Donald Hoffman, Cognitive Psychologist and Science Author, has proposed a theory of consciousness that challenges your everyday assumptions about what reality is. His argument is that our perceptions of cause and effect and what we experience in the physical world isn’t as real as you’d like to think.
The metaphor of the virtual headset he uses in these conversations with Tom explains why our experiences are limited and there are things like freewill that we never truly experience. If that’s not heavy enough for you, Hoffman bring mathematical equations into the picture to explain that all consciousness is mathematically structured.
This episode is a complete crash course into the world of Donald Hoffman and the illusion of space, time and reality. Some areas you’ll hear explored in this episode include:
Do you think it’s possible life is a simulation and we’re in some version of a virtual reality headset?
QUOTES:
“Everything that I believe about me is very different than I believed when I was five, and so over the years and decades of my life, I’ve put together this story of myself, [...] a self is a story that we weave, it’s a narrative that we give.”
“That’s something about a really good scientific theory, once you write it down you become a student of your theory.”
“The equations become smarter than the genius who wrote them down.”
“You can’t directly experience your own free choices. You can experience that you chose, but you can never actually experience yourself choosing.”
“Mathematics is like the bones of the living conscious experience, they can’t be divorced from each other. There’s more to experience than just math, but there’s not less than math.”
“At the foundation of every scientific theory there’s this moment of humility, explanation stops here.”
“We’re creating reality as we render it.”
“When we have babies, in a way that we don’t understand, we’re opening new portals into the realm of consciousness.”
Follow Donald Hoffman:
Website:http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
Email: ddhoff@uci.edu
Twitter: https://twitter.com/donalddhoffman
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donalddhoffman/
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