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
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.
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.
Showing 1961–1980 of 2,139 · page 99 of 107
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