yeah.

01:18:54.100 No, and that makes a lot of sense to me.

01:18:55.860 There's also a, just kind of part B of that, is there's kind of this misconception that

01:19:01.200 physicists themselves have promulgated since the early days of quantum physics, that quantum

01:19:06.220 physics is a theory of the small.

01:19:09.200 So quantum physics was developed for atoms, electrons, particles, you know, small things.

01:19:15.440 And the experiments are usually done on atoms, electrons, photons, small things, because

01:19:21.400 they're easy to control.

01:19:23.340 But there is no limit in quantum physics.

01:19:25.660 Quantum physics is a theory of everything, period.

01:19:28.940 Big, small, the universe is quantum.

01:19:32.100 You and I, you know, everything is quantum.

01:19:35.000 We may not notice it.

01:19:36.940 We don't notice a lot of things.

01:19:38.120 I mean, the vast majority, we can't see radio waves, for example, directly.

01:19:42.380 We don't see a lot of things in the world.

01:19:44.940 I think this table is solid, but I know it's mostly empty space.

01:19:49.040 So it is with quantum physics.

01:19:50.700 It's there if we know how to look.

01:19:53.320 It is just in line with this very strong intuition that drives a lot of my interest.

01:19:59.420 And that seems to be confirmed as I've worked in the sciences that there is so much kind of

01:20:05.800 right here with us.

01:20:06.840 It's all right here.

01:20:08.720 We just are very limited in our ability to perceive it and access it just, you know,

01:20:14.680 based on the limits of the human brain and what we evolved to be able to perceive.

01:20:19.800 Exactly.

01:20:20.620 But we also have a brain, which is, you know, a step up there so we can translate.

01:20:26.880 This is what science does.

01:20:27.940 It gives these microscopes of the mind, whether they're radio microscopes or other techniques,

01:20:33.280 that kind of bend the world into a place we can see it.

01:20:37.280 So we take radio waves translated into sound waves or into light, a visible light.

01:20:43.180 And so it is with these gravitational effects.

01:20:45.460 We take things that are so impossibly distant from us and we can find situations like black 1.00

01:20:51.960 holes.

01:20:52.140 This is why black holes come up so much in these discussions is that they're a kind of

01:20:56.880 canary in a coal mine for our current physics.

01:20:59.800 They're the place where our current physics dies.

01:21:02.800 We have to figure out why.

01:21:04.560 I'm very much in the program of like, I love exotic physics.

01:21:07.640 Don't get me wrong.

01:21:08.340 But I'm also in the idea of take the simple things and ask yourself, do you really know

01:21:13.860 what's going on?

01:21:14.700 How many people can explain how a toilet works, for example, or why the table is solid or why

01:21:22.400 the universe doesn't implode?

01:21:24.760 I mean, these little things around us, there seems so basic.

01:21:27.740 Why is the night sky dark is something I talk about in my book.

01:21:30.540 It's a very, very deep idea that no one or very few people stop to think about.

01:21:35.940 And yet, if they did, they would be like, whoa, I can't believe this.

01:21:38.920 This is amazing.

01:21:39.980 That's great.

01:21:40.620 This is all where I wanted to go.

01:21:44.620 I think you can now probably understand why I would recommend George Musser to anyone who

01:21:49.600 is looking for a quantum physics tour guide.

01:21:52.460 He and I ended up talking for almost two hours and I loved every minute of it.

01:21:57.380 And I want to play a bit more from another part of our conversation where George describes

01:22:01.920 what is known as the holographic principle, which helps illustrate how many people are

01:22:05.940 of space as we perceive it and how we usually think of it, may be distorting the true picture

01:22:11.540 of fundamental reality.

01:22:13.340 The first time I truly felt like I could begin to grasp what the holographic principle describes

01:22:18.380 was when I was watching a lecture at Harvard given by Nima Arkani Hamed, a theoretical physicist

01:22:24.640 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

01:22:27.860 And we'll link to the video of his lecture in the notes.

01:22:30.460 The title of the course is Space, Time, and Quantum Mechanics, Total Positivity and Motives.

01:22:35.980 As you can see, the first part of the title is all about physics.

01:22:39.860 The second part of the title...

01:22:42.060 In the lecture, Nima explains something called ADS-CFT correspondence, which is an example of

01:22:49.940 the holographic principle.

01:22:51.100 And to describe anti-de-sitter space, the ADS of ADS-CFT correspondence, he draws a picture

01:22:59.620 of a hypothetical universe on the blackboard.

01:23:02.380 But it's the sort of simplest example of a world in a box.

01:23:05.840 You can think of the geometry as like the inside of a tin can.

01:23:09.440 There's a warping, a negative curvature inside the space, which means that the distance from

01:23:15.140 a point on the inside to the boundary is indeed infinity.

01:23:18.980 It has some resemblance to our universe, but with one very important difference.

01:23:24.780 It has an outside boundary.

01:23:27.060 So the blackboard sketch looks like a tin can.

01:23:30.060 And the interior is filled with stars and other matter.

01:23:33.400 But it is enveloped in a cylindrical, two-dimensional surface, like the metal of a can.

01:23:39.900 All those stars and matter represent a vast amount of information.

01:23:44.620 Where the atoms are placed, how they are moving, and so on.

01:23:47.780 And here's what's amazing.

01:23:50.280 The math shows that the very same information exists on the interior surface of the can.

01:23:56.400 Which is strange because inside the can is a three-dimensional volume.

01:24:01.220 But the cylindrical surface is only two-dimensional.

01:24:04.980 So how can a two-dimensional surface hold as much information as the three-dimensional volume?

01:24:11.060 How can two very different geometries be mathematically equivalent?

01:24:17.140 And what ensures that information is replicated in both places?

01:24:21.860 These puzzles have haunted Nima and his fellow theoretical physicists ever since they realized

01:24:27.680 this correspondence in the 90s.

01:24:30.020 And many have come to think that it's the surface of the interior of the can that's

01:24:34.680 actually fundamental.

01:24:35.820 And the volume is a kind of mirage or illusion.

01:24:40.540 So this is an example of something, and people have been exploring it actively for 20 years,

01:24:45.740 and I'm sure explore it for another 20, 30 years.

01:24:48.800 It's a vast, rich, deep, every superlative you want subject.

01:24:53.740 But it's an example of quantum mechanics is king, and space emerges from quantum mechanics.

01:25:00.280 I know all of this is still very hard to fathom, but hopefully it will be a little clearer after

01:25:07.520 you hear the wonderful analogy to music that George comes up with.

01:25:11.500 Let's listen to the second part of our conversation now.

01:25:15.580 Let me just read this one excerpt of yours.

01:25:19.720 This is page 165.

01:25:22.380 On the downside, what the heck does the holographic principle actually mean?

01:25:26.880 How could the universe around us be a holographic projection?

01:25:30.280 What's the projector?

01:25:31.980 The key, I think, is not to get caught up in the minutiae of the metaphor.

01:25:35.580 The point is just that the space we observe could be a product of some underlying structure.

01:25:40.500 When we walk across a room, we are not gliding passively through a pre-existing expanse.

01:25:45.760 Something is happening.

01:25:47.560 There is a machinery at work, a grinding of gears deep within nature to produce the experience

01:25:52.860 of being here and being there.

