Conversation between Donald Hoffman and Richard Watson, #2

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[00:00] Michael Levin: One thing, Don, I was listening to a conversation you had with somebody else, and you were talking about realism and the moon, and this idea that the whole interface theory, and this idea of what's happening to the moon when we're not looking at it, it not being rendered. I'm interested in you talking about what, on your model, it means that the next appearance—say the moon goes behind some occlusion, and then the next place you're going to see it is, you can actually guess where it's going to come out next with a model that assumes that it actually does exist and it's tracing out a particular path. There's some explanatory value that you get from a model that thinks that even when you're not looking at it, it's doing a set of steps that will lead it to be where, when you do look at it, it's going to be. I was curious about hearing you talk about that, and then Richard's side on his take on the realism of it and what the delta is between what we do see and what's actually going on behind the scenes.

[01:08] Donald Hoffman: That's a great question, Mike, and I get it all the time in emails. Usually with a gotcha attitude: "clearly you haven't thought about this one." It's actually quite easy. As long as you think about virtual reality in a VR multiplayer game, you'll get the right answer. Instead of the moon, let's talk about: I'm doing Grand Theft Auto virtual reality with a bunch of people and I see a red Ferrari. In this example, the reality I'll assume is some supercomputer, just for the sake of argument. If you looked inside that supercomputer, you would never find a red Ferrari. There's only a Ferrari when you render it. However, there's something going on in the supercomputer that's not a red Ferrari. Because what's going on in there is lawful, I can use Newtonian physics intuitions to guess where the red Ferrari is going to be next based on the speed I saw and the direction it was going. I can predict. In other words, we can use all of our space-time intuitions as we should to predict where things are, and none of that affects the realism claim. We're so used to thinking that way that we miss the logical leap that we're making. Just because it's a useful way to do things doesn't mean it's true. The VR game really brings that home. My guess is that these questions are going to go away in less than a generation. I'll bring up one thing I've heard you talk about before and I think is interesting as well. It's along the same lines of what's real and what's not: the distinction between living and non-living. I know you were talking with Bernardo about that, and the two of you disagreed a little bit. Usually I agree with Bernardo, but this is one case where I disagree with Bernardo. It'll be fun to talk with him about it. I think there's no principled distinction between living and non-living. If you really take idealism seriously, as Bernardo does, and you take the dashboard or interface theory seriously, then the distinction that we make between living and non-living is merely an artifact of the limitations of that dashboard or that interface. It's a useful distinction to make inside the game. When we step back and ask, is it really a principled, deep distinction that's true? No. It's just useful for the game, the space-time science game. It's not a more deeply true thing. I throw that out there. I may not get any pushback from you because I think that was your position as well.

[04:21] Michael Levin: In moving from, let's say, the Newtonian paradigm to the relativistic paradigm, do you think that entails in any sense getting closer to the actual dynamics going on the supercomputer behind the scenes? Or are we in fact getting closer to that at all? Or what is the arrow if there is one there?

