Donald Hoffman

Oh, yeah, I have an idea about space-time, but at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, it's going to fall apart.

Not even an Einstein could guess that.

That would only come through taking your ideas, making them, doing the travail.

I mean, Einstein really, it was a birthing process.

It was very, apparently, very, very hard.

to give birth to general relativity.

And many mathematicians working in physics and so forth say the same thing.

You're working in the dark, it's hard, you're struggling, and then all of a sudden, if you're lucky, you get that breakthrough and you see things.

But then it comes back and you learn the limits of the basic concepts that you started with.

And then you reboot from a new set of assumptions.

That's right.

And we've been shaped basically by our headset to think that way.

And if I ask you to imagine a new color that you've never seen before...

You can't do it.

I mean, again, it's not because there aren't.

I mean, pigeons have four color receptors.

Presumably, pigeons are experiencing colors that no human could even imagine.

And maybe the Manchester shrimp is seeing stuff that the pigeon can't.

You know, and then the birds that see polarization of light.

I mean, they're seeing something that I – what is it like to see polarization of light?