01:25:54.840 When you stretch an arm to grasp a pencil, and it's just outside your reach, something

01:26:00.360 is acting to thwart you, creating what you perceive as distance.

01:26:04.380 And when we ask what that machinery could be, we have arrived at the outermost frontier of

01:26:08.740 modern physics.

01:26:09.560 I'm very interested in this idea, and it matches my intuitions very well, and so there's a lot

01:26:19.320 more I want to understand about it.

01:26:22.420 Oh, wow.

01:26:22.820 So this is basically all of modern string theory now.

01:26:27.020 I know.

01:26:27.600 When I was finishing, actually, I think I had just finished the book, this is 2015, I thought

01:26:33.980 to myself, the holographic principle, what does it have to do with holograms, actual holograms

01:26:39.860 you can buy or have in the back of your credit card or whatever?

01:26:42.780 And I've always loved holograms.

01:26:44.620 Yeah.

01:26:45.040 When I was a student, I did a spring break in San Francisco, and I went to the hate and

01:26:51.820 bought a hologram that was nails.

01:26:54.920 This would be a white light hologram.

01:26:56.400 You'd show the hologram under just a lamp, and the nails would pop out at you, and it's

01:27:00.580 creepy.

01:27:01.780 And it was always stuck in my mind how incredible it is that a two-dimensional sheet of film

01:27:06.920 could conjure up a third dimension of space, a sense of depth.

01:27:13.940 And the holographic principle is very similar to that, but at a deeper level of science.

01:27:21.400 So, anyway, so basically, the physicist normally thinks of it as you have a ball, a big sphere,

01:27:30.920 and inside of that is the universe.

01:27:36.780 And see, they think of the universe basically as an enclosed space.

01:27:39.880 Right.

01:27:40.200 And inside of there are galaxies, stars, and everything else.

01:27:44.380 But there's this outer surface.

01:27:48.040 It's interesting to think of what that actually means if it isn't space.

01:27:54.260 Just what that means to have any kind of boundary at all.

01:27:57.800 Ah, yeah, you brought up a very, very important question here, which I think we can bracket,

01:28:04.480 but let's acknowledge, and so we know, come back to it.

01:28:07.900 What does it mean to have a bounded space?

01:28:10.260 Because in these theories of holography, space does have to have a boundary to it.

01:28:14.860 And that already seems to be a bit of a regression in our cosmology, because we're taught to think

01:28:20.540 of, well, Cornelius dethroned the bounded space, the universe in a nutshell kind of idea.

01:28:27.160 And now we seem to be thrown back into that picture, which is important, but let's come

01:28:31.080 back to that, because it's kind of a cool story in its own right.

01:28:34.220 But just for now, except that the universe could be a big ball with a boundary to it.

01:28:39.140 Right, right.

01:28:40.140 In fact, it's an infinite ball with a boundary to it, but that's neither here nor there.

01:28:43.280 It's a ball with a boundary to it.

01:28:44.520 But the boundary, if you think of it as a three-dimensional ball with a two-dimensional

01:28:50.920 sphere as its bounding surface, the boundary space is two-dimensional space, but it's as

01:28:56.780 good a space as any.

01:28:58.060 It's like a map as a representation of the Earth.

01:29:02.240 It's, you know, it's a world in its own right.

01:29:05.280 So you can talk about physics on the boundary, ignoring the fact that it is a boundary.

01:29:10.120 Just think of it as any old two-dimensional plane, let's say, or sphere in this case.

01:29:17.760 And it has particles, fields, quantum processes going on, it.

01:29:25.060 So the first thing the holographic principle tells you, and this idea of duality, which is

01:29:31.720 kind of they're paired, those two ideas are paired, is that the two are equivalent.

01:29:37.580 So the interior and the exterior don't look the same, but they actually, in a deeper sense,

01:29:46.920 are the same.

01:29:48.140 So, for example, if you have something in the middle, like a planet, there is something

01:29:54.280 acting as a planet, even if it doesn't look like one, there's something acting as a planet

01:29:59.140 on the boundary.

01:30:00.020 Right.

01:30:00.260 If you have a hand on the boundary, there's something with the same properties somehow

01:30:07.260 in the middle.

01:30:09.000 Now, that's kind of weird to think of it that way, but this is where the hologram now starts

01:30:14.780 to come in.

01:30:16.060 So something similar happens with the hologram.

01:30:18.420 You've got something that goes like nails appearing before you if you eliminate the hologram,

01:30:24.080 but you know that it's equivalent to what, in fact, is generated by what's on the sheet

01:30:30.080 of film.

01:30:31.400 So there's kind of a matching of the two sides that in the space above the hologram are nails

01:30:38.360 on the film is, if you look at it, after you see a wave pattern and the waves interfere

01:30:43.580 in a way, they kind of combine in a way that leads to the appearance of nails.

01:30:47.740 So the quantum fields combine and interfere in a way that leads to a planet.

01:30:55.080 And this is the essence of a holographic principle.

01:30:57.600 And actually, it's a very, very deep, more than just a metaphor, it's kind of really kind

01:31:02.080 of a good way to think of it.

01:31:03.860 In my view, it does kind of lend itself to losing this notion of space also.

01:31:12.100 Exactly.

01:31:12.420 Exactly.

01:31:13.280 Exactly what it does.

01:31:14.260 And actually, I have a quote here under this.

01:31:19.260 You say, locations that seem far apart can lie right on top of each other.

01:31:24.040 What appears to be spatial distance is, in fact, a difference in energy.

01:31:28.100 Exactly.

01:31:28.600 So, for example, suppose you're moving along the radius of that sphere.

01:31:35.720 Suppose you and I are standing, you know, 100 feet apart, but along that radius.

01:31:41.440 So, our avatars, our kind of corresponding entities on the boundary, let's call them

01:31:49.240 avatars, are co-located on the boundary.

01:31:53.600 So, if you imagine drawing a line that starts at the center of the sphere, goes out, keeps

01:31:58.560 going out, hits the edge of the sphere.

01:32:00.500 So, it's like a radius line.

01:32:01.980 You are maybe in the middle and I'm a little bit further out.

01:32:04.340 Okay.

01:32:05.300 Where that radius line hits the boundary at the outer perimeter, both of us are actually

01:32:12.480 both there.

01:32:13.620 We're actually, even though we look 100 feet apart, we are actually zero feet apart on

01:32:18.440 the boundary.

01:32:18.980 And what is accounting for our distance is something else.

01:32:22.660 So, what does distance mean?

01:32:23.740 This is why we have to kind of dissect concepts of space and of physics.

01:32:29.120 Distance means that I can't reach you.

01:32:31.380 Right.

01:32:31.580 You're 100 feet apart, I can only reach a couple of feet away.

01:32:33.960 Yeah.

01:32:34.400 It takes a certain amount of time, you know, whatever number, 300 nanoseconds for light

01:32:39.400 to get from one to the other.

01:32:41.500 There's a delay.

01:32:43.160 So, all these kinds of features of our spatial position and location have to be translated

01:32:52.620 into something not spatial.

01:32:56.380 So, for instance, that when I can't touch each other, that means, okay, what does that

01:33:00.140 mean?

01:33:00.320 It means we can't interact.