[04:50] Donald Hoffman: That's another very great and important question. It gets to the very heart of what it means to have a scientific theory. A scientific theory, and this is just like the ABCs, is very, very simple stuff. We always start with assumptions, and we say, if you grant me these assumptions, I'll explain all this other wonderful stuff. Clearly, a scientific theory cannot be a theory of everything because it's not a theory of its assumptions. Its assumptions are miracles for the theory. You can say I'll give you a deeper scientific theory that explains those assumptions. Indeed, that's what we do. But your new theory will have its own assumptions, which are your new set of miracles. And this goes on ad infinitum. That's, I think, just standard, elementary philosophy of science stuff. It has important implications, but here's where I take it. I think that entails the ad infinitum. I take it seriously. That means our science is infinitely far from a complete theory of everything. It's like your kids when they're growing up who say, "Why is the sky blue?" And you say, "It's because of this thing." But why do photons have that wavelength? At some point you just say they do. That's just the way it is, and you shut up. The game the kids play—always questioning the assumptions—is something that I think we can go on ad infinitum, and in principle we should take it seriously. One thing that gets us psychologically on this is that we think that, of course, space-time is fundamental. It is an assumption, but it's the truth. We have that psychological feeling that space-time is the truth, but science has moved on. Space-time is doomed. High-energy theoretical physicists are saying that. We actually have to learn how to think entirely outside of space-time itself. One thing that I think has kept us from really grasping how important it is that there's an infinite regress of scientific theories ahead of us is that it's horrible for those who want a theory of everything. It's bad news. It's great for job security for scientists. That's an infinite job security. To get to your question, Mike, I think it means that there is a sense in which Newton is not as useful in many cases as Einstein and quantum theory. I don't think that means it's getting closer to the ultimate truth in any sense. I think at best what science is doing is giving us a description of a perspective on reality, one of an infinite number of different possible perspectives. This is just the opposite of the theory-of-everything attitude. You have a theory of a trivial perspective, the one that Homo sapiens happens to take out of the infinity. My own feeling is that the one we take, which is a four-dimensional space-time view of things, is probably one of the more trivial headsets. I mean, four dimensions is about as minimal as you can do and have it be functional. Why not have 10, 50,000? Why not go to something more general than dimensions? My guess is we're on the dimmer part of the hierarchy of headsets being used, perspectives on reality. My attitude, Mike, and I would love pushback, is that as a scientist I want us to get better and better scientific theories, but that doesn't mean that they're getting closer and closer to the ultimate truth. That just means that they're better and better descriptions of the particular perspective we happen to be looking at reality from and making useful insights into that particular perspective, which is just one of an infinity of perspectives. It's a very humbling point of view on all this.

[09:25] Richard Watson: I can't help noticing, Don, that when you wave your hand with your fingers spread, we get a little glimpse of the reality behind the dashboard that Zoom creates there.

[09:36] Donald Hoffman: That's why you look at that.

[09:39] Richard Watson: The background blurring doesn't — I can see the room is in for a minute.

[09:44] Donald Hoffman: Got a little bookcase behind me.

[09:48] Richard Watson: Which doesn't have an orchid in it. We have the standard way of assessing whether one scientific theory is better than another: the number of assumptions it makes is less.

[10:02] Donald Hoffman: Yeah, Occam, Occam's Razor, absolutely.

[10:06] Richard Watson: The dream of a grand unifying theory is almost as though we just reduce the number of fundamental forces or fundamental constants or fundamental assumptions we need to make until there almost aren't any, as though it's always just "assume that true is true and false is false and everything else will follow from that."

[10:26] Donald Hoffman: That's the goal. We want as few miracles as possible in our scientific theory. Ideally, I'm sure most, in their heart of hearts, want no miracles at all. But when you look at the nature of scientific explanation, you always have to start with some miracles. Occam just says, use as few miracles as possible. By the way, this has a really important implication for how we progress from theory to theory.

[10:52] Richard Watson: Your suggestion is that the space-time perspective might have a grand unifying theory with less miracles than those that we have so far. We can assess the value of one theoretical framework with respect to another within that perspective of their quality. But we could have taken another perspective in which the same things might have been explained with a lot of miracles or with a little number of miracles. There's an infinite number of perspectives we could have taken. How many miracles we're using to explain our predictions doesn't tell us which one of those perspectives was true.

[11:40] Donald Hoffman: That's correct. Or if not true, useful from our particular headset perspective on reality.

[11:52] Richard Watson: Can I come back to the VR and the red Ferrari for a minute? You suggested that the answer to I'm not looking at the Ferrari, but my model that assumes that there is a Ferrari gets a reasonably good prediction about where it's going to be next time I look. Perhaps it hasn't moved. Perhaps it's still there next time I look. That's a model of where the Ferrari is. And you said that's because the supercomputer has a law-like physics, for want of a better word for it, even though there isn't a Ferrari and there isn't any redness and there isn't any rendering happening until I look at it. When I modeled the Ferrari being in a new position at a particular time, was I making the assumption that it had object permanence and that it was moving through space? Or was I simply making the assumption that its behavior was law-like? What am I perceiving when I perceive space-time? Am I perceiving space-time or am I perceiving law-like stuff which is consistent with space-time?

