0:00 Welcome. 0:49 Do you ever get recognized when going outside? 2:17 Do you believe that evaluating natural selection mechanisms on the basis of payoff functions accurately represents how organisms evolve? 13:28 Can you please tell us more about how conscious realism can be tested? 17:19 How does Karl Friston’s active inference fit in with your theory? 20:30 Have you considered the idea that conscious agents are local or non-local distortions of higher-dimensional spacetime with unique frequencies? 26:42 What is the role in your theory of valence, or hedonic tone? 34:36 What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence/consciousness? 45:26 How does the concept of God fit into your theory? 50:54 Evolution has given us not veridical perceptions, meaning time is not veridical. But evolution requires sequentiality, doesn’t that mean that time is veridical? 57:03 How do you think an average person can grasp something outside of time, intuitively? 1:04:34 What underlying reality do celestial object represent, like stars, quasars, and black holes? 1:07:51 What would happen if one never stopped meditating, would one not fully realise one’s enlightenment as Ramana Manarshi? (Would it give you super powers?) 1:21:52 How would you regard NDEs under your model? 1:30:49 Would it be adequate to say that the ground reality changes, evolves or grows? 1:39:19 Why do synchronicities happen in the lives of people, does the interface theory of perceptions or conscious agents have an explanation for that? 1:42:53 What is your take on Thomas Campbell’s theory of everything? 1:48:14 Thank you and good day.
Maybe our floundering to understand consciousness is a bit like a low-tech alien trying to understand what is going on in a TV programme... They can see the physical TV... they can see that it is plugged in... but have no idea of how the 'people' (in the TV series) seem to be manifesting on the screen....
- Can We grasp timelessness? - The Simple Fact is, that We are the Timelessness, the Eternal 'Here and Now', Time can Only exists in the Mind of Living Beings. Our Day-Consciousness is Thinking, thinking is Motion, motion makes Time.
Thank you for asking Hoffman what he thought about Tom. They have more similarities than differences as far as the BIG picture. For whatever reason Hoffman seemed a little put off about talking to Tom.. just a feeling. They are my top 2 in the consciousness realm..Hoffman does have more resources & connections currently..yet Tom was on the virtual reality train & sticking his neck out LOUDLY, when it was still fringe. Can't wait for the talk. Thx again.
54:38 this is very interesting because I had a psychedelic experience that encapsulated what he just described. In this is experience, my consciousness expanded out into infinity and there was no time and I as the human being was this infinite consciousness but only as a certain perspective. When I took on the form of the perspective of the infinite consciousness, it gave me the sensation of space and time when I was take on the formless infinite consciousness, there was no concept of time nor space. I find it intriguing that Dr. Hoffman explained that conceptually in that theorem to help me put into perspective what was happening during my experience.
If Donald makes a future appearance, please ask him if his interface theory of perception can be part of the answer to the Fermi Paradox; or perception evolved on earth. So maybe we are not able to recognise alien life because our interface gives up.
The answer is a qualified "yes;" look for his talk at the Krishnamurti Foundation years ago. ("Qualified" because as a scientist, he takes pains not to commit to anything he doesn't actually have scientific evidence for or against -- but he very much suspects that "extra-terrestrial intelligence" is all around us, here and permeating the whole universe...indeed, he almost speaks along these very lines in this video when he states that planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, and indeed literally every single object in spacetime, are just "portals" to Consciousness....)
There is something that is not religion; something that is not exactly science; something that is powerful. It is this thing that Don Hoffman cries in the Wilderness about. Don Hoffman is a partial metamorphic agent..
Maybe our floundering to understand consciousness is a bit like a low-tech alien trying to understand what is going on in a TV programme... They can see the physical TV... they can see that it is plugged in... but have no idea of how the 'people' (in the TV series) seem to be manifesting on the screen...
Hmmm...this is like my fifth or sixth full Hoffman video and I haven't heard him mention -- or even more shockingly, anyone ask him about -- dreams and sleep!!
