Does Consciousness Survive Death? | Prof. Donald Hoffman | The Tim Ferriss Show

How do you think about

death

, given everything we're talking about and the first-order, second-order, third-order implications of all that? How do you think about

death

? So physicalism has a very clear implication for death if space-time is fundamental and elemental. Particles like electrons, quarks, protons, etc., are the fundamental nature of reality and what you are, what your body is, is just a set, a complex set of particles and your

consciousness

is somehow an emergent property of certain activities of those particles, say brain activity. so it is very, very clear that in death, when the brain dissolves, your

consciousness

dissolves and that is the end of the story, that is the end, that is a very, very clear implication of physicalism, we can talk about panpsychism , but strict physicalism, that is.

The end of the story, if consciousness is fundamental and space-time is just an interface and our bodies are simply icons that we use to represent certain assembly interactions of conscious agents and we can analyze how I think about that, then in that approach there is The possibility that some aspect of my consciousness

survive

s death I now have to look at, you know the mathematics of the model and delve into it, but it may be, for example, that the bear consciousness that is associated with me is just consciousness without content that

survive

s. but all the details of

donald

hoffman

and his life story within this interface maybe it all dissolves maybe we can and that's a story about what consciousness is until we can talk about what do you know if consciousness is fundamental What is it doing and why?

What is the dynamics of consciousness all about? And really, to answer the question about death, we may have to answer that question too. It's very important, please continue, so I'll try to answer that question because I think it relates to the question about death, so what is consciousness doing and why do you know? The correct answer is: I don't know and I've only seen one idea that seems

prof

ound enough to be at least worth thinking about. I'm not saying it's the right idea, but the only idea that seems deep enough to at least be a candidate and again comes from fajas and the faja completeness theorem says that essentially no matter how much you explore within a particular conceptual system, you don't You can get the whole truth, there is always more to be explored mathematically, so if consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness is all there is, then the mathematical structure is just about the possibilities of consciousness, that is all there is to do and what if what consciousness is doing from the beginning?

The exploration of the mathematical structure is in principle endless, so perhaps the exploration of the possibilities of consciousness itself is in principle endless and, therefore, what consciousness is doing is exploring all its potentialities and the reason why continue to do it from our perspective is to continue doing it. that's because, in principle, this has no end, so consciousness itself, in a sense, is always learning about itself and then maybe then what we are, what you, what people are, cats, dogs, amoebas, etc., is consciousness. trying on different headphones different realities and exploring and getting lost, I mean, this very interesting idea that consciousness chooses to really explore so deeply that you get lost in the exploration you don't even know what it is, you become physicalistic, you actually think that consciousness is not fundamentally, it goes through everything and then slowly it has to wake up and in doing so it really explores what it is not and what it is, in a sense, to know what you are, you have to know what you are not and So from that point In view, Hoffman's icon is simply the former consciousness taking a perspective of itself looking at itself through a particular spatio-temporal earpiece taking a small projection and from that earpiece there is a finite there was a birth there it grew stronger until at 20 and 30 and then after 40 you start to decline and you know that at 80 and 90 you die and that whole process is simply consciousness exploring itself from a particular perspective, in which case perhaps the Hoffman icon and perhaps many things may be left behind, but in a sense consciousness itself has learned something through that experience and the other 8 billion people and the trillions of amoebas and who knows how many viruses and so on, consciousness you just try on countless headphones and when you're done with that one you take it off and consciousness is perfectly fine, raw consciousness is fine, but the detailed icons that appear space-time icons objects in space and time brains neurons all that stuff where you know, those are just those were just icons and you know you studied them and then you realized it was cool, really you know, Mount Everest, what a beautiful icon.

The valley of death, what beautiful icons these really are, but it's not like it's something even more transcendent than space and time. I am more transcendent than the valley of death and that is why consciousness is just awakening. I mean, again, I'm trying to tell a story. I'm not saying it's correct, but it's the only story I've seen so far. At least it's deep enough that it's worth taking seriously who the origin of this story is and can you ever know if it's accurate? Do you think through testing or experimentation that the story I'm telling now is an interesting way you could be?

We can prove it, so this dynamic of conscious agents, as I mentioned, is a Markovian dynamic. You can turn it into so-called stationary dynamics where the entropy of the dynamics

does

n't change, but you can

show

that even if you have this Markovian dynamics. of consciousness in which entropy never changes any projection by conditional probability any projection looking at that dynamic we will see it as an increase in entropy in other words, the arrow of entropy, the arrow of time is an artifact of the projection, so Consciousness itself has no arrow of time, but you can

show

from this mathematics that an arrow of time is obtained by projection.

The test is trivial, like two or three lines, so here's a project that I think would be a lot of fun. Can we prove it when you look at all the different ways that consciousness could be projected into this mathematics the conditions under which all these different arrows of time the entropy that is obtained satisfy the Lorentz transformations in other words, can we obtain special relativity from this? We would have to also model the spatial aspects of It's what's happening in space, as you know, the projection of the dynamics of these conscious agents, but we see the time aspect, so could we really show how special relativity arises, since different perspectives that consciousness can take can assume a fundamental dynamic of consciousness? that

does

n't have a time arrow, that's the kind of thing with which we could start making new predictions that could be testable.