[13:22] Donald Hoffman: And of course, the inclination of most of us, including smart scientists, is to take our perceptions of space-time as real, as object permanence. The moon really is there when no one looks. Someone as bright as Einstein believed that. So that's what we typically do. Child psychologists tell us that that's wired into us from three or four months of age. So it's not an intelligent, reasoned, intellectual decision that we make. It's something that we can't help. It happens to us at four months of age, and it takes a lot of education to outgrow it as adults. I agree that's a good question. I think most of us just pre-theoretically and even theoretically assume the moon is there when no one looks, and that is real. So that's why idealism is such a shock to most people's sensibilities.

[14:28] Richard Watson: So let me extend the Occam's number of miracles thing: is it possible to go meta on that and say let's use a similar principle to assess the quality of taking one perspective or another. So in one particular perspective we might find that we have a grand unifying theory that gets down to a small number of miracles, but in another perspective it might be equally explanatory and have the same number of miracles or fewer. Is there really a difference between saying this theory is better than that theory within this perspective and saying this perspective is better than that perspective? Because a theory is just taking a perspective, isn't it?

[15:42] Donald Hoffman: Yes. The distinction between a perspective and a theory of a perspective is an interesting one, because it's hard to even talk about a perspective without already having a theoretical idea of what you're talking about. There is, at the core of all this, a deep point, which is, if I'm saying that no scientific theory is the final word, and we're going to have an infinite sequence of theories and an infinite number of perspectives, what is the ultimate nature of the reality that we're taking perspectives on? My own view is we have to think of it in terms of incompleteness results, like Gödel and others, that the reality, whatever it is, transcends concepts. So those who tell us, if you want to know the truth, you have to be the truth by letting go of all concepts and face it head on, I think there's something there, but that's not conceptual knowledge. That's entirely non-conceptual knowledge. That starts to sound mystical, but it seems to me like a direct shot from what is a scientific theory.

[16:56] Richard Watson: Can you tell me more about the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual knowledge?

[17:01] Donald Hoffman: Non-conceptual knowledge: any word you use to describe it, any predicates, are necessarily wrong. It's like the Tao Te Ching: at the very first line, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao." In other words, if you can talk about it, that's not it. And that's the attitude I have now, looking at the nature of scientific theories: reality is whatever it is. And we've conflated our little theories as true descriptions of reality. I think that that's immodest and actually not understanding what we're doing. I think a more modest position is to say theories are theories and concepts are concepts. They're human concepts, and that's not the truth.

[17:56] Richard Watson: Is that a bit like a gestalt perception? It's all there, all at once. Anything that you do to try and cut it up, categorize it, describe its parts, that's not it.

[18:11] Donald Hoffman: Yes, I'm trying to do a mathematical model to capture that kind of thing. I'm going to be doing it in the spirit of humility, saying this is just a model that tries to capture that idea that there's some kind of deeper synchronicity that is non-causal and so forth. But from a perspective it looks like there's causality and so forth. I'll say up front that what I'm about to say, I'm not saying it's anywhere near the truth. It's just that it's an interesting mathematical model. In other words, it helps us get out of a little box that we might have been stuck in. The idea is that there are these Markovian dynamics that are stationary. That means that the entropy doesn't increase from step to step. It's the same entropy at every step. So there's no entropic arrow of time.

[19:11] Richard Watson: It's a bit like saying it always was and it always will be. It's just what it is.

[19:18] Donald Hoffman: It is what it is and you can.

[19:19] Richard Watson: It's just a shape, it's not a process.

