this podcast was almost 3 hours long and absolutely blew my mind. so many fascinating insights, so many points of confusion, so many new topics I want to learn about and knew nothing about beforehand. I feel like my mind has exploded.
common intuition: natural selection favors organisms that see some form of the truth.
the point of a user interface is to completely hide reality and give a very simplified view.
so in reality, natural selection may favor organisms that hide pretty much all of reality and just show payoffs. the objects in our reality are merely data structures that represent fitness payoffs.
this conclusion applies only to sensory experience, not to math and logic. what exactly is it about mathematical and logical reasoning that makes it separate somehow from the interface theory?
epistemological skepticism: the belief that knowledge about the external world is impossible to obtain.
growing block universe theory!!?
Carlo Rovelli — The Order of Time.
we will never have a theory of everything: any theory will have certain assumptions (or primitives, or "miracles") that the theory itself cannot explain.
pan-psychism?
our traditional approach towards the hard problem of consciousness is to take non-conscious physical matter and try to understand how consciousness can be created from it; Hoffman proposes an alternative approach of considering consciousness as fundamental and seeing how the universe would arise from that. in particular, he points out that all of our science up to this point has been focused on the interface to objective reality, and points out that maybe we could come up with a more generalized theory of consciousness that can then be projected into the particular interface we have to form our traditional scientific theories (natural selection, string theory, etc.)
the combination problem in panpsychism: how the sub-pieces of a system (e.g. neurons) can each have their own separate consciousness while the system as a whole (the brain) also has a consciousness.
is consciousness fundamental to the universe?
objective chance: probability that arises not out of a lack of knowledge, but that arises from a fundamentally unknowable quantity. contrasts with the many worlds interpretation. Hoffman describes a "measure problem" in multiverse theory. objective chance → novelty, explanation stops, darkness, complete randomness. a source of novelty in the universe that we can't explain with any amount of knowledge. contrasts with non-computability.
Hoffman creates a mathematical formulation where the decision process cannot possibly be in the field of consciousness. (this maps to the empirical fact that as conscious beings, we cannot observe the process by which our thoughts and intentions arise, we can only be aware of the thoughts and intentions after they have spontaneously arisen.) Hoffman's fundamental structure is a set of conscious experiences and a mapping that determines influences on conscious experiences. the mapping itself is outside the set of experiences.
Hoffman calls his approach "conscious realism". death as stepping out of one interface and into another.
psychophysics studies how consciousness may have a very mathematical structure. Hoffman hypothesizes math being the structure or the bones of consciousness, with Godel's incompleteness theorem showing that there may be an infinite realm of conscious experiences.
how psychedelics may invoke a modification of the interface we have with reality. 5-MeO-DMT in particular.