01:33:01.860 Yeah.

01:33:02.280 And indeed, there's a way of structures of different energy don't interact.

01:33:08.460 And examples of this, we just know from music.

01:33:12.020 So, if you play a chord, let's say, or just two people are singing in a room and one sings

01:33:18.700 C, one sings C sharp, that would be terrible with dissonance.

01:33:21.320 But if they sing a third apart, then it's more harmonious.

01:33:26.320 Those waves of your voice are, you're hearing as a listener both notes because both waves

01:33:34.560 are passing through the room.

01:33:36.240 Sound waves just pass through one another.

01:33:38.120 And that can be thought of as something similar in this holographic principle, that different

01:33:44.280 effects can pass through each other.

01:33:46.400 Yeah.

01:33:47.100 But you and I, 100 feet apart to our eye, what's really happening is that our energy is just

01:33:53.520 passing through each other in a way.

01:33:55.600 I'm a bit vague here.

01:33:57.440 But there's a different effect.

01:34:00.180 And then when we do touch, suppose we were to walk toward each other, and then we just be

01:34:04.920 outstretched at arm's length, and finally we can touch our fingertips, that would be

01:34:09.940 like the energy is converging.

01:34:12.280 So, it would be like the two singers bringing their harmony down to their singing in unison.

01:34:19.020 That would be like touching.

01:34:21.000 That would be like touching.

01:34:21.840 The discoveries of entanglement and non-locality in physics are both good clues that space

01:34:32.360 is not fundamental.

01:34:33.940 And the very last phrase George landed on of it being like touching, when energies interact,

01:34:40.200 is so interesting to contemplate.

01:34:42.280 I often wonder, when we consider space to be a kind of projection or translation of the

01:34:48.440 fundamental physics, if our conscious experience reveals anything even comparable to it.

01:34:54.820 Or does the conscious experience of, say, a lamp being on the other side of the room,

01:35:00.220 represent something entirely unlike the picture at a deeper level?

01:35:05.600 As George masterfully points out, something is clearly obstructing my ability to interact

01:35:11.940 with the lamp on the other side of the room, even if it's totally unlike the space we experience.

01:35:18.440 In the case of the lamp, we're still close enough to interact with it at some level

01:35:22.920 by perceiving it through sight.

01:35:25.200 But there are, of course, countless objects we can't have any interaction with at all,

01:35:29.700 like a pebble on a moon on the other side of the universe, or a million other things.

01:35:34.340 But if space is not fundamental, it seems like there's a sense in which everything,

01:35:39.940 at least the stuff that we can potentially interact with,

01:35:43.380 is actually right here, in a sense.

01:35:45.780 Because there is no space, and the space we perceive between everything is just a hint

01:35:51.960 of some more fundamental structure or force or laws of nature.

01:35:57.180 The space could even theoretically be bridged if we only understood what it represents,

01:36:02.860 with the use of some future technology that was built on that understanding.

01:36:06.760 If you're having trouble picturing how everything could be right here, I don't blame you, but

01:36:14.280 it's fun to think about.

01:36:16.220 And strangely, it's actually another type of experience that's regularly described by people

01:36:21.660 in meditation and on psychedelics.

01:36:24.980 I'm the first to be quite skeptical that any human experience could be a true window onto

01:36:29.760 the ultimate nature of reality.

01:36:31.320 But I think it's incredibly interesting that when scientists probe the physical world deeper and

01:36:37.040 deeper, we're left without space, and when we interrogate our conscious experience with

01:36:42.840 greater and greater concentration and skill, many people arrive at the same conclusion.

01:36:49.240 So first, through our investigations in neuroscience, we understand that there really is nowhere for

01:36:55.480 a self to dwell in the brain.

01:36:57.000 And when we look directly at our own conscious experience, we find no self there either.

01:37:02.940 And then through physics, we've discovered that space is not fundamental, and perhaps time isn't

01:37:08.260 either.

01:37:09.100 And when we interrogate our first-person experience deeply, all sense of space and time can slip

01:37:15.000 away as well, even though conscious awareness remains perfectly intact and as present as ever.

01:37:20.980 Here's where I continue to find myself stuck, because I've had these experiences myself, both in

01:37:28.940 meditation and under the influence of psychedelics, and I'm of course not alone here.

01:37:35.000 The philosopher Thomas Metzinger is very interested in these states, and he refers to them as minimal

01:37:40.860 phenomenal experiences, or MPEs.

01:37:44.420 He has studied this phenomenon and published his results in scientific journals.

01:37:48.760 We'll link to a talk he gave presenting his research in the notes, and I'll play some readings now of

01:37:54.880 anonymous first-hand accounts from his research.

01:37:58.920 The body felt like it dissolved.

01:38:01.420 What was left was my awareness being aware of itself.

01:38:05.500 I felt like I just was, and my awareness just observed.

01:38:10.880 It was just experience happening.

01:38:13.960 I didn't feel a contracted version of a self, but rather an openness, boundless space.

01:38:19.820 The perception of space, infinite, unseparated, without inside and outside.

01:38:26.760 Weightless in the space of infinite possibilities.

01:38:28.820 On a few occasions, I have entered the state of deep, dreamless sleep consciously.

01:38:35.440 It is in this state where my experiences have occurred, whereby I am a simple, unified awareness,

01:38:45.000 seemingly without the daytime qualities of ego.

01:38:47.740 I have experienced vast, non-centered, timeless space, and sometimes light, and sometimes pure

01:38:55.340 black or color, but can really only put inadequate words to the experiences in retrospect.

01:39:02.020 I was everywhere at the same time.

01:39:04.780 Attention floated freely in space between the different mind objects.

01:39:09.720 I felt completely empty.

01:39:11.120 It was a clear awareness, but with no thoughts.

01:39:13.820 I was not quite sure about, or did not feel, time or space or thought or body, but I knew

01:39:21.560 that something, I take it as me, exists.

01:39:24.900 It's that background awareness behind any thoughts and perceptions, and it knows itself.

01:39:33.660 Even though these experiences pique my curiosity tremendously, when it comes to the subject of

01:39:39.620 time, my skepticism really prevents me from taking these experiences as real data.

01:39:45.980 For one, the idea that time is not fundamental is a complete roadblock to any further reflections

01:39:52.220 about anything, really, at least for me.

01:39:55.260 I don't know how to attempt to make sense of anything, even consciousness, without time,

01:40:01.540 even though I have a vague recollection of having had an experience of it myself,

01:40:05.960 which is somewhat comical.

01:40:07.040 But most importantly, when I turn to the scientists, there aren't any conclusive answers about the

01:40:13.680 status of time either.

01:40:15.460 There are some physicists, such as Nima Arkani-Hamed and Carlo Rovelli, who are convinced that time

01:40:21.980 isn't fundamental.

01:40:23.440 But there are many more who believe it is, and even more who just don't yet come down

01:40:28.020 on one side or the other.

01:40:29.220 So, in an effort to get a little more clarity, I decided to reach out to two physicists, one

01:40:35.760 who has convinced time is fundamental, Lee Smolin, and one who believes it's emergent, Carlo Rovelli.

01:40:44.140 Hmm.

01:40:45.180 Okay.