[19:21] Donald Hoffman: Run it forwards or backwards, you see the same thing, long term. But it's a theorem that if you take a perspective, you take a projection, like conditional probability on this, so three-line proof, really trivial, you get a new dynamics, a new Markovian dynamics, and the entropy will be increasing as a result of the loss of information in the projection. My own take is that our view from inside space-time, for example, of evolution of organisms fighting for resources and competing. The fundamental resource that's limited is time. If you don't breathe in time, you die. If you don't mate in time, you don't reproduce. If you don't eat in time, you die. Time is the fundamental limited resource. I've done a lot of work on evolution. I love it. It's a wonderful, wonderful theory. There's no better theory of biological organisms inside space-time than Darwin's theory and evolutionary game theory. I think that time is an artifact and it's the fundamental limited resource in evolutionary theory. I think that all of Darwin's theory, as beautiful as it is and is perfectly suited to description inside space-time, all of it is an artifact of the space-time projection. None of it is a deep insight into the nature of reality. We could have this deeper reality. Again, I'm not saying my Markovian model is reality. I'm just saying it's there as a way to help us think outside of a box. This model shows how you could have a synchronistic system where the entropy is not increasing. No limited resources, no nature red in tooth and claw. When you take a perspective on it, you get nature red in tooth and claw. You get organisms fighting, you get entropy increasing, you get Markov blankets, you get predictive processing. What I'm saying is predictive processing, Markov blankets, and that whole way of thinking are absolutely brilliant. I'm not putting it down. It's absolutely brilliant. It works really well inside space-time, and every bit of it is an artifact, a projection of a deeper system that's synchronistic and doesn't need predictive processing and so forth. It has no arrow of time. I'm saying that not to say I'm right, just to say here's a mathematical model that can help us blow open some boxes that we might have in our conceptual system.

[22:01] Richard Watson: So there will be a deep connection then between time, entropy, causation. If there isn't any time, then there isn't any cause. It's just what it is. Nothing's causing anything because there aren't any events if there isn't any time. And there'll be a deep connection between that and where you are in time, where you are on this shape, taking a perspective and having a first-person experience of it. There'll be some deep connection between taking a first-person perspective and experiencing a ride on this shape. I imagine the kind of shape you're talking about, a high dimensional curve that I'm thinking is probably a knot. When you take a particular projection of it, suddenly it looks like there are events, there are causes, there is entropy increase, there's an arrow in time. The notion that the subjective field is the sort of the primary thing. There must be some deep connection between that assumption and this idea of taking perspectives in a way that has a particular point in time or seed time as a real thing rather than a non-thing.

[24:01] Donald Hoffman: Yes, we experience things in space and time, but there is this, you said this first person perspective and that I and the sort of the I am experience, I am. It's striking that I am always only now. Nothing happens except now. There is a sense in which we actually directly experience the fact that time is an illusion, because there is no time, there's only now. Time is something that I make up to describe the changes in my experiences now. I'm not terribly comfortable in this area right now. I don't have a mathematical model of the now. From a first person perspective and also when you look at various spiritual traditions that talk about this, there is pretty good intuitive evidence that now is all there is, whatever that might mean. It does seem to interface nicely with the ideas that we were just talking about, that there could be a deeper synchronistic model that we could give a mathematics for that has no arrow of time. In some sense, since there is no arrow of time, it's always now.

[25:41] Richard Watson: If I imagine this complex high-dimensional shape or curve, which represents everything that always was and always will be and that isn't moving through time, it just is. I can imagine projecting it like projecting 3D to 2D, but I can also imagine a projection that is a bit more interesting, because the object that we're talking about is going to be fractal. So there's a possibility of a projection that's something to do with taking every other dimension from it, or viewing it with different frame rates instead of viewing it in different spatial projections, which is a strange thing to say since we just decided that it isn't moving and there isn't any time. If I imagine myself moving on a complex high-dimensional curve, then my experience of that curve as I move around it is going to be varying. I'm riding on a subway train and the carriages in front of me are doing this or they're not doing that, depending on whether I'm going around a sharp curve or I'm going along a straight. It doesn't feel like moving, but it feels like the future and the past are waving around in front of me if I'm riding on the train going around this curve. If I could change the frame rate, or change the speed at which the train is moving, I could hit the same part of the curve with the same curvature again a moment later, and it would look like it wasn't waving around in front of me. I'd hit a harmonic of that curve that made everything look stationary again. So there would be multiple speeds I could travel that would make the world look non-eventful. I'm reaching for something to make the projections you talk about, that when you take a projection of this shape, it looks like it has time, and it looks like it has events, and it looks like it has causes, and a furtherless person way of thinking about it. A way to make time fractal. Do that and give it back to me.

[28:30] Donald Hoffman: That's a great project and it's quite interesting. There's some work. Have you heard of the Universe Plus initiative from the European Research Council?

[28:43] Richard Watson: I think you mentioned it before, yeah.

