My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. Everything you see inside of space time is your construction. From the consciousness point of view, space time isn't fundamental. It's just a VR headset. The brain is giving us some clues about how the headset is being generated. There's some deeper reality. It's up to each of us to take off our own headset. Dr. Donald Hoffman is a cognitive science professor from MIT. He has spent his career exploring how we perceive reality and trick ourselves into believing this is all there is. When, in fact, there is a lot more and we know that it's there. We're at this interesting intersection where high energy theoretical physics is now saying that there's something beyond space time. And what is it? The hardest thing that many lay people have to decide is do I believe in science or do I believe in God? Is there a place where those two things literally meet? The technologies that we should eventually evolve are going to be mind-boggling.

Once you know how to program the headset, you make the laws of the headset and you can change them. Could this technology allow me to download a language? Could it allow me to regrow a limb? In the Matrix, right, Neo, I always send downloads, something, and I know Kung Fu. I'm not saying I know how to do it. I'm saying I don't see a principled obstruction.

Ultimately, who are you? You are the infinite consciousness

looking through a very, very small headset.

You've chosen to go from infinity

to just a few trillion experiences,

but you are that infinite consciousness.

I love when people accidentally prove God.

What is there a risk with unlocking this capability?

Absolutely.

Once you have that kind of power you're playing, God? Wow. Hi, I'm YMB Alec. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just a perception. Today we're going to be talking about the potential breakdown of everything that we perceive as real. And you might be thinking, gosh, that sounds really heady, very meta. Guess what? It's not. What if we were to propose to you that everything that you experience as your reality is a headset that can be taken off in very specific ways and what if we were to tell you that there's a mathematical explanation for why that actually might be the best description of the reality that we're all experiencing. We're speaking today to someone who is working on software and technology that can truly change the nature of reality and how we all perceive it, including what that means for medicine, time travel, and our overall well-being. Dr. Donald Hoffman holds a PhD from MIT. He's a professor emeritus of cognitive sciences, and he has written over a hundred scientific papers, three books, his latest book, The Case Against Reality, How Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes is a really, really incredible exploration of what we perceive, how we got to the place where we perceive what we do, and how easy it is to trick ourselves into believing this is all there is. When, in fact, there is a lot more and we know that it's there. Physics knows that it's there, neuroscience knows that it's there, mystics know that it's there, but it's really the kind of information that Jonathan and I are so excited to share with you because reality truly is an illusion, and Dr. Hoffman is going to explain how we can better understand that and how it can change the way we lead our lives. Right before we get to the episode, I'm gonna ask a very, very quick favor. Please, wherever you're listening or watching, press subscribe right now here at my B. Alex breakdown, we are doing our very best to bring you the cutting edge of the intersection of science and spirituality. We are learning so much from these amazing guests, and it helps us to be able to bring you more episodes. We cannot thank you enough for being here for listening week after week. And we are so excited to bring you more episodes like this to help change your life. So take a moment, subscribe, and onto the episode. Without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Donald Hoffman to the breakdown. Break it down. Very, very good. Thank you. You know, I think that the most powerful and gripping component of your book is literally in the preface. And what you tell us is that this book offers you the red pill. This is the red pill. This is the book that allows you to say, what if I submit to the notion that everything that I see and perceive and interpret is actually a projection of some sort. And we're going to need you to explain what is being projected, who's projecting it? Why does it matter and how does it change our lives? Simple questions. Simple questions. Absolutely, absolutely. You are an esteemed academic and professor and thinker and you didn't need to write the case against reality, but you chose to and we'd like to know why. What do you feel people are missing? Well, there is an interesting revolution happening in science right now. It's quite stunning. The assumption that space and time are fundamental or their combination space time is fundamental has been a very valuable and useful foundational idea for many many decades centuries actually. High energy theoretical physicists though have realized that space time cannot be fundamental. It falls apart at the Planck scale. So we know exactly where it ceases to make sense. It doesn't make sense at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. So it's not that some cognitive scientists are saying, we need to think out of the box. I'm just listening to what the physicists are saying, the high energy theoretical physicists, and they're saying we need to find a new framework that's outside of space time. And they're going after it, right? There's the European Research Council has a 10 million euro initiative on these positive geometries beyond space time that the physicists are now studying. So it's not like some Maverick Cognos scientists is the first to say, hey, it's over for space time. No, I'm cheering on what the high energy theoretical physicists have been saying for quite a while. But I'm saying, you know, we need to look outside of physical categories, perhaps now, space time kinds of categories. And that's hard to do. I mean, this is requiring real big leaps. So what the physicists are finding are these positive geometries. They're just static objects. They're like monoliths outside of space time. And their shapes and volumes code for particle interactions inside space time. Remarkably, they actually give you the probabilities for various kinds of particle interaction. But why, you know, is anybody's guess about why these things are doing that and so forth? So we don't have a good framework of what's outside of space time. I mean, that's the big question. If space time isn't fundamental, first, what could that possibly mean? What could possibly be outside of space time? That's the first question. Most of us go space time is the foundation of reality. What are you even talking about? So the physicists are saying, whatever space time is, it follows a part at the blank scale. So we have to find something outside of space time and it's anybody's guess what it is. Now spiritual traditions, of course, have been there for thousands of years. They've been saying space time is not, or space and time, or a final reality. There's something well beyond