01:40:46.380 But before we listen to those conversations, there's an important distinction emerging here

01:40:51.520 between consciousness and perception that often trips me up, and that I think is important

01:40:58.000 to spell out.

01:40:59.020 So, let me see if I can get this right.

01:41:01.600 The perception of space is our way of mapping whatever is really out there onto some kind

01:41:07.980 of familiar, understandable world in order to navigate it.

01:41:12.080 Something that's distinct from a true illusion or mere hallucination, right?

01:41:17.700 But consciousness is not necessarily perception, even though it includes our perceptions as

01:41:23.620 content.

01:41:25.620 Consciousness, in the way you're using the term, is just the fact of felt experience, no

01:41:30.620 matter what content is being experienced.

01:41:33.060 Whether it's perceptions, thoughts, hallucinations, or even sort of timeless, spaceless awareness.

01:41:39.100 Am I splitting perception and consciousness correctly there?

01:41:43.240 Yes, that's such a necessary distinction.

01:41:45.840 And you referenced the phenomenon of an illusion, which I think is also important to clarify a

01:41:50.960 bit further here.

01:41:52.140 So, when I suppose that space is a perception of a deeper fundamental reality, or just a small

01:41:58.240 window onto it, I'm not at all saying that our experience of space is an illusion in the

01:42:04.180 way we typically think of illusions.

01:42:05.880 And I often make a distinction between illusion with a capital I and illusion with a lowercase

01:42:12.540 I as I see them.

01:42:14.400 So, a typical visual illusion, which falls into the category of what I'm calling illusion

01:42:19.000 with a lowercase I, a typical visual illusion takes place when our visual system, which works

01:42:25.500 well at mapping the world for us in most circumstances, fails us under an unusual condition.

01:42:31.560 So, we've all been exposed to the fact that we can be tricked into seeing two arcs of identical

01:42:37.020 length as having different lengths.

01:42:39.620 I'm sure everyone listening to this audio documentary has seen this illusion and knows

01:42:44.040 that when we're presented with the illusion, no matter how hard we look or how well we understand

01:42:49.340 why it's happening, we will still always see these two identical arcs as having different

01:42:55.380 lengths in this particular setup.

01:42:57.340 And there's a whole world of fun examples like this, where we can essentially trick

01:43:02.800 our brains into hallucinating an inaccurate map of the outside world rather than an accurate

01:43:08.160 one.

01:43:08.900 So, again, I call this more commonplace type of illusion an illusion with a lowercase I.

01:43:14.240 But an illusion with an uppercase I is an experience that gives us a more or less accurate map of

01:43:20.040 the world and does its job of helping us to navigate it very well.

01:43:23.760 But it tricks us into believing we have a perfectly clear window onto exactly what the world is

01:43:30.760 rather than a map or an interface, as Donald Hoffman likes to call it.

01:43:35.900 I also want to make one last point and be very clear that I'm not saying the concept of

01:43:41.220 space has no meaning in physics either, nor are any physicists saying that.

01:43:45.740 Every physicist I know would say that space is certainly real even though it's not fundamental.

01:43:50.000 So, a phenomenon can be emergent and as real as anything else, yet still not be a clear

01:43:55.880 view of the underlying reality.

01:43:58.000 Okay.

01:43:58.940 So, let's move on to your conversations with Smolin and Rovelli.

01:44:03.780 I'm hoping they're not only informative for the listener, of course, but that they might

01:44:07.800 also shake up intuitions about space and time like they did for me.

01:44:12.600 In addition to resources about the relevant physics, we've put some links in the notes

01:44:17.700 to different meditation traditions and techniques for those who are interested in engaging in

01:44:23.060 their own experiential science here.

01:44:27.740 When I spoke to Lee Smolin, he had begun to develop symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

01:44:33.320 So, you'll hear his voice is a bit shaky in our recording.

01:44:36.420 But he was, of course, still as brilliant, sharp, and fascinating as ever.

01:44:41.100 At the time of our conversation, Lee was working on a theory of quantum gravity in which time

01:44:46.660 is fundamental.

01:44:48.180 And at that time, I had been leaning towards the assumption that time is emergent along

01:44:52.840 with space, as I had been heavily influenced by the work of both Nima Arkani-Hamed and Carlo

01:44:59.440 Rovelli and others.

01:45:00.920 But I knew that I was extremely limited in my understanding of the physics and had no business

01:45:06.140 taking sides.

01:45:06.960 I had just finished reading Lee's brilliant book, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, and

01:45:14.180 I was beyond honored and a bit overwhelmed at this opportunity to interview such a renowned

01:45:19.240 scientist.

01:45:20.600 I jumped into the conversation by reading a passage from his book in which he paints a compelling

01:45:25.960 image of causality and what he terms views.

01:45:29.840 This is from your chapter 15.

01:45:33.640 Okay.

01:45:34.460 Your view of the world is like a film projected on a two-dimensional sphere, which we call

01:45:39.380 the sky.

01:45:40.160 The view of an event in a model with three emergent dimensions of space will then be represented

01:45:45.300 as a two-dimensional sphere that we call the event sky.

01:45:49.040 What an event sees on its sky is the events directly in its causal past.

01:45:54.240 More precisely, it sees the energy and momentum coming from each of its parent events.

01:45:59.880 And then you go on to say, the next step is simple.

01:46:03.120 Hypothesize that all the universe consists of is these skies, each one the view from some

01:46:08.700 event.

01:46:09.640 Rather than construct the views from the causal relations, reverse things and derive the causal

01:46:14.660 relations and everything else from the views.

01:46:17.180 So I think this is so interesting and fantastic.

01:46:21.040 And it's the closest thing I have seen on those of, you know, the scientists I know who are

01:46:27.940 working on these types of things that leave room in a way that makes sense to me for consciousness

01:46:35.880 at a fundamental level.

01:46:37.340 But the thing I really am interested in discussing today, I'm interested in what your theory is

01:46:44.860 telling us if it turns out that time is emergent and not part of the fundamental story.

01:46:50.900 I want to talk about all the ways in which I see your theory completely holding together,

01:46:58.300 yeah, without time.

01:46:59.460 So to me, it's about how we look at causality and also about how we look at space.

01:47:05.840 It seems to me that there's a way in which we can still talk about or preserve causality

01:47:12.540 even if time isn't fundamental.

01:47:15.300 But what we would mean by causality is more like connections in what are represented as

01:47:22.780 as more than three dimensions of space, but not causality as an act of bringing something

01:47:28.500 fundamentally new into being.

01:47:31.540 And so if causal relations and causal structure are actually a deeper structure that's more

01:47:38.840 fundamental than time and is actually expressed fully in more than three dimensions of space,

01:47:45.940 like time is the perception.

01:47:47.420 But the causal structure itself could be the fabric of which these larger spatial dimensions are made

01:47:56.600 and our experience of the fundamental is through three dimensions of space

01:48:03.080 and then this perception of time.

01:48:05.360 Let me first read something to you.

01:48:07.340 Okay.

01:48:07.880 And you have to guess who the author is.

01:48:09.700 Oh my goodness.

01:48:10.580 If you've never heard this.

01:48:11.740 It's also a paragraph.

01:48:13.100 It's not me.

01:48:13.860 Okay.

