Donald Hoffman: Reality Does NOT Exist!

37 thoughts on “Donald Hoffman: Reality Does NOT Exist!”

1. What was your favorite takeaway from this conversation? Please join my mailing list to get FREE notes & resources from this show! Click 👉 http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php

2. The utility, necessity, or inevitability of illusion as a force for survival was noted by Nietzsche. One risk to survival, then, is the acquisition of new illusions, through the innovation of an energetic society, on grounds other than its survival — from religion, philosophy, morality, values, art, etc — which are strongly held but counter to survival, ending the society.

3. The sensory systems will not EVER reveal true structures of that objective reality. Instead they will give you sensory systems that serve only as guides to adaptive behavior. So the whole point is not to see the truth. The whole point is to stay alive long enough to reproduce. That's the structure of evolutionary theory. Once you understand that sensory systems are not windows on the truth they are merely the adaptive behavior then you say a metaphor to think for us.

4. Yeah everyone go to Amazon and buy the book, don't go to your local book dealers website. God knows Amazon needs all the business they can get because they only control 75% of everything sold on the planet. Jeff Bezos is working on getting more solid gold Yachts that he can park in his other yachts while he takes his helicopter to child porn Island… But thanks for having Hoffman on The Show

5. So when I die is that reality?

6. Yaaaaaaaay cat videos Mind you I’ve actually watched more consciousness & physics videos 😂😂

7. I was wondering what happened to Carson Daily 😕

8. How's Eric? The math for this is done. Donald, I'm not rendering a good portent.

9. Hoffman is committing what in logic is called the Fallacy of Composition. A reductionist explanation of X doesn't mean, "X is an illusion." Instead it means, "Oh, I get it, that's how X works."

10. Ah. The other meaning of life. 4XF.

11. "Gotta get some women in there" cause you don't want to get any shit for not including them. That's the reality… if we're going to be talking about what's "real" lol

12. "As for you, Daniel, keep the words secret, and seal up the book until the time of the end.
    the book will be examined thoroughly." (Daniel 12:4)(this message is repeated 4 times! Dan.8: 17, 26; 12:4,9) Must be very important.
    Search for the book: "What Can the Bible Teach Us?" The Creator, Whose name is Jehovah, is exposing reality to those with a receptive heart and mind.

13. Whats up with the sudden background music?

14. A conversation with both Hoffman and Nima would be absolutely amazing

15. It is interesting to me how people accept the most absurd idea of brains, complex visual systems, etc, that can form by random chance. This is why I encourage people to study chemistry to understand why such thing is not just improbable but completely impossible – not in this universe, not with these laws.

16. The first caller gives up realism. But one can say little to none (that is interesting) when they give up realism. (They move out of physics and into metaphysics or linguistics.)

    One way to address the caller's point is to explain the idea of an approximation error, a concept that a science popularizer may overlook, (taking it for grated).

    Namely, no one claims to describe reality. Theoreticians construct and investigate models. Experimentalists test how well these models approximate reality. They calculate the maximal error in their measurements. This is as good as it gets.

17. Dear Dr. Keating,

    You post engaging content. Much of it is lovely.

    Allow me to suggest that the "music" you montage over your guests is distracting. I find it very annoying.
    No offense, please, consider refraining all together or at least consider muffling the Jean-Michel Jarre, Sci-Fi, psychedelic, magical frequency noises.
    Likely, other people also feel that this depreciates rather than that it enhances your videos.
    Anyway, I can easely tune out the video effects, but there's no way to ignore the noise (sometimes louder than the underlying speech).

18. Hi Brian, thank you for these amazing interviews, this is really a treasure and you are doing a fantastic job. However, here is some subjective feedback which in my personal opinion would improve the quality of your conversations even more: 1. The music you are bringing in temporarily is somewhat distracting, I don't think that it benefits the talk 2. You as an interviewer also seem to be distracted here and there during the talk by whatever there appears on your screen, it has some slight disrespect to the person you are interviewing – even though I know that this is never your intention. So, no offense, just some – hopefully – useful feedback. Keep on doing your great work!

19. We really only perceive shadows of shadows, as in the allegory of the cave. Arthur Eddington was right that we should strive to deduce the universe, even under cloudy skies. So must therefore hurry up, and fix whatever flaws we can find in our methods in logic and reason.

20. Well I suppose whether or not it is, we should proceed as if it is. What other option would there be? Unless you could escape and get to the real reality, but I guess that's not an option at this point.

21. Perception is reality. I believe it was Max Planck who said consciousness is fundamental.

22. Wow man, this celatone invention of Galileo was amazing , honestly I didn't know about that . Really wonderful man he was ! Thank you Dr. Keating

23. Recently discovered your podcast and have been devouring episodes.
    Its excellent bar one thing…. The distracting music played somewhat randomly while conversation is going on. 🤔

24. Amazing guests Brian. I would be really interested to see you interview Hans Moravec. There is barely an interview by him online, and he is by far one of the last centuries most original thinkers when it comes to Artificial Intelligence. He has two books, "Mind Children", and "Robot: Mere Machine to transcendent Mind". He was originally trained as a mathematician.

    Best,

    Ben

25. Gonna read his book. I've watched several Hoffman interviews. Interesting thesis.

26. thanks for the amazingly stimulating philosophical talk, I'm sooo hungry for all things consciousness. Keep up the great work Dr Brian!

27. Aha, so, that's basically about virtuality of our subjective realities.

28. This is an excellent line of inquiry. I detect an error, though:
    P: consciousness may exist in a waveform collapse on microtubules.
    H: how does that make the smell of vanilla?
    P: we don't know yet.
    H: so your theory is incorrect.

    The best we can say is it's not proved, not that it's falsified. The same goes for any scientific revolution – the building blocks are studied and a grand theory is built up using observation and hypothesis testing.

    Finding vanilla is likely 20 years out, optimistically, for any of the current models. That doesn't falsify all the current models any more than the Standard Model was falsified before finding the Higgs Boson.

29. If machines were conscious they would evolve without humans creating them or programming them to learn on their own. Without us machines wouldn’t exist. We are organic matter, which is why we are able to experience being human as a spiritual conscious being.

30. Machines can’t be conscious. Our brain is a machine, but we are conscious aside from our brain. We use our brain as conscious beings to experience the material world.

31. Consciousness is not material but creates material. It is multidimensional. We are multidimensional spiritual beings experience being human in a conscious form. All things are consciousness, we are just the highest level of consciousness on this plane and 3D existence.

32. PODCAST RSS Feed seems broken last couple of weeks?

33. Excellent talk. I have his book you mentioned on my to-read list.

34. I like how you are playing with the production. It never distracted in a bad way… at least for me.

35. When you pan for gold in Nunavut, you find reality.

36. I enjoyed the conversation. Overall this is becoming one of my favorite podcasts for its delicate balance of science, philosophy and spirituality. I’m myself trying to get a better grasp of physics after having graduated with a mathematics degree. Would be great to see more content that can speak to someone like me who doesn’t like dumbed down explanations / isn’t afraid of maths but doesn’t speak physics jargon natively. Thanks Dr. Keating!

37. Amplituhedron!!! Yes! Can’t wait to hear you poll Nima for speculation.

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