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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The School of Greatness · The Math Says You've Never Seen Reality | Donald Hoffman · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

So neuroscience is very, very important, and we should study it.

But brains don't exist when they're not perceived, and they cause none of our behavior.

It's our consciousness plunging itself into a particular avatar and choosing to have that perspective on things.

So that's what's really going on is a consciousness is choosing to limit itself in certain ways, give itself certain obstacle courses with a certain kind of headset and play the game.

Well, I'm good friends and certainly colleagues with most of the people who are doing this research.

And I should say first that they're brilliant and they're hardworking.

And I know many of them personally, and they're good friends.

Most of them are physicalists, so they assume that space and time is fundamental, that neural activity or some kind of computational processes or functional architectures are the foundation, and consciousness emerges either from neural activity or certain functional properties of physical systems.

That, I would say, is 95% to 99% of the ideas that are out there right now.

And again, these are my friends and they're brilliant.

And their work is very, very good.

That being said, what is consciousness?

Well, consciousness that at a minimum is trillions of experiences.

The taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic, feeling pain, heat.

There's trillions of human specific conscious experiences.

And so now, as a scientist, I have to be hard-nosed.

I have to say, okay, so you want to start with physical systems, functional properties of physical systems.

So among them are, for example, the...

quantum microtubules, quantum states of microtubules in the brain, the orchestrated collapse of those in certain theories by Penrose and Hameroff.

There are theories of integrated information theory, Tononi and Co., and others.

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