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Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More (#585)

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    “What is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to report true properties of objective reality?”

    — Professor Donald Hoffman

    Donald Hoffman (@donalddhoffman) received a PhD in computational psychology from MIT and is a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is an author of over 120 scientific papers and three books, including The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.

    His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge, and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His TED Talk, titled “Do We See Reality as It Is?,” has almost 4M views.

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    The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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    #585: Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More

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    Want to hear another episode from someone who gazes at the universe through the lens of science? Listen to my conversation with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which we discuss childhood intellectual development through free expression of interest, communicating complex ideas to the layperson, the problem with Pulitzer Prize-driven journalism in the research frontier of science, learning from Carl Sagan, overbooking commitments, and much more.

    #389: Neil deGrasse Tyson — How to Dream Big, Think Scientifically, and Get More Done

    SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

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    SHOW NOTES

    MORE DONALD HOFFMAN QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

    “If consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality, and consciousness is all there is, then mathematical structure is only about the possibilities of consciousness.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “What is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to report true properties of objective reality? … The probability is zero.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “Very few of us know exactly how the desktop interface on our computer works. When you drag an icon to the trash can to delete a file, there’s a lot of stuff going on inside there that’s involved in deleting the file. We’re blissfully ignorant and that’s what evolution has done. It makes us blissfully ignorant about the nature of reality and gives us icons that allow us to control reality.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “Physics is not fundamental. Spacetime is not fundamental. Consciousness is. What we call physical objects are merely the ways that we play with our interface to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “Science can never have a theory of everything.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “When you can break your theory, when you find its limits, that’s when you break out the champagne because that’s when you’re going to go to the next step. Gödel’s incompleteness theory tells us that this process will never end. There is job security. Go into science.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “What we thought was the final theory 130 years ago, we now look back on it; Newton was great, but we have much better theories today.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “We have to take our current theories seriously. If we take evolution of a natural selection seriously, of course, as scientists, we’re going to eventually try to show its limitations.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “When the physicists are saying, ‘We’re spending our careers looking for what’s beyond spacetime; spacetime is doomed,’ it’s really time for the cognitive neuroscientists who are studying consciousness to catch up with what the physicists have already said.”
    — Donald Hoffman

    “I want a scientific theory of consciousness that doesn’t assume a physical world as the foundation at all.”
    — Donald Hoffman

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