01:48:14.140 Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and,

01:48:22.180 as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that because of the

01:48:29.740 infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many universes which

01:48:36.740 aren't nevertheless only perspectives on a single one.

01:48:41.540 Hmm.

01:48:43.720 Interesting.

01:48:44.140 Interesting.

01:48:44.940 I have no idea.

01:48:46.580 Yeah.

01:48:47.060 Leibniz.

01:48:47.820 Oh.

01:48:48.400 Mm-hmm.

01:48:49.120 From the monodology.

01:48:50.420 This is the founding document of relationalism.

01:48:55.100 And the difference is striking.

01:48:57.720 People who don't take this kind of thing seriously end up interpreting the evidence as if we were

01:49:06.020 in a large number of different universes.

01:49:08.740 And it's exactly the opposite.

01:49:10.220 Right.

01:49:10.460 There are many different partial views which stitched together give you a view of one universe or one city.

01:49:18.140 And it requires complexity and variety to work.

01:49:23.380 Mm-hmm.

01:49:23.980 Now, let me respond in two stages.

01:49:27.120 Something like the causal theory of views, it could be part of a timeless picture.

01:49:35.100 It could be part of a, what we say, a black universe picture.

01:49:40.040 And all I have to do is erase where it says the world consists of the present events and their views.

01:49:49.500 And I just have to say all past, future, and the views are just different perspectives.

01:49:57.300 Okay.

01:49:57.740 And there are perspectives from the past, the present, and the future.

01:50:01.360 So you get to be both a person who appreciates the centrality of time and not to believe in it.

01:50:08.680 Okay, great.

01:50:09.540 I'm so happy to hear that.

01:50:11.380 So you can, it's unfortunately, apparently coherent to believe that.

01:50:17.840 But I think it's much deeper to believe the version that I've been talking about, which is, we can call it, it's something like the presentist or stripped-down presentist.

01:50:32.120 And the little manuscript with Kalalia Berti is the furthest I've got towards, kind of lyrically at least, saying what we're trying to do.

01:50:44.880 Because we're trying to get rid of the past and the future and just have the presence.

01:50:51.760 And the idea, which was Kalalia's idea, which has gotten me, it's changed how I think of this recently, is that what an event is, what a moment is, is a transition from indefiniteness to definiteness.

01:51:07.360 I actually just had a question, which is, when you say views, is there any sense of conscious experience being part of these views?

01:51:15.400 Or is it just kind of an unknown at this point?

01:51:17.520 I guess I have a hard time understanding what a view or perspective would refer to without a conscious experience.

01:51:25.580 Are you talking about the possibility of affecting, or how is it a single, how is a view even a single thing that you can talk about?

01:51:36.540 Well, you know, there's this funny thing in which you don't have to find your most fundamental quantities.

01:51:43.380 Right, yes.

01:51:43.840 So, what the image that I'm trying to evoke is the sphere of directions around an event.

01:51:52.420 And there might be photons or other particles coming at you from the past, crossing that sphere.

01:52:01.360 And you make a little purple dot when it crosses that sphere.

01:52:04.840 I don't know why.

01:52:05.900 Purple.

01:52:08.180 And that is a physical quantity.

01:52:11.980 I am just going to assert that those are the fundamental beables, if I can use John Bell's term, things that are real.

01:52:21.320 And I'm going to assert that the universe knows how to measure the difference between two views.

01:52:29.300 It's a basic notion of difference.

01:52:32.100 And I can write a mathematical formula for that, and I do in the work.

01:52:39.060 But I just have to assume that that's fundamental.

01:52:41.880 So, what I'm looking for is the answer to the following question.

01:52:49.760 First of all, I don't want to believe in a cheap version of panpsychism where it has no cause, where things being, quote, conscious or having sensations or qualia has no causal consequences.

01:53:06.960 Oh, no, I think it obviously does.

01:53:08.960 I mean, the causal consequences are throughout the universe.

01:53:13.080 And so, if consciousness is part of the fundamental story, it's part of the causal story as well.

01:53:17.640 My question is just, is the causal story how it appears to us?

01:53:23.180 Are we anthropomorphizing what causation actually is?

01:53:26.660 And my deep sense is that causation is about a kind of fundamental structure by which different things in the universe are connected and come to be.

01:53:40.660 And therefore, I mean, so if consciousness is at a fundamental level, it's not a separate thing that's causing things to happen.

01:53:47.160 It's just part of the causal story.

01:53:48.940 It's part of the structure.

01:53:50.120 It's part of...

01:53:50.800 Good, good.

01:53:51.780 So, now I have a few proposals which are very tentative.

01:54:00.060 One of them is that the consciousness is an aspect of these views.

01:54:09.060 That gives me a vocabulary.

01:54:13.520 Second, not most views, but some special views.

01:54:18.600 And I want to say, or hypothesize, it could be wrong, it's a scientific hypothesis, that it's important for the laws that I've been playing with at this level that we can distinguish new views from precedented views.

01:54:39.600 A precedented view is one that there are the same views in the past.

01:54:46.060 It's a view that has precedents.

01:54:48.620 And sometimes there are views, most of the time views have precedents, and that's why they know how to evolve.

01:54:57.380 And every once in a while there's a view without precedent, and those are the ones that somehow consciousness is associated with.

01:55:07.160 That is, the view has not existed in the history of the universe.

01:55:12.880 Yes, that, I think, I think a lot about that.

01:55:17.440 Even though I have no way of assessing the science myself, of course, I still have a hard time getting on board with the idea that the future does not exist by definition, as Lee describes.

01:55:31.960 But I love this image of the universe being made up of views, and much of what he described was more or less something I could grasp and accept.

01:55:41.920 And what I really appreciate is the emphasis he places on what he calls relationalism.

01:55:47.540 And this is a theme I see popping up in so many theories at the cutting edge of fundamental physics, both in theories in which time plays a fundamental role and those in which it doesn't.

01:55:58.340 I often try to imagine analogies for an innately relational universe, like a web or a loom.

01:56:08.900 I described a version of my web analogy in an article I wrote for Nautilus in 2022, titled, What is Time?

01:56:17.500 And I'll read an excerpt from it here.

01:56:19.380 If you were to experience a structure on this web,

01:56:49.380 such as node A, node A, node F, you might interpret the experience as two node A's cause a node F,

01:56:59.600 when in fact the whole web of nodes already exists in its entirety.

01:57:04.680 The implicit causality would not apply at a deeper level.

01:57:09.320 Causality through time would still illuminate connections.

01:57:12.540 It's just that the underlying reality of these connections would reveal a structure vastly different from the one we intuit.

01:57:20.820 That is, a universe with a flow of time where the past is set in stone,

01:57:24.960 the future is undetermined, and the present is the only true reality.

01:57:28.940 But this analogy is certainly far from perfect and not always appreciated,

01:57:39.100 and that's completely fair,

01:57:41.040 because it can never really be accurate to talk about a web that somehow exists outside of space and time.

01:57:47.580 But the picture I'm always attempting to paint is essentially a modern version of what has been referred to as the block universe view in physics,

01:57:56.340 where the past, present, and future all exist in some complete way.

01:58:01.360 Though not static in the way the image of a block universe implies, but dynamic.

01:58:06.700 Whatever dynamic means without time.

