Ted Audio Collective

Hello, I'm Chris Anderson welcome to the Ted interview

The podcast series where I get to dive much deeper into a speaker's ideas than is possible during their short Ted talk

And that is going to be especially important today because we're returning to a subject that is quite dense but endlessly fascinating

Consciousness the experience we have of just being alive the feeling of the sun and our skin our emotions

of strange buzzing you hear in your ears right now which would be my voice

If you've heard the episode with Anil Seth recently you'll know this is a big mystery for me and has been all my life

What's exciting about our guest today is that his theory of consciousness is really radical as you'll hear

And arguably it's going to take a truly radical idea if this mystery is ever to be solved

So I'm excited to introduce you to professor Don Hoffman

author of a new book out called The Case Against Reality

In a recent Ted talk he argues that what our consciousness perceives as the world around us trees the wind

Everything we make and experience is almost certainly nothing like true reality

Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumption about the nature of reality

It opens up new ways to think about life's greatest mystery

I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we'd ever imagined

So what might that reality be?

Well, we'll get a chance to talk about that

But first we try to unpack the core mystery itself

Stick with us

Now we cover some complicated materials in this episode

But I really think it offers a new way to gaze out at the world around you

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