Interestingly Donald Hoffman mentions in this interview his upcoming paper which should start connecting the theory of conscious agents with the works of Nima Arkani-Hamed. 1:22:00 On NDE film coming up pretty soon, in which Donald Hoffman said he talks a little bit about NDEs from his point of view. He mentions that the film is by one brilliant New York University Langone Hospital physician. (Did he mean Dr. Sam Parnia? And what is the title of the film, where could the information be found about it? I couldn't find it yet.)
I don't get how Hoffman thinks an NDE could be indicative of Consciousness momentarily "taking off the headset," as he puts it, because what's been reported has all been bery clearly mundane spacetime events -- families, loved ones, Jesus, etc. -- not anything that sounds beyond spacetime at all...!
@@davidchou1675 Interesting question. And by the way, did you notice that at 1:24:05 he says that identity, persons, stories might also be part of headset? I think that it could also possibly be that seemingly experiencing families, loved ones, Jesus and so on are also just the ways that, while an NDE experiencer sees/experiences something possibly completely outside of spacetime, but has no other words/thoughts how to describe/think about what has just happened during that particular NDE.
57:05 I've tried to visualize this question myself and have thought of an analogy I think is easy to grasp (I'm by no means an expert tho). Could we use the analogy of a 'timeline' in video editing software, which contains a video from start to end, but the video is influenced by properties and nodes that exist outside of the timeline? e.g. Applying color grading effects (LUTs), video resolution, codec settings, etc. Also, if I understood correctly, Bernardo Kastrup mentioned another intuitive way to conceptualize 'timelessness' by using the analogy of a database which contains all the records and information about everyone living in a town, saying this information exists independent of time.
The "database" analogy is basically the old Einsteinian "bread loaf universe" model -- which Hoffman has indeed mentioned here. Unfortunately, that's the only way people can conceive of timelessness, as if all history were laid out on a cosmic Blu-ray disc of sorts (cf. Holographic Principle), with consciousness as the laser beam reading everything moment by moment...something still seems missing -- surely if anything it's just as Hoffman and many other meditators have observed; timelessness by definition is beyond description and can only be known through first-hand experience.
I think easiest way for people to see the concept. We know there are many spectrums of light but we only see a few. Imagine the overload if we say everything that is truly around us.
I think that when he talks about pointers he makes the wrongful assumption that the pointers aren't intelligently arrived at. If somebody has tasted a lot of beverages the word beer will give a small idea of the qualia of beer by comparing it with the other words for beverages and their characteristics, In fact he doesn't even need beverages he can arrive at the hidden information by crossing different properties. Of course there will be a lot of overlap and the possibility to misinterpret but words act as structural onomatopoeia of a projection over a subset of the qualia tied to the object by virtue of their interconnected relations and how the variations in the characteristics of the sound try to reproduce some variation within the real world perception of the object in action. In other words if you tell me beer and wine and I never tasted either, if you then give me both to experience not just in drinking but in all their characteristics I will have more than a 50 50 chance of properly associating the word to the object, in most cases, by virtue of knowing the possibilities of the world and how they map in the rest of English. It's like saying if someone tells you it went "boom" you haven't got a clear idea of the qualia but when you hear your first boom you can infer what the word was highlighting, it wasn't a mere pointer but also a descriptor, albeit vulgar. Let us call it the result of natural selection on speech, if your language has correlations within it that reflect experience it becomes easier to internalize and simpler to use and organizes your thoughts in an efficient manner that makes it easier to relate concepts however slightly making words that are merely pointers slowly disappear from the language for words that are pointers with descriptive power. Having a sneak-peek of the object is very useful especially since we learn to speak extensively, if the sound you produce produces a probability of what you are referring to within my field of vision I will have a much quicker time picking up the information than if it acts as a mere pointer and I have to rely on solely contextual evidence to arrive at what you are referring to during the learning process.
