Donald Hoffman

If I run out of time before I get my next meal, if it takes too much time to get my next meal, it's over.

If it takes too much time to get my next drink of water, it's over for me.

Time is my most fundamental limited resource.

So that limited resource of time is not an insight into reality.

That's an artifact of projection from a timeless conscious agent dynamics.

And that also suggests all the other limited resources, that's all artifacts.

So evolution with natural selection is a beautiful theory.

But it's the theory of all the artifacts that you see when you do a projection from a realm in which there are no limited resources, there is no competition.

But it looks like evolution by natural selection in this projection.

It looks like there's an arrow of time.

So all of our intuitions right now about learning new stuff, it's going to be very hard for us because our intuitions are deeply shaped right now by our interface where there's an entropy arrow.

And in this realm beyond, there need not be an entropy arrow.

And so wrapping our heads around what it's like to have the notion of exploration where there's no entropy arrow.

Now, I'm not saying I wrap my head around it, but I do know that the mathematics is there, that the Markovian dynamics does not have to have an arrow of time in the sense of an arrow of increasing entropy.

So, and that's, again, one of the points of doing science with precise mathematics.

I get emails quite often from people that I think are very, very bright and have really good ideas.

And they don't know how to take them and make them precise.

And as a result, you can never surprise yourself.

You can never – like Einstein, when he had his idea about – you mentioned the falling elevator and so forth.

And so he had that in 1907 or something like that, 1906.