The Case Against Reality (w/Prof. Donald Hoffman)

The ZDoggMD Show

ZDoggMD LLC

Spirituality, Medicine, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2019

⏱️ 113 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We have NO CLUE how consciousness emerges from 3 pounds of wet goo. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman takes us deep into his research that makes a bold claim: we’ve been attacking the problem BACKWARDS. The implications of his theories just may change everything you think you know about reality and our place in it. Take the Red Pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes… And DEFINITELY check out his book as it really lays out his case beautifully. In this extended interview we dive into the Interface Theory of Perception (how evolution hides the truth about reality in favor of a dumbed down user interface that only shows us “fitness” payoffs that help us survive), the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” and how we simply have no idea how consciousness could emerge from physical matter, the theory of Conscious Realism (how reality is really a mathematically-definable social network of conscious “agents” and our perceptions are simply the interface by which we exchange experience with other conscious agents), the math behind conscious agent theory, implications for artificial intelligence (AI), what happens when we die, the limitation of resources in the universe, synesthesia, psychedelics, spirituality, medicine, and much much more. Prof. Donald Hoffman, apart from being a brilliant scientist, is a wonderful and warm human being in person. Check out our first audio-only conversation from 2018 here, and my take on his theory of consciousness here. Here's the video and transcript of our interview. Video show archive, audio podcasts, music parodies, Supporter Tribe membership options, merch, social media, and email contact form: https://lnk.bio/zdoggmd Support us with a 1-time donation and get a personal email response from me: paypal.me/zdoggmd More about Dr. Z: zdoggmd.com/about-z Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	One, two, three, skinnifation. Yeah.
0:15.8	What's up everybody? It's Dr. Zubin Demania, AKA Zedog MD. And I am just an icon. Okay. And
0:22.8	that will be explained by watching this episode. I'm here with professor of cognitive sciences at
0:29.5	the University of California Irvine and a personal intellectual hero of mine. No bias here. Dr.
0:35.3	Donald Hoffman, professor. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Zubin. It was a pleasure to be
0:40.0	here. Thanks for inviting me. Man, it's really crazy to have you in my garage because I've seen your
0:46.0	TED talk. I've watched, I've been to workshops with you. I've read your book, The Case Against Reality.
0:52.2	Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes. And I have to be honest with you. I'm like
0:58.4	to the extent that a scientist can be a fanboy of another scientist. I am a fanboy. Because what you've
1:04.9	kind of proposed, and again, we may be wrong here, but it's the one thing that's actually felt
1:09.8	right to me about the nature of reality that we don't see it as it actually is. In other words,
1:16.0	we don't see truth. We see a graphical user interface that is a series of icons that are tuned
1:23.1	to keep us alive and reproducing, but not tuned to show us the truth. And the underlying truth
1:28.8	that is there may be much more interesting than we think. So, yes. Let's start with that. How did
1:34.4	you even get interested in studying this? Well, I was interested in perception and artificial
1:41.3	intelligence. And the question, are we machines? People just machines, or is there something more
1:47.2	to us than just machines? And so, as a teenager, I was very interested in these questions. I was
1:54.1	programming. So, I knew what programs could do a bit. But I was also, my dad was a fundamentalist
2:01.0	minister. So, there were all these other aspects of spirituality or religion that were interesting
2:06.7	about human nature. And I was trying to put all this stuff together. So, on the one side, with
2:12.1	programming and the new kinds of capacities of artificial intelligence, it was looking like
2:18.0	we might be machines. And in the other hand, there's supposed to be something about us that's
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ZDoggMD LLC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of ZDoggMD LLC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.