I can promise you that meditation without stopping will not result in you taking off the headset. It just results in silence and gaining a relationship with the characteristics of the experience you took for expressions of yourself. It just makes you another part of the experience instead of the experiencer. Anything else you hear is simply an interpretation of how this affects your understanding as you re-adjust your anchors, it is not an insight into the nature of reality, it's just an insight into self-deception. Sure it highlights different perspectives on the nature of reality but they aren't any more valuable than the perspective held by those non-meditating and the bias is self-evident from where I sit on how vainglorious the interpretations they arrive at for the experience are. How people jump into these wild conjectures just because they offer an extensively comprehensible view is depressing. Meditation doesn't give you superpowers other than slightly increasing your ability to trigger and direct what would otherwise be subconscious processes within the body.
Just for the record, Hoffman never claims to know that meditation grants super powers...he simply doesn't rule it out as a scientist but he also did note that the one time he could examine someone claiming such powers due to meditation was a conclusive (for that one experiment) denial of such claims. What Hofman does state here is that meditation may be the closest way to understand timelessness.
@@davidchou1675 Just for the record, if everyone meditated meditation would grant superpowers, I just can't say that it would grant all possible kinds, but certainly some. Since if everyone is part of the experience and no one a strict experiencer that's the natural result.
Possibly -- either in his TED Talk or on Lex Fridman he's speculated that with sufficient understanding, we as a species may one day actually zip around the universe...since spacetime is "just" an illusion!
![[TH] 2024 PMSL SEA W2D2 | Fall | เครื่องร้อน พร้อมลุย](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JO2_bLow_1Y/mqdefault.jpg)
0:00 Welcome.
0:49 Do you ever get recognized when going outside?
2:17 Do you believe that evaluating natural selection mechanisms on the basis of payoff functions accurately represents how organisms evolve?
13:28 Can you please tell us more about how conscious realism can be tested?
17:19 How does Karl Friston’s active inference fit in with your theory?
20:30 Have you considered the idea that conscious agents are local or non-local distortions of higher-dimensional spacetime with unique frequencies?
26:42 What is the role in your theory of valence, or hedonic tone?
34:36 What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence/consciousness?
45:26 How does the concept of God fit into your theory?
50:54 Evolution has given us not veridical perceptions, meaning time is not veridical. But evolution requires sequentiality, doesn’t that mean that time is veridical?
57:03 How do you think an average person can grasp something outside of time, intuitively?
1:04:34 What underlying reality do celestial object represent, like stars, quasars, and black holes?
1:07:51 What would happen if one never stopped meditating, would one not fully realise one’s enlightenment as Ramana Manarshi? (Would it give you super powers?)
1:21:52 How would you regard NDEs under your model?
1:30:49 Would it be adequate to say that the ground reality changes, evolves or grows?
1:39:19 Why do synchronicities happen in the lives of people, does the interface theory of perceptions or conscious agents have an explanation for that?
1:42:53 What is your take on Thomas Campbell’s theory of everything?
1:48:14 Thank you and good day.
I love that Hoffman pauses to think after certain questions, instead of having a ready-made generic answer.
Yes, and those Q & As are usually the most interesting and the most new.
@@GiedriusMisiukas Agreed 😎
Thanks so much for doing this. The Kastrup and Hoffman AMAs have been absolutely brilliant.
Stay tuned.
Maybe our floundering to understand consciousness is a bit like a low-tech alien trying to understand what is going on in a TV programme... They can see the physical TV... they can see that it is plugged in... but have no idea of how the 'people' (in the TV series) seem to be manifesting on the screen....
Thanks for this. Awesome! Donald is always so gracious and kind.
Absolutely! Big thanks to Mr. Hoffman from the audience as well!
- Can We grasp timelessness? -
The Simple Fact is, that We are the Timelessness,
the Eternal 'Here and Now',
Time can Only exists in the Mind of Living Beings.
Our Day-Consciousness is Thinking,
thinking is Motion, motion makes Time.