space and time. And they've had techniques like meditation and so forth to help you to sort of transcend the notion of space time. But so both sides have had a piece of the puzzle. The the the physicalists, the scientists, have had the rigor of mathematical models. And the spiritual people have had the idea that space and time aren't fundamental, that there's something deeper than that, but they've not had any mathematical tools. They've only had intuitive tools and so forth. And we can see this coming together,

historically, with Galileo and the church. So here we have the clashing of the two world approaches where the Catholic church at the time said that they had the authority of miracles and that everybody should submit because they had the authority. And Galileo was saying, no, I've got mathematics and experiments and mathematics and experiments over rule, whatever you might claim on your authority. And so there's been this division ever since, right? Because the church put Galileo under house arrest, he died under house arrest and he was forced to to recant his scientific views about the earth not being the center of the universe. Well, you know, in retrospect, the church agreed they were wrong and they apologized, right? So it took four centuries or something like that for them to apologize. But science and spirituality really diverged then we've seen them go separate paths. And for a while it was sort of, you know, important to diverge because you really needed to establish something separate from authority. You needed to have your math and experiments. But now we're at this interesting intersection where high energy theoretical physics is now saying, oh, now we agree that there's something beyond space time. And what is it? We're finding these positive geometries, these obelisks, but what do they mean? And the spiritual traditions still don't have any mathematical tools. So here's the position we're in. It seems like science has one part of the puzzle. We have mathematical models and we have experiments. This is how you make progress and really understanding things. The spiritual traditions say we understand that there's something beyond space time. And the physicists are now saying, yeah, I think there is something beyond space time. How can we try to put these two pictures together? So that's where science is right now and where spirituality is. So to summarize, the spiritual traditions are outside of space time, but there's no math and there's no experiments. Now, some of them I say, well, yeah, there are experiments looking for like anomalous phenomena and so forth. And yeah, I have friends who are scientists who are looking for psi phenomena and so forth. But any hard-nosed scientist is going to say experiments without a theory aren't going to move me very much. If you are doing these psi experiments and you're finding these anomalous results, I want you to first give me a theory that predicts the exact values of the anomalous results that you're getting. Otherwise, what can I say except maybe you made a mistake? If you have a theory that predicts something to the, you know, eight decimal places and you get that eight decimal place result and the other than the scientific theories around can't do it and a couple of the labs replicates you then of course scientists are going to pay attention right that that but just to say I've got something that doesn't fit in. They're not going to pay attention. So with the spiritual traditions and those are thinking outside of spacetime. The idealist, for example, have lacked is a rigorous mathematical model that makes testable

predictions outside. If the idealist, for example, have lacked is a rigorous mathematical model that makes testable predictions from outside of space time. What the physicists understand now is we have to go beyond space time and they're doing rigorous mathematical models, but they don't know what they mean. These are positive geometries, but who ordered them? It's It's who ordered this? I'm going to get the best of both. I want to use absolute hard-nosed mathematical models and experiments from the scientific side, no nonsense. But I want to step outside of space-time and take the idea that consciousness is fundamental quite seriously. So that means no hand-wave, give me a mathematical model of conscious experience period and with that mathematical model give me exactly how space time can arise. Again precisely. So how does Einstein's, you know, Minkowski spaces, the flat space time, oh, Einsteinstein come out of this, or how does the curved space time of linestein come out of this in general relativity? And how does quantum mechanics come out of this? Because when space time is doomed, so is quantum theory. Quantum fields, for example, are defined over space time. So to just not enough to say, oh, yeah, so we're going to go quantum on this. That's not enough. When you go quantum, you're still stuck with space time. Quantum fields are defined over space time. And if you're in non quantum field there, if you're just doing standard shroning or revolution, then you've got time as a parameter, an explicit parameter. And so you're stuck in time. So it's not enough to say we're going quantum that gets you not out of space time. So we have to really think out of the box, right? So space time is doomed. Now I'm quoting physicists like Nima Arconi-Hamed and David Gross. So this is not just a cognitive scientist saying, so I'm just quoting some high-energy theoretical physicists who say space time is doomed. And they'll say explicitly, that means quantum theory isn't fundamental either. So we have to go outside of space time and quantum theory together. And that doesn't so many of the, in the spiritual traditions who are trying to go to the next

step are still holding on to quantum theory. And I'm saying you hold on to quantum theory, you're holding on to a dead horse. This is you've got to go beyond quantum theory. This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews and Open Door Media Brand. If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Beton and Noam Weissmann dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout and disagreeman at least once.

Michal and Noam tackled the tough topics, like anti-Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion, with guests like Brett Stevens, Michael Rappeport and Sarah Herwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish-American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life, from food, to music and comedy, thoughtful, joyful, and always honest.

That's wondering Jews with Michal and Noam,

a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at unpacked.bio-nmx. My Mbox breakdown is supported by by optimizers. You know, I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just assumed it was stress. But as I learned during paramanopause and menopause, your hormones shift in a way that affect your magnesium levels. And low magnesium, it makes everything harder, not just sleep, focus, mood, your tolerance for stress. That's why I have added magnesium breakthrough by by optimizers to my nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it, see if you wake up more rest and refreshed, you've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a huge breakthrough to improve hormonal balance, to help with focus, decrease brain fog, improve sleep hygiene overall. Bi optimizers makes it very easy. Jonathan, what do they get when they go to bi optimizers.com slash breaker and use the code breaker? You get 15% off your entire order and a free bottle of massimes. Buy optimizers best selling digestive enzyme.

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