Donald Hoffman
speaker
2,139 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Donald Hoffman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And how we should interpret it, we should be very careful.
That's right.
It's quite fascinating.
Again, this is exactly the right scientific way to think about it.
This is data, maybe.
If it is data, what does it entail about...
letting go of the headset and what kind of experience we might have afterwards.
And is that just a transitional thing or is it more permanent and so forth?
Well, yeah, so I do post on Twitter.
My handle is at Donald D. Hoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-N, all one word lowercase.
And every time I publish a paper, I put a link to the actual journal article.
And then also talks like this, podcasts, anything that comes up, I will post those.
So there, you can also...
If you're a scientist, of course, you can just go to Google Scholar and type in my name.
If you just dolly hop on Google Scholar, you can get directly to roughly 120 publications.
Oh, that's an interesting question. I'll say a few things.
So people use the word consciousness in a variety of ways, but often people think of more complex thought, self-awareness, things that are more specific to human beings. But what I mean when I use the word and what I'm interested in and what I think is so mysterious and what's so difficult for scientists to study is, is something much more fundamental.
So consciousness in the most basic sense, which I usually like to just call felt experience. I think that's the best way of getting at what it is that I'm talking about. So if a B has some minimal level of consciousness. If a worm has some minimal level of consciousness and neuroscientists do not have a consensus on these things yet.
We think it's likely that they have some conscious experience because they have brains and central nervous systems. But if they do, it's a very minimal experience. You know, something like a worm or a slug might just feel pressure against their skin. Maybe some internal kind of desire, like we have a feeling of hunger or something like that when they need to go towards food.
Maybe some minimal element of fear or even just an impulse to move away from something dangerous or something that wouldn't be good. Good for their system. And so when I use the word consciousness in this context and talking about the mystery of consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in its most basic form, simply the fact of felt experience.
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