Thank you for asking Hoffman what he thought about Tom. They have more similarities than differences as far as the BIG picture. For whatever reason Hoffman seemed a little put off about talking to Tom.. just a feeling. They are my top 2 in the consciousness realm..Hoffman does have more resources & connections currently..yet Tom was on the virtual reality train & sticking his neck out LOUDLY, when it was still fringe. Can't wait for the talk. Thx again.
Another amazing AMA 😌⭐️💖
54:38 this is very interesting because I had a psychedelic experience that encapsulated what he just described.
In this is experience, my consciousness expanded out into infinity and there was no time and I as the human being was this infinite consciousness but only as a certain perspective. When I took on the form of the perspective of the infinite consciousness, it gave me the sensation of space and time when I was take on the formless infinite consciousness, there was no concept of time nor space.
I find it intriguing that Dr. Hoffman explained that conceptually in that theorem to help me put into perspective what was happening during my experience.
If Donald makes a future appearance, please ask him if his interface theory of perception can be part of the answer to the Fermi Paradox; or perception evolved on earth. So maybe we are not able to recognise alien life because our interface gives up.
The answer is a qualified "yes;" look for his talk at the Krishnamurti Foundation years ago.
("Qualified" because as a scientist, he takes pains not to commit to anything he doesn't actually have scientific evidence for or against -- but he very much suspects that "extra-terrestrial intelligence" is all around us, here and permeating the whole universe...indeed, he almost speaks along these very lines in this video when he states that planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, and indeed literally every single object in spacetime, are just "portals" to Consciousness....)
Thank you 😊
Thank you, this is super interesting, please keep on 💗💓💟
Another great presentation Don. Look forward to the next.
👀The weekend just got upgraded again!
Hehe, exactly
There is something that is not religion; something that is not exactly science; something that is powerful. It is this thing that Don Hoffman cries in the Wilderness about.
Don Hoffman is a partial metamorphic agent..
Maybe our floundering to understand consciousness is a bit like a low-tech alien trying to understand what is going on in a TV programme... They can see the physical TV... they can see that it is plugged in... but have no idea of how the 'people' (in the TV series) seem to be manifesting on the screen...
Hmmm...this is like my fifth or sixth full Hoffman video and I haven't heard him mention -- or even more shockingly, anyone ask him about -- dreams and sleep!!
Interestingly Donald Hoffman mentions in this interview his upcoming paper which should start connecting the theory of conscious agents with the works of Nima Arkani-Hamed.
1:22:00 On NDE film coming up pretty soon, in which Donald Hoffman said he talks a little bit about NDEs from his point of view. He mentions that the film is by one brilliant New York University Langone Hospital physician. (Did he mean Dr. Sam Parnia? And what is the title of the film, where could the information be found about it? I couldn't find it yet.)
I don't get how Hoffman thinks an NDE could be indicative of Consciousness momentarily "taking off the headset," as he puts it, because what's been reported has all been bery clearly mundane spacetime events -- families, loved ones, Jesus, etc. -- not anything that sounds beyond spacetime at all...!
@@davidchou1675 Interesting question. And by the way, did you notice that at 1:24:05 he says that identity, persons, stories might also be part of headset?
I think that it could also possibly be that seemingly experiencing families, loved ones, Jesus and so on are also just the ways that, while an NDE experiencer sees/experiences something possibly completely outside of spacetime, but has no other words/thoughts how to describe/think about what has just happened during that particular NDE.
Dr. Hoffman is certainly a patient man.
He's said elsewhere that he's been meditating three to five hours daily for twenty years now...!!
57:05 I've tried to visualize this question myself and have thought of an analogy I think is easy to grasp (I'm by no means an expert tho).
Could we use the analogy of a 'timeline' in video editing software, which contains a video from start to end, but the video is influenced by properties and nodes that exist outside of the timeline? e.g. Applying color grading effects (LUTs), video resolution, codec settings, etc. Also, if I understood correctly, Bernardo Kastrup mentioned another intuitive way to conceptualize 'timelessness' by using the analogy of a database which contains all the records and information about everyone living in a town, saying this information exists independent of time.