[28:45] Donald Hoffman: Universe Plus. They're finding these new timeless structures outside of space-time called positive geometries. Among them are the amplituhedron, cosmological polytopes, associahedron, and so forth. Some combinatorial objects called decorated permutations classify these structures. These are not dynamical. They're these platonic solids, although in some cases they're not polytopes; the amplituhedron need not be a polytope. It's a little more complicated than just polytopes. But these structures give rise to the correct predictions of scattering amplitudes for particle processes inside space-time, like two gluons smashing into each other and six gluons spraying out at a big collider. If you do that computation inside space-time using quantum field theory and Feynman diagrams, it's hundreds of pages of algebra, millions of terms, for one interaction. These new objects outside of space-time give answers in three, four, or five terms you can write down by hand. You get the right answer without all the mess, and you see a new symmetry, something called the infinite Yangian symmetry that you can't see inside space-time. This is only in the last 10, 12 years that high-energy theoretical physicists have discovered these structures. The first of these positive geometries was published in 2013 on the arXiv, in 2014 in a journal. So it's 10 years old. It's a brand new field, and they're doing exactly what you are asking, Richard. They're starting; it's not the final word, but they've taken a step outside of space-time and outside of quantum theory. There are no Hilbert spaces in these structures. But they're showing that you get space-time and quantum theory, both, joined at the hip as a projection, a fairly trivial projection with the amplituhedron. It is a geometric object that has three parameters, N, K, and M, and a matrix called Z. And M for our universe, space-time, is 4. But this positive geometry allows M to be any positive integer. So what we call our universe is just the m = 4 example, one of the more trivial examples of an amplituhedron; M could be much larger, even a billion. So we're stuck with M = 4. That's why when I say I feel like we got cheated, we got the cheap version. We got the M = 4 version of the amplituhedron. But the amplituhedron itself, in its definition, says M could be any positive integer you want, and four is about as small as you can be and have the thing not be trivial. There are efforts in the direction you're talking about, and I think the positive geometries are a good thing to look at there. I should say one other thing slightly off the track but importantly related. Given that we're doing all these different scientific theories, how do we as scientists actually go from one theory to another? If we have a mathematically precise theory, it will give us tools to explore its scope. Every theory has assumptions and a limited scope; there is no scientific theory of everything.

[32:48] Donald Hoffman: That means every theory, no exception. Einstein's theory of gravity, every theory has a limited scope. A good theory gives you mathematically precise tools to explore all the wonderful things in its scope. A great theory gives you the mathematical tools to precisely find its limits. That's how science, a really great theory, gives you the tools to say when the fundamental concepts of that theory no longer hold. So in Einstein's theory of spacetime, when you bring it into, say, quantum field theory, Einstein's theory assumes that space and time are fundamental, and that's a great assumption until you get to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. And at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, game over for space-time. It has no operational meaning. So Einstein's theory, together with quantum theory, is a great theory because it gives us the mathematical tools to actually find precisely what its limits are. And that's how science works. The reason I bring this up is there are many philosophers who think otherwise. There are many philosophers who would say that what I've just said is actually illogical, that I'm shooting myself in the foot, I'm making a logical mistake. They've published this. For example, I published with Chetan Prakash and Manish Singh and a number of other graduate students some work showing that evolutionary game theory entails that physical objects like organisms and resources cannot be fundamental. Several philosophers have published articles saying Hoffman shot himself in the foot. The argument goes like this. Either evolutionary game theory faithfully represents Darwin's ideas or it doesn't. If it doesn't, Hoffman couldn't use it for what he's doing. And if it does, evolutionary game theory couldn't possibly contradict the fundamental concepts that Darwin used in this theory, namely organisms in space and time, competing for resources in space and time. And that last claim is where they go astray. They think that a mathematical model for a good scientific theory will never contradict the fundamental conceptual entities at the heart of the theory. What I just said earlier was, no, that's how science progresses. A great theory actually gives you the tools to find the necessary limits because they will be limited. And that's the point. This is not optional. Your theories' basic concepts are not true. They have a limited scope. And what science does that we haven't had before is the ability to have a theory that tells you the limits of its own concepts. So this is not a minor point. Apparently it's non-trivial enough that a lot of brilliant, very smart philosophers have made the same argument in print that you necessarily are shooting yourself in the foot if you make this kind of argument.

