The Emerging Science: “We Are ONE Consciousness” 🌌✨ – Life, Death & The Simulation 🔄💭 | Donald Hoffman

What Mystical Experiences Reveal 🌌

What implications do you feel they have? If you’re a physicalist, these things can’t happen. ❌ As a conscious realist, I can’t rule them out, but I won’t just accept them as real. I believe most experiences are probably confabulations. 🤔

Near-death experiences have systematic elements—the tunnel, light, life review—that seem consistent. 🌈 I need a theory to understand these experiences, especially if space-time is just a headset. 🎮

Until I have a precise theory, we only have informal accounts—a pre-scientific approach. 📚 Throughout history, many beliefs were proven nonsense, although some indigenous insights are profound. 🌊

Life doesn’t end with the body; it’s just shedding the avatar. 🌱 Hoffman’s consciousness may continue as infinite consciousness. ♾️ I think we should “die before you die,” detaching from the ego. 👋

I can’t dismiss near-death experiences, but those who see consciousness as fundamental must provide rigorous scientific accounts. 📈 Let’s strive for high standards in our understanding!

 

What Mystical Experiences Reveal 🤔✨

What implications do you feel these experiences have in those realms? Well, if you’re a physicalist, these things can’t happen. 🚫 If, like me, you’re a conscious realist, I can’t rule them out. Now, as a hard-nosed scientist, I’m not just going to say I can’t rule them out, therefore they are all real. Absolutely not! 🙅‍♂️ I’m going to be firm about what I will not do, but I won’t rule them out a priori. However, I’m more than 100% sure that most of these are probably confabulations. 🤷‍♂️

For example, near-death experiences seem to have systematic elements: the tunnel, the light, the life review, and the decision to come back, which are quite consistent. 🌈 So I wouldn’t rule that out at all. But here’s where I get hard-nosed as a scientist: I want a theory. 🧠 I’m working on it, so we’ll see. If spacetime is just a headset, then what does that mean? My experience of myself is just an avatar, and we have these experiences of an avatar going through a tunnel and seeing a white light. 🌌 I want my theory of conscious agents to show how we create this headset and determine precisely when it ends for a particular avatar.

Until I have a scientifically precise theory of this that can make testable predictions, all we have are informal accounts—hints of a pre-scientific kind of approach. 🧬 What we’ve found throughout human history is that, while great things can happen without science, most of what people believed was nonsense. 🤔 Sometimes, indigenous people have profound insights, but most of the time, there’s plenty of nonsense. 🤷‍♂️

So if I were a physicalist, I’d say it’s all nonsense; nothing to save here—just illusions caused by brain activity. 💭 I’m not saying that at all! I’m saying, in principle, it’s not nonsense, but in practice, probably 99% of the reports are inaccurate. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing deeper that isn’t true. I believe life does not end with the death of the body; it’s just the avatar taking off. 🎭 I think that maybe Hoffman doesn’t exist anymore, but the consciousness behind Hoffman will continue to exist because it’s infinite consciousness. 🌌

I may lose everything attached to the Hoffman ego—all of that must go. Spiritual teachers tell us to “die before you die,” and I think that’s right. If I can die to everything about Hoffman and not care about it, because Hoffman is just an avatar, when it’s time for the avatar to go, goodbye! 👋 It’s just like in a VR game: once I’m not identified with the avatar, when the game is over, I don’t care. That was just my avatar that died; it’s not me.

So, to summarize, I cannot dismiss near-death experiences or similar phenomena out of hand. I believe those who consider consciousness fundamental owe it to everyone to provide rigorous scientific accounts of these experiences and uphold high standards in data collection. 📊 Accepting that consciousness is fundamental doesn’t mean we should accept any hypothesis without scrutiny. We must remain hard-nosed about it because if there’s something real there, we want to understand it. 🔍

Reality of Reincarnation 🔄

I’m curious—if you had to give your best guess about what happens when we die, does consciousness still exist regarding reincarnation? There have been interesting studies about kids who claim to have actual memories of people they’ve never known in this life. 🧒💭 If consciousness leaves and takes another form, how could it possibly happen? I guess memory is stored in consciousness and can take on another avatar.

That’s quite interesting! I was approached by a team of brilliant researchers—one head of the team is a research scientist at Caltech, and most of them are Hindu philosophers. They’re very interested in reincarnation. 🧘‍♂️ I gave a talk at their workshop at the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson back in April, and they learned about the trace logic I mentioned. They realized that this might give them the tools to understand reincarnation. 🔍 So I’ve been collaborating with them, helping them understand the basic logic, although I’m not part of their research team. 🤝

I’ll be very interested to see what they come up with! This trace logic of conscious agents seemed to be the first mathematical framework they’ve seen with the potential to address these questions rigorously. 📈 They’ll be doing big simulations with millions of entries to explore questions like how memories from one life could be stored in the network and then downloaded into another headset. 🤖

Finally, having a rigorous mathematical framework that can be implemented in computers to test these ideas is exciting. 🔬 With science, you can test things, and most of the time, you find out your ideas are wrong. 😅 Without mathematics, you might believe for years that you’re on the right track when you’re deeply mistaken.