01:58:08.680 We're clearly going to need new language as the science progresses here.

01:58:14.520 Anyway, Carlo Rovelli is a physicist who believes the flow of time is an illusion and should be challenged.

01:58:20.420 So I began by asking him to distinguish his view of time from that of Lee Smolens.

01:58:26.040 When I think about space and time, we get confused because we make a mistake.

01:58:31.540 We have an intuition about time or about space, and we ask, is it like that or not?

01:58:37.280 And the answer is, of course, it's not like that.

01:58:39.940 I mean, we know for sure it's not like that, right?

01:58:42.300 For instance, we know for sure that space is curved.

01:58:47.440 If you take a triangle and you make a right angle, it's not true that it's 3, 4, 5.

01:58:53.500 It doesn't work, because in reality, space is curved.

01:58:55.620 So space is definitely not the way it looks.

01:58:58.720 The point is that when we say space, we pile into the notion of space all sorts of aspects of it,

01:59:09.400 which in our language, in our intuition, in our perceptions, in our culture, go together with that idea.

01:59:16.600 Now, some of them are wrong, are just approximation.

01:59:20.360 Some of them are useful to some extent.

01:59:24.820 Some of them are useful to a more extent.

01:59:28.140 So there is a complexity in the notion of space, and even more in the notion of time.

01:59:32.680 I work in a theory of quantum gravity where there is no time variable.

01:59:39.380 There is no T in which things evolve.

01:59:43.680 So is this dramatic?

01:59:45.940 Well, not so much.

01:59:48.040 I mean, things happen.

01:59:51.160 We describe things happen.

01:59:52.980 There's just no clock ticking the entire world,

01:59:58.220 and the interval between two events can be a quantum superposition of two different values,

02:00:04.420 and so on and so forth.

02:00:05.100 So time has a different feature.

02:00:08.100 Does this mean that time is emerging?

02:00:11.060 Yeah, of course it's emerging.

02:00:12.640 I mean, what we call time in our experience, it's emerging from all sorts of levels.

02:00:20.700 For instance, for me, time is my memory, my expectation, the sense of flowing, the sense of urgency, all this.

02:00:27.240 This, of course, has to do with physics.

02:00:28.940 It's just neuroscience.

02:00:29.920 It's just psychology.

02:00:30.820 Right.

02:00:30.980 What happened to my brain, okay?

02:00:33.600 But from that to say, okay, so time is just created by my brain.

02:00:37.620 No, no, wait a moment.

02:00:38.440 It's not true.

02:00:39.220 Because I can understand my brain as a structure that changes in time.

02:00:44.340 So there is a clock time, which has nothing to do with my brain.

02:00:47.920 I can describe my clock using a notion of time, and my clock has no expectation, no memory, no distinction between past and future, and so on.

02:00:57.400 So it's less timey than my perception, but there's still some time.

02:01:00.840 But the description of my clock is non-relativistic.

02:01:03.040 Disregard relativity.

02:01:04.760 So if I fold in relativity, I lose another piece.

02:01:07.980 And if I fold in quantum gravity, I lose another piece.

02:01:11.240 So I think that space and time are layers of concepts which are born in different approximations.

02:01:19.940 And if you want to understand them, we have to open them up and say, aha, this comes from that, this comes from that, this comes from that.

02:01:29.020 At the bottom level, well, at the bottom level, as far as we know, there is a quantum theory of gravity, of which we have hypotheses, tentative theories,

02:01:36.640 where there is no time in the Newtonian sense, there's no direct time, but there are events that happen.

02:01:46.040 Yeah.

02:01:46.600 Okay, so yeah, so we're very much on the same page there.

02:01:49.720 Yeah.

02:01:49.840 And the way I sometimes think about it is that our experience of time is kind of this very limited window onto a structure for which we have very little understanding.

02:02:02.840 But there is a structure there, and time gives us a sense of that structure, but it is a very, very small window onto it.

02:02:14.400 So in my work, I'm always kind of trying to play both games at once, which sometimes doesn't make sense.

02:02:21.220 But to wrap my mind around what we understand about the, you know, as much as we can understand about the fundamental nature of reality,

02:02:31.640 and then what that means in terms of our experience and what parts of our experience are useful and are, you know, telling us something about the structure.

02:02:42.260 Because the innate curiosity that we, that you and I both have, you know, the answers that we want to arrive at, whether or not, you know, human beings can actually arrive at them.

02:02:51.900 Yeah.

02:02:52.240 Okay.

02:02:52.740 Yeah.

02:02:53.260 I think in my work that often we make the mistake, even scientists make the mistake of being aware that reality is different from what looks at first sight.

02:03:09.240 But nevertheless, sort of using introspection, of using intuition, and being very attached and say, okay, that has to be like that because I feel it is like that.

02:03:21.460 I perceive it like that.

02:03:22.700 Yeah, I think that's a huge mistake, yes.

02:03:24.400 And that, I think, is a mistake.

02:03:26.220 And I think it's very common.

02:03:29.380 I think at least morning is making this mistake about times.

02:03:31.940 And when I talk with some colleagues, there are technical discussions, there are mathematical discussions, there are discussions about experiments, but often there are conceptual discussions in which I find exactly this difficult.

02:03:45.800 I wish to say, come on, how do you know things are like that?

02:03:48.780 Why do you trust your intuition so much?

02:03:52.160 Allow the possibility that things are not the way you think they are.

02:03:55.920 That's basically where I spend all of my time.

02:03:59.240 My thought time is in that place.

02:04:02.320 That's right.

02:04:03.060 So I think this is important to be able to recognize the things we give for obvious and question them because that's what blocks us in going ahead and understanding.

02:04:17.060 Yeah, okay, so I've spent some time just thinking about what it means that time has the character that we now understand and that we, like, what does that mean about our experience?

02:04:34.540 And so the only way I could get my, I'm always trying to visualize things.

02:04:37.800 And so I started visualizing, like, this web or loom.

02:04:41.240 Because one of the interesting things to me about losing time as we generally think of it is that we also lose causality in the way we think of it.

02:04:49.520 And so I imagine causality and time being about connections between things and not about the way we experience them moving in one direction where this thing happens and then the next thing happens.

02:05:03.780 One big disagreement I had with Lee is the way he describes, you know, reality kind of unfolding through time so that there is all of this potential future and it is not part of the description of reality until it happens and time somehow is magically bringing things into being.

02:05:25.880 And I just don't think that's the right way to think about it.

02:05:29.240 But I was trying to imagine what this structure is.

02:05:35.540 I know you don't like that phrasing, but what this structure is, what our experience of time and causality are telling us about the structure and how different is it from our experience.

02:05:46.140 And so I started imagining this web or loom that is kind of the structure of reality and our experience being very limited to, you know, one location isn't quite the right word, but one location at a time.

02:06:04.240 And kind of wherever we are, the rest disappears for us.

02:06:08.200 It doesn't exist for us, even though that structure is clearly there and is the reason why things are the way they are.

02:06:16.340 But I was thinking about causality and thinking that if, you know, if I were on some sort of web that had a structure and I make it very simple, you know, it's like a sort of weaving on a loom where there's a right stitch, right stitch, left stitch, and there's this pattern.

02:06:30.780 But the only thing that exists for me is each individual moment that I have access to.