[36:52] Richard Watson: Incompleteness is just such a theory, is it not? Incompleteness says, I'm going to give you a nice logical argument that proves that nice logical arguments can't tell you the whole truth.

[37:05] Donald Hoffman: And that's beautiful. That's really what is so great about scientific theories as opposed to just verbal theories. Before science, we had verbal theories. In scientific theories, that's mathematically precise: a good theory. You can say, Einstein, your stuff stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. It doesn't work. What can you say except I don't like it? In fact, Einstein didn't know that there were black holes. Schwarzschild came back in 1916 and told Einstein your theory predicts a black hole. Einstein didn't know that. And of course, black holes are the thing that ultimately doom the scope of space-time. That's an important aspect about science. Apparently some philosophers—I'm not going to say all philosophers, but philosophers who've wanted to comment on my work about evolution and evolutionary gameplay—have systematically said that a mathematically precise theory of a scientific system like Darwin's could never contradict the fundamental concepts of that theory.

[38:31] Richard Watson: And based on the idea that no theory can prove its own assumptions, no theory would contradict its own assumptions either.

[38:40] Donald Hoffman: That's right. On pain of shooting yourself in the foot logically. I'm saying no, that misunderstands the whole scientific game at the core. The whole point of scientific theories is to give you the tools to find out the limits of your fundamental concepts. That's the point. We didn't have that ability before. We could just dodge and weave. We would never figure out what the limits of our theories were. So science gives us the wonderful mathematical cure for dogmatism. If we apply the cure, there are many scientists who are dogmatic, but as a field, science is not.

[39:34] Michael Levin: No, don't.

[39:38] Donald Hoffman: I think as a social field, Science is non-dogmatic. It may be slow moving. It may take several centuries to let go of space-time, but I'm confident that science will let go of space-time because the evidence will become overwhelming. I think it was Planck who said that "Science progresses one funeral at a time." And ultimately, that may be why science is not dogmatic, because the younger generation will be very happy to show that the older generation didn't know what they were talking about.

[40:12] Michael Levin: Chris Fields has a slightly more positive version of that where he says that only technologies settle arguments. So at some point, presumably there will be something that is irresistible because of its utility that rests on some other non-space-time, and then the new generation will put it into their little, and then that's the end of that.

[40:39] Donald Hoffman: I agree with that. Chris is a very deep thinker. And my own guess is that these positive geometries are a first step outside of space-time. I think of space-time as just our headset. It's our little VR headset that we use. You can think of it as the first layer of software outside the headset that's controlling our headset. Once we understand that software, we can play with a headset. If I know the software on Grand Theft Auto, I can do things that the wizard inside the game would be blown away. I could take all of his tires off. I can take the geometry of this whole space and change it however I wish, because I control the software. So my guess is that one killer app technology will be, once we understand the software outside of space-time, we won't have to travel through space-time. We can travel around space-time, right? The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.4 million light years. That's our nearest galaxy. Good luck. Your great-great-grandkids won't get there on a ship. But what if we don't have to go through space-time? What if we realize space-time is just the m = 4 amplituhedron, and now we know that's a pretty trivial little m = 4. We now know a little bit of the software outside, and we can just change your position inside that little headset from here, from Earth to Andromeda, and just change your pointer.

[42:15] Michael Levin: But that's very interesting. Because the conventional theory also points out what the actionable control knobs are. So within space-time we know there's mass and some other stuff; those are our experimental control knobs. Do we know, if we're dumping all that, what's the next set of practical control knobs we get to twist?

