Reality is an illusion: Donald Hoffman explained | Annaka Harris and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
Annaka Harris is the author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[origenward]

Raising my own hand, I ask, who else here has also experienced timeless time while on psychedelics?

[Xpistos]

This really reminds of Plato's cave. It really does seem that on a scientific level, these Greek philosophers were more correct about reality than anyone will give them credit for.

[shadw]

Lucid dreaming has taught me no matter how real something is, no matter how real it feels or how vivid your sensations are it could all just be in your head. For the most part your perception of the world is just a mental model. In a way it's not that different from a vivid dream

[irinaz]

But Immanuel Kant said it all so long time ago - it is a most important contribution to his conception of human perception/knowledge! Why he is not mentioned? It's very "simplified" version of the announced podcast topic...Kant argued that the only world we can know is the world created by the innate structure of our minds and thus reality “as it is in itself” is unknowable.

[nannue]

It would be great to have Lex interviewing some eastern Guru, shaman or monk… cause the eastern scripture, philosophy and religion, we are encoded and engrained with this concept and mindset. It would be fun. Cause I love hearing what scientist, mathematician and physicist interprets about consciousness when really it’s only one of many perspectives. I love this one very much tho.

[goblinsk]

When she started talking about mathematical shapes, I was hoping she'd talk about Mandelbrot fractals. There's something about the Mandelbrot fractals that make me think that it's the shape of consciousness. This is related to how consciousness exists in higher dimensions. But like her, I have a hard time explaining what I think about this. But the more I hear scientists talk about it, the more plausible my own ideas about it appear to be.

[Billyho-djrh]

I love how talking about subjects like this are so deep that you can see them speak sentences like they are playing password/Pictionary/ and trivial pursuit all in one turn.

[haitiancreolewithluciano]

😂 Reality stops being an illusion once you’re constipated - and in dire need to take a s***t

[lilybond]

Once you listen to Donald Hoffman — you can never go back.

[jayvee]

This looks like a good clip, but like a lot of these clips (especially anything w/ the unique Joscha Bach), I have save it on my "Watch Later", and go watch it tomorrow sitting out in the middle of a field w/ my dog so that I can properly give it some thought

[davidhenry]

Sometimes I find these conversations deep and profound, while other times I wonder whether I am bullshitting myself.

[FunnyVidsIllustrated]

I'm gonna put this out there... Tom Campbell spent 30 years meditating through the illusion, and has seen what Annaka describes as the environment outside the snowglobe. Although Tom points to it also being a snowglobe inside a snowglobe, It is, however, a separate place with separate physics and laws. Think of it as where we go when we dream, but for astral projectors like Tom he could go there freely and controlled to do science (actual science). So, what is this place? Tom says It's all possible outcomes and futures crammed into one space, a database of possibilities, where your focused intention can bring out any piece of data, outcome, scenario, that you ask for. And before you say "thats a lucid dream", this place is v e r y different from a regular dream. Its based on possibilities of outcomes, not fantasy. You dont control the details, like in lucid dreams where you say "i wanna see a black cat" and it just comes walking. This place is a separate, larger reality with its own rules, that can only be navigated through with your conscious, focused intention.

If youre curious, look up astral projection on youtube, suspend your disbelief for long enough, and you might get to experience the outside of the snowglobe. I've seen it, its real. Much love <3

[seams]

I love when Donald's interpretation of reality is brought up in the podcast.

[boshmow]

The irony that humans spend a lifetime trying to figure out consciousness...

[jamesrockefeller]

I feel like so much of perception is dependent on size if we were the size of a mountain the size of a insect the size of a bacteria we would perceive time and gravity and forces and vision would all be so different they would basically be unrelatable. But when we talk about the fundamental properties of the universe we are obviously aware of the size difference but for some reason it gets lost in the explanation

[CreationTribe]

I'm really conflicted between consciousness being fundamental (which I tend to lean toward) and consciousness being an emergent property. The more I learn about control theory and emergence, the more I'm starting to see the sense of it. I'm even leaning toward the idea that "somethingness" is an emergent property of nothing ... an idea that has taken me years to piece together. Maybe they're both wrong and we're dealing with a paradoxical anomaly that is both fundamental/causal as well as emergent. *shrugs*
The less sense it has, the more sense it makes.

[adnanbaqui]

Lex, have you considered getting someone like Sadhguru on to discuss these same issues? I think you'd be blown away by yogic science and eastern philosophies. The questions you are asking are profound and deserve perspectives from all fields of science.

[onerib]

Maybe the fading of memory allows for an experience of time passing? More recent memories are more vivid; earlier memories are more faded. In this way, the vividness or dullness of an accessed memory is a clue to how old the memory is. Comparing the sharpness of memories could be the way, or one way, that we are able to order memories chronologically

[AigleAquilin-fvkj]

Don't know if I understood what Annaka was saying correctly, but if time is an illusion, and only causality is fondamental, and everything everywhere is happening all at once, then how do you explain chaotic phenomena, described by chaos theory, for which there can be no prediction of future outcome as they are infinitely sensitive to infinitesimal initial conditions ?

[Eric]

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.
Bill Hicks