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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And so I'm proposing that there are these conscious experiences that give rise to space-time as an interface.
And when I write down the most simple mathematical model that I can do for that, all of a sudden that mathematics, I wasn't intending it, but the mathematics points to a single major consciousness that I can never describe.
So that's the sense in which I say it was sort of pointed to that.
And I would guess that
Other conscious agents with either interfaces that are not even like our space-time interface but have mathematical skills and are coming up against the limits of their own interface and starting to realize, oh, I thought this was real but this is just the interface, might, under the hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental, might run into the same thing and then get pointed by their own mathematics to a universal consciousness.
But again, these are deep waters, and I'm not secure here at all.
But I would say that the free will—I mean, I have good discussions like with Annika Harris and so forth about free will.
And free will is a standardly understood—
Probably not.
But free will in this new sense in which I'm saying that there could be a scale-free notion and a new mathematical model of free will that's scale-free, quite possibly there.
And to your point about it's not dictated.
There's exploration, real exploration going on.
I would, again, agree that there's real, to the extent that I'm talking about all these little agents having their genuine free will, there's genuine, real exploration going on, even though it's not contradiction to say as well that the one has the free will.
See, in other words, in some cases, when we think about things, we think it has to be this or that, but when we look at it more closely, we realize that there's a deeper way of thinking about it in which both can be true, and we hadn't thought about it that way.
I would say awareness has no form, but assumes all sorts of conscious forms.
Well, I think that there are countless ways that consciousness can create headsets, and it does them all.
And so one thing that we have to do, to answer your question, and I'm very interested to do this, but it's going to be hard work, is to actually use the Markovian framework of conscious agents and actually write down a dynamical system of conscious agents that constructs our space-time framework, our space-time headsets.
Well, so what we're going to have to do is think about a really large dynamical system
of conscious agents, which will never be close to the big one that we really need to get to.
So we'll always be starting with a system that's big for us, but trivial compared to the one, but that's all we can do as scientists.
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