[42:47] Donald Hoffman: And that now gets into the nitty-gritty of these new positive geometries. And that's only going to be a first step because they have no dynamical systems here. These are just static geometries. No surprise, it's only been 10 years. I think that they'll want to go there. But they are giving you some different knobs. The knobs now are the face structures of these geometries and the volumes of the various subparts of these geometries. Those are the new kind of knobs. You get things like the unitarity of underlying quantum theory coming out of the way the faces divide into smaller faces. You also get locality coming out from the geometry. Locality and unitarity are something that you see directly in space-time, but they're artifacts of the geometry of these objects beyond space-time. We're going to see that kind of thing. But the explicit knobs for us are now just part of the geometry, and there's something else that's more interesting about these bigger geometries. What I'm trying to work on with my team is to get a Markovian dynamics that would give rise to these positive objects, where we could then start to have, to get to your question, Micah, different kinds of knobs that we could turn. That would be much more interesting and able to play with things like mass and momentum and energy because we would know what those are. For example, I think mass might correspond to the entropy rate of communicating classes of these Markovian dynamics. We have specific knobs that we're starting to propose because the standard model of particle physics has to put the masses in by hand. But if our theory says the entropy rate of a communicating class is going to project to what you call the mass, then we can make predictions about masses from first principles in this theory. We will have new kinds of knobs that are predictive, whereas before we had to just put them in by hand. We'll see. This is where we're headed. I'm not saying we've done it.

[45:27] Michael Levin: I have a wacky analogy. This is probably pushing your video game analogy too far. In my search for control knobs, one interesting thing about video games is that often there are combinations of key presses that unlock meta properties of the system. You've got your controller that makes the Ferrari go faster or slower, but there's a combination of button presses that does not mean anything within the game. It's nonsense within the game — five times to the left and then really quickly right. It doesn't do anything in the game. But what it does do is unlock a meta debugger that was put in by the designers that let you tweak things for the purposes of improving gameplay. You can go in and change the mass or whatever, and you unlock it with these things that have no meaning within. I wonder if we're going to find that if we take this whole thing seriously, in the future we'll find that the control knobs are some kind of sequence of action that under the old model doesn't do anything, but then somehow, in a meta way, changes things. That's my conjecture — that there are going to be knobs that are made of conventional actions and yet they only make sense from the next level up. They don't make any sense at the level that you're looking at. Maybe that's another way of looking at the control knobs: if you zoom in, they look, well, that's just the conventional magnetic fields, but if you do this or that, suddenly it cracks some aspect of the simulation.

[47:28] Donald Hoffman: That's very likely, Mike. And that would be part of the new technology to persuade everybody that we need to move beyond space-time. One little hint in that direction is the m = 4 aspect of the amplituhedron. And m = 4 is just the meta-parameter for our little four-dimensional space-time. But there's already a parameter that they found outside of space-time that you can crank up and have a better headset. So why not an m = 8 headset.

[48:01] Michael Levin: The question is, what's the actual crank? And there are examples of this. Here's one silly example: something like feng shui. Somebody says, "Oh, you've gotta have a corridor that looks like this, and then you'll have financial success." And you say, "What the hell is the connection between the angularity of my corridor and the finance system that's going to bring in more?" And they say, "Don't worry about it, this is what it is." That kind of thing doesn't make sense within the model, but somehow activates some kind of large-scale meta-patterns that change how the virtual reality operates because of things you do in it.

[48:49] Donald Hoffman: I agree, that's going to be one of the more fun. It's promising and wild because we're going to have to really think outside of the space-time box. But we see, even in our current science within space-time, we get little hints of this. Like with Newtonian physics and Einstein's physics, you don't get the notion of entanglement. With quantum theory you get this thing that says you can do certain things and objects will be entangled over long distances of space. It takes decades before we figure out how to actually use that knob. We realized, when we do it, there are useful things that we can do with this knob. So the math told us that there was this knob way back in 1926. It took several years for us to realize it was telling us that there was this knob. And then it took us several more decades to start figuring out how to turn the knob. And we're realizing that's a really important knob. But I think the problem is our brains have a hard time thinking out of their old boxes. Even a brain like Einstein's — he pointed out entanglement in some sense because he thought that they were wrong.

[50:15] Michael Levin: Richard, do you want to say anything about the circularity of time? We've talked about it before.