The "database" analogy is basically the old Einsteinian "bread loaf universe" model -- which Hoffman has indeed mentioned here.
Unfortunately, that's the only way people can conceive of timelessness, as if all history were laid out on a cosmic Blu-ray disc of sorts (cf. Holographic Principle), with consciousness as the laser beam reading everything moment by moment...something still seems missing -- surely if anything it's just as Hoffman and many other meditators have observed; timelessness by definition is beyond description and can only be known through first-hand experience.
I think easiest way for people to see the concept. We know there are many spectrums of light but we only see a few. Imagine the overload if we say everything that is truly around us.
The scientist that Donald forgot the name is Sam Parnia 🙂
I think that when he talks about pointers he makes the wrongful assumption that the pointers aren't intelligently arrived at. If somebody has tasted a lot of beverages the word beer will give a small idea of the qualia of beer by comparing it with the other words for beverages and their characteristics, In fact he doesn't even need beverages he can arrive at the hidden information by crossing different properties. Of course there will be a lot of overlap and the possibility to misinterpret but words act as structural onomatopoeia of a projection over a subset of the qualia tied to the object by virtue of their interconnected relations and how the variations in the characteristics of the sound try to reproduce some variation within the real world perception of the object in action. In other words if you tell me beer and wine and I never tasted either, if you then give me both to experience not just in drinking but in all their characteristics I will have more than a 50 50 chance of properly associating the word to the object, in most cases, by virtue of knowing the possibilities of the world and how they map in the rest of English. It's like saying if someone tells you it went "boom" you haven't got a clear idea of the qualia but when you hear your first boom you can infer what the word was highlighting, it wasn't a mere pointer but also a descriptor, albeit vulgar. Let us call it the result of natural selection on speech, if your language has correlations within it that reflect experience it becomes easier to internalize and simpler to use and organizes your thoughts in an efficient manner that makes it easier to relate concepts however slightly making words that are merely pointers slowly disappear from the language for words that are pointers with descriptive power. Having a sneak-peek of the object is very useful especially since we learn to speak extensively, if the sound you produce produces a probability of what you are referring to within my field of vision I will have a much quicker time picking up the information than if it acts as a mere pointer and I have to rely on solely contextual evidence to arrive at what you are referring to during the learning process.
Brainbow is clearly stuck in a physicalist framework 😀
I can promise you that meditation without stopping will not result in you taking off the headset. It just results in silence and gaining a relationship with the characteristics of the experience you took for expressions of yourself. It just makes you another part of the experience instead of the experiencer. Anything else you hear is simply an interpretation of how this affects your understanding as you re-adjust your anchors, it is not an insight into the nature of reality, it's just an insight into self-deception. Sure it highlights different perspectives on the nature of reality but they aren't any more valuable than the perspective held by those non-meditating and the bias is self-evident from where I sit on how vainglorious the interpretations they arrive at for the experience are. How people jump into these wild conjectures just because they offer an extensively comprehensible view is depressing. Meditation doesn't give you superpowers other than slightly increasing your ability to trigger and direct what would otherwise be subconscious processes within the body.
Just for the record, Hoffman never claims to know that meditation grants super powers...he simply doesn't rule it out as a scientist but he also did note that the one time he could examine someone claiming such powers due to meditation was a conclusive (for that one experiment) denial of such claims.
What Hofman does state here is that meditation may be the closest way to understand timelessness.
@@davidchou1675 Just for the record, if everyone meditated meditation would grant superpowers, I just can't say that it would grant all possible kinds, but certainly some. Since if everyone is part of the experience and no one a strict experiencer that's the natural result.
Good one
It’s a simulation, can it be hacked by the players?
Possibly -- either in his TED Talk or on Lex Fridman he's speculated that with sufficient understanding, we as a species may one day actually zip around the universe...since spacetime is "just" an illusion!
Against mental advice. Against Medical Advice. Anal melancholy annals. Advance morphic aura.
AMA has many hats Swami V