Donald Hoffman

And it wasn't – he worked for years to take that idea and make it mathematically precise, 1915.

And he learned tons and tons of what at the time was state-of-the-art, fairly new math.

It was hard for him, sleepless nights, pulling his hair out, really working hard to take his good intuition.

So he finally wrote down in mathematics in 1915.

And a year later, a guy named Schwarzschild wrote back to Einstein and said, here's a solution to your equations.

And they predict what we now call black holes.

Now, Einstein didn't.

Foresee that?

He didn't like it.

He didn't believe it.

He disbelieved in black holes.

He wanted to get rid of them.

So Einstein's theory came back and surprised him.

And that's why it's so important for us to do science, because what we do is we take our best ideas that we have right now, and then we make them mathematically precise, and then the mathematics comes back and it slaps us in the face and says, here are the implications of the ideas that you started with.

implications that you simply couldn't think deeply enough about on your own, but the mathematics can take you where your own, you know, just consciousness wouldn't necessarily go.

And so here's one of those directions with this notion of conscious agents.

The dynamics need not have increasing entropy.

And so our whole intuition about an arrow of time need not hold in this realm.

So when we talk about the notion of explore, consciousness exploring for the joy of it,

We're going to have to rejig how we think about the notion of – for us, exploration is something that happens in an arrow of time.