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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But physics is fundamental, physical stuff is fundamental, and consciousness is a latecomer.

If space-time is doomed, if space-time is not fundamental, that whole story of consciousness is out the window.

That's right.

To put it very simply, I don't have neurons right now.

If you looked inside my skull, you would see neurons.

You would render them.

Right, so neurons do not exist when they're not perceived.

So neurons couldn't create consciousness because they're not even there to do it.

And nor could particles.

By the way, I have all the same knee-jerk emotional reactions that everybody else has to this stuff, even stronger.

So maybe that's why it's good for someone like me to be doing this because my emotions don't believe any of this.

They don't believe it at all.

It's literally only the mathematics pushing me, kicking and screaming at each step.

So you have to go with the mathematics and what the theories are saying.

But I don't find it that intuitive.

Maybe I will at some point, but I don't find it that intuitive.

So, yeah, you could say, you know, we don't need to talk about consciousness.

There's just some dynamical entities outside of space-time.

Why can't consciousness be a part of the simulation?

For all I know, it may be.

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