02:06:37.420 And so it makes sense that it would seem to me that, you know, right stitch, right stitch causes left stitch, right?

02:06:44.480 That those things don't come into being, that one thing being makes the other thing come into being, and that that's kind of a false way of seeing things, but that the structure itself is always there.

02:06:54.180 Yeah, yeah, I think the key to this puzzle here is traces.

02:07:02.000 So we happen to live in a corner of the universe, right?

02:07:07.100 We happen to be here in a corner of the universe.

02:07:08.920 This is just because we're here.

02:07:10.660 I mean, we could be elsewhere.

02:07:11.800 I mean, that's the contingency of, it's specific of reality around us that there is a difference between the set of events that we call the past and the future.

02:07:23.020 And the difference is that in the present, there are many traces of the past events and little traces of future events.

02:07:32.540 It's a contingent fact, I think, of nature.

02:07:35.480 So in your mental game, if you were on this web and you happen to have next to you a lot of pictures, photographs of things far away from you, but on the same side and nothing at all of the other side, you would naturally consider one side a fixed and the other side of open.

02:07:55.720 And I think that's what happened to us.

02:07:57.160 I think so, too.

02:07:58.000 So it's the abundance of traces of the past.

02:08:01.780 And the abundance of traces of the past by itself is not a mental phenomenon.

02:08:06.160 It's a thermodynamical phenomenon.

02:08:08.420 So it is a fact that we only connect with microscopic variables and not microscopic variables.

02:08:15.520 So we describe things in terms of microscopic variables thermodynamically.

02:08:19.200 And microscopically, because we are in an entropy gradient, because entropy would lower the past and higher in the future, this implies that there are traces of the past.

02:08:30.780 Namely, that looking around us, we know the past easily and the future in a more difficult way.

02:08:38.560 So the future looks more mysterious to us, because we don't have information about it.

02:08:45.180 While nature is arranged so that we have a lot of information about the past.

02:08:49.240 And therefore, we consider the past.

02:08:50.580 That's what we mean by the past being fixed and the future being open.

02:08:54.960 That's the meaning of that.

02:08:59.080 So we shouldn't, in my opinion, think of this mysteriously potentially becoming reality.

02:09:06.580 That's confusing, because that doesn't mean anything, in my opinion.

02:09:12.920 We should think that there are events.

02:09:14.760 I think we should think about nature as events.

02:09:18.320 But these events are connected.

02:09:19.880 They're connected to one another probabilistically in such a way that microscopically we have information about the past.

02:09:26.480 Microscopically, we have equal information about the past and the future, right?

02:09:29.360 If we know the microscopic picture state of the world today, the past and the future are exactly the same.

02:09:37.700 There's no difference, most classically and quantum mechanically.

02:09:41.360 Classically, it's uniquely determinate.

02:09:43.240 The quantum mechanics is equally undeterminate, the past and the future.

02:09:49.000 So in this sense, I think this flowing of time ahead is illusory.

02:09:55.020 Yeah, I do too.

02:09:56.580 That's interesting.

02:09:57.380 Okay.

02:09:57.820 So let's see.

02:09:59.340 I was going to have you read this beautiful section from your book.

02:10:02.360 Which one?

02:10:02.920 Page 182.

02:10:04.700 If the world consists of relations.

02:10:07.840 If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it.

02:10:13.960 The descriptions of the world are, in ultimate analysis, all from the inside.

02:10:21.140 They're all in the first person.

02:10:22.680 Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world, our situated

02:10:31.020 self, as Janani Smile Beautiful puts it, is not special.

02:10:35.600 It rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all physics, is based.

02:10:41.700 If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking

02:10:47.820 at it from out there, but there's no outside to the totality of things.

02:10:53.760 The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist.

02:10:58.500 Every description of the world is from inside it.

02:11:01.600 The externally observed world does not exist.

02:11:05.280 What exists are only internal perspectives on the world, which are partial and reflect one another.

02:11:12.280 The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.

02:11:18.700 So this is so wonderful.

02:11:20.300 And this is something I'm going to spend hours and days and weeks and months thinking about,

02:11:26.280 because it's a way of describing something that I already had read about and understood.

02:11:33.140 I don't know.

02:11:33.780 It somehow opens my mind to thinking in new ways.

02:11:37.140 I think that we used to think the world in the following way, that we can make sense of

02:11:42.800 the world, that's what we used to think, by thinking that there are objects, we can sort

02:11:48.560 of break the world apart in objects, right?

02:11:50.500 There's this object, this pen, this computer, this lamp, or this tree, all these things.

02:11:56.180 And each one has properties, okay?

02:11:59.020 So this plane is black, it's here, it's not moving, or whatever.

02:12:02.280 And I think what quantum mechanics is ultimately telling us is that this doesn't work.

02:12:09.500 This doesn't work well.

02:12:10.740 It worked to some approximation, it worked to our microscopic classical picture, but it

02:12:16.120 doesn't work in the details.

02:12:18.920 What the properties of a thing are is the way in which these things affect other things.

02:12:26.920 So therefore, they're those things by themselves.

02:12:29.820 Do you have a sense of what that means without time and without causality?

02:12:34.280 I mean, is there, I mean, it almost seems impossible to talk about, but...

02:12:37.540 Well, because if we think about time and causality, we shouldn't think about, we should not talk

02:12:41.900 about things, we should talk about processes.

02:12:44.400 So I think what a thing is, it's a long sequence of processes, right?

02:12:49.460 Goodman said an object is a monotonous process, the process repeats itself.

02:12:53.700 So something that happens in some location of space or in some time, some other time, that's

02:13:00.520 a process.

02:13:01.500 Or this span during one second is a process.

02:13:05.120 And the way this process affects other processes is everything there is to say about this process.

02:13:12.220 But how can we think about process without time?

02:13:15.340 You think it's just impossible for us to...

02:13:17.040 No, time is just our...

02:13:18.460 What is that?

02:13:19.120 Time is our way when there is a set of processes.

02:13:23.260 But a process...

02:13:23.980 Isn't a process kind of defined by time?

02:13:26.020 Like a process seems to me one thing happening and then another thing happens and another thing

02:13:30.820 happens.

02:13:31.240 No?

02:13:32.460 No, no, no.

02:13:33.260 Okay.

02:13:33.780 Time is the counting of processes.

02:13:35.700 Yeah, okay.

02:13:36.760 One, three, four, five.

02:13:37.780 Processes come before time, not the other way around.

02:13:39.740 Yeah, no, I agree with you.

02:13:41.460 It's just so hard for me to get my mind around to understand what that means.

02:13:44.320 It's not because, look, well, you like experience.

02:13:49.380 Our experience is day, night, day, night, day, night.

02:13:52.280 And then we give a name to that, day one, day two, day three, day four, day five.

02:13:56.420 And then we say, oh, let's give a name to this sequence.

02:13:58.900 Let's call it time.

02:14:00.820 Time is a name we give to a set of processes that are next to one another.

02:14:07.020 So there is no time, just processes.

02:14:09.180 Do you see, I don't want to use the word fixed, but do you see the universe as a stable

02:14:16.860 structure, which kind of just is what it is?

02:14:21.800 Absolutely not.

02:14:22.840 Okay.

02:14:23.160 Because we use stable.

