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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up on StarTalk Special Edition, is reality real? Do you want it to be? I'm going to say no, because then I do not owe anything to Visa.
Coming up, what neuroscience says about the nature of reality. StarTalk Special Edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Today, we're going to be exploring the nature of reality. Really? Really? Reality.
Chapter 2: What does neuroscience say about the nature of reality?
We got Gary O'Reilly. Gary, right to my right. Former soccer pro. I know. Announcer. Yep. And my co-host. And we got actor, comedian, Chuck Nice. Yes. How you doing, man? Oh, the Lord of Nice. The Lord of Nice. Wow. Well, okay. Yeah. I like that. Deal with it. So set the picture here. What do you put together?
In theoretical physics, they often ask questions about the nature of reality. But what about looking at reality from the neuroscience lens? Today, we're going to talk about the limits to our perception, the role of consciousness, and the nature of reality itself. Yes, Neil, time to bring in our guest. This one's going to go deep, so I'm looking forward to it.
All right, let's see where it takes us. We've got Professor Donald Hoffman. Donald, welcome to StarTalk.
Thank you very much, Neil. Good to be with all of you.
Yeah, you're Professor Emeritus. You're not that old. In the Department of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine, right there in Irvine, California. You're obviously a cognitive neuroscience scientist and an author. I have most recently here, and if you have another book, let me know, The Case Against Reality. Nice. Shots fired. Let me tell you, I'm an expert in that. Shots fired.
How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Love it. I love it. All right. So what are you saying? We don't really see the full picture? I mean, I agree with you. Who would disagree with that? But you're bringing in evolution to blame for this. So can you catch us up on what you mean by that?
That's right. So the standard view is that evolution shapes organisms to be fit. And surely, to be fit, we should see the world pretty accurately, right? You want to see a cliff. If there's a cliff and not fall off, you want to see what is a mate and so forth.
Just to be clear, when you say fit, you don't mean like in a fitness center. Right, right. It's not a crunch gym thing. It's not a crunch. Right. Please remind us what evolutionarily what the word fit means.
That's right. So in Darwin's theory, fitness really means the chance that you're going to have offspring successfully. So fitness is really one thing. What's the probability that you will survive long enough to raise your offspring successfully? That's what it is.
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Chapter 3: How does evolution influence our perception of reality?
If you're going to assign a zero to it, I want to know what it is you just zeroed out.
Wow. So, yeah, because, I mean, mathematically, reality would have to have a value if it equals zero.
If at some point you're going to give it a zero. Right. And it seems to me the teeth on that line is pretty reality looking. Right. The cliff ledge.
feels pretty real to me. The interesting thing about the mathematics is you don't have to specify what reality is for the mathematics to still give you the theorem. So whatever, so I don't have to assume what reality is. I can just look at the structure of evolutionary theory and say, suppose there is some reality out there and there are these so-called fitness payoff functions.
So Darwin talks about payoffs and the payoffs really are effectively, if I have an organism like a lion, in a particular state, like it's hungry, and has some actions to take, and one of them might be eating a leopard or eating an antelope, something like that. Or eating you. Or eating you, then for that lion, that's a very good payoff, right?
But if it's looking to eat and it tries for a rock, it's going to have a very poor payoff. And so you can have these abstract payoff functions. And so we don't have to know what reality is. We can just look at the property of these payoff functions. And we can ask, whatever reality is, what's the probability that a payoff function would tell you about that reality?
Okay. I still don't know what you're talking about. So I don't mind representing these forces that operate on your fitness, on your survival. I have no problems abstracting those to mathematical elements. But I need you to tell me that the lion that is chasing me isn't real. And you're not saying that. Oh, I'm going to get there.
Oh, damn. That is the lion. That's the lion. Get to me before the lion does. Well, then let me just dovetail that real quick. Is it possible then that the probabilities don't mean anything? If the fact that they come out to zero, but yet the lion can still eat you. And I mean, that's pretty real to you.
I mean, is it very possible that although the probability, you know, equates to zero, that maybe that's a particular probability that has no value to us?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of mathematical models in understanding reality?
No, he went total quantum. Neural quantum string theory.
He went off the quantum ledge on that. He did. That's right. So the idea is that if it's a VR headset kind of thing, what you see is what you render on the fly. So if you're in a game like Grand Theft Auto and you see a red Corvette off to your right, Well, there is no red Corvette in reality because the supercomputer has no red Corvette in it.
