Donald D. Hoffman is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes. His research on perception, evolution, and consciousness received the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution of the American Psychological Association, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and is the subject of his TED Talk, titled “Do we see reality as it is?”

DONALD HOFFMAN

This is really what life, I think, is about - learning to not believe your thoughts. Watch your thoughts, see their patterns and learn that you are not at the whim and beck and call of your thoughts. You can watch your thoughts, and you can choose to let go of thoughts and just be present and let go of the complaints. And that then opens up a level of creativity that's surprising. It could be in dance, science, it could be in music, or art. Wherever you have creative expression, letting go of thought and having this balance between thinking and no thinking, going into complete silence and then pulling ideas back for your art, your science, your dance, whatever it might be, is really the dance of life.

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I would say one of the most important things I'm learning right now is this balance between conceptual thought, on the one hand, thinking, and stepping out of thought altogether, and just being present in silence. And going back and forth. When I'm present to my environment in silence, then I'm in touch with a deeper intelligence that is not separate from me. It is me, and then I can bring that back into my thinking. But most of our thoughts, if we're not watching our thoughts, most of our thoughts are actually complaints and judgements, and they're dysfunctional. Most of our thinking is automatic and dysfunctional. So learning to let go, to don't believe your thoughts, watch your feelings. This is really what life, I think, is about.

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In some sense, kids don't have words early on. So they're just seeing without a filter of words. And I even have memories myself as a young child of just the wonder. I remember walking to kindergarten and seeing this bush with all sorts of flowers on it, and all these monarch butterflies on it. And I was completely transfixed. Here I was, five years old, I was looking at magic, and I knew I was looking at magic. And I stayed there so long that I was late to kindergarten. And I learned that I got in trouble for that. So taking time to enjoy the magic, I learned early on was something that would get me in trouble. Our growing up and becoming adults, we often learn to not give time to the magic because there is no time for it. You need to get onto the next thing.

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So the idea of the multiverse, as you all know, is a pretty big idea in physics right now. Many physicists are thinking about interpreting quantum theory in terms of the multiverse or many-worlds interpretation. Max Tegmark, for example, has the idea that there's what he calls a Level IV multiverse. He thinks that mathematics is fundamental. So the fundamental reality is just mathematics, and in some sense, Gödel's incompleteness theorem says that there's endless mathematics. There's no end to mathematical exploration. And so that's Tegmark's multiverse: whatever is mathematically possible is actual.

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For the 30 years, maybe 40 years for some, the dominant view of many cognoscientists, is that consciousness is something that brains create. So most of the processes in our brains are proceeding without any conscious content, so that they're unconscious processes, but a small amount of our brain processes are somehow experiences.

And the standard view is that it's a fairly recent, late evolutionary process that led to the experience of conscious experiences in humans and other animals, and perhaps other creatures more generally. My view is different. I think that the standard view that consciousness is a product of brains isn't correct because I think that our best physical theories tell us that space and time are not fundamental. Spacetime is doomed. So that's on the physics side. Physicists are saying that spacetime is not fundamental for very principled reasons, falling out of Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum field theory.

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Truth is, in some sense, a pathless land. And so anything that we state in either scientific or religious frameworks, spiritual frameworks, will always be only a partial description and will maybe give us some pointers that are good on truth. It will also miss other things that are really important... Science is part of the process of the fun of exploring using conceptual tools, this endless truth. But on a spiritual side, another way to explore the truth is - if we are in fact ourselves not distinct from consciousness, if consciousness is the fundamental reality, and we're not distinct from that - then we can explore the truth by just being the truth.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Eric Rosin with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Eric Rosin. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).