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
when there's an inability to communicate. And this is true with human beings as well. So in the case of someone who's experiencing locked in syndrome, which can happen from damage to the brain, either by stroke or an injury, that leaves the patient completely paralyzed, but their consciousness is still fully intact.
And so that's a situation that puts us closer to where we are in terms of looking at other organisms, other life forms, and not being able to know whether there's consciousness presence. If someone in a locked-in state looks like they're completely unconscious, they're totally paralyzed, they can't move.
Yet we now know based on some interesting stories we can talk about if you want, that many of these patients are actually having a full conscious experience. They can see everything in the room. They can hear everything in the room. They have thoughts. They're having as full a conscious experience as you and I are having right now with no ability to communicate.
Yeah, so the second question is related and very similar, but it kind of gets at this intuition from a different angle. The second question is, is consciousness doing something? It's about the causality of consciousness. Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Is it informing our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Our intuitive answer to this is a resounding yes.
Also to the first question, both of our, we feel very strongly that the answer is yes to both of these questions I pose. And what's interesting is to start to shake up your intuitions and realize that we don't have great evidence for answering yes to either. And the answer may be yes to one or both, but it's surprising to dig a little deeper and realize we actually just don't know.
So we feel very strongly that you know, my experience of anger, my experience of fear, even my experience of thinking through my day and my planning, that I couldn't really do any of those things without the internal felt experience. I couldn't do those things without consciousness.
If I said, you know, I woke up this morning and spent an hour prepping for this interview, but I was unconscious the whole time. It doesn't really make sense to us. So we have this intuition that, Consciousness is causal that it's doing something, but there are ways to kind of break through that intuition and get you to question whether that's the case.
Oh, that's an interesting question.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of different ways I could answer that, but I've never been asked that specific question. It's a great question. I will, I'll say a few things.
One is that I think when we are able to drop these illusions of self and separation, for some reason, it seems to lend itself, well, not for some reason, for an understandable reason, it lends itself to feelings of compassion and love, I would put in that same category. And I think that is kind of this recognition of
being a part of something bigger than yourself, but that is also you, that it is all one thing. And so I think the natural inclination to love your family, love your children, I think that starts extending further and further. I think that's just a natural outcome of being in that state of mind.
But I also do wonder, and this is one thing that I asked a few of my guests for my documentary series about, if consciousness is fundamental, is there kind of a set list and maybe it's an infinite list of qualia of specific felt experiences? Because I do think, and this is an insight in meditation that many people have had before me, but that I've also experienced.
I actually talked to Joseph Goldstein in my series about this.
Yes. Yeah. He's very, very clear. In my conversation with Joseph and in my meditation experiences, having a sense that there are certain qualia, there are certain experiences that can't be broken down any further. And actually seeing a color is a good example of that. Yeah.
Often people have the experience also in meditation, this is another thing I've spoken to Joseph about, that when you get very concentrated and you're able to really be in each present moment, there's a realization that we're not actually seeing and feeling and hearing all in the same moment, that there's this kind of weaving that happens through memory and through the brain that gives the illusion that all of those things happen at the same time, but when you're really
concentrated and you're really going moment to moment, you see that all these things kind of fluctuate. You hear the sound of the bird, you see your notebook, and you're never really in one moment hearing the sound of the bird and seeing your notebook at the same time. There's this fluctuating. And so this question keeps coming up for me. Are there
specific qualia that, you know, the universe is made of. And in some sense, they're universal. Obviously, you know, the human mind doesn't experience them all. But could we actually just, you know, make a list of all the experiences that have ever happened and will ever happen in the history of the universe? And love seems to me to be one of those things.
qualities that can't be broken down further. I mean, it can kind of blow up into a complex. You can have many thoughts about it and ideas and beliefs and it can get very complicated, but I think at its core and, you know, I'm not an expert and it'd be a good question for Joseph actually, but where compassion and love
where those intersect, if they are, when they're in the purest form, are we actually talking about the same thing? But that type of pure emotion, if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect that to be kind of one of the ones that isn't broken down.
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