So the red Corvette that I'm seeing is there when I look and render it, and when I look the other direction, it's gone. So the Corvette only exists as I perceive it. Now, if I'm a multiplayer game and someone else is looking at a red Corvette, When I'm not, they're seeing their red Corvette. They're not seeing the one that I saw. They're not seeing yours.
You just described a game of adult peekaboo.
That's funny. Explain to me, because I've never played Grand Theft Auto, does it render only the direction you're looking in to save CPU?
That's right. That's the typical of games.
So it knows which way you're looking. Right. Okay.
Because it doesn't make sense if you're not looking at it for it to be rendering because you can't see it anyway.
This has been the major argument in simulation theory where why would the programmer waste computer power simulating things that no one is conscious of? That makes sense. Just make it exist when you get there. So, for example, if you dig into the Earth, it only has to make the layers of the Earth when you get there.
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Chapter 5: How do different organisms perceive reality differently?
So I think that we have to just think very, very clearly about what does it mean to observe? And we need to get it to its bare essence, no extra bells and whistles. What is the absolute minimum essential for observation? We need to understand that mathematically. And then we have to ask, can we start with that and that alone to build up all of modern physics. So it's a new foundation.
We don't start with space-time because we now know that space-time is doomed. That cannot be fundamental. It stops at the Planck scale. So what are the new foundations going to be? I think that Leibniz was right. Leibniz said we need to start with observation. He called them monads.
And he said there had to be these monads that were somehow interacting and had some kind of mathematical pre-established harmony.
Leibniz was a mathematical philosopher, all credited with co-inventing calculus. And there was some dispute between him and, of course, my boy, Isaac Newton. But their discoveries are completely independent in the sense that They represent the calculus very differently with their symbology. In physics, we use a lot of Newtonian representation, but in math, it's all Leibniz's notations.
So the integral sign comes from him.
You mentioned the OGs of physics there. Are we likely, through your research, to find that there are slightly different laws of physics in a way that we weren't aware of?
Oh, I think not just slightly. I think that we will find that our headset is one of the more trivial headsets and that other headsets have much more interesting physics.
But I want to set it straight here. The history of physics is not where, the history of physics since Galileo is not where, oh, we all believe this and then later on that's all wrong and we believe something else. That's not how it happens. We only believe something is true if it's been experimentally verified. Then we find out there's a deeper truth. get right in your belly wick here.
There's a deeper truth in which that's embedded, and that's just a special case. Yeah, you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Not at all, and then there's an even deeper truth. So I don't have any hesitation thinking that my lame-ass 3D candy-ass headset is legit in its world, but it's a subset of a much larger truth.
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Chapter 6: What role do psychedelics play in altering perception?
Hey, man, stop doing my job.
I'm allowed two jokes per episode. Okay. All right, go ahead. The background that I have in neuroscience and evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory has made me of interest to various companies because they asked me to help them with their marketing and advertising and product design because I know the rules of the game. And so... I'll give you a concrete, there's lots of examples.
I'll just say a top level. We know how to manipulate your attention to make you want things that you don't even know that we're doing. So the answer is yes. Once you know the rules of the game, you can play them and companies pay me to do that. It's out there. I'll just give you a fun one though, but there are many. Genes. denim jeans. Your visual system has rules for how you create 3D objects.
How do you create 3D shapes? So this is all part of the headset software. And shading gradients and lines and so forth are used by the visual system to create 3D shapes. When you put on jeans and they have distress, they're trying to make them look distressed and so forth, and they have stitching, you are telling a 3D story about the body of the person who's wearing those jeans.
The only question is, do you, as the clothing manufacturer, understand what story you're telling, and is it the story that you want to tell? Are you giving the person pancake butt when you didn't want to do that, or are you making them look good? So I went to these jeans companies. Well, they came to me, actually. And so I showed them.
I said, look, you're creating pancake butt, but here's how you can change the distress so that all of a sudden you can make any shape rear end that you want. And I remember the CEO of one company, when I was giving the presentation, I won't mention the company, he jumped out of his chair, ran up to the slide screen that I was showing how I did this, and he said,
Our jeans make my butt look terrible. And so they bought it. And I showed them how to do it. And they then went and made the stitching on their jeans different and the distress different. And you can make any shape that you want once you know how to do it. So this stuff is being used. Once you know the rules of the headset, you can play the game and no one knows that you're doing it.
It's funny because the same thing happens similarly in nature. The reason why zebras have stripes is because they herd, and when they are being hunted and they run, all the stripes visually confuse the lion. Yeah. Absolutely. Most of the time. Most of the time.
I've seen a whole lot of zebra legs up. Yeah.
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