[50:28] Richard Watson: I've been thinking about everything is a vibration, everything is an oscillation. Things which appear to be objects are just oscillations of particular combinations of harmonics that create high dimensional curves. Really, all of it is just an ordinary equal curvature circle in a high dimensional space. There's no special kinks in this orbit. When you project that orbit down into lower dimensional spaces, it doesn't look like a circle anymore. For example, when you project it down from one dimension to another, it looks like it doesn't have equal curvature all over, and you regain something that looks like a regular orbit that's circular again when you find a harmonic projection that is taking a particular time slice through that temporal thing. If the reason I can see you is because I'm an oscillation at the same frequency as you, and if we were at slightly different frequencies you would look like a blur to me and I would look like a blur to you, but if we were at the same frequency we can see each other. I could also see you if I was at twice the frequency or half the frequency; if I was at a harmonic of you, you would look stationary in those as well. The useful point is that if I was reacting to things that you do, if everything that you are is an oscillation and everything that I am is an oscillation, then when I react to things that you do, that'll look like my reactions come after the stimulus. If I do it the right amount of late, it's as though it appears to be just before the stimulus, like wagon wheels going backwards in the strobe of the TV. If everything is cyclic, then by doing a reaction that's just the right amount of late, it actually becomes a prediction. What I'm reaching for there is that when we act on future consequences that we would like to have, when agents appear to act, when an organism appears to act with agency, it appears to do something because it wants a particular future outcome. What it's really doing is responding to something that has already happened in the past with just the right amount of late for it to appear to have become just in advance of it occurring again. That only works if everything is cyclic. If events are really unique and time is really linear, then you don't get to do agency that way. You don't get to have anything that looks like it's in advance of the causes. You get things like nested agency and nested selves from the harmonics of the oscillations: we're looking at the same thing but at a faster time scale, and then you get a self inside a self.

[55:03] Donald Hoffman: Yes.

[55:04] Richard Watson: That's what I've been thinking about.

[55:09] Donald Hoffman: I think that we're on the same page. We're attempting exactly that kind of thing, where the Markovian dynamics, when you look at the asymptotic behaviors, is characterized by the eigenfunctions of these kernels. In many cases they're identical to the wave function of free particles in quantum theory. So they're all about waves. The whole thing — everything we're doing with the Markovian dynamics of conscious agents theory — is all about vibes. Harmonics: ones that are compatible, ones that are not. We talked last time about this trace logic that we've discovered, and we're continuing to work on the paper to publish on that. That gives us a way of combining and also disunifying, disassociating consciousnesses based on their compatibilities or incompatibilities. It's a non-Boolean logic. It also gets at what you talked about earlier: temporal windows. Could we have a notion of temporal windows? We're looking at that in two different ways. We can take sampled chains and have different temporal windows of the sampling. We hope that will help us in predicting, for example, the inner momentum distributions of the proton. Inside the proton, when you're at the lowest resolution, what they call Bjorken x and Q-squared, which are the temporal and spatial resolutions inside the proton, you'll see three dominant valence quarks. As you increase your temporal and spatial resolution, you start to see quark-antiquark pairs appearing and gluons. At the highest resolution, it's basically just a gluon sea. You're seeing it's all gluons, all the energy in gluons. We think we can get this by looking at smaller and smaller temporal windows on our Markov chains. They'll get better and better resolution of Bjorken x, and in our model, as you reduce the temporal window, you bias towards particles that look like massless spin-one particles; that's an artifact of the sampling. So what we're going to propose is that when you're looking at the finest-resolution side of the proton and you're seeing the gluon sea, it's not that you're getting closer to reality; you're seeing noise, statistical noise, and you're seeing that noise as massless spin-one particles. There's so there we're hoping to take this temporal resolution idea and make hard-nosed predictions about the momentum distributions of particles at different Bjorken x and Q-squared inside the proton. Absolutely. And we're working on another interesting idea.

[58:43] Richard Watson: But does that connect with a notion of if events are circular, if time is circular, then the idea of taking actions because you had an intention to produce a particular future, or taking actions because it's a consequence of a particular past, those things are symmetric now. We can go forwards or backwards on this circle; it doesn't really matter. If I observe what's going on at a particular frame rate, it'll look like a prediction. If I observe it a little bit later, it'll look like it was a consequence. Looking at things at closer temporal resolution is very close to not just looking inside physically but looking inside temporally, and it's very close to the notion of the kind of thing that's weird about agency, the kind of thing that feels weird about consciousness: I know that I exist now, as you say, and now is always here and I'm

Conversation between Donald Hoffman and Richard Watson, #2

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