02:14:25.100 Yeah.

02:14:25.540 I know, it's the wrong word.

02:14:27.140 It's not quite what I mean.

02:14:28.180 So what is something stable?

02:14:29.560 This house is stable, meaning last year it was like that, this year it's still like that,

02:14:33.500 next year it's still like that.

02:14:33.620 We're talking about something outside of time.

02:14:35.560 It's a, it's a structure of processes outside of time.

02:14:40.840 Is that right?

02:14:41.700 I think, yeah.

02:14:44.300 I don't even know how to think about structure without space and time.

02:14:47.340 I mean, I completely agree with you.

02:14:48.880 And I do think, I do think this is, is, is right.

02:14:54.200 I mean, I'm completely convinced by your arguments and other people's arguments like you.

02:14:58.900 Strangely, it also matches the experience.

02:15:01.740 I wasn't going to talk much about this, but it's kind of just coming up for me naturally.

02:15:05.640 But there's something very interesting to me about the way all of this matches the insights

02:15:10.620 one tends to have in meditation.

02:15:12.780 I've spent many, many hours and have sat silent meditation retreats.

02:15:16.620 I don't know if you've had any experience in meditation.

02:15:18.680 And, and I don't think it, it necessarily would have to match.

02:15:21.740 I wouldn't be surprised if all my experiences in meditation give me no insight into the way

02:15:26.520 things are at all.

02:15:27.600 I don't think it necessarily should match, but it's very interesting to me that it does.

02:15:33.060 And that it's so close to, when you pay close attention to your moment to moment experience,

02:15:38.240 you know, in these micro moments for hours and days at a time, it just becomes so obvious

02:15:44.760 that our experience is just dynamic to the core, that it is these processes in this way

02:15:51.460 and that there's truly nothing to hold on to.

02:15:54.040 It's hard to even pinpoint what the present moment means when you start paying close attention

02:15:59.680 to it.

02:16:00.140 You know, some, some Buddhist teachers talk about it as the passing moment, which, which

02:16:04.060 is a better, a better way to describe what it is.

02:16:06.760 But there's this really kind of strong insight that nothing is stable or static or isolated.

02:16:16.020 It's such a stark difference from the way we normally go about our daily lives and feel

02:16:21.840 that, that the world is.

02:16:23.180 Okay, so no self, no space, and no time.

02:16:32.180 You're really taking a whole lot away from my world over here, Anika. 1.00

02:16:37.020 Yeah, sorry.

02:16:38.920 But I think that shifting our experience of these things that we tend to take at face value

02:16:44.000 and that we think of as the canvas on which everything else plays out, that we tend to look

02:16:49.400 right past and viewing them with fresh eyes gives us a new, exciting dimension to the deeply

02:16:56.320 mysterious nature of reality and to the mystery of consciousness.

02:17:00.740 And you aren't going to take that away, right?

02:17:03.980 No, I promise.

02:17:04.800 Okay.

02:17:05.360 Consciousness is the one thing I won't take away.

02:17:07.480 Okay.

02:17:08.320 Okay.

02:17:08.960 So let's check in with your timeline as you were preparing your presentation for Philip Goff's

02:17:14.800 consciousness conference.

02:17:16.060 Had you figured out what you wanted to say at this point?

02:17:19.560 Yeah, my thoughts were finally starting to take shape through all these conversations.

02:17:24.120 And I was getting clear about which scientists and philosophers' efforts I thought held the

02:17:29.120 most promise, as well as the questions that seem most important to address regarding consciousness

02:17:35.760 being fundamental.

02:17:37.800 I was also beginning to take note of which theories in the field strongly stem from and rely on the

02:17:45.140 assumption of self and a lack of understanding of its illusory nature in one way or another,

02:17:51.700 making them likely hopeless paths forward for that reason, in my mind.

02:17:56.820 But there were two more people I wanted to have conversations with before I finalized my

02:18:01.200 talk.

02:18:02.040 The first was Donald Hoffman, a scientist working on a theory of consciousness who I had actually

02:18:07.940 been meeting regularly with for years, ever since I reached out to him after seeing his

02:18:13.180 TED talk in 2015 called Do We See Reality As It Is?

02:18:19.060 He was the first person who introduced me to ADS-CFT duality and how it relates to the holographic

02:18:25.280 principle and the work being done by the physicists Juan Maldesena and Nima Arkani-Hamed, who I've

02:18:32.460 mentioned, at the Institute for Advanced Study, which concludes, as Nima often puts it, that

02:18:38.920 space-time is doomed.

02:18:40.840 In space and time, we've had this useful notion of causality, but it's apparently just a useful

02:18:47.580 fiction and not a deep insight into reality.

02:18:51.200 There is a reality beyond, and it may just be consciousness, and interaction with that reality

02:18:57.880 leads to certain experiences that they are triggered by a much more complicated realm that I'm interacting

02:19:05.600 with.

02:19:08.340 You'll hear more of my conversation with Donald Hoffman, as well as my exchange with the physicist

02:19:13.920 and astrobiologist Sarah Amari Walker about her collaborative effort with the chemist Lee

02:19:20.960 Cronin and what is called Assembly Theory, in Chapter 9 of Lights On, Consciousness as Fundamental.

02:19:37.680 Okay, well, I guess there's nothing left to say but congratulations.

02:19:42.640 I'm very happy to see this work finally in the world.

02:19:45.480 You've spent a long time on this, and it's got to feel good to have it finally out there.

02:19:50.100 Yeah, it does.

02:19:51.380 It's great to share it.

02:19:52.320 Yeah, yeah.

02:19:53.260 Well, now people get to enjoy it.

02:19:57.340 I can tell Violet I didn't cry.

02:19:59.320 Yeah, exactly.

02:20:01.860 Yeah.

02:20:02.500 It feels weird to thank you for having me on.

02:20:04.740 No, no, no.

02:20:04.980 Don't do that.

02:20:05.520 No, no.

02:20:06.260 Don't do that.

02:20:07.080 Thank you for marrying me.

02:20:10.140 Maybe that's it.

02:20:11.140 Okay.

02:20:11.540 I can thank you for marrying me.

02:20:13.920 Thank you for marrying me.

02:20:15.140 Yeah.

02:20:15.420 Yeah.

02:20:20.100 Thank you.

02:20:20.980 Thank you.

02:20:21.560 Thank you.

02:20:22.000 Thank you.

02:20:22.740 Thank you.

02:20:33.140 Thank you.

02:20:33.700 Thank you.

02:20:34.720 Thank you.

02:20:34.880 Thank you.

02:20:35.760 Thank you.

02:20:36.280 Thank you.

02:20:36.440 Thank you.

02:20:36.720 Thank you.

02:20:37.160 Thank you.

02:20:37.900 Thank you.

02:20:38.300 Thank you.

02:20:38.420 Thank you.

02:20:38.860 Thank you.

02:20:40.180 Thank you.

02:20:41.800 Thank you.

02:20:42.640 Thank you.

02:20:43.420 Thank you.

02:20:44.860 Thank you.

02:20:45.720 Thank you.

02:20:46.060 Thank you.

02:20:48.640 Thank you.

02:20:48.880 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 25, 2025

#404 — What If Consciousness Is Fundamental？

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