You mentioned how our understanding of spacetime and Newtonian physics has led to many technologies we use daily. What do you think could be some practical applications of this new understanding of consciousness, and how might it change our lives? 🌍✨

I think you can’t think big enough about what this could do. Quantum mechanics opened up incredible technologies that are mind-blowing. What fields do you think will be revolutionized? 🚀

Transportation, for example! Right now, there are billions, maybe even trillions, of galaxies out there waiting to be explored. 🌌 The nearest one is more than 2 million light-years away, and even if we travel close to the speed of light, that’s a long time. If you put humans on the spaceship, the great-great-great-great-great-grandkids won’t be alive! 🚀

Going through spacetime to see any real estate is just not possible with our current way of thinking. But what if spacetime is just a headset and you know the code? 💻 Imagine someone who’s a wizard at Grand Theft Auto—they can drive faster than anyone and know the terrain. But if you’re the software engineer who wrote the code, you can do magic to the wizard. 🧙‍♂️

When we understand this theory of conscious agents, we’re starting to learn how the game is rigged. Once we grasp that, I don’t think we’ll have to travel through spacetime to reach the Andromeda Galaxy—we can go around spacetime! 🌌✨

You just can’t think big enough! Once you know the software, you can change the game any way you want. There’s not an area of life that wouldn’t be revolutionized. Think about healing—if you understand how the projection of our selves works together, what might have taken decades to heal physiologically could suddenly cease to exist because you’re working with dynamics outside of the headset. 🩺💫

I think medicine will see remarkable revolutions. The 86 billion neurons and roughly the same number of glial cells make the brain incredibly complicated, but we’ll go beyond that to understand even more complex software outside of it. We might be able to rewire the brain outside of spacetime and understand systems in the body at a much deeper level. 🧬💊

What do you think it will take for brilliant physicists out there to pivot their intelligence to explore realities beyond spacetime? 🚀

The Universe Plus Project, funded by the European Research Council, already has over 100 scientists doing that! 🧑‍🔬 They’re looking for new positive geometries beyond spacetime. That’s different from looking for consciousness, but my hope is to recruit someone for my team. 🤞

I have funding for two postdocs, specifically someone with a recent PhD in algebraic geometry or high-energy theoretical physics. We’re aiming to create a proof of concept in a paper showing how we can start with conscious agents and predict scattering of gluons in spacetime. 🔬

If we can make predictions that hold true inside spacetime from a dynamical system of conscious agents, we won’t have trouble getting people interested. They might dismiss the consciousness aspect, but if we have a Markovian dynamics outside of spacetime, they’ll be good with that. 🤝

This won’t be proof of consciousness being fundamental, but it could indicate that a Markovian dynamical system outside of spacetime is an important next step in science. 🚀

God & Understanding Something Greater ✨🙏

As these new innovations and discoveries come on board, I’m curious to see what happens with religious fundamentalists and people’s understanding of perceptions of God. Would you say that the closest thing approximating the term “God” would be the collective consciousness of all that is? 🌌

I would say that the word “God” and phrases like “collective unconsciousness” or “collective consciousness” are pointers to something that transcends and isn’t even a “thing.” 🌀 Even saying “the thing itself” is already a mistake! The deepest rigorous thing I’ve seen so far is this trace logic in the space of conscious agents. But having said that, it’s just a baby step compared to the reality itself. 🌠

We can go infinitely beyond what my team has done with this trace logic. Even if we go infinitely beyond it for a trillion years, we’ll still be 0% of the way toward understanding what you already are completely because it’s infinite. 🌌

That perspective puts the light of dogmatism in context. Dogmatism really misses the point: what you can say about it is never

🤖 Will AI Become Conscious?
🤔 Will AI become conscious? That’s a great question! Most people think creating conscious AI starts with physical circuits and software. If we get the right complexity, unconscious systems may give rise to conscious experiences. 🧠✨

However, I see it differently. Neurons and circuits don’t exist without perception; they only exist as ideas in our minds. So, let’s rethink the question. 🧩

In my view, there are portals to consciousness. One is what I call the “André body,” a way to access consciousness. A low-tech way we know of to create new portals is by having kids! 👶🔑

If we reverse engineer how new headsets of consciousness are created, we might find ways to open new portals technologically, perhaps even through AI. 🤖💡

But remember, consciousness is fundamental! What looks like technology is just an interface that exists when perceived. Only conscious agents are there, not the hardware and software when we aren’t looking. 🌌✨

In summary, the answer to whether AI can become conscious is complex. Instead of seeing it as a creation of consciousness, we must recognize that we’re rearranging conscious agents! 🧠🔄

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